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Friday, August 31, 2007
 The interesting thing about WORLD WAR HULK: X-MEN #3 is that it's basically a microcosm of the whole event, in terms of my critical approach to it. See, it's not the kind of story I personally enjoy, so if I were to rate it subjectively, I'd give it an EH.However, I can't ignore the fact that as a genre piece, WORLD WAR HULK and its tie-ins are actually doing a damn sight better than their predecessors - unlike "Civil War" or "House of M", the basic plot makes sense here, and that much-sought-after moral ambiguity manifests itself because on the one hand, you can sort of identify with the Hulk and his motives, but on the other hand, you can't really support his decision to destroy the rest of the Marvel Universe... though I suppose many readers would like nothing more than to see the Hulk crush Iron Man and the pro-reg morons. But, you know, realistically speaking, it's just not going to happen. Of course, this is all window-dressing; the "point" of WORLD WAR HULK (perfectly encapsulated in WORLD WAR HULK: X-MEN #3) is to provide the punchy-punchy and lots of explosions. It doesn't have to be profound, and I think Christos Gage understands that - after all, he built this three-issue miniseries around the shaky premise that the Hulk has targeted the X-Men based on what Xavier might have done, had he actually been present at that fateful Illuminati meeting. Of course, the logical error immediately presents itself: he wasn't there, and if the Hulk is going to attack every person who could have been involved in his exile, this crossover would last eight years. Moreover, if Gage were seriously trying to sell the plot, he'd have a pretty big hurdle to jump - we, as comic fans, know the Hulk won't kill Xavier because, as Rene Magritte would've put it, ceci n'est pas une X-Men comic. Which is why, if you were to look at this comic in terms of narrative progression, what happens is the Hulk fights the X-Men, he fights them some more, Juggernaut turns up for a nicely-rendered double-page spread, and then Cessily of the New X-Men lectures the Hulk on all the crap mutants have to deal with. The Hulk, in awe of being out-angsted, takes off. It's pretty self-nullifying, in that the story has no real consequences for the Hulk or the X-Men (well, except for Juggernaut), but the battle is entertaining enough to justify the miniseries. On a broader scale, there's a great degree of parallelism between what Gage is doing here and what Greg Pak is doing with the larger WORLD WAR HULK story. To some extent, it's all about Hulk vs. Superheroes, and while I may personally find it tedious, I can't fault it from a critical standpoint: Pak and the other WWH writers are doing exactly what they set out to do, and unlike Millar and Bendis, they're actually achieving their objectives rather than aim high and hit low. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but WORLD WAR HULK: X-MEN and its parent story make for a GOOD summer-actionfest-blockbuster type of comic, and it's probably all the more appealing to readers who are sick of debating the merits of Superhero Registration. Labels: Diana Click Here to Read More... I have no idea why I'm so surprised at just how gratuitous and disappointing GENE SIMMONS' DOMINATRIX #1 is. I mean, if ever there was a book that sounded as if it was going to be gratutous, it would be something called Gene Simmons' Dominatrix - And am I really the only person who's both disappointed and relieved that it's not a comic about Simmons' actual Dominatrix? Think of the rock star gossip and awkwardness that we've all missed out on - that was advertised with the line "T'n'A meets CIA". The cover art, as well, in its weird air-brushed glory, fit with the idea that this was going to be an entirely tawdry exercise, and yet... somehow, it still disappointed.I think it's that there isn't even the slightest pretense of this being a comic about anything other than the apparent transgressiveness of having its central character be a Dominatrix. Ignore the flat dialogue that attempts to titilate (we see the main character at work, saying things like "Beg me for it worm... And maybe I'll let you have it," and also get her friends get excited about her job, saying things like "I want to hear more about this wack job that you beat up") or the ridiculous cheesecake artwork - You too can watch the main character's internal struggle as she washes dishes by focusing on her breasts! Look, she's so excited by daily household chores that her nipples are standing to attention! - and you're left with something that's so depressingly inept, it's almost comedic; a spy is so excited by his session with his dominatrix that he accidentally blurts out a secret so bad that he immediately gets kidnapped. But that's okay, because he has a magic pill that gives him superpowers - but he doesn't take it, he gives it to his dominatrix, because... um... well, just because! And then she beats this guy up! Because that's what dominatrixes do (There's even a caption where she feels guilty about it, because she's not getting paid to hurt him)! And then, after she beats up the bad guy, instead of trying to do anything about the guy she saw kidnapped, or the secret she's apparently learned that is so dangerous that said guy gets kidnapped, she goes home to have some tea. Only to get ambushed by a super sexy spy who's also dressed in fetish wear! Of course, when you read the text piece at the back, suddenly the story itself seems like high art. Especially when you get to the quote from Gene Simmons' original pitch for the series: "maybe one zipper going UP HER BACKSIDE (the guys have a zipper in the front...she has a zipper in the back-easy access!!)" "Easy access," ladies and gentlemen. Oh, it gets worse. That text page is supposedly written by the fictional lead character, who asks the female readers of the book to send in photos of themselves for Gene Simmons to pick his favorite out of, which is kind of unsettling on all manner of levels (That they have to do so calling themselves "submissives" and be dressed in their "best s&m or m&m outfit (after all, we all know chocolates and leather go well together)" just adds to the "Oh, Jesus, Gene Simmons is looking for free masturbatory material" moment). Add that to the artwork in the story that completely objectifies its heroine and the script that fails to pull a sympathetic lead character out of its various scenes but does succeed in making her unfulfilled, lonely and a sellout (There's a couple of scenes where the tone of her narration is "Well, anything for the money") in the process, and you're left with a book about a woman in charge - although, yes, you can make the argument that a dominatrix is another male fantasy object and not in charge as just subservient to men in a different way - where the overall feeling is one of women being mistreated and abused more or less as usual in the industry. Crap, then. Click Here to Read More... Thursday, August 30, 2007
 This week is clearly a Big Win for DC -- Marvel barely put out even nine comics this week. AMAZONS ATTACK! #6: There is absolutely positively no way to discuss this issue without being spoilery, so AVERT THINE EYES, MADAME, if you care about not having the ending ruined! I haven't exactly been thrilled by this series from the start, because while the premise was self-explanatory, I was more interested in WHY the Amazons Attacked (as well as the HOW of it, since last I recall, they'd been sent off forever to be with the Greek Gods). We get a little of that, but none of it was very satisfying for this reader -- a bit of hand-waving of "oooh, magic!", I guess. Circe, for what appears to be no good reason, brings Polly back from the dead using some of her own soul, which makes Polly all evil 'n stuff, but that really doesn't explain any of the OTHER Amazons' action, or how/why the bana-whatever are involved (since, again, last I remembered, the bana-whatevers and the themy-whatever branches didn't like each other at all, and hadn't been reconciled) But, ah, it was all a feint within a feint, as the last page reveals that the New Gods have usurped the Old Gods. How? No clue -- in fact, GG always struck me as pretty much the weakest of the New Gods, with her only powers being "being haggard and cranky". Another 2-3 pages of the hows and whys would have been so much better. I guess the premise is "have the population hate Diana that much more", though there isn't any story indication that *actually* worked, really. Instead, it just becomes a mess -- Paradise Island is back (Superman can hear it!), but Diana doesn't seem to give a fuck. Instead, she's worrying about Nemesis, and Sarge Steel in her next issue. Clark apparently doesn't/can't perceive Polly being on the isle, and no one seems to really be at all concerned where the Amazons (each roughly on par with Diana... therefore each roughly on par with Clark, yes?) all went. For that matter, none of the JSAers seem to be especially concerned about their fellow JSAer Polly. Oh well. Where are the Amazons? Stealing an idea from Grant Morrison, and his White Martian story, they're all spliced into GenPop, but without their memories. I could vaguely sorta accept that in the former case, because there were only 7 of them, but in the Amazon's case, there has to be thousands upon thousands of them, and it seems to be a bit much to swallow. Either way, either this will be entirely ignored until someone wants to put Paradise Isle back together, or it will be some major plot point in FINAL CRISIS. I'm expecting the former, however. So: to recap: the amazons are rescued from "limbo", attack for no special reason, have no lasting impact, then are basically thrown back into limbo again, waiting for a better plot to come along. AWEsome! No, wait, I mean... "AWFUL" OUTSIDERS: FIVE OF A KIND: GRACE & WONDER WOMAN: Strangely this sorta pissed me off even more -- Grace is now "retconned" (well, it could have been the plan from the start) to be a Bana-mazon, but the big magical spell that GG cast to splice the Amazons back into GenPop didn't work on her. Dunno why -- there's no story reason given. But here's the thing: Diana FINDS OUT that the amazons are spliced into GenPop, without memories (that took a while, huh?), but doesn't seem to give one fuck at all. Anyway, why even bother to have that kind of a "mystery" at the end of AA if the SAME WEEK you let the one character who would be most interested know about it? How does that make sense? Putting aside that whole "are the DC editors even talking to one another?" question, this issue wasn't a miss; in fact the last two issue of this five more or less redeemed the whole series. I liked the characterizations and the interplay between Diana and Grace, and the plot moved briskly at least. If Diana wasn't such a "We don't know WHAT to do with her!" character these days, I'd've liked this better. As it is: reasonably EH. COUNTDOWN TO ADVENTURE #1: It is unfortunately titled -- after all the title says it is leading TO adventure, not that there is any adventure contained within. Which is kind of true -- the closest you get to adventure is Cliff wanting to whack-off to Kory's sleeping body (Read this immediately after "AUNTS IN YOUR PANTS #1" for more amusingly perverse ideas). Like Graeme, I liked the idea of Adam Strange being thrown over for Steve "Champ" Hazard (a great name), but telegraphing him as a complete psycho-beast is sloppy sloppy storytelling. The Forerunner stuff was at least adequate, even if I don't buy any one's motivation -- but its basically just an extended origin sequence, and the future-adventure setup seems to be "What Jason and Donna are doing, except evil", which doesn't have me rushing for more, exactly. That said, I like the idea of a parallel earth where all of the planets of the Solar System have a sentient race, and they all hate earth. That's an OK sci-fi high concept. It veers close to being GOOD, but I think we'll stick with OK for now. What did YOU think? -B Labels: Brian Click Here to Read More...
