My Bags are Packed, Etc…
It's always nice when really smart people have nice things to say about you--both Dirk and Jog paid me very kind compliments today (re: the return of the Comics Column), particularly given that the final product found its way online riddled with my typos and lazy grammar mistakes. Thanks to both of you.
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Speaking of Moore and Morrison, as that column continued to do, I just saw this post, which reaffirms some of the things I've said in the column thus far. Between this recent column and the earlier Gurren Lagann review, I've leaned on that Moore/Morrison thing a little hard lately, and I'm hoping to go someplace else in future columns. Morrison shows up a bit more than I planned in the next two installments, but it was a little unavoidable based on format--beyond those, I want to get a little further away before I'm permanently branded as an advocate of the same half-dozen comic people. The next column is in my editor's hands and the next is underway, but beyond that I'm not sure exactly where I want to go next.
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I'm going out of town for a week--not sure if I'll be updating, even if the column's next installment goes up at the House in my absence (and I'm not sure exactly what the timetable on that is going to be). I'll be working on some reviews and things offline while I'm gone, but I might not be heard from until my return. That said, best way to reach me if necessary will probably be Twitter (see the sidebar). Let's meet back here next week, under the old oak tree.
The Comics Column Returns
Just in time, before I'm out of state for a week, my sort-of-lauded, mostly-ignored Comics Column at The House Next Door (care of Slant Magazine) returns, with essentially a continuation of my previous column--
Comics Column #5b: The Fragrance of Nostalgia
In which much hay is made out of two failed comic book movies, one from Hollywood and one from Japan.
"The argument over the importance of "authorial intent" has been waging since long before I was born, but it pales in the face of the idea this story represents: the narrative that we write ourselves about the art we experience or consume will override even the literal facts about that work.
[A cynic (like myself, unsurprisingly) could relate this to what feels like a growing resistance to empiricism in this country, one that feels culturally damaging. But this isn't an article about that, it's an article about my pithy response to comic book adaptation.]"
I've already sent the next column in, so it shouldn't be all that long before it drops, either. I can't promise they'll all be so regular, but not adhering to the original format is helping somewhat.
All right, actually, just one more…
I always get itchy posting a lot of links in a row, but after pointing to those two articles, I'd be remiss in not pointing out just one more: Chris Sims over at ComicsAlliance came in swinging today with this one: The Racial Politics of Regressive Storytelling--a look at how superhero comics, DC in particular (Geoff Johns in even further particular), in resetting the status quo to 1978, are whitewashing the superhero genre.
A favorite bit here:
By itself, in the isolated, insular world of comics, this makes perfect sense: If the characters of the '30s and '40s existed on a separate Earth from the characters of the '50s, then it makes perfect sense that characters created later would have existed on still another Earth. But the subtext here -- no matter how unintentional it is -- is that these newer characters don't belong in the DC Universe. They need to be somewhere else while the real characters, the ones who, by coincidence, aren't black or Italian or have Latino parents, have their real adventures.
It's the unintentional building of a cosmic-scale meta-textual ghetto.
Go, take a look. And for "fun," count off in the comments thread before someone outs themselves as ignorant - it, thankfully, takes a bit longer than usual, but not all that long.
I am superfluous
There are times when you look at what everyone else is doing, and wonder what the point is in trying to keep up. I highly recommend you check out these two articles to see what some great critics are up to:
- Matt Zoller Seitz, founder of The House Next Door, drops by Salon to point out that superhero films have proven themselves to be creatively bankrupt exercises that, as a genre, don't even aspire to as much as superhero comics.
- Over at The Comics Journal, Rob Clough takes a look at the Hicksville rerelease, including how retrospectively it seems to chart the trajctory of Horrocks's career, and also reminding us why the book is a modern classic.
I'm working on a handful of stuff over here, but things are going slowly. More hopefully soon.
I’m over at Mediaelites
Someone else was crazy enough to let me do the occasional piece for them! Over at Mediaelites, I have a quick note on the current status of the Marvel and DC legal battles. Go check it out! Thanks to all the guys over there for letting me through the doors.
While I'm here...
...I don't have anything to add, I just wanted to share that picture with you. Make your own comment. (h/t to Comicsalliance)
Your Weekly Comics Checklist
Over at David Wolkin's site, he's just run a wonderful list of what every great week of comic reading must include. You'll note, of course, that one item isn't like the others:
- A nice selection of your monthlies, whatever they may be.
- One book that you've been reading over a long period of time.
- Reading a classic book for the first time.
- Re-reading an old favorite.
- Reading at least one book that makes you want to punch an innocent bystander, leading you to buy another comic to read just to make you feel better.
- Not enough time to get around to everything, leaving you with a guarantee of awesome books for the week to come.
The thing about #5, of course, is that:
- It's getting to be nearly impossible to buy comics from your LCS without getting a book that makes you want to punch an innocent bystander. It's not just the ever-increasing predominance of "mainstream" books (nearly all of which have just given up), but also the number of "alternative" books that are circling the drain. I don't say this to be misanthropic (though I am),--there are shitloads of great books coming out (to say nothing of webcomics)--but they're getting harder and harder to find amidst the morass.
- The feeling of washing down bad art with great art does sometimes make the initial crap seem worth it, but... like the idea of "turning one's brain off," there's a certain feeling of being unethical towards oneself in purposefully subjecting yourself to that.
I'm being unfair to him, of course--he was being funny, and I was certainly amused. He captured the totality of being a comic fan, and that's why I posted his list. But the truth of the list speaks to something that is very comics--many people watch terrible movies, and it can be very fun to do so, but nobody feels like that's inherently part of the experience.
