The Intermittent

2006-09-21T19:27:00.000-07:00

I'M THE GODDAMNED ELLROY

With all the Black Dahlia talk, it occurs to me to finally mention that what Miller is doing in All Star Batman and Robin could appropriatly be coined Pop-Ellroy. He's taking Ellroy's prose style--the staccato, repeated bursts of narration--and compulsive, worshipful misogny and playing them for comedy.

Really. Dip into, say, White Jazz, read three or four pages, and go back to the first issue of ASTB&R. The narrative rythymns are very similiar. Conversely, rent the Ellroy biopic; you can easily picture him writing the comic as lark, a way to blow off steam, barking all the while.

Incidentally, if you asked me to pick actors who should never appear in a film version of an Ellroy book, Josh Hartnett would be way high on the list. He's entirely too blank to carry the weight of Ellroy's obsessions.

2006-09-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

YOU PEOPLE WERE USELESS

A follow up to Bleg! You might remember that I needed a wedding reading. Then again, you might not. It's been awhile, and the sound of electronic crickets will only keep people coming round for so long, and its been longer than that. Anyway. I needed a reading for a non-religious wedding, though one appropriate for the usual wedding crowd, only with the added pressure of friends in attendance with the usual pretensions; it was to be a schmaltz free zone.

I got nothing from the spirit of the age, here; the internet, again, let me down.

I went through my shelves. And: success. Maybe. Larkin's First Sight, The Whitsun Weddings. A nice metaphor for change, growth, and hope, while at the same time having an undercurrent of cold-bloodedness; an acknowledgment that life can be good, but only for those that survive the indifference of the world. Shocking, I know, given Larkin. Possible downside: that I might get a whole wedding wondering why I'm reading a poem about baby sheep suffering in the snow. But it was the best option I had, so I went with it.

At least as far as Minneapolis.

Flying into the Cities, I finally got a chance to try the reading out on selected persons. The reception I got was...let's be polite and call it mixed. And when the best reaction comes from somebody who WANTS there to be a ruckus at the wedding, we have a problem. Plan B. I steal my brothers big book of wedding readings, and find The Master Speed, by Robert Frost. Which is a good poem, albeit one that I totally overlooked when I went through my Frost collection, and also one that, I think, has very little to do with weddings, though I guess the wing-to-wing language at the end is what people seize on. So Frost it was, and it was well-received, though perhaps without the bit of impromptu vaudeville the presiding judge and I did it would have gone over flatter (Judge: remember to speak up, we're outside. Me: I'll speak up AND enunciate. Judge: just don't vacillate. Me: If you make me hesitate, you're going to make my reading late. Crowd: Groan).

The wedding itself was nice. At the Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden, but tucked away, just a group of people happening to get married there; not the typical occupying army of coordinators and ushers and white tenting. Then dinner, then hanging out with my family in Minneapolis, which is a damn hard thing to screw up; I never come away either from the Cities or from my family without wondering why I live so far from both.

2006-08-16T20:34:00.000-07:00

HUSH LITTLE BABY, DON'T SAY A WORD

Bush: "One way to put it is, I believe mothers around the world want to raise their
children in a peaceful world. That’s what I believe."

Left unsaid: that mothers around the world envision this peaceful world coming about through killing all the other, different mothers in the world. Yeah, everyone wants peace; they just want different wars to get them there.

2006-07-27T19:10:00.000-07:00

THE WINNAH, AND NEW CHAMPEEN....

This is pretty much the greatest blog post ever, narrowly edging ahead of the previous title holder, "blog". Though I'll freely admit that I'm a biased judge; after all, I didn't spend a goodly portion of my undergraduate experience making fun of blog comment threads, but I did spend a goodly portion of it telling the "Fuck You, Clown!" joke while hanging out at the Duke of Perth on the northside of Chicago. Nostalgia beats innovation anyday.

What I can't figure out, though, is why I've always like the clown joke and yet found the Aristocrats so tedious; both are long winded anti-punch line kind of jokes. Though perhaps clowns are funny in a way vaudville isn't.

Also, unless my bleg down below gets some more help coming this way, it's entirely possible that my wedding reading will taken from that comment thread.

2006-07-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

F.I.B.A.R.?

The U.S. Olympic Basketball team was announced yesterday. I'm not thrilled by it. A step, in the right direction, yes. Better than the atrocity that went to Athens, yes. But still not what I would have chosen. And I have a blog, and people are supposed to respect and treasure my opinions; I feel very hurt. Call me, Coach K. We can still be friends.

Anyway.

If I were picking twelve--and limiting myself to people who might plausibly play, and who aren't injured, I'd load up my team this way: Paul, Wade, James, Battier, and Brand starting. Billups, Raja Bell, Joe Johnson, Dwight Howard, Chris Bosh, Trajan Langdon, and Ike Igoudala coming off the bench. This is, I think, a better mix of stars and role players with at least one above average skill than that assembled by Team USA. You've got seven guys who are threats from the international three point line. You've got speed. At least four guys who can semi-credibly claim to be stoppers. Two players with international experience, two players used to the Phoenix offense, three players used to the Duke defensive scheme. And none of them are head cases, and none of them are going to be thirty nine years old come 2008, unlike Bruce Bowen (who looked old this year).

I'll take my team and take my chances.

2006-07-26T19:55:00.000-07:00

A LONG TERM PLAN BASED ON SHORT TERM MEMORIES

Reading about plans like the yet another attempt to secure Baghdad--from which peace and prosperity will radiate outward towards the countryside on electric waves of love--it occurs to me that the basic premise of these plans is that the Iraqi people are functionally stupid. Or at least lacking in any semblance of long term memory.

Iraq is, by most credible estimations, in the grips of an ethnic civil wary. Iraqis are killing each other; and I think it does them a disservice to assume that there is no motive behind these killings. This civil war started for a reason: it's a contest for power, and, now, retribution. A great many people have died. And now they're supposed to forget what's happened, what they wanted to achieve? This strikes me as wildly unlikely. Forgetting would mean Iraqis are terribly stupid. Stupid people, having lied through a civil war that ended with neither side victorious, assume that it's over. Stupid people fail to notice that Americans will have to go home, someday. Stupid people don't take precautions to protect themselves from further violence once the Americans leave; stupid people don't form militias, stockpile weapons, and take whatever preemptive steps are necessary to ensure that, when the Americans leave, they aren't the ones who end up dead. Stupid people assume that the other side of the civil war will be equally stupid.

Stupid people forget that their neighbors had just recently been trying very hard to kill them.

I don't think that Iraqis are that stupid.

In the end, and with a massive commitment of resources we previously been unwilling to commit, we can maybe postpone a civil war. We can maybe manage it, maybe contain it for an election cycle or two. But we can't stop it. We can't make Iraqis stop rationally planning for the day the war will start again, or rationally taking steps in preparation of that day. We can't wave a magic wand and make everyone forget the past three years, no matter how much Bush squints and stomps and says the magic words. A civil war is largely unavoidable if the Iraqis are smart, because smart Iraqis will take stops to hedge against it coming back, or against the wrong side winning, and these steps will necessitate that the war continue.

But then again, we have an elected leadership stupid enough to premise a plan on Iraqi stupidity, so maybe there's hope still. A rallying cry for the future: let's hope the Iraqis are as dumb as us!

2006-07-24T20:58:00.000-07:00

THINGS ONE LEARNS AT TWO A.M.

There are things out there which make Yngmie Malmsteen look like the height of cool.

Though on the other hand, were I eighteen years younger and jazzed on Mountain Dew and Dungeons and Dragons modules, you know: maybe.

2006-07-23T19:17:00.000-07:00

BLEG

Friends have asked me to read something at their wedding. The catch: they've left the actual text up to me. Not even a general sense of what they want. So. After wracking my feeble mind, I've decided to turn to the experts: you.

I'm looking for something maybe a minute or three in length, prose or verse. The celebrants aren't religious, nor are they overly sentimental; they do, though, aspire to a certain amount of sophistication. On the other hand, the crowd is fairly diverse in both education and background, so I'd like to keep things at least somewhat obvious. No overly involved metaphors, thanks, or things that will make me seem like a self-absorbed tool. I'll save that reveal for the reception.

Suggestions?

2006-07-22T20:08:00.000-07:00

INTERMITTENT PARENTING TIPS: THE WORST PART.

The worst part is the fear. People talk about the crying, about being up all night, about carrying the kid around; but really, when it comes down to it, that's just work. Tasks to get done. Stay awake until she falls asleep, then stay awake again at work: repeat. It's discomfitting but ultimatley endurable, because your ability to succeed at it is limited only by your ability to work at it.

No. The worst part is the fear; going to sleep after I've put her down and worrying about everything she hasn't done yet. All the things that could be wrong, that I'll never fix. And then being angry at myself for the paranoia, for the purely irrational fear that I feel, then feeling guilty at the knowledge that the fear is at heart a species of selfishness. Laying there under the covers scared and angry and guilty.

The Lass hasn't smiled yet. She's not cooing. She seems to be so sealed off emotionally. And I know I'm projecting my fear onto her, and magnifying the bits that terrify me. Patience, or so I've been told. And I understand that, in the rational part of my brain. I do, really. All babies at their own times; except for the ones who never do. I worry. Constantly, but more fervently at night. And I'll worry until she smiles at me, then I'll find something else to worry about.

The worst part is the fear.

2006-06-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

OBLIGATORY COMICS POST

Read the two trades of the Hudlin Black Panther. Gah. What a runny load of awful that is; a pointless revision of both the premise and the character, peeling away all the nuance and the mystery from the character and replacing it with second hand "hard man" cliches. The complex character Priest built is turned into Shaft, Jungle King. Who's the king that's a sex machine to all the ladies...T'Challa! Whose the cat that won't cop out, when there's danger all about....T'Challa! Not every black character needs to be Shaft. The sad thing is, Hudlin isn't a bad writer--his work on Birth of a Nation was really very good--but competence alone can't salvage a fundamentally flawed premise.

I really should learn to listen to Marc.

Shaft as sung by Chaucer here, offered as a pick me up to those depressed by all the negativity.

2006-06-21T19:13:00.000-07:00

UP AGAINST THE WALL

When the revolution comes, the first to die will be the lactation consultants. Little better than witchdoctors, all of them.

2006-06-20T21:13:00.000-07:00

A LESSON FROM THE WORLD OF "CALL YOUR OWN"

A suggestion for basketball referees everywhere. Go down to the park. Call next, wait in line. Play in some games with random guys, with everyone calling their own fouls. Notice how, often, no one contests a foul? Because everyone knows that it was an actual foul? Notice how though, sometimes, calling a foul results in fifteen minutes of debate, posturing, name calling, the abuse of innocent gatoraide bottles, and the occasional fisticuffs? Because the foul was imaginary, or questionable, or called to bail out a prima donna?

Now come back. Start reffing games. And think to yourselves before you blow the whistle: would this call start a fight in the park? If the answer is yes....don't blow the damn whistle.

For what it's worth, despite at least four horrible calls sending Wade to the line tonight, the ref's did not give this game (unlike Game Five) to Miami. Dallas lost this game on its own. If the deck is stacked against you, and you don't go out guns blazing, it's your own fault. They needed to attack, and they didn't. Simple as that.

Also, I should just come clean with it: I simply cannot root for Florida teams. I've tried so hard to overcome my upbringing. But no; I see Florida teams through the eyes of a Midwesterner still. Frontrunning jerks, all of them.

Sigh.

2006-06-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

CHOP-SUCKY

Saw the article on the new diversity at DC. I don't honestly care that much about the lesbian Batwoman; that could sort of go either way, though I my guess would be tipping more towards titilation than not. I did, though, sort of chuckle at the new Chinese superteam; if you're going to design a group with the express purpose of creating diversity, you might, you know, want to do more than rehash old stereotypes.

I mean, c'mon: the Mother of Champions, who can, and I quote, "birth a litter" of superhumans every couple of hours? Why not just call her the Yellow Horde and be done with it. And no less than four characters who look like folks with homes on Zu, the Magic Mountain? This is like having an JLA made up of three cowbowys, Scarface, and two rappers (which was, the lineup of JLA Detroit, of course). And I'm not even touching the whole Ghost Fox Killer design, what with the whole "exotic erotic" thing it has going on; I'll leave that for Rose, maybe. This whole concept is diverse only inasmuch as appealing to all stereotypes about a culture, not just some, is diverse.

And besides, why this urge to tie "foreign" superheroes to their source culture? I mean, a well designed character--one who grows organically out of his setting--has no choice but to incorporate his culture. DC's Starman, for example, was an exploration of a specific location, a specific culture, as much as it was a story of a superhero; more importantly, it was those things despite the fact that Starman himself was pretty generic in terms of character design, in a Heroclix-y "what can he do" sort of way.

Why not a Chinese Starman instead of yet another rehash of the Seven Chinese Brothers? The biff-bam-pow bit isn't where diversity comes from, and which is why, maybe, Batwoman has more of a chance than does the Great Ten; homesexuality isn't central to the Batwoman concept in the same way that "being Chinese" is to the Great Ten.

Usual caveats, I suppose. Execution is everything, and there may be legitimate story reasons for the designs. Maybe the designs are preliminary, and maybe I'm overreading. Grant Morrision is involved, which doesn't suggest stupidity, though perhaps he's reaching his Bendis point at DC. We'll see.

2006-06-07T18:48:00.000-07:00

THE INTERMITTENT GUIDE TO PARENTING

New parents unused to the business end of a baby should spend some quality pre-baby time at the local sewer plant. Changing diapers is a snap after some time hanging around a clarifier, or a bar screen. A little bit of liquid stink in a diaper is nothing after walking suspended across ten thousand cubic feet of roiling human filth, complete with greasy chunky floaty bits happily bobbing around and a guy reminding you that, sometimes, they actually have to use those life preserves.

2006-06-06T20:32:00.000-07:00

WELCOME TO THE BLOG, KID....

I can't bring myself to type the rest of that oblique reference to X-Men 171 for fear of drawing too much attention on my house. Superstition rules the roost here on the homefront today, superstition and fear and doubt and love.

Which is a long way of saying that my wife and I welcomed Intermittent Lass into the fold last Thursday. Given that she weighed 12 pounds and change at birth, we thought about going with Giant Girl, or perhaps Titania, but fear of copyright lawyers bursting into the nursery scotched those options. That, and the fact that she might read this someday, and, you know, I do want to avoid a horrible crying "you called me big!" scene down the road fourteen years from now (Note to Intermittent Lass: you weren't big: you were adorable. End saccharine interlude). So Intermittent Lass she is.

What does this mean for this site? In the immediate future, maybe, paradoxically, more blogging. Work was gracious enough to give me time off (though what they give and what they expect me to take might be something else...the office culture does sort of frown on the latitudes of the office rules), which means I'm hanging out around the house, though in more of a Mr. Belvedere than a Mr. Mom kind of role. And after cleaning, and diapering, and rocking, and cooking up a batch of lentil soup, it turns out I have time. Go figure. So I might as well blog, he says on day five of an eighteen year commitment. What could go wrong?

Wait, don't answer that; I already know. Remember: fear, doubt, and superstition are my new friends, having been delivered with the Lass.

She's worth it.

2006-06-06T20:29:00.000-07:00

BOOM!

I know, I know; thirty hours, I said. And I meant it, and it was. In my continum, at least, and an discrepancy between this site's timeline and yours is easily explained away as the normal byproduct of Superboy whaling hell out of the time stream.

Really.

2006-06-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

NEXT ISSUE: EVERYTHING CHANGES!

Face front, true believers, and forget everything you thought you knew about the Intermittent....next issue, secrets three quarters of the year in the making are revealed, loyalties are tested, new members join the team, and nothing will ever be the same again! Hobbies will live and hobbies will die! Join us back here in thirty hours, as the Intermittent faces his greatest challenge, one he just may not survive....

2006-03-27T19:48:00.000-08:00

REQUIRED READING REDUX; IRAQ WAR EDITION

More ten year old IR pieces that read as if written tomorrow. Up today, though sadly enough not on the web, The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict by Barry Posen, who you may remember from such op-eds as this Boston Review piece. For those of you with access to a decent research library, well worth looking up.

The security dilemma is one of those theoretical shortcuts that has gotten surprisingly little attention during the past, oh, five years. The concept, in a nutshell: actors want to be security vis a vis each other, and the measure of this security is the ability to defend themselves against the other. To ensure his own security, one actor stockpiles weapons, or takes up an aggressive tactical position just in case trouble happens, or hoards resources. The other actor looks at the first, sees that the other actor now has an advantage; and confronts a question: does he trust actor the first? Because measured sheerly on capability, the first actor now has a power to hurt the second actor that wasn't there before, and the only thing which would prevent the first actor from using this power is his own good will towards actor two. It's thus not irrational for the second actor to take an action to ensure his own security, which in turn makes actor one less secure, which starts the whole thing over again. And in that kind of spiral, it doesn't take much for one actor or another to think that maybe, maybe, it could best ensure its security be getting rid of the other actor. Permanently.

So how does this play into civil wars? Like this (and really, Posen's article is much richer than this half-digested version I'm giving up here, and you really should go find it; in the meantime, here is a decent little explication of Posen's piece in a paper by Jack Snyder and Robert Jervis). Ethnic groups look at each other in a vacuum and have to gauge the relative likelihood that the other groups will, if in power, use the power of the state to persecute. If Group A might be persecuted by Group B, Group A is going to want to retain the ability to defend itself, or is going to want to keep Group B from gaining power. The ability to defend itself of necessity implies the power to hurt Group B. Group B in turn retains its arms to defend itself against the armed Group A, which in turn causes Group A to feel it needs a stronger option to protect itself against Group B. Each step closer to the brink makes it harder for to step away, as the ability to punish on both sides is now so great. Eventually a mistake happens; an incident is misintepreted, or blow out of proportion, and it all breaks loose: better to strike first, and we're racing off to the killing fields. The application to Iraq should have been obvious by now.