As you know, I'm usually most interested in the crunchy subtext, and BTVS is a particularly interesting show for that. In part, this is because Whedon and crew were particularly facile with metaphor and subtext; there's the initial conceit of the show, of course--high school as a horror movie--but also the subtextual stuff going on in particular stories and arcs, such as the genius twist of Season Two's "Innocence" where Angel turns evil after sleeping with Buffy. But BTVS is also particularly interesting because that initial conceit gets thrown out after four years, and the show goes on for another three with an official eighth season now turning up in print. Whedon has said in the past he intended to start BTVS, get it established, leave it in capable hands, and then go off and do other stuff. Yet, he continues to return to the character. And why is that? Is it because as long as people are interested in the Buffyverse and willing to be milked of their hard-earned cash, Whedon is interested in showing up every morning with the milking pail? Well, sure. Whedon is always swinging for the fences of pop culture fame, and I have no doubt he wants Buffy on t-shirts, and lunch boxes, and action figures, and in cartoons. He wants that because he strongly believes Buffy represents a special turning point for the roles of women in heroic literature, and it would be a great thing to have little girls have a strong ass-kicking hero they believe in. He also wants that because, like any other individual who works in Hollywood, he is well and truly aware of how much money those sorts of things make, and how much power is conferred to someone who reaps that cash harvest. So the idea of Buffy: Season Eight in comics can stem from both Whedon's desire to make more cash, to give the brand that much more power, and his desire to tell a story, to have something to say that he can best say with Buffy and the characters of the Buffyverse. Or rather, the idea that Season Eight might be a bit of a cash grab won't stop him from developing a story with something meaningful to say. What should be interesting is seeing if we can tell from the first five issues of Buffy: Season Eight what Whedon might want to say, or what he might end up saying. As I mentioned, BTVS was built around the "high school as horror movie" conceit it abandoned after three years (although I think the "college is hell" conceit for Season Four works pretty well, too). These conceits are successful in part because the same fears of powerlessness (and, also, a corresponding fear of power) that fuel horror movies are part and parcel of teenage life. As the series goes on, Whedon becomes more interested in that fear of power, and the cost of power, than the fear of powerlessness. Being the Slayer is a terrible responsibility for Buffy: the early seasons show her complaining about how it screws up her chance for a normal life, and the later seasons show exactly how it screws her up. A lot of what I found thought was careless plot hammering in later seasons the first time I watched became clearer on rewatching--even though it bites her on the ass time and time again, Buffy keeps secrets from her friends; she struggles with feelings of superiority and callousness that come from her power; she equates sex with danger; and she is too quick to accept responsibility for things that happen, to the point of defensiveness. Buffy learns lessons and moves forward with each season's arc, but she doesn't always become a better person or learn the right lesson--for most of Season Seven, for example, she's an insufferable ass (although what part of that is weaknesses in Sarah Michelle Gellar's portrayal--she clearly is ready to leave the show by this point--and what part of that are strident speeches made by Whedon on the price of being a leader, I leave for a smarter viewer than I to suss out). One nice trick in BTVS the TV show is the use of history (the school subject) continually being used as a metaphor for, well, History: at the beginning of the show, it's the subject Buffy has the most trouble with but as time goes on, her relationship to the subject grows more complex: sometimes people talk as if she's a natural at the subject, other times the nuances of it elude her. But it's never a topic she can dismiss: in Whedon's universe (and in the Whedonverse), history is inescapable. No matter how she tries to run, or what she tries to hide, the history of the Slayer lineage (or what she's done, or who she's slept with, or how she's fighting) is always inescapable. I suspect, in fact, this is the reason Whedon was never able to break away from Buffy. The struggles of Buffy, one of a long line of vampire slayers, to accept that lineage is something that perhaps struck close to home with Whedon, a third-generation TV writer. Despite his attempts to be a screenwriter and filmmaker, Whedon was through all of Buffy the TV show, only successful in the medium of his father and his grandfather. Like Buffy, he couldn't escape his lineage and, like Buffy, Whedon grew most powerful embracing it and using the resulting power to exert control over it. (Now that I think about it, like Slayers, television writers are vitally dependent on their watchers. To what extent might Buffy's complex relationship with the Watchers' Council--she's fond of hers, but dismissive of the power the others try to exert on Slayers--mirror Whedon's relationship with the people who it possible for him to make a living?) I wonder if all the frustration and ambivalence and outright fear Buffy expresses of her power and responsibility are echoes of what Whedon went through during the making of the show (and Angel, and Firefly)--the frustration, ambivalence, and fear of an artist saying: "Yes, this is what I can do well. But is this all I'm going to be able to do?" In the first four issues of Season Eight--the equivalent of one TV episode--Buffy is the leader of a worldwide group of Slayers, and she's more comfortable in her power. Xander is the Nick Fury-like organizer of the group, Willow is her powerful back-up, and Giles is her recruiter and diplomat in the supernatural world. In issue five, The Chain, a Buffy decoy dies trying to carry on Buffy's name, saying, "There is a chain between each and every one of us. And like the man said, you either feel its tug or you ignore it." Because the Buffy decoy does so, she takes solace even as she dies, saying "You don't even know who I am. But I do." While this suggests Whedon is more comfortable with the idea of one's place in history being irrelevant as long as you know who you are and where you come from, the use of the chain--a symbol of bondage, slavery and oppression--as the connector points to continuing ambivalence. (Or maybe I'm wrong, and the bondage Whedon talks about is his connection to Buffy and the Buffyverse, the possibility of being "the Buffy guy" for the rest of his career?) In any event, Season Eight suggests that Buffy is more comfortable in her roles as leader and as Slayer, and Whedon more comfortable in his role as "the Buffy guy" and these are both comforts that couldn't be conveyed on TV, since in this medium Buffy is free of Gellar's "get me the hell out of here" airs and Whedon is free of his "what the hell am I doing still working in TV?" frustrations. In fact, free seems to be word of the day for Season Eight. Whedon is free of the concerns of a show's budget and he can deliver visuals as big as he can think of: the first four issues of Buffy have had magical battles, dream sequences, an army of zombies fighting an army of Slayers, dragons, castle raids...the list goes on. And yet, this freedom may prove to be Season Eight's biggest weakness: all those scenes in the TV show of Buffy and crew in the library or the magic shop researching their enemy was a clever way to have the characters be proactive without spending more precious money on new sets, new effects, new fights--but it's also where Whedon and his writers were better able to make us care about the characters. (As I mentioned above, Whedon is one of those artists whose work apparently gets better under material considerations and restrictions.) At five issues in, I can give you a rough idea about what's happening with all of the above characters, but I can't recall reading a scene from the books that actually would have made me care in its own right--the emotional impact comes only from the affection I already have for the characters. Whedon points out in that Onion AV interview it's going to be harder for him to create what he calls "juice"--to create a character in the comics that has any of the appeal of someone on the show--but I think even more challenging may be taking a creator who's always drawn tremendous amounts of inspiration from his actors (what would BTVS had been like if James Marsters had never read for Spike, originally a one-off villain?) and giving him nothing to bounce off of but his ideas, his editor, and the book's art. The work on Season Eight so far has been pretty and competent, but more than occasionally rushed and never particularly inspired. Finally, there's been talk about Season Eight taking place over fifty or sixty issues, which is four to five years of real time. That's certainly plenty of time to craft a sweeping mega-epic, but is it possibly too much time? (If Season Five had lasted five years, I would've bailed and never come back long ago...) In fact, the last three seasons might've fared better at twelve or thirteen episodes each instead of twenty-two. Unless Season Eight has well-planned plateaus--areas that feel like climaxes even if they aren't the arc's ultimate one--it could take far too long (and cost far too much) for the audience to stay interested. I think Whedon's idea for the arc (Buffy may have found peace, but the U.S. military--and maybe the world--is clearly still quite afraid of her power, and, I'm guessing, but just as Season Seven had the uber-vamp, Season Eight will have a Slayer-Slayer) and his enthusiasm for the comics medium will make his run worth reading. I certainly have enough affection for his characters that knowing what's happening to them next is tremendously appealing. But if Season Eight hits none of the remarkable high notes of the TV series, maybe that shouldn't be a tremendous surprise: lineage or no, it took Whedon a lot of time to become a master of the TV format. It might be naive to think, despite his considerable talents, he'll be able to do as much with the comics medium in a much shorter (and yet, thanks to the miracle of publication schedules, much longer) time. Ultimately, what may serve Whedon best may be what he'll least want to do--take some huge risks with the Buffy characters and the comics medium in the hopes of coming up with something new. If nothing else, taking such risks might help him identify again with the fear of powerlessness, and bring his relationship with Buffy full circle. I guess like any good set of Watchers, We'll just have to wait and see. Labels: Jeff Click Here to Read More... Okay, so so much for that "returning and beginning again" thing yesterday - That's what happens when you suddenly find yourself working a 13-hour day the night before and being unable to get to the store to pick up new books to read, apparently. That's what I get for letting other people at my company to get sick without my permission, it seems.