My Life in Binary: 09/28/09

Last week, amidst the ongoing threat of swine flu (even though the media’s gotten bored with a goddamn PANDEMIC, of all things) I suffered the quickest illness of my life, presumably to make-up for the incredibly awful ear infection I had in high school where I was so sick that I saw the clouds in the sky forming skulls and crossbones.

The weekend before that I had come up with a great premise for an anthology project I refuse to tell you about and managed to hash out the story (pun intended) over breakfast at The Mission as my roommates and our friend on-his-way-to-LA sat in silence at our booth, each working on separate things as we waited for breakfast to come. It would be another week before I’d be able to come up with a decent execution for it.

Which brings me to my illness. Exactly a week ago I suffered a harrowing, surprisingly linear fever dream of Lynchian proportions in which I went with my sister and dad to see a screening of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly that was for some reason being attended by Halle Berry. In the middle of it, my dad decided to leave, confusing and upsetting me as we followed along. Hysteric and bawling at the dinner table, I couldn’t figure out why he would do that as my sister coped with the preposterous action quite well, my other sister verbally dissected me, and my mom was nowhere to be found (probably in the kitchen making dinner, as she is wont to do)--heightened versions of my entire family to drive me into hysterics. To further exaggerate reality, I was completely unable to maintain my histrionics, stopping my bawling to deliver a joke. It was like my mind was trying to deconstruct itself.

Waking up with a jolt, I coughed out the essential puzzle piece to my story. My hero would face an ad hoc dissection of his entire existence, and he would need a partner/lover to instigate the whole thing. Scrambling for a pen and paper, I hazily, hastily scrawled ideas into my notebook, and finished the story another week later. Took a bit too long, I’ll admit, but writing isn’t so convenient.

NOM NOM NOM MEDIA

Caught Arctic Monkeys at Soma in Northeast San Diego. One of the bigger small venues in town, the place turned out to be an all-ages affair packed with kids and adults annoyed to be around kids. Which means moshing. At an Arctic Monkeys show. Not the greatest show I’ve ever seen--when did the Arctic Monkeys grow from snotty little shits into well-dressed longhairs?!--but I did go a bit nuts during “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” which I always thought was the band’s bratty little masterpiece. First time going to a show alone, which wasn’t as traumatic as my neurotic fears would have be believe.

Entering the venue, security patted me down and took my (rather nice) pen, tossing it in a box with other crude writing implements. Leaving the venue, I saw they had left the box out on the floor and I got mine back. Victory of the night.

The Dirty Harry tour continues. The Enforcer really sucks, but I’d like to see someone dissect it vis-á-vis the fairly contemporaneous women’s lib movement, as Harry Callahan’s partner in this foray is a woman who carries around a huge, unwieldy purse and has to catch criminals in heels. You’d be amazed at what movies are automatically improved by their critical papers. For example, James Kim’s "The Legend of the White-and-Yellow Black Man: Global Containment and Triangulated Racial Desire in Romeo Must Die" totally justifies the existence of one of the relatively better entries Jet Li’s very bad streak of American films.

Sudden Impact proved a slightly better film and features the line "What you doin', you PIGHEAD SUCKA?!" as Harry kills the only black criminal from the 1970s he didn't get in the first few gos. However, it's a movie with Dirty Harry as a guest star. When you’re raped and you spend the entire movie exacting revenge on the people who wronged you, you become the hero of the movie--not the no-nonsense, rule-breaking cop who has nothing else to do in the movie. Good thing Abel Ferrara made a proper version of Sudden Impact two years earlier and called it Ms. 45.

The Dead Pool, the final Dirty Harry movie, is more cohesive than the previous two but suffers from a fatal case of who-gives-a-shit outside of the amusement of seeing early work from Liam Neeson and “James Carey.” There’s a scene where the killer gets his victims with bomb-rigged R/C cars that’s laughably silly and makes me think of the cleverness of the screenwriter.

You see, The Scheme is how a screenwriter high-fives himself in a script. He’s come up with a new, original way to do something in an otherwise boring, by-the-numbers script. It was a neat idea when it first came out, I’m sure, but to posterity it’s weird and silly and trendy. Imagine a 1998 sequel, Dirty Harry Blows Someone's Head Off Again, where he has to track a killer who uses the internet to kill his victims. And once again, we the screenwriter high-five himself for being so clever.

Last movie I saw in theatres was Gamer. It was not the brilliant Godardian masterpiece that Crank 2 was (no, seriously), but it’s worth a rental at least. For a lot of reasons.

Been rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and being shocked at how throwaway most of Season 1 is (Demons are rigging the school election! Frankenstein's crashing the prom!), and how the quality takes a dramatic spike (pun NOT intended) with Season 2. I guess The WB saw that Buffy was going to be a hit and decided to finally let Joss Whedon do the show his way.

READIN’

Finished Rick Spears and Rob G’s Teenagers from Mars and thought it was a ripping good tale of teenaged rebellion and comic book love.

Finally read Cameron Stewart’s Sin Titulo webcomic and regretted that I hadn’t done it earlier. It’s got a wonderfully breakneck pace and a lot of surreal intrigue to set it apart from the more mundane crime comics. I updated the “Webcomics I read” sidebar on the blog to include Sin Titulo and other webcomics I love. Go read and be merry.

Been reading Thomas Pynchon’s V. as an ebook on the iPod Touch and the experience itself isn’t bad. Read a chunk, tap on the right to get to the next page, reducing an entire novel into thousands of tiny, digestible chunks, which I’m sure someone will give me shit for, but my iPod fits in my pocket and I don’t go to bookstores as much as I’d like to. As for the book itself, the Whole Sick Crew chapters are a bit like Kerouac without the Benzedrine, and I’m learning to appreciate the epoch-spanning Stencil chapters considering they’re proving to be the brunt of the book.

FIND ME ON THE INTERNET

At Spectrum Culture, I teamed up with colleague Eva Gordon to write a mega-review of the Feelies rereleases, which are fantastic. With Crazy Rhythms, you witness the birth of the Pixies, and with The Good Earth the birth of REM.

White on Rice has an unfortunate title that implies that it’s going to be a movie about the Asian-American experience, which thankfully it isn’t considering it’s made by a white guy who discovered Japanese people while doing Mormon missionary work in Australia. It’s not incredibly funny, but it’s likable enough to make me sit through it once.

Over at Monkey Toss TV, we’re gearing up to start shooting video segments at various comic shops in San Diego. For some reason I’ve been deemed appropriate for this venture, so I’ll start posing links to them once that gets started, provided I’m not too embarrassed.

In the meantime, here are the last couple installments of This Week in Comics. In the 9/16 edition, I cover some interesting manga, make fun of Galactica 1980, and feature a couple too many superhero comics. In the 9/23 edition, I quote The Simpsons, tell you what you’ve been missing by not reading Wednesday Comics, and jump the gun on Umbrella Academy: Dallas.

One Model Nation is an upcoming comic by C. Albritton Taylor (Courtney Taylor-Taylor of The Dandy Warhols) and Jim Rugg (of Street Angel) that looks awesome. Given a preview of the book, I managed to write an article about the unlikely partnership of comics and music.

HORRORS OF THE NET

Marvel Smart Ass illuminates the beauty of old Marvel Comics in all their wonderful POP silliness by looking at Incredible Hulk #111.

This Hark, A Vagrant comic amuses me to no end, especially the final panel with Joe Kennedy’s stern face and the completely oblivious baby Ted Kennedy. Kate Beaton should be made known to everyone who is smart and cool.

And here I will share the greatest comic panel in history:

Joe Matt’s Spent and Alt-Comics Autobiography: You Can’t Possibly be THAT Important

Remember that 1960s Marvel Covers post where I mentioned wanky Drawn & Quarterly autobio bullshit? I was referring to Spent by Joe Matt, which I bought a year ago in a wonderful Chicago bookstore and finally got around to reading a couple weeks ago.

Which I kind of fucking hated.

I have no prior experience with Joe Matt’s work -- his Peepshow and The Poor Bastard are supposedly good -- but from Spent I get the sense that Joe Matt is like every other indie cartoonist who writes self-indulgent autobiographical comics.

Spent, like most alt-comics sprung from the loins of Crumb and Pekar, is about the cartoonist, who likes esoteric, oldtimey stuff like early 20th Century comic strips, antique records, and being insufferable. To add an additional dimension to the work, Spent (a collection of a few issues of his Peepshow series) is also a self-loathing wankathon about how much Joe Matt likes to masturbate. How meta!