What makes this situation worse in places with ethnic conflict is that, very often, groups have good reason to distrust the intentions of the other; the odd bit of forced relocation, or ethnic cleansing. The kind of thing that makes it hard to forgive and forget.

Anyway. A strongly recommended read if you can find it, and remember: no one could have predicted that Iraq would fall apart.

2006-03-27T18:59:00.000-08:00

LOOK IT'S SAVING ME TIME ALREADY

See, just like I told you; now I can read something like this and, instead of taking the time to write a tedious pox-on-both houses counter that everyone would ignore anyway, simply refer back to this instead. Problem: solution!

2006-03-23T18:36:00.000-08:00

EVEN LOW EXPECTATIONS HURT WHEN DASHED

I wasn't expecting great things from this Duke team, at least not after seeing them play. But still: they teased me into, if not belief, hope. Hope, which has now been snuffed, or rather, spiked back into row three. It's especially galling inasmuch as the loss is as much to blamed on Duke going into mental vaporlock as it was superior play by LSU. Coack K has to shoulder much of the fault here, as the offense self-destructed(though of course the Tigers defense helped); both Redick and Shelden Williams gave up on their teammates and forced some truly, truly awful shots when giving up the ball would have led to something better. The spacing was much worse than you typically see off a Duke team. Greg Paulus continued to waste space. Just a poor showing all around.

And my consolation prize is gearing up to root for Greg Zoubek next year? Bah.

Oh well. At least they beat Maryland. Twice.

2006-03-23T18:26:00.000-08:00

UNPLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

Kim Thompson, succinctly encapsulating everything I've been trying to say these past two years:

"There is no such thing as a cartoonist whom it is "wrong" to dislike, and boredom or exasperation with subject matter, pacing or style are completely valid reasons to dislike anyone. (There's a few highly praised European cartoonists I've never been able to read more than 4 pages of.)

Anyway, there is a useful distinction to be made between work that engages you personally and work that doesn't but whose qualities you recognize. POGO's wordplay and slick surface irritate me and I can never read very much of it but I'd still put POGO in the top five strips of all time. (And I'm proud and pleased to publish it.) I hate LI'L ABNER on pretty much every level and actually DON'T think it's any good, but I understand the qualities that its defenders are attracted to. I'm never particularly offended if someone hates one of my favorites, although I may get mildly rankled when he (rarely she) acts as if I'm an idiot for liking it. But I'm now old and rich enough to not care if my saying "DILBERT is a really funny comic strip" makes someone's head explode all over their keyboard."

There's nothing I can add, aside from an Amen.

2006-03-20T19:40:00.000-08:00

REQUIRED READING: NO REALLY, I MEAN IT EDITION

Per this rather cryptic page at Top Shelf, Kagan Mcleod's Infinite Kung Fu is being issued as a graphic novel at some point in the near future. I dearly love Infinite Kung Fu and wish to read more of it, and thus rather selfishly urge you to pre-order the book, especially you, Mr. Lowery, as I suspect it's blend of warm-hearted ultra-violence will roll right up your particular alley. It's the kind of loving, well-executed homage that puts something like Kill Bill to shame, going right in all the places those films went wrong; its pursuit of the cool is organic rather than labored, the influence of old Shaw Brothers films a springboard rather than an anchor.

Plus it has zombies. And everbody loves zombies.

2006-03-20T19:33:00.000-08:00

REQUIRED READING, COMICS BLOGOSPHERE EDITION

I haven't read but three of Tom Spurgeons Top 50 Comics of 2005; I haven't even heard of maybe a quarter of them, except in the most general terms.

Luckily, ignorance is more advantage than impediment to blogging. So I've still got that going for me at least.

2006-03-20T19:24:00.000-08:00

REQUIRED READING, IRAQI CIVIL WAR EDITION

Been reading talk in the near future about the (imminent/ongoing/possible) civil war in Iraq. A suggestion: before commenting, consider plowing through Chaim Kaufman's "Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars." A quick read, pretty light on the jargon, and decidedly non-ideological. Also, incidentally, for those who really can't spare the fifteen minute it requires, pretty damn hopeless in its implications for Iraq.

Enjoy!

2006-03-05T20:07:00.000-08:00

LINGERING SUSPICIONS, ANECDOTALLY CONFIRMED.

I've talked before about how I think kids really want material far, far more weird and disturbing than the material normally written for kids. Jog, reviewing the manga Apolalypse Zero, provides another data point for this theory. And really, what kind of blogger would I be if I didn't seize upon a random bit of data as evidence of my particular Great Theory?

The kind too lazy to look through my own archives for the other times I've gone on about my own theory, that's what kind. Lazy, but still sort of pretentious.

2006-03-05T19:40:00.000-08:00

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS: IT'S ALL ABOUT THE CHILDREN EDITION

Clarifications and corrections, re: the post below.

Kevin Church is thirty-something, not twenty-something. Apologies.

Girls (and/or their mothers) evidently do sometimes want to read Wonder Woman comics. I did not know that. Inasmuch as having a Wonder Woman comic acceptable for little girls to read is good for comics, then hey: to the extent I actually care about the well-being of comics, I've got no objection to a Wonder Woman comic acceptable to little girls. Thanks to Dorian for the factual heads-up; and I learned long ago not to argue retail facts with a shop-owner.

Lastly, despite the fact that Church expressed his hate for the current Wonder Woman comic in a post dedicated to his personal taste in comics, Kevin explains in comments below that his hate is not intended to as rhetorical support for his own taste in comics (assuming, of course, that I'm reading his comment correctly); it was, rather, merely a general statement about how an all-ages Wonder Woman comic would allow for the sale of more comics and would, therefore, be a Good Thing. Which is fine, if a bit of a non-sequitur in Church's original post. Again, I've got nothing against selling people more comics, or against comics for little girls.

Bear in mind, though, that a definition of good for comics based on sales can have nothing to say about what a good comic is from an enjoyment standpoint; if, god forbid, Jim Balent comics sold, we'd have to conclude that his scary porn comics were good for comics, despite the fact that they're profoundly freaky and make me feel icky just typing about them. Or call it the Hillary Duff principle: she can neither sing nor act, but she can sell records and movies, so she's good for the movie and record industries. Right?

2006-03-01T19:03:00.000-08:00

INTERMITTENCY

The short story: searching, buying, closing, moving, building, painting, repairing, moving, selling, closing again. Holidays. Work and deadlines and pressure and changes at the top. Impending irrevocable changes in life, to be further explicated in tedious detail, as if no else's life is as special as mine.

But if Ken can start posting again, and if J.W. Hastings can start posting again, then surely I can get off my lazy can and post again. Plus now I can look down my nose at Otto and Matt Rossi.

2006-03-01T17:55:00.000-08:00

BREAKING RADIO SILENCE: SOMEONE, THINK OF THE CHILDREN EDITION

Saw this today, killing a little time at work today between various emergencies:

"The fact that a 9-year-old girl can't easily read recent issues of Wonder Woman drives me up the wall."

Um, why? Why should this drive anyone up a wall?

I, mean, I assume that Kevin Church is not a 9-year old girl. And it's not like 9 year old girls are lacking in comics to read: a slew of manga titles, Archie comics, Bone, Akiko, heck, even, if the girl wants supehero comics, the various Marvel Age and DC Adventures titles. There are, in fact, lots of back issues of Wonder Woman from back in the (presumptively better) day. He can't be talking from a merely market-growth viewpoint, inasmuch as any of the preceding can be just as effecitve entry level titles for young girls as could Wonder Woman. What makes Church mad can't be a lack of comics for little girls; it must be, rather, a lack of Wonder Woman comics in particular that makes Church mad.

Which brings us back to: why?

Is Wonder Woman essential? If girls miss out on Wonder Woman do they grow up with a little hollow spot in their hearts? Is that why cutting is on the rise? Maybe manga doesn't supply the essential nutrients the kids need. And besides, it important that our children like the exact same things in the exact same way as did we as children. If they don't, it shows we have failed as a society.

Or is it merely that something created for kids must be preserved for the kids, whether or not the kids have any interest in its preservation? Let's assume that nine year old girls, by and large, don't care about Wonder Woman, and never will, even if we hypothesize Wonder Woman comics written specifically for little girls. What then? DC has an obligation to keep writing it for the seventeen nine year girls who still might want to read it? When do kids lose their claim on a character? What if DC can sell more comics to middle-age men than to nine-year olds; still an obligation to write for the kids?

Or maybe it just comes down to this: Church, a twentysomething man, doesn't like the current Wonder Woman comics because he simply doesn't like them. But that sounds so, so idiosyncratic; so open to debate. After all--other twentysomething men seem to like Wonder Woman comics (leaving aside the fact that the damn book keeps getting cancelled. But still). But if we think of the children! Ah, now that's a hard position to argue with. May be a rhetorical winner, that.

Even if it doesn't make any sense.

Link via the, as of earlier this month, Ancient One.

Bonus question: is a comic still bright, poppy, and joyful if it features the nuclear annihilation of the very real city of Montevidao? How about if it features the extended torture of Mr. Miracle? Is it still bright poppy fun when Dr. Doom asserts a right to rape a woman?

Just asking, is all.

2005-12-15T16:56:00.000-08:00

HURRICANE REVIEWS: THE KING, BY RICH KOZLOWSKI

What a well done, competently stupid book. Short version: Has Elvis returned from the grave, reincarnated as the God of Song? Short answer as expressed in the book: who cares? Because, as the book tells us, the truth is irrelevant. The truth is the province of those leading gray little lives. Mystery, faith, are what ennoble us, even if that faith is based on a lie. Especially if that faith is maybe based on a lie.

Better to believe in a lie, knowing it might be a lie, than know for sure.

I have trouble with this line of thought for any number of reasons. Both from a religious and practical standpoint; after all, this many years into the Bush presidency, I have some trouble with any argument for faith over facts. Besides, religion is about finding the majesty of God in the everyday, not ignoring the created world in favor of a godly simulcram. Um, at least, to me it is.

But it is a competent book, don't get me wrong. As Pheley notes, the characterization is well done (if loaded), the art is confident. The craftsmanship isn't bad (though not up the level of Three Fingers). It's just in the service of stupidity. But your mileage may vary, contingent on your view of the moral; readers with less religio/political baggage than I may come away with a different reaction.

2005-12-15T15:50:00.000-08:00

UNCOVER YOUR EYES.

Man, lots of typos in the post below. Most are fixed now. I wish I had an editor.

2005-11-29T18:40:00.000-08:00

WIL-MA! OR, YESTERDAY'S STORM, TODAY!

Part of the reason for the longer than normal absence of my oh-so necessary voice from the blogosphere: Hurricane Wilma. You may not remember Wilma, that tropical bitch. From what I could tell, it didn't get much play in the national media. We more got the silent treatment, or perhaps our less photogenic misery wasn't as impressive post-Katrina. But misery it was, although, to be fair, of a more short term and less threatening nature.

The storm came through on a Sunday evening. We were mostly ready for it; most of us, I think, were glad it was finely here. One of the hardest things with hurricanes is the waiting. The uncertainty; you might die, or....maybe not! Find out in three days. Make that four; the system is taking it out on Mexico a little longer than expected. We started boarding up. Stopped. Realized we needed more wood. Sunday morning I finally finished. I've gotten better at the construction bit over the past couple of years. Even with revising my plywood design (bracing! Steel Brackets! 2x6 Framing!), the install was not such a bitch as last year, which featured pulled muscles, copious swearing, and a fair to moderate risk of lockjaw. This year, I even had time to watch the Packers game, which was, frankly, more irritating than the plywood.

Woke up Monday morning to banging. Howling. A door had come open from the pressure and was slamming against the house. I shut it; it flew right back open. Not so good, not least because I wanted to go back to sleep, and there was a fair to moderate risk comics were going to get sucked away. I found a length of twine and tied the door off. It stayed shut. I went back to bed, and laid there listening the wind, the distant cracking of, presumably, trees. Watched out the window as some shingles and a gutter blew off the adjacent building. Eventually I fell back asleep. Not much I could do anyway, and, I figured, if something bad was happening from a structural standpoint and I didn't have time to wake back up, being awake wasn't going to do me much good anyways.

Woke up a couple of hours later. The power was out. This was expected. Downed trees equals downed lines, etc. Surely it can't take long to get them back up; it usually doesn't. Looked at the back yard. Two trees had gone down, and literally every leaf in the remaining trees had blown off; the fence had blown down as well. Outside in front the usual crowd had gathered; the nice thing about hurricanes is the neighbors work well together. By the time I showed up, five or so people were already out clearing debris; two hours later, we had a pile maybe eight feet wide by five feet high. Mrs. Intermittent had meanwhile dragged out the battery operated TV and....bad news.

Wilma had hit four or so counties, all badly. Power was out regionally, not merely locally. It was going to take, not days, but weeks to get power back on.

Well. That changes things. Were we prepared to rough it in the dark for weeks? Let's see.

We were going to need to do something about food. We had a cooler but were going to need ice, which meant that we going to be at the mercy of some level of government of another. Depending on which one, we might come out okay. Or really, really poorly.

Were we prepared for looters, rioting, and random other Katrina-style threats to life and limb? Not so much. We lost the key to the lock on our gun, and while I was prepared to give the pistol-whipping of a lifetime to an intruder, that was probably not going cut it as a viable self-defense plan. We were sword-sitting my brother-in-law's katanna (long story), so we did have that, and the idea of using a sword did exert a powerful pull on the thirteen year old part of my brain.

Dude! Critical hit, I totally cut his arm off! Fucking sweeeeeet.

Or maybe not. Possible alternate plan: use of irritating girlish shriek to annoy intruders away.

We had enough water, we were good on candles. We had no gas, but I wasn't worried about that. Silly me.

That night I sat up reading by candlelight, which is a substantially bigger pain in the ass than any number of Little House on the Prairies and/or Lincoln biographies would suggest. Honestly, if I grew up in 1870's Wisconsin I would be illiterate. Or blind. Or both.

Also likely very cold for a substantial portion of the year, but that's really neither here nor there.

Tuesday was ice day. We'd gotten word of a secret ice distribution site, luckily near my home. Walked over, stood in line for maybe two hours. The streets were covered in leaves and shingles and random bits of metal. Got two bags of ice. Later, got the fence mostly back up, or at least up enough that the Intermittent Puppy wasn't going to bolt for the Everglades, and freedom. Scrounged together our cash and went over the store. Weird scene, the store. No lights, people sort of shuffling among the aisles. It's a cliche, but it felt true: it was like being on set for Land of the Dead 2. People weren't talking much, not in the aisles, at least. Not much eye contact. Competition for the remaining provisions? Maybe. I found some tortillas, some potatoes, some onions, and a green pepper. With the canned foods at home, I figured I could at least make on the grill tortillas and maybe some stew.

Read the big Bone book that night. Heard on the news that the less-secret ice sites were getting a little rowdy: eight hours in line, no ice, and worse, no ETA on the ice. Not the best of starts for the recovery efforts.

Wednesday, second verse, same as the first. More ice at the still, amazingly, secret site, another trip the store. Still no work. To avert the total breakdown of society, Mrs. Intermittent and I dragged the kettle out the grill and made coffee, and there was much rejoicing. A neighbor was close to tears. It's the little things that keeps us going, I guess. Tried grilling some brats, but they came out burnt on the outside and frozen on the inside, a culinary critical failure. The stew came out good, though. I went to sleep feeling vaguely proud of myself. By God, I'm providing for my family through my wits and gumption! A satisfying feeling for those of us whose lives are normally the typically prosaic white collar existence. Our dirty class secret is that we're all secretly scared of the working class, scared that they're more in touch with the masculine ideal than those of us who sit inside pecking at keyboards all day, that there is something to that "real man" crack. But not now, not me: I was hunter-gatherer man, ready to defend my house with folded Japanese steel. Or, failing that, girlish screams.

Thursday, sitting in a five hour gas line, I didn't feel so proud of myself. Backing up. We woke up on Thursday hearing that it could be two more weeks before ANYONE got power back on. No power equals no gas pumps. Two weeks equals dry, dead cars, maybe. So: better to get gas now while there was gas to get got. I found an open station running off generator at around two in the afternoon. Got in line. And stayed in line. And stayed in line. And stayed in line some more. At seven, I was the next car in line when....they shut down. Not ran out of gas, but shut down. Now. I firmly believe in the right of the individual business to run itself by its own rules, but still: a little compassion would be great for those of us who'd stayed in your line all damned day. I was irked, mightily. And the forty or so cars behind me in line? Oh, well beyond irked. Words were exchanged, in several languages. Ugly times, even after the cops showed.

I'm honestly shocked nobody got shot waiting for gas. Seriously. What're the odds a bunch of armed, frustrated Floridians, forced to wait in long lines all day would fail to kill at least a couple of people? Pretty damned low.

Tension wasn't running high just at the gas station. Everyone was starting to run a little ragged. The situation had stopped being novel. The neighbor down the way was screaming at her kids, for no real reason but for the fact that they, at least, were something that she maybe could control. We offered to take them off her hands for a couple of hours. Enough time for her to get her head back. We cooked them brats--done properly this time, thank you very much--and let them play with the dog, who, thankfully, was not her normal spastic self.

On Friday the power truck came. My wife went out and watched them for awhile; a crew from North Carolina. She asked if they needed anything; one asked for her phone number. She laughed him off.

Two more days without power, though, and I think she might have thought about it if it was going to get the juice going again.

The crew worked all day. And then left us in the dark. Talk about crushed. We'd spent all day checking the lights. Now? Now? Okay. How about....Now? Turns out it took them longer than normal because the power grid here is old. Actually, I believe the word the crew used was "antique." As in, if this system wasn't such an antique this would have taken us two hours instead of two days. Not a fun evening here at Casa de la Intermittent.

Saturday we had our power back. And everything else sort of fell into place after that, at least for us. It took longer for other folks. But hey: my blog, my story. Later, some thoughts on the books I read during the aftermath, including Bone, the King, Pahluhniak's Choke, and a couple of others.