(Also: People who say that they want me to write more on this site? I'm flattered and all - and ignore any potential snark there, because I genuinely am - but convinced you mean someone else. I already write almost daily on here...) (Also also: Thank you very much to everyone who's contributed via the Paypal link, by the way. I will now try and review some comics to earn my share.) 52 AFTERMATH: THE FOUR HORSEMEN #1: I don't know if it says more about how much I enjoyed 52 or how little I'm enjoying Countdown that I find the follow-ups from the previous weekly miniseries so much more interesting than the goings-on in the current universe-shaking mini. That extends even to this Okay opening issue of the spin-off of one of the more disappointing elements of the Morrison/Johns/Rucka/Waid series; despite the overly expositionary dialogue - the Veronica Cale/Wonder Woman scenes in particular are leaden with the feeling of "this is what you're supposed to know" infodump - Keith Giffen manages to pull an initial swerve with the recasting of the Horsemen as spirits possessing survivors and emergency workers in the remains of Black Adam's 52-ending rampage. It's an unusual book - it feels too subtle and dark for both Superman and Wonder Woman to be starring in, in a strange way - but one that's almost worth paying attention to, for that very reason. COUNTDOWN #35: Wow, cruel trick to lure in readers with a JG Jones cover only to hit them with Manuel Garcia's less impressive art on the inside (To be fair to Garcia, I think a lot of the problem is with the inking; if there was more variation in line weight, things would look a lot better). Storywise, the book is as disappointing. Not only is the script overly reliant on cute scene transitions and flat dialogue ("What if, together, [Kyle Rayner], Jason Todd and Donna Troy decide to navigate the multiverse in their search?" asks one of the Monitors, and instead of you thinking "That would be terrible!", you think "Oh, like all of the already-solicited spin-offs, you mean?"), but the plot is equally reliant on unsuccessful cliffhangers (Did any of the cliffhangers from last issue end in a way that surprised anyone?), nonsensical plot developments and absolutely atrocious pacing. Continually disappointing, and still pretty Crap... COUNTDOWN TO ADVENTURE #1: ...But this, on the other hand, turns out to be surprisingly Good. Maybe I'm just a soft touch for a story that sees Adam Strange replaced by a man called Steve Hazard - Apparently, you can't defend Rann unless you have a wonderfully melodramatic name - and treats its characters with respect and affection instead of interchangable chess pieces in some crazy sales plan, but this was very much better than it had any right to be. Congratulations should be flying in the direction of Adam Beechen and Eddy Barrows (who provides some clean art here, with the occasional Rags Morales touch in places) for this one, because, really, who saw heart and fun coming from this book when it was announced? Labels: Graeme Click Here to Read More... Infamy is a tricky thing. It has a way of making your work slightly immortal, in that a title's mention might cause a listener's ears to perk, and their mind to wander through all the books they've ever read, searching for the source of that scratchy feeling they've suddenly got. For years, if someone were to utter the words Boiled Angel in front of me at my junior year winter formal or my younger sister's Holy Confirmation or something, I'd react. Internally, but instantly. They are trigger words. But I'd hardly read ten panels of Mike Diana's work in those years. It was only the infamy that hit me. Stephen R. Bissette once wrote of his infamous horror anthology, Taboo, in its next-to-last volume: "I'm glad Taboo was gutted like an organ bank while it was still walking, that it was heartlessly abandoned by its creators. Taboo demanded so much, more than I could continue to give. No longer possessed like a madman, no longer wishing to be a thankless midwife and proprietor to its insatiable needs, I, too, abandoned it, leaving it as everyone else had: unwanted, dismembered and exsanguinated, its rank heat dissipating in an unforgiving night. "Undead." Immortal, undead... but what is the character of these mad and dreadful things? It's easy to shock yourself on the internet - why, just yesterday I visited a popular anime review site, and treated myself to a summary of a new rape/humiliation porno production, with a surgical experimentation theme. Brain transplant bestiality, a forced sex change operation... shocks come so easy these days. But infamy carries the weight of history, and captures a bit of time it was born in. I often find my response to infamy is superficial - I react only to the prior reactions of others, in that I react to the charge of infamy itself. It's better to get up close, and really rub my face in notorious comics. Right in the store parking lot! I don't care if they all stare! They can't hurt me with their eyes and laughs. My car will snuggle me like Mother. Anyway, Taboo makes for a perfect study, being a pretty infamous series, and one rich in history. The most infamous of all of its ten volumes is the second one, cleverly titled Taboo 2, but some background will also help. Taboo was first published in 1988, though it was conceived years prior, while Bissette and John Totleben worked on DC's The Saga of the Swamp Thing, which most of you know became a very popular horror series with the addition of writer Alan Moore in 1984. Perhaps fired up by this success, the two artists cooked up the idea of a whole anthology of new horror comics, one that would press the form toward the horror frontiers explored by other arts. Mark Askwith (comics writer and event producer) provided the title, and Dave Sim initially planned to fund and publish it under his Aardvark One International line of comics-that-aren't-Cerebus, an effort that would actually only produce one title, the 1986-89 Stephen Murphy/Michael Zulli series the Puma Blues, which eventually became embroiled in a distribution controversy between Sim and Diamond, the scintillating details of which I shall save for my multi-part Puma Blues coverage at some point in the future. The important part is that Sim got out of the business of publishing anything other than Cerebus, and Bissette opted to publish the book under his and then-wife Nancy O'Connor's SpiderBaby Grafix & Publishing; by that time Totleben had backed away from active participation, although he retained co-creator credit. That first volume of Taboo, released in 1988, has some nice stuff in it. There's a nice introduction by Clive Barker, who was later supposed to be a bit more present in the series, in that Bissette had planned to serialize a comics adaptation of Barker's short story Rawhead Rex with the aforementioned Mr. Zulli collaborating on the visuals. That project had originated at Arcane Publishing with rights holder Steve Niles; however, after Arcane's option expired (and Arcane went out of publishing), it was purchased by Eclipse, a publisher Bissette & Zulli opted not to work with. The adaptation was eventually published by Eclipse in 1993, written by Niles himself, with art by Les Edwards. As for the actual comics in that first Taboo (ah, comics, yes yes...), there was a surreal Alan Moore/Bill Wray piece, about a woman who finds the energy to feel alive while sitting in the studio audience of a suicide game show. Eddie Campbell provided some reportage on the strange Australian case of The Pyjama Girl. Charles Burns presented Contagious, the first iteration of his teen sex plague idea that would culminate in Black Hole. Some interesting stuff. But Taboo 2 is where the infamy really began. After the ordeal of publication was over, Bissette recounted the history of Taboo 2 in the 1990 debut issue of Gauntlet. This tale would later be reprinted in Taboo itself, as the last thing in its final issue. A parting bow. Having assembled the contents for Taboo 2, Bissette sensed there might be trouble due to three features: one from underground comics veteran S. Clay Wilson (who'd also appeared in the first Taboo), one from Cara Sherman-Tereno, and one from Zulli. Wilson's piece proved especially contentious - enough so that co-publisher/spouse O'Connor declined her editing credit on the volume, receiving instead an "assistant editor" credit with Totleben. The book was sent for printing at the Canadian house that handled the first Taboo. It refused to print the material, perhaps owing to the political climate in Canada at the time (so Bissette mused). The materials were then sent to a US printer, which declined the job on grounds of sexual content. A third printer agreed to take the job. But you know, you're never quite aware of how many steps it takes to create and release a finished book (circa 1989) until you read a litany of troubles like the one that followed. A typesetting house refused the project, as did two copy shops. As did a color separation outfit. A different separation outfit, approached to handle the back and inside covers, had to be assured that certain symbols on display were not Satanic. Upon approaching a bindery, the book was refused because the people there believed incorrectly that John Totleben had drawn a vagina somewhere in his front cover art. Nine binderies refused the book in sum. Finally, the damned thing was released in the Autumn of 1989, all 10,000 copies. Some of which were then seized and destroyed in customs busts in Canada and the UK. At the end of 1989, Bissette was refused a business loan by his bank, which had handled the prior issue's money, for the purposes of reprinting the volume. That is infamy. But what is in this infamous book? How do the controversial pages work? It's easy enough to start with Wilson, who provided four full-page drawings, tucked away in a section called S. Clay Wilson's Black Pages, festooned with skulls and CAUTION AVOID EYE CONTACT! stamps, thoughts from underground ally Tom Veitch printed on both sides. I'm going to get a bit graphic for the next four paragraphs. Drawing #1 is titled Rebel Reject Robots Dally with the Bastard Daughters of Corrupt Technocrats. It depicts robots (really metal-flesh cyborg things) waging war against naked or near-naked women, setting hair on fire with lasers, choking and raping, etc. Drawing #2 is titled Rotting Zombie Harpies Dispatch a Vampire. In it, several nude women with rotten, torn flesh hold a naked vampire aloft, one of them stretching and tearing his penis with her teeth while another thrusts a stake through his heart. Dual phallic power seized, you see. Drawing #3 is titled The Checkered Demon and a Vampire messmate "Race to the Bottom." A vampire with a thin mustache