Assuming it’s all true and not a parody of autobiographical comics (in which case I’d praise the thing as a genius satire), Joe Matt’s greatest talent is his brutally honest self-awareness. He paints himself as an angry, pathetic, dislikable gremlin, which is a brave move for a guy creating a comic about himself (it’s so easy to cast yourself in a favorable light, especially when you can draw, too) but it’s impossible to figure out why we should care. Major events in the book: Joe Matt cockblocks fellow cartoonist Seth by buying an old comic strip Seth was collecting. When he’s not jerking off, he’s dubbing his friend’s porn tapes to blank VHS, deleting all the shots of men. Then he jerks off.



The big question that Spent makes me ask is why so many alt-comics creators insist on writing about themselves. Is it to rebel against the mainstream which is wholly fictional and features people flying around? Is it that many of these guys are self-absorbed twats who think their lives are important enough to put into pseudofictional form? Don’t they realize that we can’t ALL be Harvey Pekar?

Books like this always remind me of an issue of DORK! where Evan Dorkin turns his critical eye on mainstream comics fandom in the other direction towards indie comics and introduces The Northwest Comix Collective, the alt-comics version of The Eltingville Club. Instead of a bunch of spiteful fanboys they’re a bunch of spiteful cartoonists who all do autobiographical wank. Welcome to a life of stereotypes. I’ll be your tour guide today.


The best chapter in Spent is the final one, where Matt seems to have a mini-nervous breakdown as he approaches his own drawn comic pages -- presumably the one you hold in your very hands. He admits he’s not even trying with his comic work anymore, and then his pet cat diarrheas all over him. It almost -- ALMOST -- satisfies, but only in terms of schadenfreude. There’s no payoff to this autocritique, however, so all his cheap meta moments just hang in the air. While I don’t expect Joe Matt to be a dynamic character, I’d like his comic life to be more interesting and insightful.

Then again, he could be pointing out the futility of navel-gazing work like this, especially considering that the most telling moment in Spent has Joe Matt searching his apartment for something to wipe, um, himself off. What does he find as a suitable rag? An old R. Crumb T-shirt. Ha.

There seems to be at least two strains of autobiographical comic books: the kind about significant events in the author’s life and the kind which explores the mundane for whatever reason -- be it lack of ideas or simply a gift for looking at every day life with an interesting perspective.


After Spent immediately came Epileptic by David B., which belongs to the former category of autobio comics with pathos and a point. It helped me to remember that autobiography is not as self-indulgent as Joe Matt and his ilk make it. Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Allison Bechdel (Fun Home), and the aforementioned Craig Thompson (Blankets) also help matters like this.

Notice the autobio books I do like, which provide me with a perspective of people I do not have an intimate knowledge of. I have no experience being a French boy with an epileptic brother, an Iranian girl, a lesbian with a dead father, or a guy coming of age under an Evangelical Christian upbringing. I do know, however, what it’s like jerking off, being a dick to my friends, and not getting any work done. It’s about as interesting to live as it’s interesting to write about.


Rereading an old Suicide Girls interview of Joe Matt by the late, dearly missed Daniel Robert Epstein puts Spent in a better perspective as a case of the author spending his career working through his hangups and obsessions, but still doesn’t prevent the work itself from being a self-flagellating bore for everyone else.

This is because your problems as a white American male (for those of you who are white American males) have a limited mileage. When Rivers Cuomo ran out of songs about his experience as a sexually frustrated male he turned his sword to his own fans, himself, and resorted to wildly flailing musically as Weezer grow more inscrutably irrelevant. At least with pop music you can ignore the words.

Even Harvey Pekar knew to shut up about himself when he did American Splendor: Unsung Hero and focused on the experience of a Vietnam vet. But Pekar, in regular American Splendor mode, has a gift for turning the mundanity of human experience into something the reader can actually care about. It’s autobiographical, yes, but Pekar has a distinct view and personality that makes him a character worth following.


Those of us who don’t have a personality worth paying attention to would do well to retreat to fiction, where you can act out all your weird obsessions in a palatable, entertaining way that forces you to work to figure out presentation instead of simply drawing yourself touching yourself. G. Willow Wilson, a young woman who converted to Islam, works out her concerns with terrorism, faith, and geography with Air, a comic about a young woman who falls for a Middle Eastern man and gets entangled with terrorist groups, a forgotten country, and other oddities. Grant Morrison frequently dons fictionsuits, most notably to purge himself of all his post-millennial demons as Greg Feely in The Filth. Both are wonderful works that court themes and meaningful events in the authors lives, but do so with a degree of distance that allows the creator a freedom to go beyond him or herself and not be limited by the writer’s own limits in reality.

It’s something you learn in creative writing class. It’s as simple as taking you and changing your name and hair color. That’s enough separation to start to be interesting. Take it further and change gender, occupation, interests, and so on. Now you’re writing a teenaged girl treasure hunter who likes REM instead of a thirtysomething film critic who likes Hüsker Dü. And more: instead of obsessing over French New Wave, she obsesses over treasures found on sunken Spanish galleons, which leads her to discover the selling of priceless artifacts on the black market…

And imagine if you stayed the thirtysomething film critic. You’d get bored with yourself and jerk off.

My Life in Binary: 09-10-2009

Sunday night, a cool breeze begin to blow in through my window. Huzzah! Maybe I can stop complaining about the weather now like an old person. Remember this in November when I complain about how cold it is.

Also, what’s going on with the comics industry right now? A week after Disney bought Marvel, DC Comics has been restructured into DC Entertainment. Suddenly the future is looking very, very uncertain, and I find that very, very exciting. Ask me a month ago and I would have said the very status of the industry means DC and Marvel were going to run themselves into the ground.

Hmm…

This post is nearly 2,000 words. I am so sorry, Internet.

THIS IS GOING TO LOOK VERY EMBARRASSING

A sense of irony is important. I was looking through the Netflix Instant Queue on the Xbox when I noticed that Showtime’s Barbershop: The Series was on. We watched it, thinking it was going to be terrible. After all, the Barbershop films were mostly okay and didn’t really justify a series being made of them, right?

Oh, how wrong we were.

Barbershop: The Series is a live-action Boondocks yet somehow more silly. Developed for television by legitimate screenwriter John Ridley, the show’s full of racially-charged humor and witty repartee as young Barbershop owner Omar Gooding (playing the Ice Cube role with more charisma) has to wrangle his goofy, borderline insane employees. It even features one of the dudes from House Party (I can’t remember if it was Kid or Play). Raf called it “The Black Arrested Development.” He’s not too far off.

The quality of True Blood Season 1 doesn’t get better than the first few Alan Ball-directed episodes. It does, however, get increasingly ridiculous as the show goes on. I’m not too convinced yet, but I’ll keep watching because it’s massively entertaining. The final episode of Season One is playing right in front of me. I’m not quite sure what Alan Ball is thinking with this show (I think it might be “Cash in on Twilight with ridiculous accents while working on real movies”), but I really wish he’d get HBO to pay for some decent special effects.

Have we talked about The Friends of Eddie Coyle? A wonderful ‘70s crime film that manages to put off action more than it indulges in it? The movie that made me realize I have a pretty good Robert Mitchum impression?



Last night I caught I Shot Jesse James on The Auteurs, and it was not quite as good as Pick-Up on South Street, though I loved the final scene. I also loved the climax of Pick-Up on South Street -- a surprisingly brutal (even by today’s standards) subway brawl -- which leads me to believe that it is Fuller’s forte. I guess one has to accept the B-movie trappings of Sam Fuller’s films and appreciate the innovations and artistic indulgences within.

It doesn’t help that The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford stole much of this film’s thunder.

AND FOR SOME REASON MY WALLET IS EMPTY

I did it, Internet: I broke down and bought the single issues of Cassanova because not only did I need to read the as-yet-uncollected second story arc “Gula,” but I also had to read the single issue exclusive backmatter. I’m not obsessed. Shut up. With this purchase I no longer have urges to visit every comic shop in San Diego and spend money I don’t have on wonderful, interesting comics.

With Volume 2, Matt Fraction managed to change the very premise of his own comic book by making it a less dense ensemble piece. It never occurred to me that one could just consciously DO that with a comic. Then again, The Invisibles shifts gears in each volume, but some of that is a result of Long-Running Vertigo Series Syndrome, where a creator changes with his creation, finding his footing and sometimes even losing it as the book evolves.

Casanova works especially as an example of what you can do with your own comic. Free of creative limitations of corporate properties, he can essentially do whatever he wants: kill important characters, completely change the tone, and even have the protagonist disappear for the entire story arc.