2005-10-17T19:47:00.000-07:00

THE NAME IS WAYNE....BRUCE WAYNE.

An example of what I was talking about below; how audiences just in it for the entertainment handle change. We've just gotten an announcment of the new James Bond. He's the sixth guy to handle the role.

And the audience just accepts it. There is no movie explaining away the change from Pierce Brosnan to the blond guy. No tortured narrative feints and dogdges about surgery gone bad, or how Bond is now undercover and officlally dead or somesuch. Nope. Just a new actor, new movie, new explosions, same audience. When the franchise turns more serious after the Roger Moore era (see here for a little summary of Bond through the ages) there is no explaining the previous films as the product of drugs, or SMERSH plot. The tone of the film simply changes, no explanation needed nor given. No one tries to explain how Bond fought was around during the Cold War and is still thirty.

Which is a healthy thing. There are only so many people willing to get so emotionally entangled with a character to need justifications of change. The rest--the ones who make up the bulk of the people who spend money in the world--simply want a good, entertaining story. If your market is such that a story explaining the story is a blockbuster....well, it seems to me that you've already lost the casual fan. There really shouldn't be that many people who desperately care how different Supermen compare to each other; there should instead be lots of people who care how the Superman story is going to turn out.

2005-10-17T19:14:00.000-07:00

OBLIGATORY INFINITE CRISIS POST, NOW WITH BONUS DECIMATION CONTENT

Well. I was compelled to take drastic measures to save my blogger credentials; the bill was way past due, and the interest, she was a bitch. So: I've read Infinite Crisis. The sacrifices I've made, and all for you.

This is perhaps an overstatement. The story isn't bad, per se; rather, it's sort of inert, as a story, despite the fact that roughly six thousand plot points occur. There's a war! In space! And Mongul! And Omac's circling like hammerhead sharks! And the Spectre! And, Uncle Sam getting beat up, and not by Karl Rove! But a story that's all peaks is of course a narrative flatline, albeit a very loud one. The definition of a dull roar. Of course, your mileage may vary.

The book is, I think, more interesting as a little cultural artifact than a story. Start with the metafictional weirdness: a book where the writer actually lectures to the characters. Evidently Morrison's notions of 2d agency have taken root at DC editorial; infinite Crisis is an elaborate way of arguing a point with fictions. Do we need to have a second Superman mediate a dispute between the audience and the "real" Superman? I mean, I've always enjoyed me some comics, but I don't have enough emotional investment in these things to need a story like Infinite Crisis to hold my hands through change. I'm not mourning the loss of fictional characters, who, after all, can't really be destroyed. To the extent that this series is not simply wanted but needed by fandom, we've learned some very interesting thing.
A healthier audience--one, that is, with a healthy proportion of dilettantes and hobbyists--wouldn't much care about this kind of exercise, I think. This book is only necessary if we're all obsessives, now.

A wagering point: how long it takes before some future Turk, young or otherwise, seeks to revert the landscape post Infinite Crisis status-quo to the pre-Infinite Crisis post Crisis on Infinite Earths landscape. I mean, we have, twenty years of stories to selectively parse? The same exact problem being solved, at least partially, by Infinite Crisis?

A similiar point, with respect to the post-House of M Marvel U. The whole point of that is to allow writers to keep exploring mutants as a metaphor for minorities? How dull. Marvel has a stable of characters that could be used to explore a whole range of issues, if that is what you really want to do. Morrison's greatest gift to Marvel, after all, was a glimpse at how the X-Men could be used to address a host of other issues. I mean, we're standint at the biological threshold (and you have to imagine that Hank Pym is running far more advanced stem cell research than is the NIH) and we're using the X-Men to keep arguing about race? Not that you can't tel very interesting stories in this vein, but still: weird that Marvel felt the need to foreclose the ability to talk about other issues.

2005-10-14T15:59:00.000-07:00

JACK CHICK GOES MANGA, OR, BELA VERBOSI'S DEAD

Via Belle Waring: Hairy Polarity and the Sinister Sorcery, far and away the best Evangelical anti-Harry Potter manga I've ever read--to put it in words the book's characters might use, it was crazy wack funky! Best moment: the fact that the Temple of Elemental Evil apparently lies underneath Ye Olde Local Booke Chain.

No clue as to whether the creator was paid Tokyopop page rates.

Also, "the brew of brainstretching?" I'm totally drinking some of that this weekend.

2005-09-28T17:43:00.000-07:00

TRULY, I HAVE THE PULSE OF THE PEOPLE

Writing last nights post, swear to the deity of your choice, monkey trickster gods excepted, I thought about Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark; more evidence, I think, that what the kids want is not, or at least not always, reassurance and mollycoddling in four colors. Spend a bit of time Googling around, trying to find Sean Collins' blurb on the book before I quit and went to bed.

And now this morning, it's talked up everywhere. I wish I could claim I sensed the moment, but being lucky is enough for me.

2005-09-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

THE DIRECT MARKET VERSUS THE WISDOM OF OLD DEAD GERMANS

Interesting juxtaposition: over here, vendors in the direct market bemoaning the fact that comics are too dark for kids, over there, an appreciation of the power the darker of Los Bros. Grimm's fairy tales exert over children. I'm not disputing the wisdom of those on the retail front lines; learned my lesson there, I have. But still; it'll take a whole lot of work to convince me that kids don't want the dark stuff.

2005-09-13T20:04:00.000-07:00

GIVING UP TO THE GHOST

So. I've been outblogged lately by the zombie corpose of Grotesque Anatomy, if the Blog-o-Tron is to be believed; damn Jakala, he gets me to check every day, and for nothing. Clearly, a condition that cannot be allowed to stand. But what is a lazy blogger to do? Ah yes: linking.

Timothy Burke gives up on modern superhero comics; see also this earlier essay for his way forward. I'm not certain I agree with his argument, but then again I'm markedly more willing to ignore continuity than most comics fans. That Alfred may (if I've read the boards correctly) have killed a man doesn't work to retroactively or prospectively taint other Batman stories for me, any moreso than does the existence of Disney's Snow White taint the Brothers Grimm version. At least for me.

Newsweek has a short blurb on Baghdad Journal, upcoming through Fantagraphics. I think I ordered this, but I can't confirm that. One of pre-orderings little pleasures: the comic shop surprise.

2005-09-12T17:43:00.000-07:00

TWO THOUGHTS, NON-COMICS VARIETY

I really, really don't understand what constitutes pass interference in the NFL anymore. The game is slowly turning into the NBA, in which the call is less dependant on the on-field event than on the star-value of the perpetrator. An ominous sign.

Also, I'd have been much better off saving all the money I spend on seven years of fancy-pants education and simply investing in a construction-crane rental company.

2005-08-08T18:37:00.000-07:00

SAME AS IT EVER WAS

So. Wizard World Chicago. Not much to add that can't be found elsewhere. The show is what the show is, and accepted as such, mostly harmless. At least as harmless as any other large gathering of slightly obsessive individuals prone to dressing themselves in costumes that I've been to. I've made my peace with the fanboys, and can walk among them now with neither fear nor rage.

Highlights of the weekend:

Hanging out with my brother, of course; the family connection is the real draw for me. I'm not paying for that airfare merely to buy half price trades.

The hot dogs at Gene and Judes, which are merely competent Chicago hot dogs and therefore better than any other hot dog sold East of Gary Indiana. And of course the dinner at the Duke of Perth.

Picking up a big stack of cheap trades. Most were fill in the gaps type purchases. Best new to me buys: Jeffrey Brown's These Things These Things, and the first three Finder trades. I finally got around to reading Brown last year, and have since caught up with the work in print (anybody got a copy of Early Works they want to get rid of?). His art style--a deliberately slapdash and crude style of cartooning--turns some people off. I can see that; I mean, some art just doesn't work for some people. But those folks are missing out on great stories, oblique little vignettes that glide from the personal to the universal with real subtlety. These Things These Things is more slight than his other works, but no less engrossing, and is perhaps his most heartrending work. Folks turned off by the veins-open display that was Clumsy should try again with TTT.

Finder is a book I've heard things about for, literally, years. But, you know, laziness, plus lack of easy purchasing avenues equals continued ignorance. The kind of ignorance which is hard to justify when Carla Speed McNeil is in fact pressing the books into my greedy little hands. Quick verdict: good stuff. More later, but the curious could do worse than to get Jim Henley's take. I'm told that Salon, in a weird bit of synchroncity, had an article on the book as well this past week, but the ad thing has kept me away.

Most nerve wracking purchase: a color illustration Seth did of sleeping students. A gift for my wife, to put in her classroom. I walked by it seventy nine times, sweaty hands stuck in pockets, trying to look cool and comfortable, prior to stumbling over myself in my rush to Buy! Buy! So comforting to know that my game hasn't improved since eight grade. I love it, even if it does not express the jaded innocence of the silver age or whatnot.

Also had the good luck to meet Ken Lowery and Rick Geerling. Ken is substantially less spittle flecked than one would expect merely from reading his page. Though his taste in souvenirs is questionable at best, and he is completely unintelligible on the phone (though this latter could I suppose, be my fault; damn my childhood, filled as it was with shotguns and punk rock shows). Rick is, for his part, much less pale than I had envisioned. Both are, to the surprise of utterly no one, a good deal of fun to walk around a convention and/or sit around bullshitting with; both are also much younger than writers of their caliber have any right to be, though Jog is the worst offender in this regard. Really, I've been wasting my life.

And that's about it. Those of you who were not there are likely better informed as to the news, such as it was, than was I; they've yet to implement by suggestion of a hype dedicated loudspeaker for the floor, so those of us whose noses were stuck in yet another box of cheap trades could be just as informed of The! Big! News! as those sitting at some panel. Final tip, which I found out late: though the Doubletree is in fact connected to the Exhibition hall, the action is at the Hyatt. File away for next year. Bonus tip: work out those back muscles prior to show time.

2005-07-27T17:24:00.000-07:00

STORY PROBLEMS

For ten points: Is it step forwards, backwords, or sideways if Little Black Sambo characters are replaced by Scowling Gangsters in manga titles? Please show your work.

Also, Raekwon was not the leader of the Wu-Tang Clan. That was the RZA. And thus I come to suspect that perhaps the Emm Ess Emm really has lost touch with the pulse of ordinary Americans.

Link via Tom Spurgeon.

2005-07-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

WHAT I READ ON MY SUMMER VACATION, REVISITED.

Forgot to mention Felipe Smith's MBQ, one of the newer American manga from Tokyopop. An interesting start, though anyone who complains about decompression best stay away; the book is 220 pages of set-up for volume two. Which is cool, of course, if you're in it for the long haul, but who can tell who is, these days. Anyway. Volume One arranges the players--gangsta's, beatific fast food giants, rookie cops, and wannabe artists--on the stage, and sketches out their connections to each other. That's basically it. Though in it's favor, the story does move; Smith keeps the non-happenings moving fast enough that the absence of action isn't really noticeable. The storytelling is crisp; particularly the way Smith orients his characters with respect to his backgrounds, and the what he chooses to reveal and obscure between panel cuts; he likes to make you focus on a likely outcome, segue into a reaction consistent with that outcome, then pull the rug back. Well done.

But.

The last segment of story is an(other) attack on the comics industry, on superheros, sci-fi, fanboys, the way that The Stan keeps the true artist down. And maybe he's right; hell, if Smith told me it's hard to get a manga Magnolia published, hey, I'm buying. But that I might believe him doesn't mean I actually care. Which makes me a bad person, one who is likely Dragging Comics Backwards, but I don't care about that either. I'm sick of reading comics about comics, or about making comics, or about comics culture. It's tedious and it makes the work feel small. It doesn't fire my imagination. There's a big world out there, and new worlds besides; comics, take me somewhere new. Please. (Note that this comment also applies to Wanted, in addition to the below).

Besides, complaining about how hard it is to publish your book in a book published by one of the more successful publishers out there is just stupid. The injustice of it all.

Oh, and there are some serious gender issues: the women in this comic are all, no lie, screaming maniacs or dehumanized sex objects. A possible milestone to note: the first American manga analogue to Dave Sim emerges. Maybe. But still a book worth reading.

2005-07-26T18:33:00.000-07:00

BUT MALIBU STACY HAS A NEW HAT!

So. A new color scheme, from light blue to a somewhat darker blue. With luck, I'll figure out how to get my blogroll and comments back. Current action is running three to two that I don't. New content? Not so much. But new colors! Shiny and new! That's not enough? You people just take and take and take...

2005-07-25T17:12:00.000-07:00

WHAT I READ ON MY SUMMER VACATION

Not many blogs, certainly. And very few comics, for that matter. I did read the Wanted trade. I know; I was warned. Even so, my expectations were too high; and I'm a man of simple tastes, who can be distracted by pretty explosions done right. I like my fireworks, narrative and otherwise. And the book fails at even this, which is a shame, because at least competent boom-bap would have partially disguised the abject failure of the books argument. The last two pages of the book are a standard issue, though more explicit than normal "you are all pathetic sheep who refuse to seize the power given you" critique of modern consumer culture; all of us sheeple are contrasted with Wesley, who, after an issue of enduring race, gender, and competency related humiliations, has freed himself from the bourgeois rules by force of arms; he (literally) stops being screwed and starts doing the screwing. But what lesson is there? Wesley has the magic ticket; he's in essence given his freedom when he finds out that he is The World's! Greatest! Killer! Which of course makes it much easier to get make your own way in the world. The rest of us? Well, I guess we continue to get screwed, since power is the coin that pays the way out. Odd that Millar, avowed semi-socialist that he is, doesn't seem to see that he's making the same argument as any number of right-wingers, the one in which rich men, many of whom did not earn their positions, rail at the poor for not helping themselves sufficiently.

What else? Steve Niles' Secret Skull. Competent, though man would I have been mad had I paid what IDW wanted for the trade; story value is perhaps a third of what was charged. Nice coloring job, though, a cartoon version of the graveyard palette. Street Angel was nice; not up the expectations the relentless internet hyping saddled it with, but still: nice. It was, at times, I thought, too knowingly wacky for its own good, particularly the second issue; this problem was minimized as the volume went on, and later segments felt much more organic. The broken up lettering was a neat design element, though overused. And I demand, demand, damn it, to see the basketball skills put to use.

And that's it for comics. Actually, not quite. I cranked through Thomas Ott's Cinema Panopticon prior to leaving. That book is an object lesson in the triumph of technique over content. A series of semi-horrific vignettes, told in wood cut, or so it appears. The stories are nothing special; typical EC style twisters. But the wood cut illustration lends these twice told tales weight they likely don't deserve; the stark, wavy lines are at once realistic and abstract. The art distorts from the real world in a way that highlights the surreality of the stories. Objects are recognizable but somehow wrong. I don't think that the story content could bear any sort of weight with a different art style.

I had substantially better luck with books. Flew through The Smartest Guys in the Room, about Enron, which turned out to be the scariest book I've read in years; a big red flashing reminder that the customer is not always right; that the customer is sometimes, in fact, really, really wrong. There's a lesson there for Alberto Gonzalez, should he choose to heed it. Less terrifying but still scary by virtue of personal interest is Evan Wright's Generation Kill, about Marines in Iraq; my brother in law should wrap boot camp next week, then on to Camp Lejeune. I wonder how much the soldiers in the book are products of the Marines, and how much of their attitude was concrete pre-enlistment. I wonder if it's even possible for him to come back as the same person I knew.

Read George R. R. Martin's A Storm of Swords. I'd resisted reading more fantasy for years, until the first book in this series. And now I'm nosing around the fantasy rack in Borders, sheepishly looking at spines. I know, just know, that I'm heading for a bad reading experience; several, likely. If the fourth book would come out sooner, I'd be able to better control this reawakened fantasy monkey on my back, but no....now release is in November sometime. Rats.

And lastly, read Melville's The Confidence Man. Who knew it was a non-fiction account of the Karl Rove era? Not me. Depressing, somehow, to realize that the tactics may change but the game never does.

2005-07-25T16:47:00.000-07:00

LIVING LIKE MACARTHUR

I have returned, though not by sea, and sans corn cob pipe; an overinflated sense of self did of course make the trip. In fact, I returned twice; once, to my old home, once to my new. The old is central Wisconsin; I can barely recognize the landscape now. What used to be fields we would play soldier in are now housing developments. A new Wal-Mart, a new(ish) highway. The foundry is, literally, gone; a whole industrial facility vanished. I can still find houses whose foundations I helped pour, but it's harder now; too much new hay surrounding the needles.

And yet it still feels, demonstrably, like home. The details feel right even if the stage has been rearranged. The styles of the houses, the types of trees. The lake, and how I miss the lake; how I miss freshwater. There's a quality to the light in Wisconsin that is observably different from that in the South; it feels more brittle up North, somehow, more fragile (though moreso in fall than summer). It feels like a place that I could slip into again, and perhaps will. Did I really want to leave, fourteen years ago? Is it failure to return? Ten years ago I might have said yes, to both questions. Now I'm not sure, which I'm sure blows my hipster credentials, such as they are, all to hell. But I've lived in the big city; I've done my time in black, thanks. I've lived in cities long enough to grow picky. I'll live in a city where I can walk places, but not one where I'm stuck in traffic all day; I'll live in a city without a yard but I damn well better have decent public green space. Do I love where I am now? No. I don't hate it, mind. I tolerate it. It's tolerable. I'm not certain what keeps me here, other than inertia and a fantastic job. Who is the bigger coward: the guy who tolerates where he is for the sake of a job or the guy who leaves the good job to run home?

A return to small town America? Why yes, maybe. Especially given the internet; I can get any book I want, most songs I want, delivered right to my door. The lack of good brick and mortar stores isn't the brick to head, culturally, it once was. So, we'll see. On Wisconsin. Maybe.