and glasses sucks blood from a (mostly naked) woman's neck with a straw, while Wilson's signature lil' devil creation snorts something out of the woman's vagina via glass apparatus. A bottle of Fuck You Beer sits on the floor, for those who choose to look. Drawing #4 is titled The Merry Makers Parade By... Oblivious to the Odious Acts in the Alley. This scene presents a man standing in a filthy alley, holding a club in one hand and his grotesquely engorged S. Clay Wilson-type penis in the other, a woman laying on the ground bloodied and with her face caved in. Off to the side stands another man, clutching a smaller naked girl, a finger pressed into her mouth. The merry makers indeed parade by in the background, appropriately oblivious. On one hand, it's easy to see why many might balk at this material. It wouldn't be any easier a sell today, I suspect. But on the other hand, I can't say it's all that unexpected as per its place in the S. Clay Wilson catalog. He'd been doing that sort of stuff for a long time by 1989. And more pertinently, his presence in Taboo establishes a link to the past, a sort of continuity between what was taboo then, and what is taboo now (meaning 1989). While a wholly new reader might indeed by stunned by the garish drive of Wilson's vision -- all wild detail and goony faces and nervous energy -- other readers may not react at all beyond the understanding of Wilson's place in comics history. The prior issue of Taboo ran a drawing by the late Greg Irons, another underground artist - it would later run a story by horror magazine stalwart Jack Butterworth, and the first English translation of Alejandro Jodorowsky's and Moebius' debut collaboration, Les yeux du chat. Does this mean the Wilson material isn't in here for nasty shocks? Oh heavens, no. I remind you: skulls and CAUTION stamps. But the distance we're allowed by time affords us a greater chance of looking at this potent material, and seeing its place in Taboo as part of chain of horrors, a tradition the series reflected on and carried forward. This is among the benefits of examining infamy, this distance. What of the other stories Bissette suspected as shocking? Well, Cara Sherman-Tereno's story (actually a two-chapter serial set back-to-back, the first half dating back to 1978) is an overwrought bisexual vampire saga, notable mainly for some outrageous phallic symbols and a straightforward interest in addressing topics like AIDS. It's a middling piece of socially aware subgenre horror, although I suspect the semi-graphic gay sex bits set off a few alarms somewhere. Its presence in Taboo indicates an egalitarian approach to sexual subject matter, as well as a desire to apply horror tropes to then-contemporary pressing subjects. Quite simple. And then, there's Zulli's Mercy. Plotwise, it's nothing striking. A sleeping man is haunted by plenty of ye olde Catholic guilt, sexual shame mixing with punishment, and so he wakes up and snips off his penis with a pair of scissors. Th' end! No, this story's importance to the Taboo tapestry is that it demonstrates the series' devotion to exploring the graphic capabilities of the comics form. Anyone who's read the Puma Blues knows that Zulli is very capable of smartly handling bold and complicated visual concepts, on top of his obvious ability to render delicate, precise realist characters, as often seen in his works with Neil Gaiman. Here, he provides several tight arrangements of vertical and horizontal panels, whipping from childhood flashbacks to images of Christ being scourged without warning, varying panel height and width to control the impact of specific moments. And all atop everything -- not confined to caption boxes but spilling across bunches of panels at once -- are all of the story's words, all of them being heard in the main character's head, fonts galore and sizes varying. The subtlest thoughts are squirreled away between panels, almost too out of the way for the reader to find - this is fitting, since they are the thoughts that lay deepest in the slumbering character's psyche. They are also the only ones to carry over to the otherwise wordless waking action, punctuating the gory finale with the aftershock of nightmare. It's simply excellent work. Zulli would handle a fine, if more stylistically subdued adaptation of Ramsey Campbell's Again in Taboo 5. But he would also become something of a phantom of lost projects; along with his and Bissette's Rawhead Rex project, Zulli would also get involved in perhaps 'the' big unfinished Taboo project: his and Gaiman's Sweeny Todd, which only appeared in volumes 6 and 7 (and the volume 6 entry was actually a preview book that only came wrapped with the preordered segment of vol. 6's print run - good luck finding it today). Still, other graphic experiments were present. Taboo 2 also featured a story by writer Tim Lucas and Simonida Perica-Uth, a fascinating little piece of words and pictures going off in two directions. Lucas' words, set out in plain typeface against blocks of white, tells of a metaphorical domestic drama about a wife who can only conceive when her distant husband speaks to her during lovemaking, though his silence is imprinted on their children. It's strange, gently surreal, and more disquieting than anything. Meanwhile, Perica-Uth presents each page as a collage, heavy on ancient Egyptian images and little flights of whimsy, like cartoon sperm floating in the sky. The arrangements of Perica-Uth's human figures do generally match what Lucas is writing about, but the approach dislodges the plot from a magical realist houshold world, and plunges it into an imaginary space of cosmic forces fucking and posing, pinning myth on workings of love. Lucas was perhaps the most effective of Taboo's relative comics novices; he was (and remains) primarily a film critic, one who innovated the now-common approach of considering video and print quality while reviewing movies released for home viewing. He later founded Video Watchdog, and recently published Mario Bava - All the Colors of the Dark, an 1128-page, full-color hardcover monster with over 1000 images and a manuscript running nearly 800,000 words in length. In Taboo, he primarily wrote a serial called Throat Sprockets, a sort of non-vampire story about a mysterious sexploitation film that pops up in a grindhouse, its images prompting an intense fetish for neck-biting in viewers. The best chapter was in Taboo 3, a wildly veering piece of reflection on ephemeral relationships, so jarring in its transitions and pace that it teeters right on the line of pressing ambition and simple incompetence - a little like the best exploitation films! The project was never finished in Taboo, or in the comics form at all, though Lucas eventually revised it all into a prose novel. Indeed, that might be the last quality of Taboo, one discernable through the infamy - leaving things undone. Another serial debuted in Taboo 2: a little something called From Hell, which teamed two the prior issue's seperate contributors, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. It wouldn't finish in Taboo. Not a lot did. Taboo kept running into money troubles. Moebius' Starwatcher Graphics kicked in a little money. For Taboo 4, Kevin Eastman's Tundra kicked in a lot. It was needed - as of Taboo 5, Canadian and UK distributors would no longer solicit orders, essentially limiting the book's readership to the US. By that time, Taboo was being published in association with Tundra, and Bissette became involved in other matters with the company. A special issue came out. Taboo 6 and 7, last one in 1992. Bissette had many problems with Tundra, not the least of them his feeling that its decision to publish From Hell as a standalone comic in addition to its Taboo serialization effectively crippled his sales. And then nothing. Bissette left Tundra. And then Tundra melted into Kitchen Sink. And in 1995, Bissette came to Kitchen Sink and released Taboo 8 and 9, two 'coda' volumes stitched together from the remains of an unpublished sexual abuse awareness special, unseen bits of since-completed serials like Throat Sprockets and Jeff Nicholson's Through the Habitrails, and other paid-for odds 'n ends. Kitchen Sink didn't publish comics for much longer. Taboo was never seen again. But I can still recall seeing images from Taboo. From the Kitchen Sink catalog I got by dialing the telephone number in the collected edition of The Crow. I heard stories about it, somehow. Hell, some of them probably went around for the purposes of selling some back copies. But it worked, you know? The stories. I'd hear 'Taboo,' and I'd know it was something bad. It'd get me like that. I know it better now, and I'm glad. I can feel the history on it. The life experience of the old ghost, still haunting. Labels: Jog Click Here to Read More...Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Like Jeff said, you being active in some way really DOES matter -- whether it is giving us a buck, or even just posting to the comments threads, it keeps us going knowing that people ARE interested. So, since like 25% of the people posting in the shipping list thread asked, let's talk about Asshats. I like that word, because it's really only sort of a swear -- it sounds dirtier than it really is, I think, because for me it really is more about idiocy than anything else. After all, who needs a hat for one's ass? It would quickly fall off! (Mechanical) things are the way that they are in the DM for what are usually actually very very sound reasons. That's not to suggest or imply that the DM is perfect, or that there aren't 47 different things that go wrong in the execution, but when you look at the underlying principles behind, say, the solicitation process, they evolved into what they are because they work for the participants of the DM. There's a reason, for example, that books generally ship monthly -- much slower than that, and the audience is much more prone to drift; much less than that, and the audience gets confused whether they've bought an issue or not. Honestly! *one* of the (many) reasons we put in a POS system was that we get asked "did I buy this already?" quite a bit. MOST comics readers don't come in weekly. MOST don't have a pull list. MOST don't read the news sites. MOST aren't totally-organized in their collecting, making themselves lists or whatever. So, for me, screwing with how-the-customer-buys is just an idiotic thing to do. And that makes you an Asshat. There's no way I'm going to do this every week -- because there's weeks where no one was especially egregious, or there's nothing meaningful to say, or there's some really valid other reason. But sometimes you get some pretty obvious boners, and it's worth handing out the Award for Auspicious Asshattery. There's even TWO this week! AAA #1 goes to LOCAL #10. Holy, frickin' cow, this book was supposed to ship in NOVEMBER 2006. Nine months late? Are you insane? And you have the AUDACITY to not resolicit? I deeply deeply love much of what Oni puts out, but they have some of the sloppiest shipping schedules in