The single issues are especially desirable for their backmatter, which feature Matt Fraction as well as Gabriel Bá (in Volume 1) and Fábio Moon (Volume 2) talking about the issue, their influences, and other matters. Particularly compelling is Fraction’s self-conscious frankness. It’s amazing how much of himself he puts into the book -- not only just a quote from an obscure ‘70s crime film, but also bits from his personal life.

You can read the first issue of Casanova here.

FIND ME ON THE INTERNET

Over at Spectrum, I reviewed the new Postmarks album, Memoirs at the End of the World. The official Postmarks Twitter (I’ll assume it was Tim Yehezkely herself) liked my review. Apparently I’m one of the few critics who “got” the album and didn’t just write it off as a Belle & Sebastian clone, which it assuredly isn’t.

Before I realized just what the album was doing, I wrote this opening paragraph:

Good music so rarely comes out of Florida. As a former denizen of the Sunshine State, I must apologize for the following bands: Underoath, Limp Bizkit, Creed, Matchbox 20 (or Twenty depending on your era of allegiance), Newfound Glory, Yellowcard, Dashboard Confessional, every late ‘90s Boy Band that ever was, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, and, of course, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

There are, however, some bright spots in the Florida music scene (Morningbell, Joon, Inuit Jargon), but many of them are bands I’m friends with and it would be unprofessional to write about them . Thankfully, for the purposes of this review, I am not friends with South Florida’s The Postmarks even though I’d really like to be.

And now, my ending statement where I say not only is the album great, but it’s

also proof that not every band from the Sunshine State is utter crap. So you can thank me for 2 Live Crew, Iron & Wine, Against Me!, T-Pain (shut up), Tom Petty, and The Postmarks.

At MonkeyTossTV I have a couple new articles. I wrote a really pompous article where I claim to know just how to get new readers in comics as if it’s the easiest thing on the planet. And you know what? It probably is.

There’s also another This Week in Comics (its lateness the reason this post has been delayed), wherein the most mainstream comic I feature is the new Secret Six and I fawn over books I probably will never get around to reading. I also realize that Fantagraphics is better than Drawn & Quarterly.

WORKLIFE

Finished a draft of one comic. As much as I love writing, scripting a comic book is grueling, especially if you’re thinking while you write. Not thinking about the story, I mean. You should be thinking about that. The bad thinking, however, is when you’re dwelling whether you’re doing anything even remotely important or if this is another step towards becoming hack who makes a living doing Warhammer books and movie novelizations. Then you think of other writers and how they script their books and you wonder when the hell you’re going to develop your own style and voice and whether the things you love are taking too much influence upon your work ACH! MY ARTISTRY!

But when you finish your brain becomes the lower levels of the Titanic that were full of neglected poor people and the endorphins are Poseidon’s fluid trident come to drown your stressful little brain peasants. So you get lost in a stupid metaphor, fall over, and wake-up in a bleary daze only to reread what you’ve written and realize that, save for one really ambitious page, it’s mostly unreadable pap.

Then comes the second draft.

Writing is hard, if you didn’t already know.

With the second draft done came one of the best premises I’ve ever come up with, for the same project. Just need to get a decent script out of it.

Also, still need to finish Raf’s comic.

Fuck!

HORRORS OF THE NET

Alan Moore, in an interview with Mania.com, expressed his desire for his Marvelman/Miracleman reprints to be republished without his name and for the money to go to original Marvelman creator Mick Anglo, saying that he wants nothing to do with the American comics industry, especially because they make enough money on his name already.

So, please give any royalties and such that I’m entitled over to Mick Anglo, but make sure nobody knows that I, the most famous and greatest comic book writer on Earth, wrote it.

Does anyone else see some mixed signals in there? He wants the money to go to Mick Anglo, which is noble, but that he doesn’t want his name on it -- a name that ensures that more people will pay money that will, one assumes, in some fashion go to Anglo. Sure, those of us who have been reading comics long enough know what Marvelman is, but thanks to V for Vendetta and Watchmen, a few regular folk have become interested in Moore and will just think Marvelman is some really lame new character from Marvel Comics.

Moore just grows more insufferable with age, doesn’t it? His stance on movies was a bit noble (if he didn’t talk about it all the goddamn time), but now he’s trying to erase his legacy like a cripple trying to halt a tsunami. I'm sure if he had his way his name wouldn't be on Watchmen or V for Vendetta.

So please. Shut up. Alan Moore.

Over at Comics Reporter Ng Suat Tong posted a fairly competent but ultimately useless formalist piece on the difference between writer/artist teams and an artist who handles both scripting and art. While he does some impressive analysis, Tong’s argument is inevitably, to quote Heidi McDonald

Ng Suat Tong labors mightily and makes the startling and groundbreaking twin discoveries that cartoonists who write use the formal conventions of the comics medium more fluently than writer artist teams and — even more shockingly — that few comics writers are as inventive as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.

She forgot the surprising revelation that the Bendis/Maleev Daredevil is inferior to the Miller/Mazuchelli Daredevil. Gasp!

Number one, it’s really unfair to slight anyone in favor of Moore and Morrison. Moore’s scripting method is “describe every single minute detail of a panel so things will come out your way no matter the quality of the artist,” while Morrison, himself a capable artist, is capable of generating more ideas in a single issue than many of us are capable of in a lifetime.

Tong also totally ignores that Bendis and Brubaker used to draw their own comics.

Number two, comic book scripts don’t have a set format like screenplays. Until someone agrees to draw your stupid story, a comic script is pretty much an unsent letter that nobody wants to read.

There’s a benefit to sparsely written scripts. That is, that the artist gets a ton of freedom to do what he or she wants with your idea.

Sean T. Collins also takes Tong to task less sarcastically, but equally as thoughtfully.

Blah, blah, blah comics. I talk too much about this shit.

Here’s a German TV show about a cop who is also a dog, thanks to Eddie Argos of Art Brut.

THE GREATEST BLOG POST EVER WRITTEN! AN ANALYSIS FOR THE AGES!

Mere moments ago I finished an article for MonkeyTossTV that was a broader, more common sense version of all those silly “Why don’t girls read comics?” articles. Short answer: SHUT UP, THEY ALREADY DO, MANGA COUNTS.

However, in my modicum of research I came across a quote from writer Sean McKeever about how such little promotion goes into a new comic book.

“We put out these new series with new creations and do little more than hype the first issue in the catalogs, show a preview online and do a few interviews. Really, to me, a big part of the reason new characters tend not to 'stick' in comics is because there's no excitement built around them.”

This is what we must do in the modern age with our Internets and skywriting technology. Good thing we’re trying to save the trees. More objects to staple fliers to.

Still, we can learn from the past here -- back when comics were available in all sorts of stores and mostly read by kids and college kids on drugs.

Reading McKeever’s quote my mind immediately went to the old cavalier pop art 1960s Marvel Comics, where Stan Lee came up with a million half-baked ideas in the span of a month and a cabal of artists like Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Steranko, and Everett would fully bake the ideas before Stan the Man came back to slather on icing in the form of dialogue.

But I’m not looking at the Marvel Age of Comics as a lesson in efficient comic production. I just want to look at the covers.

I dunno what happened in the last decade, but comics stopped having words on the covers. For a while, if you checked Marvel’s submission page under “Cover Artists,” you’d see that they favored generic, iconic depictions of their characters as opposed to any plot detail. This sadly missing element might be the key to why comics sell less these days. When comic book covers were terse, it meant shit was SERIOUS.


Let’s start with Fantastic Four #41:


Look at that. Better yet, read it: “Possibly the Most Daringly Dramatic Development in the Field of Contemporary Literature!”

Oh my god, this must be the important issue of Fantastic Four EVER. I immediately want to read this not only because I want -- nay, NEED to find out why Ben Grimm has betrayed Marvel’s First Family, but also because the comic claims to revolutionize modern literature.

Try #32:


“NEVER BEFORE SUCH DARING DRAMA… SUCH RAW REALISM!” It praises itself!

Enough Fantastic Four. Let’s look at Amazing Spider-Man #16:


Amazing Spider-Man #16 REFUSES TO BE YOUR FRIEND if you don’t like it. It dares you to dislike it. It spits in your general direction because it knows it’s brilliant.

I don’t care if we’re talking superhero comics or Drawn & Quarterly self-flagellating autobio bullshit about buying records. Let’s forget that comics are neither irrelevant power fantasy pap nor legitimate, introspective literature and just TELL people that these stories are going to permanently damage your senses (“Senses Shattering FIRST ISSUE!”). In the good way, of course.