2005-05-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

PSA'S

Sam Hiti has his new book, EL LARGO TREN OSCURO, available for order at his site here. Hiti's work is on my automatic buy list, based on his earlier Tiempos Finales, which was a species of splatterpunk bible story, only with substantially more metaphorical and narrative throw weight than that high concept implies. I thought it was the best book put out last year. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of the new book; c'mon, it's about a demonic train and will undoubtedly feature some gorgeous art. One hundred and four pages for ten dollars. Go.

Also, I'm thinking about going to a new template. If any of you three are really wedded to the baby blue, this is your chance to speak up.

2005-05-18T18:38:00.000-07:00

WARREN ELLIS AS LEMMY

Someone remarked once that Motorhead hasn't written hundreds of songs over the course of their career; rather, that they wrote basically one song hundreds of times. But then again, who really cares, insofar as that song is The Ace of Spades. Or Overkill, or Killed by Death, for that matter.

similarly, it's pretty well known by now that Warren Ellis prefers to work the same strip of earth in his books. But then again, who really cares, insofar as those books are of the level of Planetary, or Hellblazer. Desolation Jones will get a look; when Ellis is hitting the right notes, he plays his song like no one else.

Bonus Motorhead/Ellis connection here: "I knew a guy whod put a tape into his cars player and would wait until Lemmy tore into Ace Of Spades before standing on the accelerator and pulling out into the street. I mustve nearly died a hundred times because of that bastard."

I've never been a car with Ellis but still; I've been that driver at another place and time. I firmly believe that this is acceptable, almost mandatory behavior, frankly. On the other hand, driving recklessly to Bad English's "I Remember You?" This should not be acceptable under any circumstances.

2005-05-12T15:19:00.000-07:00

MY DAY, IN A MICROCOSM

I'm in the bathroom at work when the button drops off my pants. Into the toilet. The public toilet. Now, the bowl is clean, and I thought about my retrieval options, but still; a public toilet.

At least it wasn't my cell phone this time.

2005-05-10T19:03:00.000-07:00

QUICK THOUGHTS

I haven't read EVERYTHING BAD IS GOOD FOR YOU(not that a simply ignorance of the material has ever stopped me before), but based on the New York Times piece, his argument seems to be that complex narratives are better, and better for you, than simply narratives. This seems wildly wrong to me. This, for example, and to stay with this week's "Freemason's Rule the Country!" brand of O.G. paranoia, is an incredibly complex narrative, full of odd connections and character; it's also the work of a loon. This, on the other hand, is similiarly complex work of paranoia and alternate history (featuring again the Queen of England if not the ubiqitious Masons) and is, if not, art, at least a hell of a good time. In other words, I'm not sure complexity itself is enough, at least not if we're talking aesthetic merit (complex but inartistic works might I suppose be good for you in cognitive development sense, even if they're are crap as art). When we talk about art being good, we're really talking complextity plus something; be it craft, inspiration, or revelation. Complexity by itself is not enough.

Second, while reading through the back and forth on the Rosenbaum piece, I notice Rose raising a question about the proper use of stereotypes internal to other cultures. This is a good and prescient question, especially as more Western creators appropriate Manga and Anime tropes as well as Asian themes in general; in fact, in an odd bit of blogospheric synchronicity, I was wondering about this recently as well, after reading Sharkknife. Not that Sharknife is either bad or offensive, mind; but there is something weird, or at least potentially, weird, about an American book by a white creator whose protaganist is an Asian girl whose primary characteristic is, essentially, cuteness. Or where the dialogue is, I don't know, some sort of a faux street thing; a work whose impact depends on an appreciation of the funkily exotic. Maybe there is nothing weird about it, given the cultural cross-pollination at work. Maybe it's me. I mean, I think Sharknife had it's heart in the right place, but still; Elvis loved black music (allegedly), after all, and he doesn't get a pass. I wish I could articulate why this thought crops up in some works but not others; after all, I don't think Kagan Mcleod's Infinite Kung-Fu is bad for playing with both Blaxploitation and Chinese stock plots and characters, but then again that book has style to burn. It may be merely that I want some self-awareness from a work that is playing with foreign tropes. Mcleod, with the extensive back end he puts in his books, where he rambles on about classic martial arts films, sort of suggests that he knows what building blocks he's using. Sharknife, by contrast, is pretty much the opposite of self-aware, which could be what sort of bugged me about it. More thoughts, later, with more time to think.

And in the spirit of half-formed thoughts dragged from the Peiratikos comment threads, I'm still gnawing away on the bone that is Sin City; how and why the film version was so much more unpleasant than the comics given that the film's slavish devotion to the source material. I never thought that the comics were too much; I felt the movie was way too much. I felt bad seeing it with my wife, even though she liked it. And I can't quite figure out why. I mean, it's not because the film deviated from the source material. It might be the overload of three stories at once. Reading each segment a year apart, it's harder to notice Miller's obsession with genital mutilation. It might be a change in where I'm at with respect to the real world; fictional evocations of torture--especially torture used to reify the morality of the protaganist--is something I find more troubling these days, certainly moreso than I did back in, say 2000. It might be that we respond differently to film and comics violence. Movies control what we look at in ways comics can't, plus there is sound, Dolby surround in this case. And not just noise and movement, but real people up there on screen. I think that this may be the big one. We're sort of trained, I think, to look at people on the screen as stand-ins for real people. Naturalism, with respect to the human body, is sort of the default assumption; even in a movie like Star Wars, the basic limits of the body are basically the same as lived by the audience. Blades cut, rocks crush, throats choke shut. We empathize with the mutilation because we understand it; we've lived it, in miniature at least. Bodies in comics are abstractions, on the other hand (maybe) are abstractions. We don't empathize the same with a representation of a person. Picasso's Guernica may be a powerful painting, but it is rather worse at conveying the horror of war than this picture.

2005-05-10T18:39:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON DC: FOOD, FELLOWSHIP, SICKNESS, AND SHOES

I have returned from Washington DC. Interesting trip. The last time I was on 12th Street NW, it was six years ago and my friend was working as a bouncer at Poly Esthers. The area to the east was...well, not so good for drunken post-club wandering. Now? Pretty much stumbling drunks curb to curb come midnight, so far as I could tell. Some pretty powerful gentrifying going on there. Not at all what I expected from DC. Poly Esthers, by all accounts, remains a shitty place to go if you're not getting free drinks from friends on staff. Any club that can ruin Prince for a man is a bad place indeed.

I was able, thanks to commenters steered here by Jim Henley, to get some pretty good food while I was there. Jaleleo and Zantinya were both, as promised, excellent, and made wonderful backdrops for my friend Brian to explain his decision to abandon law to teach high school; and damned if it didn't make a lot of sense, and he didn't seem much happier than he did as a billing machine. Capitol Q had good pulled pork; if not so good as might be found in Texas, at least good enough for me. Again, thanks to everyone who helped me out via comment.

The trip also gave me the opportunity to meet some of my erstwhile compatriots. It's odd meeting in realtime people you've only know online. They're at once much more and much less than you'd anticipated. Less magisterial and imposing, more funny and kind, especially as regards the bartab. Jim, Eve, Marc, Julian, Will; it was a lot of...well, I'm sure there's a word for it, I'm sure of it. A good one.

But it was not all good food and company; no, I was afflicted in head and toe. The latter, a classic mistake: never bring, as your only shoes, brand new dress shoes. The lanky thiry year old hobbling around Dupont Circle this weekend? That was me. And I somehow managed to pick up a sinus infection while I was there. That part, at least, was no fun. I am no fan of pleghm.

But it was worth a little pleghm to meet some terrific folks and to see again America's premier Masonically designed city. A trade I'd gladly make again.

2005-04-28T18:34:00.000-07:00

EAT AT JOES?

The Intermittent is taking a road trip to DC next week; I haven't been there is years and years, since my friend stopped bouncing at a horrible seventies themed nightclub and moved to Seattle. And that was back in the nineties. I'm guessing things have changed, and not simply Presidents. Which is a long way of asking for a little help: anybody know of decent places to eat in the greater Metro Center area? I'd prefer good, cheap, and healthy, but will settle for good, cheap, and unhealthy.

Anyone?

2005-04-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

REVIEWS, TO PROVE MY WEEKEND WASN'T WASTED.

No slave to the NFL draft I; while glued to the couch, I managed to get through two comics, as well as wrap my re-read of Crime and Punishment (and as an aside, Dave Fiore writes as though he were a Dostevsky character; it's uncanny). Brief reviews below, nominal spoilers.

**Through the Habitrails, Jeff Nicholson. There's the theory going around that holds that the Countdown to Infite Crisis is, at heart, an adolescent work, inasmuch as it self-consciously rejects childish fun in favor of bloated self-importance. Not having read the book, I can't say whether or not this comment is deserved; but I do endorse the idea of bloated self-importance being a teenage hallmark. But of course this bloat expands both ways; both into the childhood past and the adult future. By this standard, Through the Habitrails is very, very adolescent work.

The book is nominally a nightmarish tale about deadening effect of the modern workplace, complete with evil bosses draining workers of their precious bodily fluids; no, the metaphors are not subtle. What the book is really about is how special the author is, about how how his life would be better if people just acknowledged him as the shining little star he is. We're meant to read the book, I think, as part autobiography, if I read the afterword correctly. The mouthless protaganist is an explicit stand-in for the author; this has the unfortunate effect of introducing the real world into the story, encouraging the reader to try and find the "real" story behind the symbolic conceits. And the contrast shows us, what exactly? Well, the protaganist evidently had a shit job that he thought was beneath him. Boo-hoo, and welcome the party. Also, he had girl trouble. And....well, that's really it. These things are not a foundation for the kind of apocalyptic dissatisfaction Nicholson seeks to express. Unless, of course, one is a teenager, and every little compromise with the adult world is a matter of life or death. Over the course of the book, this limited, all or nothing viewpoint grows from grating to laughable; as this is nominally a book on the horror modern life, I'd call this a failure of execution. Moreover,there are some really weird gender issues going on. The introduction notes that Dave Sim endorsed Nicholson's work; perhaps best to leave it at that.

On the other hand, the art has a nicely downscale Alex Robinson vibe to it. So there is that. And speaking of nice art, I give unto you Paul Pope's 100%. This book is also, in it's own passionate way, a teenage sort of book; really, what story of first and sudden love isn't, at some level? But it has a sweetness about it as well, a redeeming self-awareness. The passion is tempered by an awareness of the costs of idealism, and it is a stronger work for it.

Better men than I have talked about Pope's art. I'll instead just briefly note his way with the mis-en-scene. Pope's panels are amazingly crowded with detail; but interestingly, his detail is typically more suggested than shown. Where someone like Geof Darrow will use a thin line to draw a hundred different unique onlookers to a scene, Pope uses a thick line to sketch out the rough contours of a crowd. Amazing, the different ways to the same result.

2005-04-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

ALWAYS WITH THE HOOKS

So, here's my question, after playing ball tonight with the older crowd down at the rec center: now that I'm over thirty, when do I get the unblockable running hook shot added to my game? I swear, every guy there could shoot this ungainly running hook with deadly accuracy. Frustrating as all get out. Damn fundamentals; it's entirely unfair to those of us raised on the latter day NBA/playground game.

In many ways, it's easier to guard younger guys than older guys. The old guys--the ones that are still playing ball--have all evolved their game; jump shots from weird angles and at weird times. The ball comes out either a half second early or later than it would in a normal game; really throws off my defensive timing. And sure, over a game or two I'd get used to it, but a game or two is really seven or eight games later when nexts are stacked three deep. Sometimes I think I'd rather be dunked on.

2005-04-24T17:49:00.000-07:00

THE LONGEST DAY

Saturday, of course. And not because of 24 Hour Comics Day, but the NFL Draft. I am a geek two times over; I have a strange fascination with sport's drafts. In many ways, I think that the offseason is more fun than actual football season. Trying to determine how to best improve a team (in my case, the Packers; I'm lucky insomuch as I don't have the misfortune of following the Redskins. Actually, following this draft, perhaps Redskins fans should pity me.) is a nice little puzzle. Lots of possibilities, lots of angles to work. Lots of drama as my little plans get dashed, round by round.

The dashing itself wouldn't be that much of a problem, of course--sports exist to teach us humility, after all--but for the fact that it takes so...damn...long. The first round of the NFL draft was, what, eight hours? Way too long. Plus, that much Mel Kiper should be illegal. ESPN has in general gotten much worse over the years at running the presentation; far too much time is spent joking around, far too little talking about, you know, the players, whom I;m led to believe are the point of the whole thing. There were times when I couldn't tell who had been picked because Chris Berman and Mel Kiper were intent on reliving their bygone days of yore, or because we've cut away to Merril freakin' Hoge (and really, no self-respecting former Steeler be allowed to wear his suits. Perhaps it was the concussions). Or the interminable Jim Rome style round table, with all the manufactured controversy that entails. C'mon, guys. Maybe you should, you know, actually cover the draft rather than covering yourselves.

In retrospect, going out for Peruvian food was probobly a much better decision that sitting through the entirety of the second round.

2005-04-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

THE PATH OF COMIC BOOK LAW

Found at Suspension of Disbelief:

“The trouble with applying this "superhero world" rationale to Manhunter is that none of its errors can be explained away because of the existence of superheroes. The rules about character evidence aren't going to change. The rules about what is relevant and irrelevant testimony aren't going to change. Prosecutors are still going to have to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, and they need to produce actual evidence to do that. (If anyone would like to argue that such changes would be natural consequences of superheroes, I'd love to hear the reasons.)”

Reasons? Okay, I’m game.

Short, wisenheimer reason: because the laws of god and man are trumped, within comics, by the laws of dramatic necessity.

Shorter, more thoughtful reason: 9/11. Or the DCU equivelent thereof.

In the real world, twenty seven hundred people die and weeks later we have the government conferring on itself the right to hold citizens indefinitely. We have the government inventing places beyond the reach of any court. We have detentions based on hearsay, tribunals in front of which a defendant will be forced to respond to information classified from his view. We have limitations on attorney/client privelege. We have torture. We have, in short, the creation of a parallel judicial system with radically different provisions from those found in the criminal justice system.

We have a majority of the voting population who arguably approve of this new system. Because of twenty seven hundred people.

How many people you think have been killed in superhero battles? How many people are injured when cars start getting tossed around? How many trillions of dollars of damage have been done to Metropolis? To the New York of the Marvel Universe? And to think that the legal system would be even remotely comparable to ours? That kind of thinking is not simply naïve, it’s dangerous.

The Constitution was not given us by God; it’s written not on stone tablets but on paper. It is a creation of our own devising, as are all our laws. Its protections and contours are only so large as we make them; or, in other words, what we think of as rights are fragile, transitory things. Against a strong enough force they give way. Yesterday you could drink; today the will of the people renders that beer contraband. Yesterday your contracts were your own business; today, your business is run to the whims of that Government. And maybe that’s a good thing, viewed from some Benthamite heights. But in either case, the “right” to disagree is gone, obliterated by the popular will.

If ten thousand more people die via terrorist plot, does anyone really think that something so gauzy as the Constitution will prevent radical changes in the way we the people want our Government to behave? Are we confident that the document will read the same, the day after tomorrow? The price of freedom is vigilance not against our enemies but against ourselves; our rights are only as strong as we allow them to be.

And the courts know this. Sure, behind every judicial decree there is a threat of violence. Sure. But only so long as the man with the gun chooses to enforce the decree. Andrew Jackson was a blowhard, but he was also right. And the courts know this too. For all the talk about activist courts, the real truth is that most often courts wait to see which way the wind blows before acting. When power is based on credibility, it is incredibly dangerous to stray too far from the crowd.

So let’s return to the land of make-believe, a land where sudden sci-fi death can come to citizens at any moment. Are we confident that the Constitution in the DCU wasn’t amended to allow the federal government over superhuman crimes? I would expect that amendment to be rapidly forthcoming after the second or third superhuman disaster; citizens would be begging to empower the federal government to address the issue, and politicians would be stepping over each other to do it. In a world where possession and mind-control and telepaths are common, would we expect that superhuman crimes must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt? Or would the burden of proof shift, or maybe the relelvance of character testimony, since consistency with past actions would have relevance to the issue of whether or not the defendant was acting under his own power, as it were, and not as a mind-controlled dupe? If villians have the power to level cities, on whose side is the court going to err, on whose backs will the burden lie; the individual defendant, or the mass of innocent citizens? Maybe the burden of proof in superhuman cases is not "beyond a reasonable doubt", because the risk of putting one innocent metahuman jail is worth it when balanced against the cost of letting a human tank walk free for want of better evidence.

After the nth iteration of the Joker’s patented kill-crazy murder spree, think maybe that the prevailing attitudes about the propriety of trying and executing the insane might change? About the power of the state to conduct forced lobotomies? The power of the state to assert authority over the bodies of superhumans in all facets?

I could keep going.

Now, granted, neither DC nor Marvel has given us this sort of legal backstory, largely because it would allow the setting to swallow the stage. Fair enough. It’s fair to say it’s sloppy storytelling for DC or Marvel to paper over what look like factual gaffes by reference to never before explicated changes in the way their fictional worlds work. Tends to jerk people out of the story, that. These are all fair criticisms. But to assume that our legal protections are constants both in fiction and real-life is error. Something to remember, especially insofar as forgetting it in one area ruins your enjoyment of comic-books, but forgetting in the other area can ruin your life.

2005-04-13T20:39:00.000-07:00

THE FRENCH ALWAYS RUIN EVERYTHING

Mark Kalesnkiko's Mail Order Bride has been voted as "the comic book best suit for film adaptation" by some subset of the French. A plea, in response: please don't adapt this book. It's a nearly perfect comic, and I love it to the point of obsession. A jealous kind of love. I don't want another version out there, one bound to be inferior; I doubt a film could capture the subtle ways Kalesniko uses shifts in line weight and drawing style to emphasize competing viewpoints even within panels. Nor could I stand to see a work that doesn't easily reduce into explanations or life-lessons "clarified." I don't want to know what it's supposed to say; in the purit of its confusion the book is perfect.

Please French people, no.

Link via Tom Spurgeon.