the business. Listen: freakin' AVATAR is a more-likely-to-hit-their-shipdates publisher these days (Avatar has, to their credit, seemed to have mostly solved their shipping problems) AAA #2 goes to an old friend of Asshattery: Robert Kirkman and WALKING DEAD #41. Dude, #40 came out LAST FUCKING WEEK. Double-you-tee-eff? Man, am I going to be swimming in "did I buy this?" questions for the next few weeks! I repeat: MOST comics customers don't come in weekly. Don't undercut your own sales. What's funny is that I believe that if WALKING DEAD shipped on an old-school schedule, like how I know that some of you could remember the days when you could set your clocks by comics -- BATMAN came out the second week of the month without fail, or whatever -- anyway, if I could tell people, "yeah, WD comes out the last week of the month, guaranteed", we'd be selling 30% more copies just like that. WD would be a top *50* comic, y'know? And the ironic thing is that I tend to suspect that with the freakish exception of MARVEL ZOMBIES, as a creator-owned book under the Image deal, Kirkman pretty much has to be making more money off of WD than any of his page-rate Marvel work. What really makes this harder for me is that I GENUINELY like WALKING DEAD. There may be sequences I hate (like the rape stuff), but over all this is pretty much certainly Image's strongest and most consistent book. If I had written reviews last week (ah, sorry, sorry, it was order form week with a new computer system, and new hybrid method of taking orders!), I would have given #40 an "Excellent", full of wonderful and vivid characterization. Which brings me to a special Award for Auspicious Asshattery: Diamond comics for shorting me 2/3rds of my order of WALKING DEAD #41, so I can't even fill subs, let alone have copies for the rack. Though, actually, this sorta works in my favor, because now it will look to most of my customers as though there were two weeks between issues. Hmmmmm..... (Robert Kirkman is now allowed to make the "...and such small portions!" joke in the comment section, if he feels like it; and I will be obligated to say something self-deprecating in return) -B Click Here to Read More...  Howdy! I'd like to ask you to do something for me. I'd like you to use the little Paypal button below the list of the SavCrits and give us a dollar. (Actually, if you're reading this on an RSS feed, I'd like you to do two things for me: First, go directly to our site; then, use the little Paypal button below the list of the SavCrits to give us a dollar.)Here's my thinking on the subject. As of Graeme's post this morning, there have been approximately 50 posts this month (not counting my garage sale posts or the Douglas Wolk signing pix) and there will doubtlessly be more by the time August ends this Friday. (Maybe 55 posts?) If you came across a zine in your local comic book store that had the dozens of reviews everyone's done, plus Abhay's smart-assery, plus Jog's coverage of Igor Kordey's career at Marvel, and the overview of Valérian: Spatio-Temporal Agent, would you play a dollar for it? Let's say I follow the public television model and only do this once every four months. Would you pay for a dollar for a zine that would then be (let's assume) four times that size, with four times the reviews and four times the etc., etc.? Now, I think you know right now whether you'll push that little button and give us a dollar or not. Some of you aren't going to give us a dollar because you don't have to, or you don't have paypal set up, or you can't be arsed with remembering your paypal password, or you think if you give us a dollar today, everyone will be hitting you up for a dollar by this time next year. No matter what reasons I put forward for why you should give us a dollar--with the possible exception of me suddenly breaking into piteous cries of extreme financial distress--I think you've already decided whether or not you'll give us that money. But in the interests of making this entertaining, I'll still go ahead and tell you why you should. Clearly, the North American comics industry has been changing dramatically over the last several years. Interestingly, and for very different reasons, the North American newspaper industry has been as well. For example, despite being essentially the only daily paper in town, The San Francisco Chronicle recently went through a rather grueling round of layoffs and cutbacks, in part because circulation numbers diminish as more people get their news and opinions electronically. In the past, I think newspapers would have, over time, come to employ fulltime critics to perform reviews of graphic novels and the comic medium as they did with other developing media. But because the newspapers are struggling to find their place in a dynamically different workplace, that's probably never going to happen: they're using freelancers, or they're assigning their regular critics to cover this field. Comics doesn't have its Tim Goodman, or its Frank Rich, or its Andrew Sarris. Despite my delight that in Douglas Wolk we may finally have our Pauline Kael, Douglas isn't (yet) set up at the New Yorker, able to focus on educating and inspiring weekly and not having to worry about hustling for the rent. Coverage in the news about comics is still spotty, and it will probably remain so from some time until it figures out how to understand how to best take advantage of the public's new habits. Until it does--whether as Boing Boing Media Networks or Google Press, International or Digg Universal or whatever--a rejuvenated field has little more to rely on for its criticism than passionate individuals who continue to contribute to the field with their own free time and resources. We all do this out from a sincere passion and love for the artform, and that won't change no matter how many people click the Paypal button. But what we do here does take time and energy and commitment, and financial remuneration has a way of making the time we clear from our schedules easier to justify, to ourselves and our loved ones, and it is my hope that it will provide the sustenance--emotionally, at least--for smart, knowledgeable people to continue to write engagingly about this medium at a good clip for some time to come. It'll also make a strong incentive to expand the site, whether that's adding interviews, podcasts, or merely another wave of critics for an even wider view of the marketplace. To phrase it a bit more succinctly, Making with the clicky shows both that what we do matters, and also that it matters that we do it. Looking back on the first forty days or so of the rebooted Savage Critic, I very strongly believe both those statements to be true. So much so, in fact, I sent in the first dollar myself earlier today. As I mentioned above, I'm thinking of a public television model for this, and one of the things they do with public television pledge weeks is they offer incentives. So the person who offers the first donation will get a DVD of Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera mailed to them, and the person who donates the most by the end of this week will get a copy of Jim Woodring's Seeing Things. If you want, I'll even personalize each with a little critical blurb (or not, as you prefer--they're certainly both such significant pieces of work they can get along just fine without me.) But I'd like to think you don't need any such incentives. It's the last week of the month and payday is right around the corner. If you think what we do here is valuable, take a second to remember your password, and take the plunge. Although I'm only speaking on behalf of myself here, I'm sure all of us at The Savage Critic would appreciate it. Thank you. Click Here to Read More... I've been sorta blaise about posting the shipping list (I missed 2 of the last 3 weeks), partly because I'm not sure how it really fits the NEW Savage Critic(s), and I wanted to see who might say "hey, where is it?" Not that many people mentioned its absence, but one of them was a Professor of Marketing, and I figure one should listen to professional educators if you're going to listen to ANYone. So, here's the list: 2000 AD #1549 2000 AD #1550 30 DAYS OF NIGHT EBEN & STELLA #4 52 AFTERMATH THE FOUR HORSEMEN #1 (OF 6) ACTION COMICS #855 AMAZONS ATTACK #6 (OF 6) AMERICAN VIRGIN #18 AMORY WARS #3 (OF 5) AUNTS IN YOUR PANTS (A) AVENGERS INITIATIVE #5 CWI BATMAN ANNUAL #26 HEAD OF THE DEMON BIG BANG COMICS PRESENTS AGENTS OF BADGE #6 BLACK PANTHER #30 CWI BOMB QUEEN IV #1 (OF 4) BRIT #1 CARTOON NETWORK BLOCK PARTY #36 CONAN #43 COUNTDOWN 35 COUNTDOWN TO ADVENTURE #1 (OF 8)(CD) EMILY THE STRANGE VOL 2 DEATH ISSUE #1 ENIGMA CIPHER #2 (OF 5) (RES) EX MACHINA MASQUERADE SPECIAL FALL OF CTHULHU WALPOLE CVR B #5 FALLEN ANGEL IDW #19 FANTASTIC FOUR #549 CWI GENE SIMMONS DOMINATRIX #1 HACK SLASH SERIES SEELEY CVR A #4 HELLBLAZER #234 HELLBOY DARKNESS CALLS #5 (OF 6) HOT MOMS #10 (A) HUNTERS MOON #3 (OF 5) JUGHEAD #184 KISS 4K #3 KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #130 LAST FANTASTIC FOUR STORY LOCAL #10 (OF 12) MARVEL SPOTLIGHT HALO MICE TEMPLAR #1 NINJA SCROLL #12 OUTSIDERS FIVE OF A KIND WEEK 5 GRACE WONDER WOMAN PUNKS THE SUMMER COMICS SP SILVER SURFER REQUIEM #4 (OF 4) SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #179 SPIDER-MAN ONE MORE DAY SKETCHBOOK OMD SUBMIT #1 (A) TALES TO DEMOLISH #1 TEEN TITANS #50 (NOTE PRICE) TEEN TITANS GO #46 TRUE STORY SWEAR TO GOD IMAGE ED #8 USAGI YOJIMBO #105 WALKING DEAD #41 WARHAMMER 40K DAMNATION CRUSADE CVR A Of(6) WARHAMMER FORGE OF WAR CVR A #3 (OF 6) WASTELAND #11 WETWORKS #12 WITCHBLADE TAKERU MANGA MACK CVR B #7 WONDER WOMAN #12 (AA) WORLD WAR HULK X-MEN #3 (OF 3) WWH Books / Mags / Stuff ADVENTURES OF RED SONJA VOL 2 SHE DEVIL WITH SWORD TP (RES) ASIADDICT GN ASTHMA GN BATMAN BATMAN AND SON HC BATMAN SECRETS OF THE BATCAVE TP BECK MONGOLIAN CHOP SQUAD VOL 9 GN (OF 19) CABLE DEADPOOL VOL 7 SEPARATION ANXIETY TP COMPLETE BITE CLUB TP DC TOP COW CROSSOVER CLASSICS TP ESSENTIAL DAREDEVIL VOL 4 TP FONE BONE PLUSH TOY GIRLS AND CORPSES MAGAZINE PREMIER COLLECTORS ISSUE VOL 0 GIRLS AND CORPSES MAGAZINE VOL 1 FALL 2007 HULK AND POWER PACK PACK SMASH DIGEST TP INCREDIBLE CHANGE BOTS GN JEREMIAH HARM VOL 1 TP JUXTAPOZ SEPT 2007 VOL 14 #9 LOOKING GLASS WARS HATTER M PX HC MANHUNTER VOL 3 ORIGINS TP NINJA SCROLL TP NOTHING BETTER VOL 1 TP PREVIEWS VOL XVII #9 SQUIRRELLY GRAY SC SUPER SPY GN TANGENT COMICS VOL 1 TP TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE VOL 5 TP TOKYO IS MY GARDEN GN (RES) WIZARD MAGAZINE SPIDER-MAN ONE MORE DAY QUESADA CVR #192 So my question is: DOES this fit on this site any longer, or should I move it over somewhere on comixexperience.com? Any opinions? What looks good to YOU? -B Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists Click Here to Read More... Goddamn, but my ass is getting kicked by this week already. Is this some kind of weird karma for the fact that there's a holiday weekend coming up, or am I just cursed?BATMAN #668: More than anything else, this three-parter that JH Williams is illustrating