Because that’s what POP does. It insists on itself.

And let’s not forget, for a brief period in 1965 Marvel Comics rebranded itself as “Marvel Pop Art Productions.”

My Life in Binary: 08/31/2009

WHAT WE’RE ALL TALKING ABOUT

So Disney purchased Marvel. Fanboys are screaming THE END IS NIGH and crying into their semen-flecked issues of Dark Reign: They Saved Captain America’s Brain, Marvel’s staff are making jokes about the merger on Twitter, and those of us who are sensible are explaining that shut up, you’re not going to have Goofy in Dark Avengers or whatever. I’m to write an article about all this and what it means, so no freebies here.


Still they say “A popular children’s entertainment company bought an unpopular children’s entertainment company! They’re raping my childhood!”

Now here's too much information about my silly little life.

IN WHICH I COMPLAIN ABOUT THE HEAT LIKE AN OLD PERSON

Good lord, what a shitty week. California is experiencing a heat wave, an evil punishment from God considering that SoCal weather reports are supposed to be undescriptively terse:

My Mom, over phone: “How’s the weather?”

Me, spinning in my office chair and looking longingly at the empty text document on my computer: “Nice.“

It does not help that many San Diego apartments don’t come with A/C (why would they need them) and I’m also cursed with the inability to work in uncomfortable conditions. In my last place when my bedroom got unbearable I could go down into the kitchen where sun does not venture and work a bit whilst waiting for my room to cool off.

The new apartment does not work that way. It gets hot and does not stop and then you wake up with self-inflicted wounds because you woke up in a feverish mania and thought you’d be cooler without any skin.

SCARS OF THE SILVER SCREEN

Because of that subtitle, Fall Out Boy has to think of another name for their new album.

I don’t remember watching very much. In fact, I don’t remember most of the week.

Finally saw Dirty Harry and loved it. The following night we watched Magnum Force and liked it quite a bit. It a more meandering affair, lacking the immediacy of the first, but a pretty fun ride. Would make for a good double feature with Electra Glide in Blue. But you’d have to watch Magnum Force first so you can see the best opening in cinema.

Most painful media watching memory involves eating vegetarian pozole in the middle of the warm night, huddled with my roommates on the couch, watching Breaking Bad before passing out from heat stroke. Breaking Bad is essentially the male version of Weeds, which I guess makes pot a girly drug.

Most striking about Breaking Bad is how consistently funny it is. Your protagonist is dying of cancer, cooks meth so his family will have some money, and deals with the scum of the Earth on a daily basis while lying to his wife, family, and DEA agent brother-in-law. And the writing is really, really funny.

Remember, kids: your trappings can be dead serious and you can still make a story naturally funny.

Or maybe we’re just sick fucks and nothing is funny.

Further proof: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li was pretty fun in a minor action movie/DTV film short of way. I think the first Van Damme Street Fighter flick is a glorious cheesefest that, for all the fan service in it (read: costumes straight from the game), is completely and utterly disappointing to anyone even remotely familiar with the games. In other words, THERE’S NO FIGHTING.

This new take features more fighting, but that’s negated by the lack of goofy costumes. However, it does feature the weirdest Chris Klein performance EVER and the Neil McDonough accent that won’t stop fluctuating. Also, Robin Shue emerges from the pocket universe where he is the World’s Greatest Actor to take his rightful place as the youngest Old Martial Arts Master.

Here’s how a Street Fighter movie should work: a three-hour movie of 12 slightly parallel stories of fighters in goofy costumes making their way to some common goal (Street Fighter tournament, final boss, whatever) at the end, constantly intersecting along the way. Then everyone fights. It’s Crash with kung fu. In other words, 10,000 times better than Crash.

Why am I writing this? Better yet, why AREN’T I writing this?

COMICS TO MAKE ME CREDIBLE

The name of the game is “Go to Comics & Stuff and scour the dollar bins for interesting books.” This game has mixed results. Recent notable grabs include a bunch of issues of Metal Hurlant and the entire run of Jonathan Lethem’s Omega the Unknown. I’ve read through the first issues of Omega, and it’s wonderfully strange. Totally bizarre that Marvel published a comic with such thick indie trappings.

Meant to pick up a big stack of Casanova single issues, but most of them were gone from the last time when I restrained myself from buying all of them, so I picked up the remaining few. Resisting the urge to look at other Comics & Stuff locations for the rest of them. I reread the first trade, which makes more sense to me the first time because I’m not trying to read it on a plane. Funny how that works out. Also, why the hell did I take so long to get to this?

What’s most surprising about Casanova is the change that the series makes with issue 8. Suddenly, it’s all rendered in the grungy linework of Fábio Moon instead of his cleaner brother, everything’s in a medium blue instead of a weird green tone, and there’s a thick streak of somber running through the thing. The opening features Casanova Quinn in a hospital and it’s clearly been written in duress -- and not just because the backmatter told me so.

Yeah, I think I’m gonna track down the other issues ASAP.

NYC Mech is an old mid-period Image Comic published after they started giving up on the bad ‘90s trends they invented but before they were recognized as THE publisher for creator-owned books. It’s a slice-of-life crime comic with an ever-changing cast, except everyone is a robot. That’s it. It’s a cool aesthetic choice, but not much else.

Pirates of Coney Island is a comic by Rick Spears (this guy must be labeled “underrated” considering he’s so prolific but nobody talks about him) and Vasilis Lolos. It is a wonderful take on The Warriors if The Warriors jumped on top of cars and robbed people. Shaun bought one issues and I liked it so much I picked up the other available issues. I’ll slowly piece together the story.

Warren Ellis’ 1990s for-hire work intrigues me for the author’s emerging voice. Take, for example, his run on Ultraforce, a Malibu comic we’ve all forgotten about. Ellis trademarks: nobody seems to like one another, there’s an English character in the form of Black Knight, and Rotting Corpse Man jokes about peeing in someone’s eye sockets. The angry banter is the best part.

Marvel should wrangle all those legal issues involving the Malibu Comics characters and bring Ultraforce back. They could be such fun in the right hands. Especially Rotting Corpse Man: a green mossy guy with a trenchcoat and a scarf. There’s no built-in audience for it, so you could make it anything. A MAX book, for example. I’m full of ideas, aren’t I?

Finally finished the first volume of 20th Century Boys, and must resist a new urge: paying 12 bucks for the next volume.

FRIGHT AND SOUND

Sorry again, Fall Out Boy.

Camera Obscura tend to get flack for being a Belle & Sebastian clone, but the two bands have diverged sonically while having similar MOs. Admittedly, I may have stolen that observation from Pitchfork, but I agree with it, so hah. Regardless, My Maudlin Career is a really, really good album.


FIND ME ON THE INTERNET

Over at Spectrum Culture I reviewed the new Arctic Monkeys album, which is pretty good with a surprising Nick Cave influence.

At MonkeyTossTV there's another This Week in Comics, of course, which needs a far better title than the one I gave it. Suggestions at the ready, friends.

Regardless, everybody please read Chew.

WORKLIFE

Did a bit of scripting at the laundromat today. Tried out a new method where I write out the basic skeleton of a page script so I can add the fun parts later.

The result looks something like this:

PAGE 4

Panel 4.1

They wonder what it is

Panel 4.2

They decide to LOCK & LOAD

Panel 4.3

Jenni begs they wait

Panel 4.4

CRUNCH -- heads explode

I feel comfortable posting that because it’s barely a sketch.

Speaking of sketches, I need to finish Raf’s comic. Fuck!

HORRORS OF THE ‘NET

Katie Brown sent me a couple of music videos from some female hip-hop(?) group called Millionaires. It is hilarious in its stupidity, right down to the YAMAHAWT keyboard. I remember Chuck Klosterman, who is a big fat pseudointellectual twat but I’m gonna mention him anyway, talking about how the old question one had to ask was “Is he a hipster or homeless?” and that the new one is “Is he a hipster or retarded?”



Guess which question I’m asking.

I hope Andrew Tan doesn’t watch this video or he’s going to go out and punch the first woman he sees.

Amypoodle of Mindless Ones has read Blackest Night and fucking hates it. He’s not wrong, either. In fact, he’s right about all of it. Especially that all the superheroes should just fuck and get it over with. Blackest Night features the worst excesses of superhero comics: an impenetrable bore only important to people who have read decades of comics. I know who these characters are and I don't give a fuck.