2005-04-12T18:01:00.000-07:00

iTUNES MUSINGS

Man, Kurt Cobain ripped off Mark Lanegan's cover of Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" pretty much note for note for the Unplugged in New York album. Two point penalty on the dead guy. The white one.

Also, for folks who like the Decemberists version of clattering waltzes, ballads, and sea chanties, I highly recommend Firewater. Plus Firewater swings like a hanged man.

2005-04-11T16:32:00.000-07:00

SNAPSHOTS OF MY LIFE IN COMICS, EXECUTIVE SUMMARY VERSION

I’ve been sort of on/off thinking about the comics that really kicked my ass growing up; the books that sort of defined certain periods of my life. It's an interesting excercise. I can remember some things so vividly; not just the books but where I was, in some cases what was on the radio. Smells, even. In lieu of my participating (at least not for the moment) in the getting to know you meme sweeping the blogosphere, I offer my life in comics, the pre-college years.

1982: I started really reading comics seriously with X-Men 166. I was eight. I’ve talked about what a revolutionary thing that issue was for me at the time. I won’t bore you by repeating myself; suffice it to say, this was the first time in my young life that I had access to media that spoke to me like I wasn’t a child, that hinted at real danger. I realized as I was making this list that this sense of the illicit is something that many of my favorite comics share; and I wonder whether or not the decline in comics readership has less to do with the availability of other media in general than with the fact that specifically 'dangerous' media is more available to children. Kids today wouldn’t regard God Loves, Man Kills with the same sense of wonder as did I, given that the swearing in that book is heard now on mainstream TV. At the time, though…our neighbor had a pop-up camper; during the summer, I and my cousins got to sleep out there, a way to get the kids-who-wanted-stay-up-late out of the house. It was sort of our unofficial clubhouse, from which we would creep out to, of course, spy on our parents; I’m still shocked that I was never bit by anything poisonous given how often I crawled under the deck to sneak closer to the house. Moreso shocked that I kept doing it, given that the most outré thing I ever saw was my parents watching Caddyshack. Anyway. We kept a copy of God Loves, Man Kills hidden in the pop-up; it had bad words, and we were afraid my mom would find out. That would have been, needless to say, a bad thing indeed. The book fascinated us, like some sort of untranslated communication from beyond; we would take turns reading it aloud, for the sole purpose of getting to bits with the swearing. We’d practice spitting out the words, trying to sound worldly and tough and older. If kids today don't get that thrill, they're really missing out.

On with the show.

1983: I got Daredevil's 187 and 188 as a Christmas present; part of Sears catalog comics twenty four pack, I think. I arrived in the middle of this story, having had read Daredevil. I wound up with a subscription, I think, less than year later. Miller’s work had a beat, a drive, that was, again, not like anything else available to me, with the possible exception of Raiders of the Lost Ark; and of course that wasn’t out on video yet, and videos were still rare and precious things in my neck of the woods in any event. The O’Neill run didn’t meet the same quality, but it wasn’t far off, to my mind at the time. I gave my mom Daredevil 200 when she got worried about my burgeoning hobby; the anti-revenge murder message I think assuaged her fears about comics content, and freed her to worry full time instead about Dungeons and Dragons. Lucky for me that she picked that comic (based on the bloody cover, I assume) and not, say, the Swamp Thing annual my Grandma had randomly picked up for me at a gas station as a gift; had my mom seen Hell as drawn by Steven Bissette, the world would be one comics reader poorer, the internet correspondingly richer.

1984: Ah, Secret Wars. Like mana from God. Every summer my cousins would stay with us. Mark and Jim were, respectively, three and one year older than me; both like superheros more as concepts than as stories. That is to say, both loved staging superhero fights with GI Joe characters (Airborne always standing in for Wolverine, for some reason) or else running around the woods playing superhero. Mark had permanent dibs on Hawkeye, Jim on Wolverine. To be difficult, I think, I usually played Dr. Fate (I had discovered All-Star Squadron earlier). Secret Wars provided some sort of context to our games. Now instead of having to make up reasons why Hawkeye and Wolverine were together (we were typically sticklers for narrative consistency in our games, for some reason) we simply used the Secret Wars miliau; and while Doctor Fate shouldn’t have been there, he was easy enough to shoehorn in. Hey, the Beyonder had infinite power, including the power to reach into alternate comics' universes. And then The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, needless to say, opened up whole new worlds for us; Jimmy took a particular fondness to staging fights with an imaginary Ulik the Troll, despite none of us ever having read an actual comic about him. Sometimes we would incorporate creatures form the Monster Manual. Yes, we were nerds, but in a sort of playing outside in the woods all day kind of way. And there was always Ting to drink. I can't think of a better way to grow up.

1985: I’ve moved to Texas and start middle school all at the same time; truly, those were the salad days. I made friends with soccer and copies of Born Again, friendships soon to blossom to include Mail Order Monsters tournaments on the C64. I loved that game.

1986: X-Men 204 hits, and for the first time I’m aware that there is art and there is ART! Windsor-Smith can do that do a kid, I suppose. Gone were the days when all I cared about was a good story; now I wanted a good story to also look cool as hell. And what a pain in the ass that is to find.

1987: I’ve moved back to Wisconsin. Which means yet another junior high school to adjust to, just what ever thirteen year old always wants. My grade school friends had their own cliques already, and a surprising number had evolved into what were termed “grits”, that is, essentially, metalheads. To this day I don’t understand how a disgusting foodstuff is the right comparison for a fourteen year old in a Dio T-shirt, but I didn’t invent the jargon. Anyway. As you can expect, lots of free time for Dave! Which meant, of course, comics. The Kraven’s Last Hunt saga caught my attention, as did Legends and later, the JLA spin-off. Like many things that seemed important and profound at the time, Kraven hasn't aged well. I love it anyway, still; plus it's my first exposure to Blake, which allowed me to fake a profound knowledge of poetry in eigth grade English (I'd also come across a copy of Yeats' The Second Coming, which helped). Later that year I make friends with the help of Thor, after a kid on my soccer team somehow mentions the character. I’m still friends with the guy. He's got a kid now. Weird. Hi Owen. Oh wait, he can't read yet...

1988: At some comic book show at a bowling alley in Appleton I discover in one fell swoop The Question, The Shadow and the Dark Knight Returns. The universe expands again. The Helfer/Sienkievicz/Baker Shadow, in particular, just set up residence in my brain, forever warping my notions of entertainment; here was wrong fun done right. If pressed, I'd say to this day that that series, taken as a whole, was better in every way than The Dark Knight Returns.

1989: The year of the Punisher. Wiindigoo James and I sitting in a basement playing Top Secret, roleplaying imaginary Frank Castle-style commando missions, complete with Punisher-style looting of corpses for spare change. I half suspect our parents would rather we were down in the basement with a bottle of Wild Turkey rather than ten sided dice and a dog eared copy of the The Punisher's Weapons Locker but you never get the kids you want. It's also the year I'm reintroduced to Mike Mignola (whose seminal work on Rocket Racoon I’d loved as a kid) via Cosmic Odyssey; I have a very vivid memory of reading the third issue of that series as my dad drove us out to the marsh to go hunting. I hated duck hunting, but liked spending time with my dad. Debate eventually is my ticket out of the marsh; I make it up to dad by hunting pheasant with him, which is so much more fun than hunting duck. Moral: movement is better than sitting still.

1990: I can drive myself to the comic shop. Big times; I get a license to drive, discover the Pixies and the Before-There-Was-Vertigo grouping of DC Titles, Sandman, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, pretty much all at once. Then of I get busted hauling ass back to school after a dental appointment—had to catch the last ten minutes of Western Culture, moreso to stare longingly at a girl than to absorb the subtle differences between Doric and Ionic column—and spend a lot of time cooped up at home. Reading comics of course, and searching for that one punk song that most perfectly expresses my alienation; I find many contenders on Husker Du's Zen Arcade. Doom Patrol was my first Morrison book, and in some ways it's still my favorite, if only because Morrison really only writes one kind of book and the read is freshest the first time. Not sure why I kept reading Hellblazer, in retrospect; I came aboard during the tail end of the Family Guy storyline, which was both continuity heavy and also terribly dull. I think it the Steve Pugh fill in issue about a possessed dog, that kept me onboard. That one issue was cool enough I kept waiting for lightning to strike twice. Also, roundabout this time I start reading Marshal Law, and once again find myself terrified that my mother will read one of my comics. I'm still terrified that she'll someday find this comic, and I'm thirty one years old now.

1991: My timelines are getting all fuzzy now. Some of the 1990 books may have belong here instead. Well, this is a subjective list anyway. I think maybe Starman started around here; the last superhero book I picked up at issue one and followed to the end, if I’m not mistaken. Though the whole “Jack in Space” bit really tried my patience. About this same time as well the bad local comic shop—the one that smelled funny and was run by an extra from Deliverence and a Hawkwind groupie gone long in the tooth—had this ridiculous, we’re too lazy to move our backstock sale. Ten books or five prestige format issues for a dollar. The Wiindigoo picks up the Epic issues of Akira; along with Appleseed, my introduction to manga. I pick up, among other things, the Giffen/Bierbaum Legion reboot. Which of course, it being my first sustained exposure to the Legion, I still think of as the definitive Legion series. Dropped the book again when the Legionaires showed up. I wind up oddly addicted to Giffen's...unique art style and later in life become the only person in America to buy all his Image titles.

1992: Senior year. I know I read a ton of comics, but damned if I can tell you which ones made that big an impression, other than continuing stories in Sandman and Doom Patrol. I had stopped reading X-men and Daredevil by this point, at least in a slavish fanboy sort of way; I'd instead stop by for an issue or two just to catch up. For old times sake. I'd started to toy around with intro-level indie titles; stuff from Piranha Press, some random books from Caliber and Tundra. It was a miracle, really, that I even had access to these. One shop carried them, and even then, 'carried' is a strong term for what was really a pretty hit or miss chance of finding them racked.

And then I went to college.

Well. Quite the trip down memory lane, putting me in the mood to sing maudlin Sinatra peaons to my lost youth. Peh. Instead I'm going to the gym to prove that my youth is gone.

I'd google up covers for all the comics I'd mention but I'm, surprise, lazy. Also, the dating here is based on subjective memory not honest to god research; the internet is for slipshod personal digressions, not for finding things out.

2005-04-10T18:35:00.000-07:00

HOT IN THE PURSUIT OF THE COOL

A piece of advice, of use to likely no one reading this blog. If you are playing basketball, outdoors, in Florida, while wearing a knit skully: you are not cool. Not in any sense of the term.

2005-04-10T18:26:00.000-07:00

IS THIS GONNA BE A STAND UP FIGHT, OR ANOTHER BUG HUNT?

The smart money is on bug hunt. The ever-lovin' intermittent puppy is having flea problems. She's chewed the hair off her flanks, bitten her belly raw. It's tremendously sad to have this little half-bald fox walking around the house. Damnable, inevitable fleas.

This should not be a surprise, I guess; Florida is overrun with superpowered versions of most other bugs(the roaches here aren't just huge, they also fly, frex). That the local fleas are ferocious is just par for the course. Welcome to swamp living in the tropics and all that. But still. I don't see other dogs having these kinds of problems. And it's not as if I've taken a laizze-faire approach to pest-control. I've dosed the dog with Frontline, I've dosed her with Advantage. I've sprayed the yard with Malathion, I've sprayed it with predatory nematodes that allegedly feed of flea larva. I've tried to shoo off the possums and feral cats that I assume act like some sort of flea mass-transit system, running around the back yard waving a broom at them (my wife won't let me use the pellet gun). I've bombed the house, vacuumed, and vacuumed, and vacuumed. And I've still got a dog with fleas.

The vet is now working off the theory that maybe the dog is simply super sensitive to fleas; it's not that she's got more fleas than other dogs, but that her skin is allergic to the few fleas left. In lieu of another round of steroids (which would likely get my dog subpoenaed by Congress anyway), the vet recommended we give the dog Benadryl caplets. He also passed along, under the table, the name of an exterminator who uses The Good Shit. We're about to do the yard up old school style, chemically speaking.

Fucking parasites.

2005-03-31T16:01:00.000-08:00

MST3K VS. STEVEN SEGAL FIGHTING A FAT MAN

A confession: I'm vaguely more depressed about the impending deluge of Countdown to Infinite Crisis commentary than I am about the title itself. I mean, I know it's likely going to be a terrible, terrible comic. Then again, I'm not planning on reading it; no glutton for punishment me. But the commentary will be a pain to avoid. Lots of blogs over the next few months are going to be in this race to craft the most righteously indignant post about it; hey look, we're off to the races already!

And not that I think that the book deserves better, but still...I mean, everyone writing these posts and damn near everyone reading them knows the book will be lousy. I can't imagine anyone buying this book in this post Sue Dibny world is under any illusions as to what they're going to get. No one is performing a public service here. This is simply dogpiling on the weak, though admittedly a weak book that is really asking for it. After a point the critical spectacle gets somewhat depressing. It's the blogging equivalent of bear baiting.

By way of comparison, and this is really a terrible comparison, mind, but it fits to me. So bear with me. There was this Steven Segal movie from his early days--Out for Justice or Above the Law or Straight to Video or somesuch--that climaxed with Segal beating up a fat man. And yeah, the guy was a drug pusher or some other variey of scum/villainy, but at some point during this agonizingly long fight scene--maybe the fifth or sixth minute of this (so-called) Aikido master kicking around this helpless fat guy--I realized: watching Steven Segal beat up a fat guy isn't very entertaining. What's the fat guy going to do to Segal? Wheeze at him? It's not like he could defend himself. The only drama was seeing if coronary disease would kill him before Segal. There was such a mismatch between force and target the whole thing just felt sad. Sordid. Moreso, even, than your typical Segal flick. Which is saying a mouthful, trust me. If you're going to put the man down, just put him down already.

This whole Crisis business tends bring out the worst Segalian tendencies of the blogosphere. Which should, I think, give us pause. The mismatch between the book and the vitriol just seems so, so....I mean, look at this. And I know that ADD tends towards the excitable. But even so. You'd think the book was written on human flesh rather than merely being the millionth bad comic to be published during my lifetime. You'd think the book was in his house kicking his puppy. Guy, ease back already. It's just a bad comic. Stop killing it, it's already dead.

Which is not to say that I want some kind of moratorium on bagging on the book. I just want it done with some panache. I do like me some snark. When done well (which is why this is largely snark free; I know my limits). You want to use a bad comic for comedic fodder? Fine. Hey, I sat through a whole lot of Turkey Days; I'll go dumpster diving for laughs. But I just don't want to feel dirty when I come back up, you know? I want Tom Servo; I don't want Tom Servo screaming obscenities at me.

And in my defense, regarding my admitted Segal watching: I was young. And this was the Dark Age of the kung fu media scene, at least as such existed in central Wisconsin. After Sho Kusugi, before Rumble in the Bronx. My options were Segal, Van Damme, and, shudder, Jeff Speakman. Under the circumstances, I can only plead ignorance.

2005-03-29T19:40:00.000-08:00

BOOKS AND BOOKS AND BOOKS AND BOOKS

A perfect memestorm over at Ed Cunard's, as two seperate book memes collide. I'd play, but man that list is a monster. I'd be combing through it until the weekend, and that's simply not going to happen. As an offering to the meme gods, though, I offer up this, my list of books read so far this year (excluding comics, graphic novels, etc):

Lloyd: What Happened, by Stanley Bing
American Ceasar, by William Manchester
Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon
Already Dead, by Denis Johnson
Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin
Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin

These latter two satisfied a long dormant fantasy itch that I've recently gotten the urge to scratch; any recommendations of similiar books would be appreciated. Fair warning, though: anyone who recommends a book by Terry Brooks will be on the recieving end of an electronic scowling of a terrible magnitude. Already Dead is high end noir. If not as profound as it dearly wants to be, it remains thriller (not a mystery, not really) both tightly plotted and as open ended as life. A series of random, inevitable events slowly turning a town against itself. Not sure if Johnson's poetry is of the same quality, and I missed the film version of his Jesus' Son, so no comment on that. I'm trying to talk myself into re-reading Crime and Punishment next, but frankly, that sounds like work to me right now, a literary obligation rather than a pleasure. Later maybe; I'm be spending a week away from wife attending meetings in Washington DC come May, and maybe I'll try and crank through it again then.

In other news, Sean Collins is scared beyond the capacity for rational thought. His mind has gone bye-bye. Alternatley, he's on a real Orson Welles tip. Either way.

2005-03-28T19:04:00.000-08:00

NO LOVE FOR THE NEW SCHOOL

Jim Henley, while taking a deserved bite of some of comics sacred cows, implies that Ed Brubaker enjoys some sort of high end critical-darling status. Maybe. But it seems to me that Brubaker's work is enjoyed in a sort of midlist, good for what it is kind of fashion; certainly Brubaker doesn't enjoy the same blanket critical adoration as do Moore, Morrison,and Gaiman.

In fact, I have trouble thinking of any semi-mainstream writer that has been inducted into the invisible pantheon since that trio ascended in the early nineties. Bendis? Matt Wagner? Joe Casey? James Robinson? Ennis? Warren Ellis? Greg Rucka? All have produced quality work, but work which resides on a critical plane below that of the holy trio. If there are debates as to which of these writers deserves enshrinement, they're going on at a volume I can't hear. Assuming I'm right (which assumption I gather is a bedrock privelege of blogging) I'm curious why no other writers have achieved that sort of critical mass as Moore, Morrison, and Gaiman. Is it simply that haven't been other writers since whose body of work is comparable? Is it resistance on the part of older critics to a new school of writers; a sort of modern day "no one does it as good as Kirby did"? Does the profusion of online chatter undermine the formation of a critical consensus?

In the odd chance that last is true, I'll best be shutting up now.