C2E2 Wrap-Up, Post Illness
Well, that was a pleasant bit of fuckery.
Anyone following my Twitter feed this past week caught the news already, but I spent about half of the con too sick to participate, and the other half dazed and confused. I apologize again to the people I was supposed to meet up with in some capacity, but I was an absolute mess.
That said, as far as my impressions of the show are concerned... The inimitable Matthew Brady has been giving his own breakdown of the show over a few posts this week, and I encourage you to visit his site for his take, because it was a great deal more optimistic than mine was.
I freely admit that a great deal of my ambivalence may be due to how goddamned sick I was all weekend; other than catching up with rising star and old friend Jeremy Haun and giving the floor a cursory once-over, I barely took in a lot of the show. McCormick Place has a patio that looks out over Lake Michigan, and it's a beautiful view, so I wound up sitting out there and reading comics for a lot of the con's duration. The fresh air was better for me than the crowds, which made me dizzy.
But... I did get a feel for the tenor of the show while I was there, and I wasn't totally impressed. Reports of the turn-out are high (27,000 is about what I keep hearing) but what I tended to hear from most booths and tables at the show was that the crowd seemed consistently sparse. The mood, as well, seemed very laid-back, and very going-through-the-motions... it was nice for creators, to some extent, because they got to interact with pleasant fans. You'd have to ask some of the folks who were selling, how it went business-wise.
I was on a shuttle bus sitting in front of some folks working a dealer's booth, and they were lamenting the turn-out on Friday. To make the trip worthwhile, they were going to have to do six times as well the following day, and I'm fairly certain that it didn't happen. Part of the problem in the dealer's pavilion was that compared even to Wizardworld, it seemed like the retailers were dumping their garbage stock. The time that I spent in that part of the show, I had specific items in mind, and I found most of them after a bit of hunting:
- The "Dark Knight, Dark City" arc in Batman, an interesting piece of Peter Milligan work which is a cornerstone to Grant Morrison's current Batman and Robin run.
- The Brendan McCarthy issue of DC's Solo, which should not really be sitting in a dollar bin, but that's typical--
- The new Simon/Kirby omnibus, this time focusing on The Newsboy Legion,
- And a DVD set of Cowboy Bebop, which I embarrassingly didn't own until now, and which I was reminded of by this great piece of writing by Sean Witzke.
And, of course, I picked up great books by Richard Carbonneau and Steve Bialik over at the Cellar Door Publishing booth, but they're both friends, and that was the first place I stopped when I got to the show.
C2E2 fulfilled its main promise, in that the show minimized the non-comics bullshit part of these types of cons... celebrities, gimmicks, this stuff was shoved off to the side or was not present at all. It was comic-focused, and that was great. But it was a mainstream show, and so it had the same problems that all mainstream shows have. I've reached an age and a temperament where three days of superheroes is just far too much. Obviously, there were other things there, people were showing other stuff (I liked seeing the "webcomic pavilion") but those other things are always an afterthought, a stowaway passenger. I haven't been fortunate to go to those shows that have a less mainstream focus, due to any number of factors over the years, and I know that I'd find a little more of what I'm looking for there... but when a show is as large as this one is, you really wish that meant it was all-inclusive rather than just a reflection of what comic retailers stock for what are, realistically, similar reasons. The presence of manga and anime, for instance, was limited to a few retail booths and a Funimation table that all looked like they got lost on their way to ACen.
My wife attended a number of the educational panels, and they were wildly up and down, which is to be expected from the con panel experience. For my part, I attended the AV Club panel, which was nice enough but skewed towards the movies in order to accomodate their primary skillset; I wanted to ask more questions, but they were ushered out quickly when it was through.
I think what surprised me the most was Artist's Alley. They were some incredible creators there, and they mostly seemed to be having a good time, but what I only saw rarely was people pushing self-published and indie fare at their tables. There were a couple, but it was mostly folks "dancin' for dinner"--doing sketches and selling prints. The "streets of Calcutta" feel was largely absent, because nobody was there to start out. It may have been the high cost of entry--just to get a chair for your booth at McCormick was something like $70--but without the eager energy of newcomers with strange and occasionally wonderful work on photocopies and in POD copies, the show felt airy and diminished.
A couple of years in, C2E2 may grow to the point where some of these issues are resolved, but I'm not yet sure. It's an expensive venue, and despite being downtown, it's no more convenient to get to without a vehicle than out in Rosemont (from my address, it's almost more difficult - we wound up stowing away in the hotel shuttles). If C2E2 leans too far mainstream to offset the costs, it could become Wizardworld all over again down the road.
It's the best show that Chicago has had since Wizard took over the original Chicago Comic-con, but I do wonder if its standards are low, or just too different from my own for me to enjoy it fully.
UPDATED: The Beat offers a fairly even-handed take on the event.
T-Rex, In the Wild
I'm not sure if my friend Richard Carbonneau has posted this elsewhere or not, but this continues to delight:
This image is from the Chicago CTA map, marking the Field Museum (known, of course, for its T-Rex skeleton, named "Sue").
This reminds me of something...
From Dinosaur Comics
Now, I'm pretty sure he knows this already... but I'm tickled every single time I see it.
Guestblog by T.M. Camp
(Originally posted in July of 2008)
Our final old Guestblog comes courtesy of author T.M. Camp. Many of his plays, stories, and poems are available online at http://www.tmcamp.com, where you can also download free audiobooks of his novels “Assam & Darjeeling” and “Matters of Mortology”.
My thanks to these old friends for making time for my late, lamented site - the least I could do was bring you all back. Nostalgia's in, right now!