makes me very excited for the rumored Morrison/Williams creator-owned book that the two are apparently planning - What makes this Very Good has nothing to do with Batman whatsoever, and everything to do with the way the two creators play around with the comic format and visual identities of different parts of comic history. Which isn't to say that I'm not into this particularly-Avengers-esque (that's Steed and Mrs. Peel Avengers, not the Iron Man and Captain America ones) story, just that it's almost more exciting to imagine what else the two could get up to, in other circumstances. COUNTDOWN #36: Yet again, the series gets to the point where - for the plot to get where it's supposed to go - the characters have to act like idiots. Zatanna really calls Mary Marvel a brat who needs to get spanked? The Justice League seriously meet with Jimmy Olsen about his joining the team? What? Seriously? Blah and Crap, really. GREEN LANTERN CORPS #15: I love the craziness of this whole comic; I mean, there's a sentient planet that's being attacked by an evil sentient city that manages to disrupt the planet's gravity and tear it apart, which is not something you see every day. It's got the dumb insanity and overwhelming sense of everything-happening-at-once that something like Infinite Crisis had, but without the feeling that you have to read seven different comics to get what's going on, which makes it pretty much the definition of Good superhero emergency comics for me. THE SPIRIT #9: Just like a Buffy episode as we head into the last third of a season and it all starts tying together, plots from earlier issues come back to haunt poor Denny this time around. It's a shame to think that Darwyn Cooke's leaving the book so soon, considering the consistently Very Good work he and J. Bone put into this series issue after issue - Maybe I'm greedy, but I'd love to see this kind of thing all the time. SUPERMAN #666: Kurt Busiek really gets the old-school Superman thing even as he updates it, something that this devilish little treat proves handily; it's relatively throwaway and - if you ignore all the murderin' and stuff - reasonably light, but no less enjoyable for all that, partially for the injokes and fun of seeing Mean Superman, and partially for the joy of Walt Simonson's bold and exciting artwork. It's not the kind of Superman story I'd want to read on a regular basis, sure, but as a special Satanic one-off? Hellishly Good. TANK GIRL: THE GIFTING #3: Who knew that an Ashley Wood/Jamie Hewlett collaboration would look like that, that's what I want to know. And something else I want to know - Just who is Rufus Day-Glo, now credited with layouts on the book? He(?) really has a Hewlettish touch to his(?) stuff, whoever it is... Otherwise, the series continues along the "pretty, but ultimately unfulfilling" road that it's been on since the first issue - Maybe we need some Philip Bond in the fourth issue to balance things out. Eh Tomorrow: We return and begin again, sadly... Labels: Graeme Click Here to Read More...Monday, August 27, 2007
And, of course, after taking two days out for the weekend to get caught up on other writing I had to do, I have two days left and all manner of books from this week to review. So let's get all of the Marvel ones out of the way first, shall we?AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #543: I love the fake-out on the cover of this book - "Oh no! Peter is covering his face while pulling cloth over a body on a hospital gurney! Aunt May must be dead!" even though the entire issue is essentially one big piece of filler because JMS can't quite finish off his "Aunt May has been hanging onto dear life" plot until, what, November now, because of Joe Quesada's schedule. While I kind of like the idea that Peter Parker is now breaking real laws because of what he feels is his great responsibility to the people he loves, the execution of it manages to almost suck all the life out've the idea. Very much Eh. ANNIHILATION CONQUEST: STARLORD #2: On the plus side, Timothy Green's artwork continues to shine, and those were some unexpected deaths. On the minus side, a lot of the quirkiness of the first issue seems to have gotten lost in the jumble of "war is chaos" scenes here, and as a result, the book seems much less charming and more generic this time around. Okay. ASTONISHING X-MEN #22: It's not going to stick, of course, but part of me really would like the last page here to be the final death of Cyclops, if only because I'm very amused by the idea that one of his last memories is having sex with Emma (Or perhaps I've just got a dirty mind, and that's meant to be something else). That said, even as we're clearly approaching the endgame here, the book seems to have lost a lot of the focus and intensity of its earlier issues; maybe it's because of the schedule, or perhaps I'm just not that interested in the generic alien monsters or seeing Colossus and Kitty have sex...? Either way, Okay, depressingly. I want to enjoy this more. THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST #8: They had me even before they introduced a sumo wrestler called Fat Cobra as a challenger to Iron Fist in this new martial arts tournament storyline, I have to admit. Ignoring the great art by David Aja (with Roy Allen Martinez taking the Travel Foreman flashback artist role this time around), Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker hit just the right notes of awe and humor when dealing with the mystical city of K'Un-Lun and the mystical tournament between it and six other mystical cities that Danny is forced to compete in... Month in and month out, this really continues to surprise and amuse with just how Very Good it is. IRON MAN, DIRECTOR OF SHIELD #21: For some reason, this feels as if it's the first issue written once the Knaufs had read the end of Civil War - We get nightmares about the death of Captain America and a plot involving the Initiative - instead of the first post-World War Hulk issue, but for all that, it's as Okay as ever. There are probably many people who enjoy the deliberate pacing and strong leadership of Tony Stark in this book, but I'm not one of them. Roberto De La Torre's art is still nice, though. THE ORDER #2: So much more enjoyable than the first issue - I thank the idea of Britney Spears analogs fighting bears with jetpacks, personally - with a team dynamic and book dynamic slowly emerging as things go on. I'm still not the greatest fan of Barry Kitson's art, but have to admit that Mark Morales' inks make it look better than I've seen it; Matt Fraction's script seems to have recovered the sense of humor that I thought was missing from the first issue, and I appreciated seeing the PR flack appear and having that side of the show played up more... Whether things'll continue along these lines or next issue will be back to the more straightforward superheroics of the first remains to be seen, but for now? Good. Tomorrow: DC! Tank Girl! And arguably nothing else... Labels: Graeme Click Here to Read More...The weekends go fast. Lots of reading. Today, I spent a good chunk of time with an old issue of The Comics Journal I picked up for two bucks - it's #202, from March of 1998, and no less than 62 pages of it are devoted to Gary Groth's career-spanning interview with Kevin Eastman, with a special emphasis on the life of Tundra, the infamous alternative comics publisher that he founded, and ultimately blew $14 million of his Ninja Turtles fortune on. Detail after absurd detail piles up - you can hardly believe it all really happened, the circumstances are so surreal. Really one of the classic Journal interviews. Oh, last week. Batman/Lobo: Deadly Serious #1 (of 2): Remember in the old Sam & Max comics where Sam would get off the phone with the Commissioner and say something like "Bad trouble in ancient Egypt, Max," and then in the next panel, by god, they'd be in ancient Egypt? That's kind of how this comic starts, with Batman summoned away to space in panel 1, on page 1. And he's staring down Lobo by page 4. No scene-setting shilly-shally while writer/artist Sam Kieth is around! No need for introductions; as far as this issue goes, there isn't even anything all that Batman or Lobo-specific going on. There's some typical odd couple clashes -- physical and moral -- but mostly the title characters run around and react to a strange entity that's possessing innocent schoolgirls and straight-laced women with space clipboards, and transforming them into shredded-clothing murder machines... and the entity is often passed from body to body by same-sex kissing!! Don't worry gang, it's actually all about how women are driven to explode by male subjugation! Can Batman and/or Lobo trample through the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored before Earth is doomed or something?! It's sort of fun, very much a loosely-plotted lark that gives Kieth an excuse to draw pretty girls and ugly alien creatures, and Batman's extra-long cape. He remains as good as ever at that, although I generally prefer seeing his energy channeled through the daffy personal vision of something like My Inner Bimbo (the one extant issue of it); here, Kieth treats the superhero bits almost as an obstacle, which makes for a hint of unease with the antics. OKAY for what it is. I'd have liked it more as a Sam & Max story, but that's also what I thought about The Three Paradoxes, so maybe it's me. Guy Ritchie's Gamekeeper #4: You know a series is skipping off the rails when one of the variant covers sports a character that's not only absent from this particular issue, but hasn't been introduced to the story at all, and the official website contains plot spoilers that have to stretch at least a couple of issues into the future. Maybe the promo stuff got pumped up since Ritchie is going to direct the film adaptation? It doesn't say much for the pacing if what I'm seeing is supposed to be basic scenario stuff. It will be a fun movie to watch if Ritchie bases his visual choices off of artist Mukesh Singh's, in that all the action bits look like murder scenes from Susperia. Sadly, there's none of that this issue, which devotes itself almost totally to backstory, including that interminable b&w flashback I'd be getting sick of even if I didn't now know how it pans out at some point in a later issue. It's not that Andy Diggle's dialogue is lacking in craft, but straight-up thriller material such as this isn't going to benefit from dwelling so long on generic plot contours. And almost totally stripping an issue of action only underscores just how generic it is. There's still spark in the art - I can't get enough of Singh's jutting ink stroke tree branches, and he can compose some nicely sterile metal and glass urban environments. I especially liked how, going over the flashbacks, only the bloodletting done by the hero is in color, so as to emphasize its radiance in his memory. But that's all this book's got keeping it at EH level in an issue like this. SPECIAL BONUS IN-DEPTH ART COMMENTS: Black Summer #2 (of 7): Juan Jose Ryp sure can draw a man's face being ripped off. Wolverine #56: I liked Howard Chaykin's version of the character better the more he looked like a caveman, the final splash being the apex of my joy. Although, if my co-worker was a drunken, emotionally ruined screw-up to a 'kick the shit out of him by the dumpster' extent, I'd probably protest his continued operation of the gigantic weapon that's the only thing keeping the extremely dangerous mutant at bay down in the metaphor pit. Wait, that wasn't an art comment. Labels: Jog Click Here to Read More...Sunday, August 26, 2007