2005-03-15T18:48:00.000-08:00

VALUE SUBTRACTED

Via Fanboy Rampage, logic at work:

"This beckons to one of my favorite rants about what the REAL cost of a comic is nowadays. To wit: In the past, you would spend well, let's use the mid-seventies price just for devil's advocacy, say 25 cents for your average comic. Today, that same average book is about US$2.25. So that's 9 times greater over 30 years. But, in that 1970s comic there was a pretty good chance that you'd get a full story with a discernable start and finish. Today you get a small chapter of that same story drawn out over four to eight issues. Granted there are huge differences in artwork, production values, blah, blah blah. Fine, I get it. But if you think about it and use the four-issue model, that's really 36 times the cost of that same story in the mid 70s! Using the rule of 72, it's easy to see that this represents a rate of about 12.5% annually compounded over ther last 30years. Not a bad rate of return if you could get it! The eight-issue model represents more than a 25% annual compounded cost for that same comic's contents!"

So then, obviously, a comic with three eight page stories should be worth, what? Almost seven dollars! Six four page stories? That's nine dollars of value! Wait! What if we went to single page stories; now how much would you pay for your twenty two page funnybook? If you're paying less than forty bucks you're getting a deal, my friend, since that averages less than two dollars a story!

Clearly, the market awaits only a publisher savvy enough to see this market lapse. One not headed by Mark Alessi.

2005-03-15T18:41:00.000-08:00

OH THE PLACES I'VE GONE

Via Jim Henley, the latest meme.

Bold the states you've been to, underline the states you've lived in and italicize the state you're in now...

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /
Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

I've defined "been to" as two consecutive nights; sleeping on the floor of the Newark airport does not count as having been to New Jersey, the deathflu I caught there nothwithstanding. "Lived" are places where I've spent two consecutive months. What does this tell me? Well, that I've moved south over time; Wisconsin to Illinois to North Carolina to Florida. Give me another couple years, you'll find me in Tierra Del Fuego.

2005-03-10T19:37:00.000-08:00

FAILING THE SAVING THROW VERSUS LOGIC

Per the IDF, those who play roleplaying games are securitiy risks who likely suffer from illogic and deficient willpower (in game terms, this translates to a -4 on all WIS roles). This perhaps explains why Henley is such a commie-pinko; his brain had been addled by too many roles of the dice.

2005-03-10T19:03:00.000-08:00

MAKING BEN VREEM PROUD

Like I said below, I've been passing over comics for books lately. After trying and failing in both high school and college to get through Vineland, I finally finished that book last month. An eerie read, that. Back in the early nineties, Pynchon comes across as a hippe jokester trading in paranoia to round out the mis en scene. Now, it reads as a descriptive adjunct to the evening news, as as addendum to any number of DOJ memos. And yet, at the same time, Vineland seems to me the most human of his books; the closing, in which a motley collection of strikers and scabs and hippies and the just scraping by come together is, I think a nice response to the sketch of government he developes. We always have the power to create our own worlds, at least in miniature.

I wish I could buy into the Emerson quote though; I'd sleep much easier if I could buy into a notion of cosmic justice. Emerson, as quoted by Pynchon:

"Secret retributions are always disturbing the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice.
It is impossible to tile the beam. All the tyrants and proprieters and monopolists of this
world in vain se their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous
equator to its line and man and mote and sun and star must range to it, or be pulverized by
its recoil."

Perhaps this explains why Dave Fiore is the way he is (in a good way, of course).

And on the subject of semi-pretentious modern lit, Dave Lartique asks if Haruki Murakami is worth the read. Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Though I would start with Dance Dance Dance rather than the Wind Up Bird Chronicle,though this latter is certainly a masterpiece in its own way. Murakami has an odd gift; he tells tales of the fantastic in very prosaic prose, and yet his stories always connect on an emotional rather than a intellectual level. You will believe a sheep man can cry. I realize this isn't selling his books very well. A better description. Picture, maybe Hal Hartley adapting Borges for the screen. Or in comics mode, Clowes' Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron with a heart nine sizes larger. Clowes' work is actually a good descriptive touchpoint; as in LAVGCII, most Murakami books center on slightly odd young men searching for missing women, and stumbling into worlds different from ours as a result. But Murakami is a humanist and Clowes a misanthrope. And while I've little desire to revisit Clowes except to admire the craft, I return again and again to Murakami. Really, I can't recommend Murakami strongly enough. Go, read.

2005-03-10T18:38:00.000-08:00

LAZYBLOGGING, PART NINETEEN

I have reasons for my blogsloth this past month or so. Work issues, computer issues; my power supply and my internet connection were both on the fritz, and solving the latter meant solving the former. Which took more time than I would have liked, but....Also, I've been busy trying to replant my yard; determining which plants best survive an environment of heavy shade and benign neglect. So far lakeview jasmine seems the clear winner, though the bleeding heart vine is gamely hanging on, no pun intended. The grass? Dead twice over, thanks, and soon to be buried under a layer of pebbles. So, yeah, I've been busy, but mainly I've just been lazy. I can't say my yard is so large as to make planting a month long project.

Part of the problem is that I haven't been in a very comics kind of mood lately. Given my dwindling time, comics have generally lost out to other media. I've come to the realization that I don't really love comics, not in the way that much of the rest of the blogosphere does. I mean, I love certain comics, but I certainly don't love comics as a medium, at least not to the extent of favoring it over any other. The proof is in the reading. Given stacks of books and a stack of graphic novels, I've spent the past two months essentially reading books. Maybe I've got the wrong OGNs in my stack, I don't know, but none of them screamed read me. I'd certainly be open to suggestions; my list of last years best is a pretty clear indication of my tastes, if anyone wants to lend a hand.

Also, the controveries of the day just don't really move me. I do remain amazed at the continued quest to find some moral imperitave requring people to create, sell, and read the right kind of books. If only more people would simply listen to their aesthetic betters, we'd be that much closer to utopia, with ponies for us all; I can only imagine the good fortune of finding out that one's tastes are enforceable against the great unwashed. My suggestion, as always, is more suggestion and less derision.

Catch up blogging to resume shortly.

2005-03-07T19:57:00.000-08:00

IF IT WEREN'T FOR BAD LUCK, WOULD'NT HAVE NO LUCK AT ALL

So, this Toronto Comics Arts Festival looks pretty sweet. Too bad it's not going on in late March, when I'm actually leaving the South to head up Toronto way. Is there maybe a three month time difference between Florida and Toronto? No?

Damn.

2005-03-07T19:22:00.000-08:00

RISING SUN IN THE RED STATES

Before two movies this weekend, Coke had an anime syle NASCAR themed ad playing; yes, the sport whose fans look down on Japanese cars is being packaged and sold using a Japanese style. I've said before that one of things that I think drives the manga boom is a yen not merely for more genres of comics but is instead (or perhaps in addition to) a product of a more general cultural trend which holds all things Japanese to be cool. Things like this Coke ad make me think that I'm right. If the trend is so deep that the Bubba crowd is embracing anime and expected to digest and appreciate its assorted visual tropes, we have some serious cultural penetration.

2005-02-01T20:24:00.000-08:00

WELL WORN THEMES

Got the Rare Cuts TPB in my DCBS order today; read the Morrison/David Lloyd Hellblazer story, originally printed in Hellblazer 25 and 26, over dinner. I read this back at the time and dimly remember being impressed. It packed a visceral punch, a nervy apolyptic energy, that Delano's more prosaic Hellblazer stories lacked; for better or for worse, Delano's stories all sort of seemed to be told in a sort of cold grey tone. They're more cynically wry than horrific. Morrison's story is, frankly, horrific, if a little by the numbers.

What is interesting, though, and something I couldn't have noticed at the time, is how fully developed Morrison's themes and structural tricks were, even then. The distance, formally, between these Hellblazer issues and the structural trickery of We3 is shorter than one would expect. The Hellblazer story uses subtle variations in panel composition to signal the impending apocalypse; perpendicular lines give way to subtle angles to pages where panels are arranged like fractured mirrors. The shift from the geometric norm is precisely plotted and controlled. It's an impressive feat. The story, morever, very nicely sets out his by now standard hobby horses: the horrors of military science, the animal masks, the chaos nestling inside otherwise structured environments, the redemptive power of pop music. The long foreboding underground tunnels. It takes a certain kind of genius to rework the same themes for fifteen years and continue to produce works that feel, if not revelatory, than at least fresh.

Blogospheric aside: if anyone has any ideas as to the symbolic signifigance of the repeating circles motiff in the above Hellblazer story, I'd be interested to hear it.

On the other side of the coin, you have Warren Ellis, another creator with tramping down a well worn thematic path. I like Ellis' works, seemingly moreso than most of the blogosphere; having recently reread both Planetary and Stormwatch, I think both will stand the test of time; Planetary in particular, if for no other reason than it again does very interesting things structurally. Ellis takes too much flak, I think, for his online persona, which is his own fault, and for pursuing a Micheal Caine approach to work; he'll pimp himself quite willingly for the payday. This I don't care so much about, frankly. What does sort of creep me out, though, is the constant way Ellis returns to torture as a way to restore moral order to his fictional worlds. It is profoundly discomfitting to read the most recent Planetary, which ends in a rather brutal act of torture, given the realities of the world today. I would be willing to on faith assume this act is in service to a larger point but for the fact that Ellis has in the past seen fit to serve up setpiece torture scenes to establish the moral bona fides of his characters; see, e.g., the Midnighter at various points during the Authority. It's a perverse trait, and one that flies in the face of the more nuanced morality he typically trades in.

I'm forced to live in a world where talk radio hosts and Senators call for, using all the right code words, people to be tortured. I don't need my fiction to trade in the same ignorance.

2005-01-31T17:45:00.000-08:00

MY MANGA MALADY

I don't read much manga; this comes as no surprise, likely. I used to; I read many of the titles that, I think, Eclipse put out in the late Eighties. Appleseed, Black Magic. Akira, through Epic. A friend got heavily into anime/manga at around the same time, so I got to skim even more stuff; Ranma 1/2, stuff like that. Grey. Then I went to college and my friend was lost to Madison, and I basically stopped reading manga.

I've since dabbled sometimes. I read some Sanctuary, picked up both No. 5 and Black and White. Domu. But by and large the wave has passed me by, to my half-hearted consternation.

I fully believe that there is lots of good manga out there; I'm not some sort of xenophobe, though neither am I the kind of Japanophile that seems to be driving the movement. So why don't I read more manga? Because, paradoxically, the fact that so many manga books are published at once increases the raw number of quality books out there and also makes it far, far too hard for me to determine which books those are. The oppurtunity cost of figuring out what's the good stuff is frankly not worth it.

I can see some of the folks in the peanut gallery sniggering, Statler and Waldorf style, at this explanation. Let me try and make it more concrete. I'm looking at the new Previews for books coming out in April. DC has four titles coming out. CPM Manga solicts five titles. Del Ray has three. Dr. Master lists four. Tokyopop has a whopping twenty five, running the gamut from new releases to stories eight volumes in. Not to be outdone, Viz lists forty one.

That's eighty two titles.

Okay, so what? After all, there are probably a couple hundred English language comics listed in that same previews, and I can make an informed decision on all those. What's so hard about manga? Well, the cues that I use to winnow the bulk of Previews into my monthly order are largely absent for manga. I include or exclude American books based on creator; Morrison is an automatic pull, for example. Can't do this for manga. Outside of a couple of folks--like Matsumoto--I'm not familiar enough with the bulk of manga creators to be able to make informed judgments simply on the basis of creator. Sure, over time, that facility would come; but that takes time, and involves lots of missteps along the way. I read a lot of crap American comics before I figured out who to trust.

So I can't useful analyze the offered titles by creator. The solicit copy is not much help either; like all copy, the copy used by most titles is junk. Good! Evil! Romance! Cliche after cliche after cliche. Solict copy gives me nothing. Tokyopop is the brave pseudo exception to this; their new solicit style at least tries to give me points of comparison to it's books via the "should appeal to fans of Ghost in the Shell and Little House on the Prairie!" lines it now includes. Sometimes this works; I picked up Tokyo Tribes based on the solicit (with a little online nudging) and loved it. Sometimes it doesn't, as witnessed by my copy of @Large.

I give some American comics a look based simply on publisher rep; a D&Q book gets a pretty good once over, even those I eventually choose not to order. The manga publishers, though, seem to publish, typically, the gamut of books; there is no "prestige" manga publisher that I can tell, with the possible exception of Ponent Mon, and I was so irked at Yukiko's Spinach that I frankly don't trust them. Which may be my loss, I suppose.

I could go online and look at previews. Tokyopop has scans of lots of titles up, maybe all of them. But this takes time, and this is really the crux of the matter. I've only got so much time once I account for work and sleep and cooking and other obligations. I've got lots of ways to spend my free time. I've got a stack of honest-to-god books to read that's three feet tall, and only a slighly smaller stack of graphic novels; I'm not wanting for things to read. I've got three video games in various states of completion. I've got basketball to play. Friends to talk to. A dog to train. Blogging to think about doing, if not actual blogging. It's hard for me to short one of these to try and get up to speed on manga. Every minute I spend trying to figure out if Random Manga Title No. 1 is for me is a minute I don't spend doing something else; and because of lots of other very satisfying things to do, I do those instead of the rather more tedious work of separating the manga wheat from the chaff. I don't have the time to spend lost in translation. And while I could given time learn to sort manga the same way I sort American comics, this is no help; the key to the last sentence is "given time" and time is precisely what I don't have. Time is the problem.

The other answer would be, I suppose, that I'm not terribly quick on the uptake. Maybe other people pick this stuff up much faster than myself. Very possible. I can only speak for myself.

What I have found helpful are the more informed blogospheric manga reviews; I've sought out Junji Ito's books based on the general blogosphere consensus, I've got Planates in my pile some where. I'm ordering 20th Century Boys based solely on blog cross talk, so if I'm steered wrong I'm gunning for you, Internet. John Jakala and Rose have nearly convinced me that I should read Sgt. Frog, of all things. Nearly. I have enough faith in some of these folks to take their advice and run with it; others, unfortunatley, much less so. Some are perhaps too familiar with manga; reviews that talk about genre conventions don't much help those, like myself, unfamiliar with said conventions. I'm slow; I need more hand-holding, at least until I get my critical legs under me. Which could, admittedly, take a while.

And in the meantime, I'll keep ordering mostly American titles and feeling vaguely guilty about it.

2005-01-31T17:36:00.000-08:00

OLD ENOUGH NOT TO EXPECT ANY BETTER

Yesterday was my birthday (it's not enough that half the comics blogosphere is named Dave; half of us also seem to have birthdays closely clumped together. There is a paper here, somewhere). How did I spend my birthday? Taking the dog, who is bound and determined to chew the fur off her legs, to the vet. Replacing some rotted out sections of deck; I meant to do this last weekend, but had to put in additional time at the office. Made lemongrass chicken wings. Read. Went to sleep.

Man, getting old sucks. No balloons, no party.

Though on the upshot, I got to spend another day with my wife. And my family, from three separate time zones, all remembered to give me call. I've got a big stack of new books to read, and I can still hit the occasional jump hook. Plus I'm still young enough to wear curmedeon-hood poorly. So no more complaining from me.

2005-01-26T18:22:00.000-08:00

I......LIVE!

The above should be read in the voice of Mushu the Dragon, if for no other reason than it makes my wife laugh. And we need the laughs here at Casa de la Intermittent; 2005 is to date a much less enjoyable year than 2004. In any event, I take solace in the fact that I have numerous brothers in slack these days. Bob would be proud.

Anyway. It's almost February, which means it's well past time for my list of 2004's best books, and a list is, as every high school student knows, a great way to take up space; plus a nice way to stretch the ol' blogging muscles out. Enough justification. On with the show. I'm going to keep this to a top five list, with a wild-card entry that, while published a while ago, I happened to read this year. So, a top six list, then:

6. Tony Millionaires Uncle Gabby
5. We3
4. Lovecraft (which I review in this post)
3. Clumsy (the wildcard entry, for those playing along at home)
2. You Can't Get There From Here (which I wrote about here)
1. Tiempos Finales (which I really don't need to say anything about given this).

No manga on my list (my manga paralysis is the subject of an upcoming post). No superhero titles, indicative of a general suckiness in the titles this year moreso than any allegiance to the concept of "comix." No Seaguy, which was to me the comics version of a Yes album, no Scott Pilgrim, which I simply haven't read yet because I am lazy. Opportunities to keep the hunters of bias in the thickets for days.

Whew. All that typing leaves me winded, out of shape as I am. More later, perhaps, after I get done watching the Duke/Maryland game; perhaps, even, basketballogging, if we dare to live the dream.

2005-01-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

LATEBALL

So. Finally (finally) got around to reading Eightball #23, the now infamous "Death Ray" issue. Is it the Greatest Story Ever Told, as some of the contemporaneous reviews would have you believe? No. No, it's not. It is interesting though, which sounds like faint praise but is really not; it's interesting in that it forces you to really look at it trying to discern the shapes at the edge of your vision. Clowes runs a masterful peepshow, keeping the reader constantly guessing at the significance of color schemes and panel placement, structural building blocks typically ignored in the medium.

The book has been ably summarized elsewhere; one of the advantages of being the last mover is that I can simply refer to you the work of others rather than having to do it myself. Of course, sloth has its downsides as well, in this case, the chance that Clowes will come by and spill the beans on what it all means. Which he in fact did; The Death Ray is, in fact, a critique of superhero books.

Cue the weary sigh.

I would have, prior to reading Clowes' comments, argued that Death Ray was in fact only tangentially related to superheros (and I realize that this I pretty big claim to make about a book which features a dude in costume on the cover and is billed as "The Death Ray!"). As a critique of superhero books, it is underwhelming. Yes, Andy does not hew to conventional comic book morality. Yes, Andy is a jerk and, later, a murderer. He has trouble finding crime to fight. He is not Peter Parker. Does this shake the very foundations of superhero comics?

No. No it does not.