CHUD has written a quick piece on the 10 Marvel Comics that Pixar should adapt. Is it just me or does Project Pegasus sound fucking awesome?

Warren Ellis has posted a heart wrenching account of Satanism and PCP. Shame it’s a Facebook hack, but whatever, it’s funny.

My Life in Binary: 08-24-2009

I’ve decided to include all my plugs in one weekly post of varying length where I talk about my silly life, much of which is spent front of the computer, caffeine addled, with weird music playing.

THE BOY WITH THE CRYSTAL EYEBALLS

I saw Inglourious Basterds and loved it. Loved everything about it. Expected another loving tribute to genre film and got something entirely different and far greater. I may write a post about it.

Earlier in the night I watched Electra Glide in Blue and witnessed the finest closing shot in cinema history. Saw Point Blank and desperately wanted to do a graphic novel about stoic, aging Lee Marvin punching people. Maybe I’ll work on that.

Got through Mad Men Season 2. A few strange decisions like opening an episode with The Decemberists’ “The Infanta” but some things you just have to roll with. Otherwise, a great season, and Season 3’s already shaping up as well. Then came rekindling that affair with Breaking Bad which we’re only 2 episodes into the second season and it’s already proven to be one of the most intense, funny, well-written shows on TV.

Dragonball Evolution was really, really bad in a way that few movies are. Morbid curiosity put me in front of a movie that barely held together as anything even remotely coherent.

THE BOY WITH THE CAMERA OBSCURA

Falling in love with Bat for Lashes. Falling in love with the new Camera Obscura. Started listening to The Rolling Stones London Years singles collection and remembering how much I like stuff like “Ruby Tuesday” and “She’s a Rainbow.”

Found the new Antony and the Johnsons album on my computer. Needs a few more listens, but I’m intrigued.

Did you guys know that A-HA is still around? And that their new album is GOOD? If you’ve only heard “Take On Me” like I have, then you’ll think Foot of the Mountain is vintage A-HA.

Recommended listening: “Riding the Crest.”

WORKLIFE

With Spectrum Culture I’ve been trying to get back into the groove and be a bit more consistent in both quality and output. This is my promise to you. And my editor, who is probably reading this and cackling to himself.

Year By Year: Modern Science Fiction is a list of the best Sci-Fi films of each year since 1969, which provided me a lovely excuse to finally get around to watching movies I hadn’t yet seen. In Part One I cover The Man Who Fell to Earth (great), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (needs more Truffaut and less Dreyfuss, and then we'll talk), and The Fly (contains sufficient amounts of Jeff Goldblum and Cronenberg body horror). I created no content for Part Two.


In Year One: Music we wrote about albums that were released the year of our birth. I covered Tim by The Replacements because it was awesome and I was on vacation at the time and didn’t have a copy of Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs on me. Then again, I probably would have picked Tim anyway.

Ponyo is a film by Hayao Miyazaki. Now that you already know how good it is, my review pinpoints his place in his oeuvre and engages in a bit of ham-fisted animation theory.

I also reviewed Paper Heart, which was a cute movie. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Over at Monkey Toss TV, I’ve done a few small reviews and one gigantic one.

The Ultimatum: X-Men Requiem one-shot allowed me to mourn the failed experiment that was Ultimate X-Men, which managed to compress the decades-long derailment of the X-Men franchise into a manageable 35 issues.

Ghost Riders: Heaven’s on Fire #1 was not a train wreck, but an enjoyable comic that will surely get even more AWESOME now that the setup is out of the way. Also, as an added bonus I was finally able to officially write My Four Rules for Ghost Rider (Formerly Known as My Three Rules for Ghost Rider).

In my mega-review of the first five issues of Chris Claremont’s X-Men Forever I analyze the difference between old Claremont and Nu-Claremont, point out that Tom Grummett’s a bit of a boring artist, and try to figure out what the point of X-Men Forever is. Do-over, self-tribute, glorified fanfic, or effort to keep Claremont away from the major X-Books? U-DECIDE!

I’ve also started a weekly ordeal where I look at the list of upcoming comics for a week and write a few hyperbolic putdowns and beg you to read Scalped. It’s getting me to pay attention to things that are less prominent when you obsessively check Newsarama and CBR like I do.

Thus, I’m really excited for King City. And Spin Angels, though that one could suck.


THIS IS THE ONE THEY’LL REMEMBER ME FOR

Non-ranty creative work (a.k.a. “Working IN the mediums I complain about”) is going pretty well now that I’ve gotten into the groove of being productive and beautiful. Must be all that weird brainwave-altering music I’ve been playing. I’ve been plotting out seven issues of one Big Comic Project and figuring out how to put together an epic, overarching story. Currently, the last installment is a ponderous, ultracompressed monstrosity that could actually go for a bit of decompression lest I attempt to recreate Final Crisis or something. We’ll see how that goes.

Screenplay Project goes incredibly slow, and I’m totally to blame. I’ve been trying to watch some giallo flicks (Suspiria, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) for inspiration, which gave me some ideas about how to structure the thing and what the characters should do. Remember, kids: take notes when you watch movies. It helps you learn stuff, and that way you can remember what you want to plagiarize.

Video Game Project chugs along as usual. It’s pretty fun to add your own flavor to an entire fictional world a player interacts with. I wouldn’t mind doing this to a world of my own creation. Imagine having to design every element, right down to your dialogue with the butcher who sends you on a quest to find him the Crystal Cleaver or the incidental background dialogue by the trollop’s son as his mother accuses you of stealing her petticoat.

I don’t know what kind of video game THAT would be, but based on those two things I would play it every day.

There are still a few other projects I need to move forward on such as Short Comic Project and Short Film Project. I really should be working on those instead of talking vaguely about them.

Oh, those ideas Shaun and I are working on.

Oh, and that comic I’m drawing for Raf.

Fuck!

Tossing Monkeys or Something

Oh, there you are. Still not mad about the Comic-Con writeup, are you? Good.

According to this bio I'm writing reviews for this website called Monkey Toss TV. I'm not sure how you pronounce it. Monkeytoss TV as if "monkeytoss" were a curse like "buggerall?" MONKEY TOSS TEE-VEE as if you were talking like a caveman? I have no idea and I'm not going to ask anyone.

First review is for Justice League: Cry for Justice #1, which was laughably overwrought crap. I just make fun of it. It's tits.

Second review is for Marvel Divas #1, which I tried out of morbid curiosity and found myself pleasantly surprised that it wasn't made by Hitler. But, Jesus, how can you blame me when the cover looks like THAT?

I'm thinking about using Monkey Toss as a place where I can write the most snotty, snarky, irritating things and save the pseudointellectual wank for this blog. Until I find a place that will officially post my pseudointelletual wank, in which case I will reserve this blog for nudie links and shameless plugs.

Or I might just save the nudie links for myself.

Comic-Con 2009: The New Disneyland

Special thanks to Shaun Spalding for the photos.

[WARNING: This post contains excessive namedropping, esotericism, and gushing. Now that I’ve gotten this out of my system, Dial D for Djeljosevic will return to the regular stream of drunken rants about comics and open letters to Kanye West.]

Comic Conventions have gotten better for me over the years. As a teenager in South Florida, I had to deal with lame “collectibles nights” in a hotel ballrooms, tiny South Florida conventions populated mostly by vendors and creators of self-published books that didn’t go past the first issue, and slightly bigger cons where Richard Hatch is the biggest draw of the weekend. A contrarian teenager, I decided I hated cons and the weird gremlin fanboys who populated them.

Then came MegaCon, the great convention below the South (clarification: Florida, despite its geographic location, is not a Southern state) with its swarms of cosplayers, “Free Hug” signs aplenty, and the presence of real creators like Darwyn Cooke and Mark Waid and top-tier convention celebs like Peter Mayhew. It was huge. It was overwhelming. It was gleefully geeky. I took it all back; I love cons.

MegaCon was monstrous enough, but Comic-Con International: San Diego* is the biggest convention in the world. A year ago, I moved to the city where it’s happening**.

*This is what it’s really called. Found this out after getting it wrong in a bar trivia contest.

**San Diego, if you weren't paying attention.

THURSDAY: OVERSTIMULATED

We parked in a less-populated area of town and took one of the Con’s generous bus shuttles to the convention center.

Shaun: “Is this the shuttle for Comic-Con?”

Bus driver: [Derisive laugher]

Oh, how he laughed. Ever get laughter in response to a simple question? It’s ominous.

Soon enough we were nearing the San Diego Convention center and we saw the number of people outside. There was no line. There was no crowd. It was a fucking horde. Comic-Con is bigger than any of us ever imagined.