Howdy. Here's what I've been reading and watching lately. God help me, I'm still so trained to write reviews in old school SavCrit style, you get it all in one big glop. I'd like to do something similar about the comics I've been reading, but can't quite tell yet if my week is going to open up enough to let me do so. Anyway, for now, here's what's what. CEMETERY MAN: Cinematically, I've been in search of some satisfying lowbrow thrills and it really seemed like this cult favorite was gonna do the trick: after all, it's an Italian horror comedy based on a graphic novel by the creator Dylan Dog about a morose gravedigger who must not only bury the dead but kill them when they inevitably return to life. After all, it's got zombies. And boobies. And Rupert Everett at his deadpan best. And yet? Still not very good. It's designed to be a horror film for the Smiths set, with Everett being a proto-emo moper trying to separate fear of death from fear of life, and confusing, as the youth do, love and death, and passion and pain. But not only is Everett about five to ten years too old for the role to make any sense, the filmmakers run out of script about two-thirds of the way through and begin throwing anything at the screen to see if it'll stick, with Everett encountering different incarnations of the woman he loves and being led to greater and greater acts of violence and passion. And then they throw in an ambiguous ending to make the whole thing seem like a mysterious riddle, rather than a cobbled together waste of time. In some ways, it reminded me a lot of Donnie Darko, except I liked Donnie Darko and thought it accomplished a lot of what it wanted to, while this flick was sub-EH. But there are still people who act like this movie was a greater invention than ice cream, so what do I know? COMIC FOUNDRY #1: There's a lot to like in this first issue and a ton to nitpick, although I'm not sure it'd really be worth your time or mine to sort everything this issue has into those two piles. I think it's highly OK, although the mag should seriously get a good ad rep so there are ads for somebody other than Previews and Rocketship in there (if nothing else, a higher page count would make that price tag sting a little less). And this is probably really dickish for me to do since I can just email the guy and tell him directly, but I thought Ian Brill's fiction piece brilliantly parodied (although I think maybe inadvertently so) chick lit's over-reliance on brand names (Think The Devil Wears Prada, but with comic nerds) and cannily used the protagonist's superhero creation, The Reality Surfer, as a metaphor for youthful indecision. It wasn't the most brilliant piece of short fiction I'd read in some time, but it was effective. More than any other piece in the magazine--and, like I said, there's a lot of stuff to like in here--it makes the case that Tim Leong's ballsiness might really bring something new to the comics magazine marketplace. CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN: Continuing in my search for cheap lowbrow thrills, I picked up the inexpensive Grindhouse Experience boxed set which has 20 films jammed onto five DVDs for a low price. Astoundingly, I found a good movie on my first try (although the transfer was, as you'd expect, terrible): Confessions of a Police Captain, an Italian cop procedural from '74 with Martin Balsam and Franco Nero that plays like a variation on Touch of Evil. Balsam plays the jaded police captain who starts the movie off by setting a killer off on a bloodbath, and Nero plays the idealistic district attorney investigating Balsam to determine just how corrupt Balsam actually is. (The great thing about the movie is that it's set in Italy, so corruption is never a question, it's just the degree of corruption). Despite the occasional shootout or stabbing, it's not really an exploitation flick, although it is the sort of film that sounds salacious enough to have played a grindhouse in the '70s. It is, however, a chance to see Martin Balsam play the shit out of a leading role, and to watch a film with insight into the urban Italian mindset of the day. While not exactly a diamond in the rough, it's a highly OK little flick and I'm glad I saw it. DRIFTING CLASSROOM, VOL. 7: Probably the first volume where things lag a little bit. Of course, in the world of Kazuo Umezu's horror/disaster manga, a lag means only that after the flash flood is through ripping people to shreds, strange mushrooms begin to grow on all the food and tough decisions have to be made about whether or not the strange fungi should be eaten: it leads to a 30 page section where motivations get even thinner than usual and cruelty exists less for thematic purposes than to keep the chain of events clanking along. After that, however, we get deformed monster-children, a hasty religion devoted to the hero's mother, the new opiate of the masses, and a one-eyed Lovecraftian menace that threatens to devour everyone and everything. Vol. 7 suffers by comparison to the other books in the series as the pace flags just enough to suspect that Umezu is either vamping or winging it entirely. Still, quite GOOD and apeshit enough to make for a fun read. FLOWER & SNAKE '74: Strange little impulse purchase, which I made in part because they mentioned Riichiro Manabe did the score, and his music for Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster is probably my favorite Godzilla score ever, and in part because I have such fond memories of the ultra-insane Sex & Fury which this seemed to resemble. Turns out it's not nearly as inspired (or inspiring) as the Lady Snowblood-styled Sex & Fury, and instead comes off a bit like Belle de jour if you stripped that film of all of Bunuel's lovely surreal touches and put an obsession with enemas in its place. Flower & Snake '74 is about Makoto, an kink-loving impotent clerk living with his pornography making mother, who is hired by his boss to break the boss' wife. The 70+ minutes of bondage and enema inducing are made watchable (unless, you know, that's your thing) by the novelistic approach to Makoto's character (he's been rendered impotent ever since childhood where he caught--and killed--a black G.I. making love to his mother) and, similarly, a cast that has the (very) slightest bit of depth to the personalities. (And it's pretty easy to make the case for Makoto, traumatized by the conquering of his mother by an American, representing good ol' fucked-up post-war Japan in the filmmaker's eyes). There's also a few shots-- such as when the bloody spirit of the murdered G.I. appears against a blood-red sunset--that are technically impressive. But, generally, unless you've got an annual subscription to Comic A-G, it's the kind of exploitation trash you're not missing much by skipping. Highly EH.
GOLGO 13 VOL. 7: As is the way with these volumes, Takao Saito makes us pay for the awesome (Sweet Jesus! Golgo 13 snipes a nuclear power plant!) with pages of technical research and blathering secondary characters. In the second story, G-13 ends up in a compact piece of gangster noir set in a small Nevada town, with the tale's highlight being a one-page knife-versus-gun fight that's an engaging and spiffy bit of page design. Finally, Takao Saito is interviewed by the charmingly insane Kunio Suzuki who gets bonus points for writing craziness like "Golgo 13 was the textbook of my life." If you've been digging Duke Togo 'til now, you'll probably think it OK. JOJO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE VOLS. 1-3: The Overlooked Manga Festival at Shaenon K. Garrity's Livejournal has become an invaluable resource for me, and as soon as I read her overview of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, I knew I had to get my hands on it. The pleasing mix of epic scope (several generations of family and friends travel the world to fight a vampire who's taken possession of the patriarch's body and his superpowers; everyone has a psychic power based on a motif from the major arcana of the Tarot deck), astounding dopiness (many characters have names that are lame puns on '70s and '80s rock and pop performers; the art looks like the project was originally intended to be Street Fighter II slash fanfic) and over-the-top gorey horror tropes (how else to describe the fight scene that's largely a man being cut apart by a straight-razor wielding voodoo doll?) make it an entertaining, deeply dopey read. JoJo's Bizarre Adventures isn't without its significant weaknesses--at three volumes in, the story is deeply formulaic (like levels in a fighting game) and there are times when the author, Hirohiko Araki, gets bored or runs out of ideas and whisks his characters off to the next location and the next enemy--but it also takes frequent turns into the inspired, such as the section where the heroes have to fight a porn-reading orangutan on an abandoned oil freighter. So far, the book reminds me of what the early days of Image Comics were supposed to be: product so juvenile and energetic it's irresistible (as opposed to what the early days of Image Comics actually were, which was product so undisciplined and yet fiscally calculated it was simultaneously annoying and dull). I should really call this stuff highly OK, but considering how eagerly I gobbled down the first three volumes (and how much I'm looking forward to the next three) I guess I'll reservedly call it GOOD. It won't appeal to everyone, certainly. LUCKY V2. #1: I loved how this issue uses the autobio up front to heighten the punch of the extended dream narrative in the back. It's not done in the way that you might think with recurring visual motifs or what-have-you, but through some brilliant tricks of pacing. By breaking the autobio stories into brief one or two page segments, and by continually excerpting her performance of the dream story in the back in a hyper-compacted fashion, the dream story, My Affliction, feels much, much longer and recreates the feeling of being trapped in an seemingly endless dream. It's really fucking brilliant, and makes the issue well worth the $3.95 cover tag. A VERY GOOD issue, and one that moved me from being a casual fan of Bell's work to avidly interested in what she'll do next. (By the way, is it wrong that Gabrielle Bell's style reminds me of J. Backderf's? I feel like I should be seeing more of a David B. influence, but that cover and the use of blacks really makes me think of Derf. Not that it's a bad thing, but I can't think of a tone more opposed to Bell's than Derf's.)