Andy is the result of a rigged game. Over the course of the story he evolves from apathy to homicide; he is at no point in the story what one would consider well adjusted. And so it is no surprise from a narrative standpoint that his actions are what they are. It says little, or rather, little that is useful, about superhero comics writ large; it would be akin to drawing a critique of marriage from Liza Minellis life. Of course its a disaster; it was set up, designed such that disaster was the only option. In the end, it proves nothing. Had it allowed for a moment, the possibility of redemption, it would have been a stronger work (the scene with the baseball team comes close, but even here, there Andy gives up on semi-normal human interaction with nothing more than a comment from Louie). I'm a firm believer that the best art contains multitudes, that it pushes against itself; The Death Ray doen't, and suffers from it.

An even less charitable reading would note that what Clowes has given us is nothing more than the origin story of any number of Silver Age villains: the isolated guy, mad at the world that won't acknowledge his genius (though this more describes Andy's dad than Andy), using his powers to get back at all the little people. You could draw a fairly straight line between, say, Plant-Man and Andy. If all Clowes has done is dress up a Gardner Fox bad guy in alt-comix clothes, Im not certain anyone should be very impressed.

But of course, that isn't all Clowes did. The Death Ray isn't merely a half-baked critique of superhero conventions; he also gave us an acutely observed, claustrophically-illustrated narrative of an individual radically disassociated from society. This narrative is both disturbing and powerful; it is an object lesson in the perils of emotional isolation. Chris Allen correctly finds in The Death Ray the limits of Clowes disdain for the mass of humanity: the limits of the wish that everyone would just go away. Of course, given that the mass of humanity doesn't have Clowes design skills, some disdain may be inevitable. The Death Ray is a primer on the use of space and panel composition; note in particular the way Clowes obscures people, and sometimes words, in his panels. The effect is at once to draw the reader into the story, attempting to discern the missing information, and at the same time to convey how incomplete Andy is in relation to the world. Andy is so disconnected from people that he cant see them as whole individuals; that the art is able to convey this sickness is testament to Clowes' skills.

Given the strength in the work, I suggest that Clowes' stated goals for the work be ignored while reading it. This is a great narrative but a lousy polemic on superheroes. Why let an author sabotage his work? The work speaks well enough for itself.

2004-12-16T17:15:00.000-08:00

GIVEN THE CHOICE, I'LL BE THE ANARCHIST INSTEAD OF THE MILITIA MEMBER.

You have no idea how much better I'll sleep tonight knowing that Chris Butcher is out there to protect me from myself. God bless you, good sir!

Snark aside, I actually don't have any particular reason to doubt Butcher (or Tom Spurgeon) that variant covers are bad for the industry as a whole, long term. But of course this begs the question of why publishers put them out and retailers order them, given that variants are destructive; what incentives are in place that make it rational for publishers and retailers to eat their young? The whole "because they're dumb (or Evil)" explanation seems unsatisfying. There has to be something more to this. Which is my segue into half baked, mostly uninformed speculation. Feel free to grab a donut on your way out the door.

So. Why do companies staffed by smart people do dumb things like bring back variant covers? In the case of Marvel or DC, I half suspect corporate politics might be to blame. I would imagine that the publishing arm of Marvel, especially, feels somewhat under the gun these days. Ari is clearly running the show, and he clearly sees Marvel not as a publishing house but as a licensing stable. The copyrights and trademarks making up this stable can be kept alive without month to month publishing; a toy or a pair of underwear is just as good at maintaining the intellectual property as is a monthly comic. At some point, I would expect that someone--one of the outsiders, likely--would question why Marvel is even in the publishing game. Which means that Dan Buckley and the others in Marvel's publishing wing have a real big incentive to gin up short term sales; this way they can show that their side of the business is growing, or at least not shedding readers. Sales spikes buy them time. It makes the publishing wing appear more viable. And anyway, why worry about the long term? From a corporate perspective--or rather, from the perspective of those who make decisions for the corporation--things look awfully Keynesian; hey, in the long run, we're all dead. Or retired and living in Vail. Either way, keep profits up, keep sales up, keep the publishing branch limping along until retirement. After that, it's someone elses problem.

That makes a certain amount of sense to me. Other hypothetical reasons would include milking a dying direct market for all it is worth to better fund a cut over to a bookstore model, but I'm not up enough on the economics of the situation to know if this would make sense or not.
Or, Marvel could figure that Oni and Fanta and Tokyopop are doing the hard work of growing the market, and that Marvel can piggyback on their efforts; if the market is going to grow even if Marvel does nothing, and if this will lead to more Marvel customers, maybe it makes sense to free-ride and make all the short term profit they can? Again, the economics may cut against this argument. Just thinking out loud here. In any event, I could, given time, think of some reasons why Big Comics would find it rational to go for the short term profit pump rather than looking out for the long term growth of the industry.

What makes less sense to me is why retailers are jumping on the variant bandwagon. At the end of the day, Joe Comicstore has more to lose than Time/Warner. Are store owners so beholden to the fan mentality that they like stocking variants? Is there some sort of perverse prestige in being big enough to collect 'em all? Are margins so small that most shops need the hardcore fanboy to come in and buy ten copies? I can't for the life of my imagine why a store owner would shoot himself in the foot by encouraging variants. And yet they do. Someone, please, help me out here. I mean, I know why fanboys like variants (that answer is easy, though disturbing), I can sort of see why publishers might like variants, but I can't for the life of my figure out why retailers would expose themselves to the risks that variants entail.

My Christmas wish is to be less ignorant. And some books. And a pony.

2004-12-16T16:21:00.000-08:00

LIKE STRETCHING

Easing back into this blogging thing via some quick linkblogging...

At Critical Mass, a more jaundiced view of Maryland's attempt to incorporate comics into the classroom.

It turns out I kinda sorta know the people promiting Otaku-con. I may go tomorrow; a Hunter Thompsen-esque story of my time amongst the cosplayers will likely not follow anytime soon.

And finally, the reason (beyond mere laziness) that I've been so slack lately: ESPN College Hoops 2K5. What does it say about me that I derive immense pleasure in building up the Dartmouth basketball team into a national powerhouse and dream about the day my little video avatar can make the jump up to coaching the Gophers? Incidentally, the news that EA Sports is now the exclusive home of video NFL football is tremendously disturbing. I've been playing video football games since, oh, Atari days; since back when I kept my own stats on a notebook. And yes, I am a total dork. The Madden series of games started out a cut above similiar offerings (leaving aside the Front Page Football series for the PC, which was an order of magnitude better than any football I'd ever seen when it came out, and which descended into a buggy morass with each subsequent release); over time, though, Madden grew terribly stagnant. Even regressed. New bells and whistles undercut gameplay. Things only turned around when Sega Sports (later bought out by ESPN) got into the video football mix. Their initial offerings featured responsive gameplay, especially in the running game; it was the first video football game where a four yard gain was the norm, but long gains where possible. It blew Madden out of the water. EA reacted, making Madden a substantially better game than it had been. It is, now, probably a better game. But this history makes me wary of it enjoying monoploy status, which it now does. Time will tell, I suppose. More comments here.

Finally, what's happened to Ken Lowery? The world needs, if not more ragefucking this holiday season, than surely someone willing to call bullshit on all of us. Perhaps the elite John Byrne hit squad got to him....

2004-12-02T19:10:00.000-08:00

WITH GREAT POWER COMES RANCID CONTRACT PROVISIONS

I'm generally a big believer in letting people order their own lives; I'm in favor of much broader contract rights than I suspect are most other people. The idea of people selling their kidneys doesn't keep me up at night. The idea that I could be forced to give up my right to speak out about the undiscovered or future conduct of a party to a contract however? Yep, that's going to keep me up tonight.

This comes up via this link (via Obsidian Wings): a builder whose sales contract prohibits buyers from discussing with third parties defects found in the homes. In other words, family buys a home, finds out it was built with cardboard and modeling glue, and gets sued for telling their neighbors about the defective work because the contract under which they bought the home makes it illegal for them to talk about the problems. A gentle reminder that it's not just the government which tends to abuse power.

It's a fact of life--a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless--that large concerns are going to get, nine times out of ten, the better side of the contractual bargain. With great power comes the ability to grind down the other side. But still; this type of gag provision is simply unacceptable. And not simply on moral grounds. This is a practical issue as well.

Look. Any given consumer is going to have little ability to rewrite boilerplate contract terms. Try it next time you buy a car, or a house; ask to strike the arbitration provision, observe the smirks and the giggles of the seller. You can't change boilerplate. You're stuck with the terms the seller gives you. So how do you protect yourself against a bad deal? You do your homework. You check out the seller, check out the reputation of the goods at issue. You avoid sellers that elicit raspberries and cussing from past customers. You still wind up stuck with some pretty restrictive boilerplate, but at least you're (hopefully) stuck with boilerplate from an otherwise reliable/reasonable seller.

But if you can't investigate the seller's reputation because former costumers are prohibited from complaining? Well, we just turned your contract into a crapshoot, didn't we? And removed one incentive for sellers to, if not draft friendlier contracts, at least make better products. Like I said up above: this kind of clause is bad, bad news.

Have fun shopping!

As per usual, this post is just me talking, and is not intended to serve as legal advice or as a solicitation for legal services.

2004-12-02T18:35:00.000-08:00

UNCLE BENNET?

The assertion that superhero comics don't toe the Republican party line is so obvious a statement it should inspire little shock (though similarly, I think it is equally obvious that superhero comics don't support the "liberal agenda", as that term is defined in the fevered dreams of the Right).

What is surprising, though, is that a presumably intelligent person looks at so substantively empty a slogan as "with great power comes great responsibility" and discerns support for any particular ideological position, much less a conservative one. I mean, Uncle Ben's injunction could just as easily be a slogan for national health care as it could a license for foreign adventurism. Or it could be neither, rather meaning something altogether different. Which is, I suppose, one reason superheros have proven so enduring a concept; as Jim Henley has noted, they provide an wonderful way to explore different conceptions of the way power and morality intersect.

That, and the explosions. And maybe the cheesecake factor.

Original link found via The Forager.

2004-12-01T21:05:00.000-08:00

EARLY CHRISTMAS FOR NERDS, LEGAL SUBDIVISION

Judge Richard Posner, author of the Seventh Circuit opinion in the Gaiman/Mcfarlane case, has a blog. Or at least half of one. Posner and the economist Gary Becker have started a blog together, though as yet content is minimal. This is tremendous news for pseudo-intellectuals like myself; the output of both men is consistently interesting, and some of the least ideologically hidebound work you'll find out of two men nominally lumped into the conservative side of the divide. I'm very much looking forward to checking their blog out as it matures.

Now if only I could somehow cajole Clyde Drexler, one of my few remaining non-blogging idols to have a go at it. The world needs a Glideblog. I need a Glideblog.

2004-12-01T20:58:00.000-08:00

LAZYBLOGGING

Random linkblogging, because I'm too lazy for anything else. While Marc Singer has a go at those claiming to be lost in a story, John Holbo nibbles around the edges of what how one actually reads a comic. And in an only tangentially related post, Tim Burke wonders about the lack of a mature (and popular) criticism of video games, thinking that perhaps this lack handicaps games from assuming their rightful place in the economic/cultural landscape. This latter point can, I think, be traced back to comics as well; though here, and in the case of games as well, one confronts a bit of a chicken and egg problem--good criticism follows cultural acceptence but cultural acceptance is dependant partially on good critics to play the role of John the Baptist.

And over at The Onion, an oblique Dan Clowes gag. It's in the poll.

2004-11-24T05:47:00.000-08:00

AND ANOTHER THING

There never was a golden age. Everyone complains that everything is getting worse; and they're all, mostly, wrong.

2004-11-24T04:55:00.000-08:00

THE WISDOM OF MR. ROSE

Mrs. Intermittent and I (and of course, the ever-loving Intermittent Puppy) leave for North Carolina today. Thanksgiving with her sister in lovely Raleigh. It should be fun....so long as nobody decides to talk about politics. But then again, that has been the rule for as long as I can remember with my own family; nothing like a traditional holiday, I say. I vividly remember my Grandmother stopping conversation by asserting that the Red Chinese were taking control of the National Park System. Lots of polite nodding and folks hurriedly stuffing their mouths so as to avoid having to, you know, say anything in response. Even the rest of my fairly Red family was flabbergasted. My sister, who talks wistfully of the Chiapan rebels, almost choked to death.

So, like I said, I'm an old hand at dealing with holiday political weirdness. But I still don't enjoy it. I wish there weren't as many borderline moonbats in my family as there are.

And yet we all still sit down together, and laugh, and pitch in to clean up. Because, no matter what, everyone knows that the people at the table are good people. No one has changed their mind on the issue du jour, but...you overlook things. You see the person in context; the loony John Birchy statements in relief against the hours she spends at the church soupkitchen.

This is turning into a paean to tolerance. Which it is, sort of. Though I think my Grandma is wrong, wrong, wrong on any number of issues. I would by very unhappy to see her agenda put into legislation. But of course, if she saw the world as full of me's, she wouldn't want to legislate; sure, I do things that she would not, would never, do. She thinks that Friends is godless show. Something like, oh, Preacher would make her head explode. And yet she overlooks the things I read, or watch, or listen too (a convenient semi-fictional ignorance). I'm me. She knows I'm a good person; the rest is just details. The stuff I do isn't who I am to her. I suspect most people are like this with their family and neighbors; we tolerate the people we know for their politico-cultural transgressions--while at the same time imagining that somewhere out there are the really scary folks, folks who don't have the redeeming qualities we see in those around us.

This idea is, I think, flatly wrong.

I've lived in Red America most of my life. Raised in a small town. Played in the woods. Hunted with my dad. Went to church (one of the first comics I got was a comic version of the New Testament, from, of course, my Grandma). Watched a lot of football. Done a lot of time in Blue America too. School in Chicago. Living now in South Florida, where, if you really want it, your whole life can be lived as a background player in E! specials on sex, skin, drugs, and the beach.

Everywhere I've been I've know folks who disagreed with each other on the issues. Usually civilly (though not as much in college, where the future activists of the world tried to out D'Souza each other in the hopes of winning attention from their Big Ideology patrons). Why civilly? Because the people know each other. They know that the guy who wants to clean up TV is the same guy who swears like a sailor about Tennessee football. The know the woman who wants legal abortion is also the same woman who bakes brownies for every class party.

The see through the noise and bullshit and to the people underneath. Real people don't reduce easily to ideological caricatures (side note: Tom Delay is not a real person. Sorry. Cheapshot).

And that's the heart of the matter. There doesn't need to be a stark divide between the Red and the Blue. And yet there ism and getting starker. Why? Because that divide serves its purpose.
The whole red state/blue thing is a construct; a machine for getting out the vote. Yes, yes, of course, there are in fact nutcases out there. Yes. In a country of three hundred million people, you're going to have a lot of crackpots. These people are dangerous, don't get me wrong. They should be kept away--far away--from the levers of power. But the ability of the Dr. Dobson's of the world to weasel up to the wheel of state is dependent on the machine I just mentioned. A machine that projects a fictional Other out there, a bogey man to scare the people back into the camp.

The people who vote for moral values, most of them, I'd wager, don't care that I play Vice City (or live there, for that matter). One of those voters in fact just bought my brother--my church going brother, paramedic brother--Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as a Christmas gift. I'm not scary; my brother is not scary. We don't implicate the Death of the West. But of course these same voters, who might tolerate my peccadilloes in context, believe that liberals writ large do pose a threat.

lllllllllLLLLLLiberallllls. And who are these Liberals? Fictions, mostly. The people who wife-swap their way to the porn-store, usually while high, and have fully absorbed the UN injunction that spanking is a violation of international law; the ones who want to legalize man on boy love, who want to kill Christ (again), who want their to be no standards on what little kids can see on TV? They don't exist.

I mean, sure, you could find me examples of same--nutters and greens and Berkley students and Katha Pollit. But really; for the appeal to work--for the Liberals to be scary---you're talking about real people who believe in that kind of hooey. Otherwise you're talking about Hare Krisnas, who are funny precisely because they have zero power. You need numbers of folks to be scary. And these folks, in numbers, don't exist. But their non-existence as a matter of facty does nothing to diminish their importance as a political illusion bought by millions of otherwise tolerant people. This is the truth: Red American doesn't hate YOU, Blue America; it hates an imaginary version of you. A bed time, scary story version of you; a version of you where New York is only filled with pimps and the C.H.U.D.S. And the converse is true as well; New Yorkers, you only think you know what we're like out in the sticks.

So, on the one hand, we've solved the riddle of Red State hypocrisy; the moral values voters aren't absolutists. A little sin is okay for otherwise good people, and lots of people are otherwise good. Guilty pleasures, but pleasurable nonetheless. What they fear is not the instant vice, but the constantly looming shadows of a more extreme moral decay; the movement of the strip club from next to the airport to next to the preschool, or of the Sopranos into prime time, as described in the latest bulletin from the Family Research Council. It's not the act; it's the threat that act will crowd out the wholesome bits. Is there some hypocrisy? Yes. But not much.

So that's the good news. Hey: we don't need to secede! I get to go back home without flashing a passport. The bad news, of course, is that this (assuming my anecdotally supported argument scales up nationally) gives little ammunition to the Democracts to fight back with. Moving substantively rightward on cultural issues might help at the margins. But of course the machine doesn't depend on facts anyway. The cultural threat level will remain red, because red scares the otherwise tolerant into voting Republican, and better to be in power than right. There will always be a threat to the children. It's a classic move; a threat really does wonders at helping political cohesion.

The even worse news is that this move is not without its risks. As Tim Burke has noted, use this language enough, with enough vehemence, and someday maybe you don't look across the holiday table and see otherwise good people. The stakes have been made too high; you see someone who you must, regretfully perhaps, consider an enemy. And Reds and Blues turn into Tutsi and Hutus. Or Serbs and Croats; contrary to the common wisdom, it was only after Milosevic began playing the race card as a way to ensure his party's political viability did the whole thing melt-down. Are we there yet? No. Are we heading that way? Well, you tell me. I'm busy watching otherwise reasonable people, people who I read and enjoy gird up for war. Me? I'm with Axel on this one: we don't need no civil war.