The line to get our admission badges snaked around itself. It was during this long wait that we learned a valuable PRO TIP: if an infinitely long, snaking line moves and someone on the side ahead of you doesn’t notice the movement, everyone in the latter portion gets to skip* .

*Warning: may not be a real rule. Unless you count mob rule.

After spending minutes upon seconds at a couple of panels we simply weren’t feeling, we ended up in the exhibit hall, which reminded me of every other Con floor I’ve ever been to: mini-comic shops, bootleg DVD vendors, indie comics presses. It would be hours before I realized that we were just in the comic book portion of the exhibit hall and that you could fit an aircraft carrier in there.

The first panel we sat through in its entirety: “Spotlight on Bryan Lee O’Malley,” wherein Scott McCloud gushed and chatted with O’Malley about the creation of Scott Pilgrim and other craft-related things. It was a treat to hear about the things that inspired one of my favorite comics (seriously, go read it now*), but what really struck me was O’Malley’s low-key demeanor. For the creator of such an energetic comic book, he’s an incredibly soft-spoken guy who seems like he might be more comfortable at his art desk or in front of a vintage NES than talking about River City Ransom in front of hundreds of admirers.

*Don’t forget to Digg me first.

Immediately following was the Dumbrella panel, which for me was the biggest surprise of Comic-Con, as I’m not a huge fan of webcomics. You can blame this exclusively on the fact that most of them are about the creators playing video games with their robot sidekick. Then there’s a matter of the oft-employed “joke a day” format, which doesn’t quite give me what I want out of sequential art. Then again, Diesel Sweeties really speaks to me, so I think it’s a matter of finding something I care about. And, let’s be honest, even something that I can’t stand like Questionable Content is more authentic and better made than Hi and Lois.

The panelists (because they deserve the attention) were Andrew Bell ( The Creatures in My Head), Sam Brown (explodingdog), Jon Rosenberg (Goats), Meredith Gran (Octopus Pie), Chris Yates (Reprographics), and the incomparable R. Stevens (Diesel Sweeties). Unsurprisingly, it was a joke-a-thon. Pretty sure my friends and I were a bit obnoxious, as we sat near the front and laughed loudly at every R. Stevens one-liner, who may have that disease where every response is an involuntary joke. What’s that called? I think it’s Djeljosevic Syndrome.

(if you look closely, you can see us in the last panel of this Repographics comic)

I’ve been thinking a bit about collectives like this. A while ago Warren Ellis encouraged/demanded that up-and-coming writers form a “band” with three artists and do an anthology book. Becky Cloonan, Gabriel Bá, Fábio Moon, and Vasilis Lolos formed a supergroup and even released a book (Pixu) which I forgot to pick up and have each of them sign. Maybe next time. There’s something to a collective. It’s strength in numbers, it’s more bang for your buck — it’s a series of clichés, really. Though mainstream comics seem a bit compartmentalized (here’s the writer, here’s the artist, here’s the letterer), there’s tons of room for active collaboration and beautiful serendipity.

Plus, I always wanted to be in a band.

The rest of the afternoon was going to be a solo flight (speaking of clichés). I went to a bunch of panels about breaking in and other boring professional stuff. No complaints, but Shaun and Raf went to see previews of Terry Gilliam’s newest and Kick-Ass while I watched people like C.B. Cebulski, Joe Quesada, and Jeph Loeb tell me what I already knew about working for Marvel — they don’t accept unsolicited writing, there’s minimal chance they’d give a complete newbie the chance to take over Astonishing X-Men, and that the best way to get your start with them is to get published elsewhere and come up with pitches for solid 8-page stories. Looking for a get-rich-quick type of answer is, of course, idiotic, but hearing these people give the same advice {in person} is reassuring.

Then came the Q&A section, the part I dread. I still live under the impression that most Con attendees live underground only to surface when Dan Didio is within shouting distance so once you give geeks a microphone someone’s going to break the taboos of basic human interaction. I had hope, though: this was a group of aspiring artists, writers, editors, and other comic book publishing staples (except, of course, aspiring staplers. The Staple Industry Convention is in October — or, as they call it Stapletober). Surely they’d be smart enough to solicit thoughtful advice and not make asses of everyone in the room and our ancestors.

“I want to write. I’ve done everything I can. I’ve spoken to all of you at cons, I’ve applied to be an intern, I’ve read all the books. What more can I do?”

“I’m a law student and I love comics, so what would it take to join Marvel’s legal department?”

“As an aspiring writer, it’s hard to find artists. Where do you recommend a writer find an artist besides Digital Webbing?”

So far so good.

"I'd love to be a voice actor. What would I need to do for that?”

Okay, maybe a bit misdirected, but still. Not a complete crazy, despite wearing a Deadpool costume.

The penultimate questioner stepped up to the mic.

“Why do you only hire either big-name writers or people from guilds?”

Oh Jesus.

Here it was: the crowd was going to gasp and the panel was going to be taken aback as this loonie berates them for hiring only Hollywood writers and major talents* . And we had to witness this and our dead grandparents were going to turn red and *POOF*.

*This claim may seem true, but it’s incredibly false.

Joe Quesada leaned over to his mic.

“That’s not true.”

The panelists, while clearly annoyed, took his question seriously and explained that no one in their right minds would let some random yahoo take over the Marvel Universe and urged him not to be mad just because Brian Michael Bendis writes Avengers and he doesn’t.

Despite my white T-shirt, it was a bit warm in the room.

Then came what could have been a more helpful workshop: “Creating Creator-Owned Comics the Image Comics Way,” which featured such creators as Stephen T. Seagle, Richard Starkings, and Joe Kelly talking about making creator-owned work. This should have been more helpful than it was, but they only had an hour to talk about stuff and they didn’t get through everything. Important lessons learned: the power of the Internet (might have known that, not sure), and the glorious opportunity we have as con attendees to talk to professionals and the like.

Skipped the Vertigo panel to wander the exhibit hall in a caffeineless daze. Like I said: real big, aircraft carrier. Minor tragedy when I got in line for swag at the DC booth and they ran out of Green Lantern rings six people ahead of me. One childhood dream quashed, and I didn’t mind all that much.

THURSDAY AFTERPARTY #1: Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
Or: Shut Up We’re Not Seeing Tyrese

Paid ten bucks donation for a bag of swag (Rasl #1! Some art prints! $20 off at Things from Another World!), free food, access to a cash bar, and the opportunity to hobnob with some genuine comics talent like Gabriel Bá, Fábio Moon, and Tyrese Gibson* .

*No, seriously.

We sat at our table, looked around a lot as Raf tried to use mental powers to get a girl to talk to him. After a little while, having seen few creators (I did later realize that we were in the presence of Gabriel Bá), we decided to go, as we had a GWAR concert to go to*.

*No, seriously.

THURSDAY AFTERPARTY #2: GWAAAAAR
Or: I’m not sure why security is patting us down at a GWAR show — oh

Turns out this (free) GWAR concert was to promote Tim Schafer’s new game, Brütal Legend, which I assure you will be my new favorite game after I get through all the new Monkey Island and Sam & Max material. Which will be after I finish Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Saints Row 2, Fallout 3, Xenosaga Episode 1, Eternal Sonata — good lord, someone pay me to play these games.

Being a promotional event, the bar served free tequila drinks and tall boys of Asahi (!?).

Needless to say, we got drunk.

Chatted a bit with this hardcore GWAR fan who probably went on to seriously injure someone in the pit and then, more interestingly, we talked to a man we deemed Zombie Eric, organizer of the world’s largest zombie walk. He was at Comic-Con to get his Guinness World Records certificate. He told us about how the late creator of Poison Elves based a certain locale (I dunno, I’ve never read it) on a party house in their mutual hometown. We exchanged numbers but didn’t get a chance to hang out the rest of the weekend.

GWAR itself was okay. For a metal band that dresses in ridiculous rubber costumes, they don’t seem to have very much energy. If you took away the pageantry, they’d just be any other metal band. Once the novelty went away halfway through, time slowed down to a snail’s crawl and the music wouldn’t stop no matter how much I begged the world on Twitter.

A lesson was learned: GWAR is a vengeful band.

For some reason someone snuck a tallboy of Asahi into Shaun’s bag. How generous.

FRIDAY: YOU CAN EAT MY HEAD IF YOU WANT

Somehow managed to lose Raf during the act of getting off the bus. It was a rough night, so we wrongfully assumed he fell asleep on the bus and we unknowingly abandoned him. Turns out he just found another way in and spent the first half of the day hungover, cursing the God that zapped him into existence. Close enough.