MONSTER VOL. 10: The most satisfying of this week's Viz Signature releases, and not just because it's about 30 pages longer than Golgo 13 and a dozen pages longer than Drifting Classroom. Although you'd think Naoki Urasawa's introduction of yet another kindly drifter (Grimmer, a former spy turned freelance journalist) would undercut the story's narrative tension, Monster succeeds by setting up any number of potential victims to be preyed upon by Johan's evil scheme, the mystery of Kinderheim 511, and all those crooked cops and violent gangsters lurking around every turn. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for long narratives jammed with characters and odd details (the strangely understated and creepy street sign for the Three Frogs Bar in Prague made the whole volume for me)--I thought it was a VERY GOOD chapter, in any event. MY DEAD GIRLFRIEND VOL. 1: Eric Wight's first book from Tokyopop made me curse the heavens, not just because I'd spent money on the thing, but because the book could've been so much better if Tokyopop had treated the material as more than a simple IP grab: Graeme in his review gripes about the pacing of this book and what he suspected was an imposed three act structure on the story. And certainly, there's some really awful pacing choices in this book that seem designed to drag the story out for another two volumes. But even more frustrating than that are choices that suggest Wight really didn't consider his structure too much in the first place. In the opening few pages for example, the protagonist recounts the family curse that results in all of his ancestors dying a highly absurd death. As the hero finishes up, we see that he's been delivering a school report... and that all his classmates are monsters. It's not done in a way that maximizes the reveal, by the way: it's just done as a standard transition by someone telling a story without much thought for the best way to get the maximum impact from it. Similarly, once the supernatural setting is fleshed out, you can't figure out why the protagonist is so upset about the idea of dying, or even dying absurdly: all of his ancestors, including his ghostly parents, are still around, playing cards and telling stories. In this Addams Family lite setting, death is only one more moment on an unending continuum, making the protagonist's anxiety about it come across as deeply prissy.The reason all this bugs me so deeply is that if there's one section of the American comics marketplace that should understand the importance of an editor helping a creator shape the material and maximize its impact, it would be one of the top three North American manga companies. I mean, Wight's panel to panel storytelling is good, his character design is appealing, and his art has a Bruce Timm-ish quality to it I really like--it wouldn't take much for someone read the material he has, criticize it constructively, and help him find the best way to present the material, and I get the impression that most manga companies in Japan wouldn't let it get out the door without that. But Tokyopop, like most of the other big comic companies here in the U.S., is more than willing to keep the overhead low, push the material into the marketplace, and reap the dividends, should there be any. On the other hand, what do I know? Graeme gave it a Very Good, and the book's front, back and inside covers are practically leprous with blurbs from industry professionals praising the book. So maybe I'm wrong and I read this book on the wrong day or something. But it must've been a worse day than I realized, because I thought this was a frustratingly EH piece of work. SAMURAI COMMANDO VOL. 1: You ever see that Sonny Chiba movie G.I. Samurai (also known in some places as Time Slip)? I stumbled across it on video a few years ago, and it's one of my favorite b-movies for both the elegance of its plot hook and its execution: a troop of Japanese Self-Defense Force soldiers on maneuvers end up back in feudal Japan and decide, basically, to conquer the country. Despite being armed with firearms, a tank, a helicopter and other modern weaponry, the soldiers aren't prepared for the combination of their own internecine conflicts and the power of their enemies. As I said, it's one of my favorite action flicks, so I got pretty hopped up to come across this manga by Harutoshi Rukui and art group Ark Performance reprinted by CMX: it's essentially the same premise, except that the Colonel of the Forces instead makes allies with the warlords of the past and together they declare war on the present. (Both the movie and the manga work from the same material, the novel, Sengoku Jieitai by Ryo Hanmura.) However, while the Chiba movie balanced out the blabbity-blab with ninjas attacking helicopters, Samurai Commando (which appears to be only two volumes long) spends so much time setting up the premise, introducing the characters, and hinting at their backstories, and so by the time you've got gunfire and decapitations by samurai swords, it's too little, too late. It's a shame too, because the art by Ark Performance is dynamic and strangely airless in a way that I think fans of Jim Lee would like: this could have been, like Death Note, a nice little transitional manga for comics readers of the Big Two looking to branch out a bit. But instead, it's a very EH little manga, and given the choice between recommending it and suggesting you visit Amazon and pick up an out-of-print copy of G.I. Samurai for less than five bucks, I have but little choice but to exhort you to do the latter. Pity. TRAIN_MAN VOL. 1: It's easy to see why this tale of a reclusive Internet introvert struggling to find romance with the help of his online community is wildly popular: it's nearly impossible to read this and not have your heart strings plucked, to the point where I found myself a little resentful of the brazen emotional manipulation. Each chapter gives the Train_Man a minor challenge that seems insurmountable to his sheepish soul, and each chapter shows him succeeding, with page after page of laudatory exclamations from members of his online community. And yet, to bitch about the first volume of Viz Media's Train_Man being sweet to the point of near implausibility is like chastising a teddy bear for being cuddly: that's what it's supposed to do, it's clearly marketed as such, and it's very effective at what it does (I'd be lying if I told you I *didn't* read the volume all in one breathless sitting). It's Good material, provided you've got a weakness for the cutesy, but I can't guarantee you won't hate yourself just a little for enjoying it. Click Here to Read More...Saturday, August 25, 2007
I was planning on skipping this week, but I'd like to write briefly about one of the most interesting comics that came out this month. Maybe not THE single most interesting, but ... Top 5. If it were my Myspace friend, I'd put in my Top 8. Its Myspace song would be Okkervil River's Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe. Later: I'd discover it was a 40 year old police officer, and I'd inadvertently been caught in an elaborate sting operation to track down internet pedophiles. The regret, the horrible, horrible regret. All because of this comic. It's that interesting.
I'm of course talking about the two-page Honda Elements SC Advertisement fumetti in this week's Marvel comics. THE PLOT: a lion, recently escaped from the zoo, has met a Honda Element, somewhere "in the city" (presumably New York City). Plainly, the lion is a super-genius as not only can it escape from zoos, but it also can talk; however, the lion is insane as it's talking to a car. Cars can't talk. Anyway, the comic ends with Crazy Fucking Lion teaming up with the Friendly, City-Slicker Honda to go find a drugstore where it intends to purchase hair products. And then, off to Marquee, to snort blow off of Lindsley Lohan's skeleton! Aaah, New York! It's two pages about a schizophrenic talking supergenius lion, which is intended to sell Honda SUVs, and I found this in an ad for Marvel Comics The Order #2 and Mister Iron Fist #8-- not in Vertigo comics, not in Fantagraphics comics, but plain old mainstream, run-of-the-mill Marvel comic books. We all know that comics aren't for little kids anymore-- they're wildly inappropriate for little kids. But, fuck, are they even for college students anymore? They're for people with enough disposable income to purchase sports utility vehicles. I didn't have that kind of money in college-- did you? I don't know a thing about cars, not a thing, so to me, a SUV is for families-- at least late 20's, early 30's. And that's not just the audience for The Order, but enough of the audience to capture the attention of advertisers...? It didn't just end up in these comics by accident-- Marvel must have people who sell ads. Honda must have people who evaluate whether it makes sense to purchase ad space, whether it'll hit their target demographic, meet their branding strategy, etc. The comic reflects not only an aging comic audience, but a series of business decisions, money changing hands, memos going out, phone calls, e-mails, teleconferences-- the channels of fucking commerce, you know, lit up and shit two pages of Honda ads into my Mister Iron Fist comic book. The other ads in these book are o-kay, but not as good. The Army has a recruiting ad-- recruiting standards have gotten so low thanks to the War that the Army is willing to accept nerds now. Great. Fucking fantastic. The 81st Fighting Hemophiliacs... watch out terrorists. You can not only bring democracy to the Middle East-- you can bring the Philosophy of Star Trek. That's what that region needs. I say Go! Sign up! Say hello to Iran while you're there, Cosplayers. And then there's a men's underwear ad that's all about negatively stereotyping women-- which... not only did those advertisers decide to sell to the comic book audience, but they even got the casual misogyny right! Cheers, Mad Men! But the Honda ad's the most interesting. You know, the lion is a symbol in the Book of Revelations for Christ-- the "Lion of the tribe of Judah." Check out this awkward line of dialogue from the Honda ad: "You're a lion on the lamb." The lamb? Also a symbol of Christ, only from the Gospel of John: "the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). So really isn't this Honda ad essentially all about the Second Coming of Christ? And I think what Honda is saying is if and when the Second Coming happens, Jesus will not only return, but return in a Honda Element, North America's Truck of the Year in 2003. Also: he will apparently have beautiful hair because the Honda Element will help him to purchase hair conditioner before he redeems the world. Fucking A! That's what you call a hard sell. I love how much credit it gives to comic book fans, too-- they can't just do a straightforward ad campaign. They have to use Dadaist humor in order to connect with comic fans, since comic fans are so cynical and discriminating...? Really, Madison Avenue? Come on, now. The Order #2 and Mister Iron Fist #8 were both fun or whatever, but that lion ad? HOLY SHIT. Labels: Abhay Click Here to Read More...Friday, August 24, 2007
 (The nerd conundrum for the new millennium: who's stronger, Annalee or Graeme?) Sorry these took so long to post; Douglas's signing is at the start of my workweek and was followed immediately by my garage sale (which turned out great, by the way), and after the last nine weeks or so of six day workweeks when I finally got time off, I totally slacked. Of course, I've got no right to bitch after meeting Douglas Wolk--not only had the guy only been home 22 hours in the last month (the way he put it was, "22 hours total," which leads me to infer they were non-contiguous hours), but he still had something like 11,000 words to write before(?) he left for Burning Man (which he may be doing today, I can't remember) for his six or so regular columns. Yeah, he's kind of a dynamo, Douglas, and yet still manages to be an incredibly sweet guy, very low-key, filled with great stories, be they about how he got his new column at The Nation, or one of the bands on his record label. (Yes, Douglas Wolk is that kind of terrifying ultra-achiever: the hyphenate.) Not that I'm an expert on either man, but he really reminds me of Scott McCloud when I first met McCloud at San Diego back in 1990--very, very smart, very kind, self-assured but not content to just rest on accrued laurels. (I hope that doesn't sound like a diss against current day Scott McCloud, by the way, because it's not: it's just that when I met McCloud in 1990 and complimented him on the great work he was doing on Zot!, he thanked me and told me he was leaving the book to do a mammoth how-to on comics, a fact at which I could only stand there and gape. "Well, you've earned my trust as a creator, so if that's what you want to do I'll be there..." I not-very-encouragingly said.) Anyway, here's just a few photos of the signing, and if you get a chance to turn up for one of Douglas's signings in the future, you should |