And in the meantime, I'm going to just hope that holiday is, if not free of political acrimony, at least a reminder that an opponent is not necessarily an enemy.

Also, that my pies turn out okay.

2004-11-17T20:13:00.000-08:00

THREE MORE DAYS TILL HIP-HOP EASTER

If my theology is right, Big Baby Jesus rises from the grave on Saturday. Make your peace, protect your neck. Y'all.

2004-11-17T19:34:00.000-08:00

THINK LIKE A BOMB

More bombs and violence. All set, of course, by terrorists, because only terrorists set bombs. Only terrorists cause violence. A notion, of course, confirmed by our sterling intelligence. There is no chance, of course, that various Iraqi factions are using the cover of the current chaos to, say, rearrange the political scene in advance of the upcoming elections. No good Iraqi, of course, would try to get a leg up on his political opponents by blowing the legs out from from under them. Why, that would be cheating. It would be violent.

And certainly, no one involved with the political process in Iraq has a history of violence. Or cheating.

2004-11-17T18:38:00.000-08:00

TO SPEAK, AND REMOVE ALL DOUBT

Thoughts tonight in a very curmudeonly vein. Though no howling.

Reading through the DC solicts, found over at Newsarama. Seven Soldiers looks, like everything else Grant Morrison writes, to be a must read. But then I stumble across this, which reinforces my conclusion that I should really stop reading interviews with Morrison. Wonderful, wonderful writer, but really; interviewed, he's an incredible ass. "The most intricate and ambitious superhero story anyone's ever attempted?" Really? Well color me duly impressed. Hopefully he has a Sherpa to guide him on these icy paths to comics immortality.

Also nice is the backhanded way he insulates himself against failure, linking the success of the book to a hope that there are enough people who want "new kinds of thrills" to make Seven Soldiers a go. Because, of course, the only reason it could possibly fail is if the audience, content to continue chewing reguritated literary cud, is simply not interested in the sheer magnificence, the dizzying highs, the deep lows, the creamy middles, of the most intricate, ambitious superhero story ever! Note that audience stupidity is of course what killed Seaguy sales as well. Poor Grant Morrison, bravely keeping alight the fires of reason against the darkness of the age. God bless him and his symbols, deployed as always, with utmost clarity.

I'm also curious to see if Morrison gets a pass for whatever reinventions he has made to the characters he is using. From the sound of it, he's basically shoehorning new characters into old names. Does Morrison get the Question treatment? Does Kirby get the same deference as Steve Ditko? And if not....why not?

Other than the fact he writes brilliant comics, I mean. Talent: it erases a multitude of sins.

2004-11-09T20:02:00.000-08:00

RED COMICS FAN BLUE COMICS FAN: LIKE A BAD SUPERMAN STUNT

One of the few good things to come out of last week (a week I otherwise am still pretending did not actually happen) is that people are making noises about engaging with the Other, American version. You know: maybe not all gun owners are wingnuts, maybe not all New Yorkers are pedophile drug users, no matter what Rorschach thinks. Maybe it's pretty fucking obvious why no one is engaged in constructive dialogue when all conversation is shouted down by the catcalls from the corners.

Maybe telling someone you better know their wants than they isn't going to win alot of converts. Maybe people like what the like, independent of what you like. Maybe being an asshat better be its own reward, since it's not going to advance the cause much.

So, yeah. Mr Red State, Meet Mr. Blue. And no arguing over who got the better color, please. I'll have more, much more on this, later. A tedious, audience paring amount. A whole lecture on the virtue of humility, the uses of group identity, and lessons from Serbia. You're spared it tonight, but still; it's coming. A whole lot of sanctimony wrapped in the usual half-assed analysis found here. But not tonight.

Tonight, you get this: the micro version. The comics audience version. Comics fans don't break down into red/blue geographic lines. They can, however, be broken down into some sort of binary: indie/spandex, or artcomix/mainstream, or whatever other appellation one wants. We all know who we're talking about. And this breakdown is by its nature arbitrary. There are lots of people who live in both camps: hey, I'll cop to it. I've got Seth sitting on top of my Best of Wolverine even as we speak. But still: there is enough truth to the two camps breakdown to get us somewhere useful.

So, anyway. Two groups, both of whom spend their time sniping at each other. How much time you got? I can't give you the chapter and verse about the idiot legions of drooling fanboys, the perverts who refuse to grow up and let go of their childhood toys, unless you've got some time. And if you have even more time, we can talk about all the sneering grad students who only read untranslated copies of The Adventures of Worker and Parasite and comics about the ennui, the ennui, preferably as found in suburbs or cubicles.

Think of how many otherwise good reviews are marred by weird, out-of-left-field attacks on people who presumably won't like the book in question. About how much time is spent admiring shit-knives. Think about how much market analysis is grounded in the assumption that people's choices are bad for them.

Think about how stupid this all is.

I get hooked on comics blogs because here were a bunch of smart folks talking about comics without it devolving into hair pulling and name calling. Here were folks arguing about comics in good faith, understanding that there is not One True Path to Comics nirvana.

I miss that.

2004-11-09T19:42:00.000-08:00

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE SCOT BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Some of the usual suspects are pimping James Webb's new book Born Fighting as explanatory of the whole red state/blue divide. Which it is, partly; there is a pretty good (albeit pretty old) data suggesting that the Scotch immigrants did shape the culture of the South, particularity in Appalachia. This data does suggest that the Scottish experience in America has contributed to the general Southern willingness to go to war. Fair enough.

But note: cultural predisposition is not predestination. In fact, James Webb, Scot through and through, Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, opposes the war in Iraq. Just something to keep in mind as the Scotch meme turns from explanation of a willingness to go to war into one that justifies the decision to go to war.

2004-11-03T20:28:00.000-08:00

WISDOM

I've been in somewhat of a daze today, frankly. A winning electoral strategy of econonic profligacy plus cultural jihad plus Empire! is designed with focus group precision to raise my hackles and dampen my spirits. The culture war thing in particular, if only because I hadn't had time to prepare for it and the fact that it brings back unpleasant childhood memories of being handed Hal Lindsey books by relatives.

Anyway.

These two essays by Tim Burke did a little to raise my spirits today, despite their fairly dire prognosis. The kind of moral clarity these essays trade in is its own reward; both essays shine with good sense and charity. Two little lamps in an otherwise dark day.

2004-11-03T18:52:00.000-08:00

BAD TIMES ARE COMIN' ROUND AGAIN

Jon Langford, prophet. So the hard cultural right played the role of the cavalry in this one, making them, I suppose, the Calvary Brigade. The question then, is what happens now; whose heads are they demanding in payment?

Well, let's just say that this is a good time to look under the couch for change to send the CBLDF. Despite the vehemence of the reddest of the red staters, and despite the fact that their bill will be due and owing, don't expect big big changes to the fabric of American society. Not yet, though the leading edge may cut its way deep enough into the polity to make those changes imaginable, someday. Success breeds new wedge issues; the bad guys are done with containment and now dream of rollback. But still, despite the dreams, not yet. Too much risk in the frontal assault. There are twenty two million people who watched such a quintessientially blue state show as Desperate Housewives; eight million people who bought Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Besides, Kulturkampf, phase one, didn't go so well, electorally speaking. That's the good news (though not so good that I can be of good cheer). They won't be that dumb again; they'll start with the low hanging fruit. And few hang lower than comics.

Look. The big targets--hip hop, porn, cable tv--are consumed by millions on millions of people; the producers of these products have billions of dollars with which to fight. Comics have neither. Comics have little money and less clout with which to defend themselves. They're defended by a couple of thousand unorganized fans. They're "for kids." They promote homosexuality, deviant sex, and occultism. Easy targets for, say, DOJ. Castillo writ large. Pressure on libraries to stop stocking comics. A return to the good old days of Ed Meese. It could be ugly. It might not be; but the potential for a truly ugly worst case scenario is definitley there. Comics would be a nice trophy to hand to the flesh eaters, one that could be hunted and killed at the cost of little political treasure. Who will complain if they clean up a kids medium filled with filth? How much easier would it be to go after comics instead of The Sopranos?

Going after comics is all political upside at a low cost. Motive and oppurtunity; two thirds of the way to the crime.

More Langford:

We all knew that things would get better/if we kept acting rational and sane/now I can see the clouds on the horizon/bad times are coming round again.

This CBLDF link courtesy of Tom Spurgeon, by the by, proving yet again that he is something far beyond a blogger; blogo superior, maybe, with powers feared and envied by other bloggers.

2004-11-03T09:33:00.000-08:00

A SUMMATION, COMICS STYLE

I'm in a very Elektra:Assasin kind of place right now.

2004-11-02T09:47:00.000-08:00

BAD REVIEWS OF GREAT COMICS

Just noticed this review of Mail Order Bride over at Indy Magazine, which I discovered via Marc Singer. Mail Order Bride is likely the best comic I've read in the past five or so years; it is a phenomenal, breath-taking work, one that I come back to over and over again. Really, I can't say enough good things about it.

The review, though....well, it falls prey to a typical flaw made (I think) by those looking at the book. Many people seem to want to read Mail Order Bride as the story of Kyung's (the titular bride) triumph over the limitations of her husband Monty, who embodies all the worst stereotypes of the comics nerd; Monty is limned as the kind of guy who likely masturbates to Chuck Austen comics, a sad little man who reads comics and plays with toys because unable to deal with the real world and, especially, real women. The book is read to end with Kyung liberating herself from this oppressively geeky, horribly pathetic world, emerging as a whole person from the nether world of the emotionally crippled middle aged comics fan. This is the wrong way to read the book.

Mail Order Bride is about the abject failure of communication, about the ways in which people are unable, or unwilling to communicate with each other. All the characters--including Kyung--are trapped by their inability to make a real connection with another person. Kyung's rejection of Monty--to the extent that there is a rejection, and there may not be--is less a triumph than an admission of cowardice; she rejects him because it's easier than trying to understand him. Both Monty and Kyung reach out to each other during the course of the story, and both are rejected by the other. Both are equally pathetic, both trapped in fantasy worlds where the hard work of claiming their own happiness is foisted off on others; both are complicit in setting the trap that swallows them. Kyung doesn't liberate herself, because that would mean acknowledging her part in the tragedy. It would mean forging an honest understanding of another person. And that she can't do, and neither can Monty; and Monty and Kyung are thus stuck with each other. This is not a tale of triumph, it is a tale of failure.

Anyway. The book deserves a far more thorough treatment than I'm giving it here. Something for me to come back to; but in the meantime, to the extent that my recommendations mean anything, consider this as my unqualified recommendation. Kalesniko's book is worth your time.

2004-10-27T05:45:00.000-07:00

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING REQUIREMENTS

To anyone who has come here for the promise of brilliance: that, wasn't really, uh, true. Whatever brilliance there is here is buried among pages on pages of ignorance, incoherence, and improper grammar. But of course, having been duly warned, you're welcome to go prospecting for whatever nuggets there are, here.

For real brilliance, right out in the open, go here, or here, or here.

2004-10-26T18:54:00.000-07:00

HERE COMES SICKNESS

Sick today, yesterday too for that matter. I've taken a bullet for you, Mr. And Mrs. elderly American; I didn't get my flu shot and now I'm paying for it. Or maybe it's just the effects of being in a battleground state; the toxic residue of six weeks of non-stop campaign commercials. We had deceptive ads tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing well before the new Wolves ad. It does take a toll.

Anyway. In between my orange juice, I got around to reading 1602. It's...not as bad as it's been made out to be. Not the most hearty of endorsements, but still. 1602 is worth a read, if approached with the right expectations. It is not a deep work; its concern is simply in telling a good tale rather than deconstructing superheros. Of course, it is only intermittently a good tale, though the parts that are good are very good; I respect any story that (SPOILERS) has the guts to put Dr. Strange's head on a pike. It suffers, though, from trying to work in waaaay too many characters. The Magneto subplot doesn't add much, and is in fact largely dropped towards the end of the book; Gaiman spends four issues setting up, as if for the first time, the Xavier/Magneto duality, only to have it peter out. Additionally, once it sets its mind on Mighty Marvel style superhero smackdown action in period drag, well, there's a reason I don't read many superhero books. A story more focused on what is a fairly interesting setting, and the characters more fully integrated into that setting (Fury, Strange, Daredevil) would have been a substantially stronger read.

The art is also problematic. Kubert is a nifty artist on a contemporary superhero book; he is much less so on a period piece. His natural tendency is to have characters pose and flex; flexing is not something I associate with the court of Queen Elizabeth, frankly. His character designs are also hit or miss; good work on Matt Murdock is undercut by frankly silly X-men designs. Spandex looks odder than normal when contrasted against period costume; see also the design for the Vulture, which is essentially the original character design. It's distracting; it's hard to get into the seventeenth century mindset with the Vulture flying around like the third rate character he is. If you're going to reinvent the characters, do it right; see, for example, the cover art to the series, which is everything that Kubert's is not: stylish, a compliment to the story, consistent with the period details. Though if the story was done scratch board style we'd still be on issue two.

The above makes 1602 sound like a bad book. It's not. I don't regret the time I spent reading it. It was mostly fun. Take it for what it is, have a good time with it. Go in expecting Sandman two, though...well, that's a recipe for disappointment.

2004-10-26T17:53:00.000-07:00

METAPHORS AREN'T SCARY

Dorian laments the fact that vampires and zombies have been defanged, as it were, by the fact that these beasties are used to push dodgy metaphors. Which is all well and good; I'll gladly join the good fight against bad metaphors. Where Dorian and I might part ways though, is whether good metaphors should replace the bad. Frankly, I don't think they should; at least, not if what you want is to create a work of horror. Metaphors relate things back to human concerns, things people can understand. True horror is all about the alien; it is about things that are beyond human understanding, beyond the natural order. Horror should resist metaphor. It should simply be. Unique, unknowable. If the horror can be understood by looking at the context of our everyday lives, how scary can it really be?

Now, of course, very interesting movies can be made using horror tropes as metaphors for other things. Lots have been. But those movies are not, frankly, horror films; they're social critiques dressed up in horror clothing, not that there is anything wrong with that. But if I want horror...I'd rather have a movie that puts forward the undead as a malign anti-human presence than as stand-in for some observable problem in my life.

2004-10-21T16:25:00.000-07:00

AND WE WANTS IT

Speaking of Paul Beatty, if anyone out there has a copy of Big Bank Take Little Bank they want to get rid of, please, please, shoot me an email. I'd gladly pay a bit of cash for it.

2004-10-20T20:53:00.000-07:00

BUT WE'RE AN ADULT IN DOG YEARS

Birthdays abound, this site's among them. Today is the one year anniversary of The Intermittent, though we really only have about four months worth of content to show for it. Electronic milk and cookies all around; the big bounce house and the pony ride are around back.

2004-10-20T20:38:00.000-07:00

LIGHT NIGHT LINKBLOGGING

My output has been even sparser than usual lately. Yes. True. Blame Fable, which has devoured my life the past week, stupid addictive video crack that it is. Could be worse, I suppose; I could have the capability of playing GTA: San Andreas, which would likely lead to a divorce and unemployment.

So, to win back the hearts and minds of my readers, I offer some token links.

Look! The comics blogosphere is big enough that we get to have our very own Wonkette; by which I mean, of course, someone with the chops to get away with a bunch of dick jokes.

The Howling Curmedeons talk about Gerard Jones. Jones is a vastly underrated writer, similiar in that respect to, say James Robinson. Jones did a Martian Manhunter mini that was really quite excellent; sort of a fifties sci-fi paranoia kind of thing, in somewhat of the same vein as the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but with more panache. He also did an interesting Batman mini with the much missed Mark Badger, though Badger really sort of stole the show on that one. Badger did sort of have a flair for that; his page layouts and design sense was so strong it did tend to overwhelm the story on occaison. Still, you got to respect a man who writes a Batman mini in which jazz appreciation is the lesson of the day.

In honor of the poetry theme that Ed is passing on:

Why that Abbot And Costello Vaudeville Mess Never WorkedWith Black People
by Paul Beatty

who's on first?
idon't know, your mama

Yeah, it's not Robert Frost. But then again, Frost never made me blow milk out my nose, so call it a draw.

2004-10-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

YOU GOT TO KNOW YOUR CHICKEN

Once every month or so, I get hits from people looking to find out how to open their own Harold's Chicken Shack franchise. To all such people dreaming dreams of greasy piles of lard and hot sauce money: I don't know if Harold's has any franchise oppurtunities. Sorry. I actually never really much liked Harold's. The unknown mystery substance in the hot sauce (MSG? Paint thinner? Liquid Vibranium?) never much agreed with me. And anyway, I was always more of a Maravilla's man, in the Old School way out by Midway Airport sense.

So. Good luck on the franchise hunt, but I'm not going to be a patron.

2004-10-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

THIS RAINBOW IS A PROMISE

Soon: less hopped up political blather on my part, more half informed comics nonsense. Upcoming is a bout of biblical comics blogging, as I hope to take a look at Kyle Baker's King David, Giffen/Hampton's Eden, and Testament from Jim Krueger and a kitchen sink full of artists.

2004-10-13T19:18:00.000-07:00

NINE OUT OF TEN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SCHOLARS AGREE: HENLEY HAS IT!

And while we're referencing Mr. Henley, don't simply take his word that we're not safer without Saddam in power. Take his words, plus the collective words of 650 of the nations International Relations professors.

Now sure, some of these folks are exactly what you'd expect. Damn hippies, through and through. But many, many more.....aren't. At all. Folks like John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, Charlie Glaser, Jim Fearon, Stacie Godard, Barry Posen, Christopher Layne, and Richard Betts are pretty much all as far away from hippie as is human possible without talking like Moose from Riverdale. All of these people, and many more on the list, are very comfortable with using military power in the right context. These aren't people who view conflict in moral terms as a general matter.

And they all think that our "current foreign policy is overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests."

I bet I know who the first 651 folks up against the wall will be, once we start dealing with traitors like we should.