Skipped the Mike Allred panel, couldn’t get into the Coraline panel, so we ended up at the X-Men panel to satisfy my comic book mancrush on Matt Fraction, who I assumed I wouldn’t be seeing at any other point during the con.

Shaun: “Which one is Matt Fraction?”

Me: “The dude in the hat.”

Shaun: [Thumbs up]

The panel itself was fine. A powerpoint presentation accompanied the writers’ rote, borderline disinterested descriptions of upcoming storylines. Where the panel really shined, though, was during the usually dreaded Q&A section which featured two guys in Deadpool costumes asking Deadpool-related questions*, a person in a Northstar costume asking questions in character, and Matt Fraction making fun of a stupid question.

Fan: “Is Jean going to have a part in [whatever the hell the next big crossover is]?”

Fraction: “Jean’s dead, dude. What kind of fan are you?"

*Seriously, people in Deadpool costumes are the winners of the con. Especially the one in the bathrobe.

The rest of the day was a blur as Shaun and I met up with Lauren for the end of the Prisoner panel (looks cool), the entire Spartacus: Blood & Sand panel (holy crap, it’s 300: The Series with more killing), and wandered the floor to check out the video game portion of the exhibit hall, where I spied Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell but wasn’t sure what to say and got a picture taken with a girl in a Max costume eating my head.

At some point I found myself in line to meet Bryan Lee O’Malley/get my newly-purchased copy of Lost at Sea signed. O’Malley seemed a bit more lively in person, as I suspected. When he asked me who to make it out to, my voice cracked when I said “Danny.” I repeated myself whilst affecting a deeper voice. Nobody found this funny. He did, however, sketch a kitty in my book.

Next up was the Marvel Animation panel, where we sat through clips and announcements about Iron Man: Armored Adventures and Wolverine & the X-Men just to see Warren Ellis (due to a convenient contractual obligation!) and get a first look at Marvel’s new anime venture. We were horrified by the Wolverine anime footage, which was a clichéd panderfest, with a spiky-haired swordsman with claws dispatching Japanese spirits — exactly what you’d think of when someone told you that Marvel was making anime. The Iron Man footage proved a bit more palatable, with missiles that turn into Iron Men and explosions abound. Thankfully, we were assured that this was only test footage to show what the animation would be like and reflected none of the actual content. Whew.

Warren Ellis I’ve never seen in live captivity before, but what surprised me most about him was his very Neil Gaiman-like accent — delicate, friendly, reassuring. Surely you’ve seen video of Neil Gaiman. When Ellis isn’t calling security on an overzealous fan, he sounds just like that. Shaun remarked that he looked like some sort of frightening British trucker.

Additional highlight featuring Madhouse President Masao Maruyama:

Panel moderator: “Who’s your favorite Marvel Comics character?”

Maruyama: [Japanese, a name that sounds like Jubilee]

Translator: “Maruyama-san’s favorite character is Jubei from Ninja Scroll — that is not a Marvel character!”

Maruyama: [Facepalms]

Translator: [Saving face] “He likes them all. He can’t decide.”

Skipped the DC Animation panel to go move my car.

Thursday was surprisingly uncrowded, and Friday was pretty thick with bodies, especially on the video game/media side of the exhibit hall. Following days were considerably more crowded. God help those who had to navigate the place on Saturday.


FRIDAY AFTERPARTY: TRUE BLOOD
Or: This Place Has Nothing For Me

Rock Bottom was hosting a True Blood promo party, with free drinks and swag. We had so many drink tickets (both ours and donated by people who were leaving) that we could all get nice and loaded. Too bad I had to drive. At least I got a “Fang Banger” T-shirt.

The only vegetarian option of the free food was some sort of giant mushroom (unacceptable), so there was a quick reprieve to the nearby Fuddruckers so I could get a veggie burger. That’s right: Fuddruckers had more to offer me than gourmet free food.

Sat with some new friends Lauren made that day whose names I’ve completely forgotten. In my memory they will be Derek and Priscilla. Derek stands out for bringing up Captain Britain and MI:13.

In walked in three actors from one of the twelve iterations of Stargate on TV and a couple actors from True Blood including Stellan Skarsgård’s son. Lots of picture flashing.

Had exactly one beer (“Surprise me,” I said, ensuring that I would not be able to order that drink again because I don’t know what it is) and considered seeing a late night showing of the new Harry Potter film. Didn’t happen.

SATURDAY: REPRIEVE

The scene, months previous:

“Saturday sold out.”

“Fuck!”

Guess who didn't buy tickets until after this scene.

A free Saturday meant I got a proper night’s rest for once this week. Raf and I did our radio show for the first time in weeks, where we read our short stories in our ongoing attempt to find a format worth a 20-minute drive to La Jolla. We’re getting ever so close.

Raf read a relatively normal but quite good short story while I read “Congratulations, Herr Jacobs. You’ve Just Been Promoted to The Life-Farm,” a borderline abstract pervert sci-fi story about god-knows-what. Nazis? Fucking? The meat industry? It pleases me to imagine the joggers and students walking by our speakers while I read things like

“MEAT! MEAT MUST BE COOKED!” I bellowed as I burned the damaged Reich Property formerly known as people.

Really, it’s about love. Between future Nazis. Spread over centuries.

Can’t wait for next show.

SATURDAY AFTER(?)PARTY: FALSEBLOOD
Or: A Shlock Smoothie Just for Me

Nighttime was another True Blood party we couldn’t get into because the line stretched all the way to Jupiter. We picked up a very drunk Lauren from this shindig and made our way to the Petco Park area for a free taping of Kaiju Big Battel. Did I mention I’ve never seen an episode of True Blood?

The taping took place in a building called Wonderhaus, an old Wonder Bread factory converted to a warehouse people rent for things like movie sets and art exhibits. I did background work on a TV show set that took place at an art gallery, so technically I’ve been to both at the Wonderhaus.

Whilst waiting in line, a conversation about how we weren’t going to argue Pirates vs. Ninjas attracted the attention of one Steve Wakcher, creator of the webcomic Circle vs. Square. Guess what it’s about. We had a fun chat, I’ve plugged him on my blog, and now I await payment.

For those unfamiliar with Kaiju Big Battel, it is like pro wrestling, but with people dressed as Godzilla-like monsters and Ultraman. It combines my two favorite bits of so-called low culture. Needless to say, it was amazing. The guys in front of me cheered on the villains and booed the heroes.

Walked all the way across town back to my car. San Diego was beautifully bustling — geek and bro alike swarmed the streets. I imagined all the exclusive industry parties and wondered how the usual San Diego nightlife felt about the nerds that cramped their style as they tried to neg some poor floozie at Aubergine or tried to look comfortable in high heels.

SUNDAY: SCHMOOZEDAY

Today was going to be the day: I printed 600 business cards, brought along the 100 good ones, and I was going to MAKE CONNECTIONS.

It helped that we all ended up going our separate ways for most of the day. Walking around in a group means you have a convenient set of people to talk to and less drive to chat with new people, make connections, and all that. One of my complaints about my MegaCon excursion, if you read that load of wank.

It also helped that I started the day waiting in line and talking to a very friendly aspiring actress named Raven who was courting the producers of the live-action Cowboy Bebop to play Faye. Having a conversation with a stranger does a lot for one’s confidence when you completely lack it.

Whilst waiting in line, I realized what I was wearing: beat-up Chucks, gray non-jean pants, a quirky button-up shirt, and a blue velvet jacket. Not to mention the black-frame glasses and goofy Caucasian appearance.

Holy crap, I looked like Doctor Who.

Except Doctor Who doesn’t wear a hat. Maybe no one will notice.

Spent about an hour trying to meet up with my Twitter friend Leeanne (“Where are you?” “In front of a condiment stand.” “So am I.”) before we finally met up at the Oni Press table and had a quick chat (she immediately noticed the Doctor Who resemblance) before she had to continue to volunteer. Maybe next time.

Also tried to meet up with my professional friend, Quarterstone Comics’ very own David LeVack, once I finally got the hang of Con and figured out where his booth was. He was busy being elsewhere the whole time (presumably doing the same thing I was), but I left my card and got an action figure made of me in the process.

Only one panel today. Caught the end of the Paper Heart panel as Charlene Yi called some douchebag questioner a creep for asking if Michael Cera was going to be an annoying weirdo in this movie too (“Go down your walk of shame!”). The Mystery Team anel was short, but hilarious as Donald Glover acted as a diva with a head injury and a fake mustache. Derrick Comedy’s going to be big(ger) with this one.

Afterward, I caught Devin Faraci of CHUD shooting the shit with what I assume were his fellow film critics. I thought it best not to bother a snarky film critic, so I went back to the exhibit hall.

Missed the “Making Webcomics” panel (sorry, Cameron Stewart and Molly Crabapple) as I wandered the convention floor and tried to talk to creators and the like. Good thing it's available online.

Doing this sort of schmoozing thing can be confusing. Which small press publisher is a legitimate publisher and which one is just a couple of dudes putting out their one crappy comic? Are they talking to me for the love of the game or do they just want to sell, again, their one crappy comic?

Got called over to a booth with some creators selling their graphic novel series called Age of Insects, about a war between humans and insect-human hybrids or something. They were classy enough to rope Ben Templesmith into doing the covers, so it can’t be all bad. I haven’t read it yet, but flipping through later chapters reveal some pretty good gore.

First intentional stop was comics bad boy Rich Johnston — gossip monger (I mean that lovingly), journalist, comic book writer, and friendly Brit. “Don’t shoot me — shoot Daniel!” he wrote as word balloons on the Doctor Who: Room with a Déjà View issue I just bought from the IDW booth.

“This is not cosplay, by the way,” I said, pointing out my outfit. Immediately a real Doctor Who cosplayer showed up and he and Tony Lee took pictures with him.

Johnston gave me a Bleeding Cool business card, so I gave him mine — “Just as a confidence booster for me. Feel free to throw it away later.” He politely accepted it. Nice guy, that Rich.

And holy crap, Matt Fraction was doing a signing at the Marvel booth. I searched through the first comic book vendor I found and came across exactly what I was looking for: a 2007 Sensational Spider-Man annual* by Fraction and Salvador Larocca — a nice one-shot story about the relationship between Spider-Man and Mary Jane and one of the few superhero comics to emotionally affect me. For my heart is otherwise black and lumpy.

*The only mainstream superhero comic I bought this weekend, by the way.

Waited in line with a bunch of fans who wanted their favorite creators to sign like five comic books while we watched other people at the booth get photoshopped into pictures of their favorite superheroes whilst holding up goofy props. It was very Disneyland.

“Just one,” I said once put my single issue of Spider-Man in front of him. “Hope that’s not too much.”

As he signed it with a heart-within-a-word-balloon coming from MJ’s mouth and a scribbly signature, I asked him what I referred to as “a probing professional question” about how much trust to put in an artist whilst scripting. Got a good answer about playing to the artist’s strengths. Plus, a Stark Enterprises business card.

“Stark Industries is looking for fresh talent. We’ve got a place for a fine young man such as yourself,” he said as I thanked him and walked off.

Additional fanboy moment: Walked by Nathan Fillion. Immediately stopped in my tracks and grinned.

Went over to the Dumbrella booth, bought/got autographed a Diesel Sweeties book and an Octopus Pie book whilst soliciting valuable coffee advice from R. Stevens himself. Will act on the advice once I run out of coffee.

R. Stevens himself is an incredibly friendly fellow — so friendly, in fact, that we ended up talking like three times that day. The second time I only stopped by because I forgot to thank him for the signing/advice and we ended up talking about Ninja Turtles with this TMNT superfan who comes by every year with free Turtles swag for the Dumbrella kids. Usually when people are done with you at Con (usually after you’ve paid them) they’ll offer a handshake (maybe) and say “Enjoy the show” as secret Con code for “I’m done with you. Who else wants to buy my self-xeroxed minicomic for 12 bucks?” but it felt like R. Stevens would have been cool with fans just hanging around all day.

Stopped by the AIT/Planet Lar booth and ended up buying Warren Ellis’ Switchblade Honey like I kept meaning to and publisher Larry Young’s complete Astronauts in Trouble. I got to talking to Young, who introduced me to Kirsten Baldock , writer of their newest book, Smoke & Guns (drawn by Fábio Moon!). Guess whose book I then bought. Then I was introduced to Stephen Grant, writer of Badlands. When I said I actually owned the published, unproduced screenplay but not the comic book, I found myself with a free copy of the screenplay (in lieu of the comic, which was sold out) signed by Grant. Let it be known that Larry Young might be the friendliest person in comics.

Best advice from Mr. Young: “Don’t worry about seeming too schmoozy. That’s why everyone’s here.”

Beaming just a bit after that experience, I found myself called over by Douglas Paszkiewicz, creator of the sick, hilarious Arsenic Lullaby. I mentioned that we met years ago in one of those tiny Pompano Beach conventions and we bonded over Insane Clown Posse, who were the special guests that year.

“It was like someone shook out a hot trailer home,” he said.

“You’re a sick, sick man. I love it,” I said as bought his newest book with quarters.

Met up with Shaun and I ended up in front of R. Stevens for a third time. I assured him I wasn’t a stalker. He pointed me out as the average fan (“low-key, well-dressed”). Shaun and I agreed to work on a webcomic* in front of him like we were getting married and he was the trustworthy sea captain.

*Still banging out that idea, by the way.

Our con experience ended with a reuniting with Raf as we attempted to get free swag at the Marvel booth — “attempted” meaning we shouted inane things to get attention like “This is my only shirt!” and “Pick me! My dad was a Hulk notebook!” We didn’t get anything, but it was fun little rally. I tried to negate the punk kid who was getting obnoxious about getting some swag by politely cheering on those who won things, be it a surf boards, statues, or shiny Dr. Doom hat.

Because Comic-Con is a happy place.

Like any good day, Sunday ended with burritos.

Jesus, my feet hurt.

TRANSFORMERS 2: WHAT THE FUCK

DON'T FORGET: YOU PEOPLE ASKED FOR THIS

What happens when an auteur known for his excess is given all the money in the world and nobody ever thinks to tell him “Michael, I don’t think that’s a good idea?”

You get Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Transformers 2 has to be the most expensive film ever made, right? Considering how many things blow up and how 99% of the film is a special effect (including Megan Fox). It’s so expensive that everything is rendered in a gold hue. This is a 24-karat movie.

And don’t act surprised that it happened. All of us gave money to movies when we paid to see the first one, and sequels nowadays do nothing if not escalate matters. If there was a scene in Transformers where Michael Bay shot a minority point blank, the sequel would have had Michael Bay orchestrating the extermination of an entire race.

Remember, we gave him permission because we paid for the first one.

And I don’t even like the Transformers all that much.

FULL DISCLOSURE

Let’s be honest here: Transformers is a stupid movie based on toys. Oh, and there’s a cartoon or something. I hated the first one, for all I wanted was robots and explosions -- not robots hiding behind trees from easily crushable parents and a Spielbergian treasure hunt. The night I saw it, a friend of mine exclaimed it was the best film he had seen in a long time. I quickly turned around, left the theatre, and drove home alone.

Transformers 2 is about 30 to 40 minutes way too long. If you cut out some of the boring human parts in the latter hour of the film, I’d call it the best thing ever. As it is, I might still call it the best thing ever. Not the best movie ever, mind you. The best thing ever.

PAINTING OVER THE POSTER

Michael Bay’s best film is Bad Boys II. It’s where he perfected his cinema of excessive overindulgence, with a car chase that uses cadavers as obstacles hurled at our heroes and a third act that involves Martin Lawrence and Will Smith invading Cuba. I’m not joking. There’s some semblance of a plot (about drug dealers or something), but Bad Boys II is almost exclusively about set pieces, quips, and a complete disregard for all we hold dear. It’s so over-the-top that it’s clearly the work of a mad genius with a disregard for things like the three-act structure or emotion or even humanity.

Transformers 2 is even above that.

I cannot tell you what Transformers 2 is about. I don’t know who the new villain is or why he wants to blow up the sun with a laser hidden in a pyramid. I don’t know why Optimus Prime is the only robot that can defeat Robo-Pharaoh. I don’t know how a chase scene that began in a college moved to a torture scene at a warehouse and suddenly ended with a fight scene in the forest (you see, it’s like nature versus technology!). I don’t know what’s so important about all those weird symbols that Shia LeBeouf sees or why he doesn’t want his robot car to come to college with him. I don’t know why Tyrese or Josh Duhamel or even John Turturro are even in this movie.

None of it. Makes. Any. Sense.

When you give Michael Bay so much money to make a two-and-a-half hour film, don’t be surprised that the suburban family house explodes because it’s full of transforming kitchen appliances or that there’s a completely unnecessary scene where the mother accidentally eats pot brownies and goes apeshit. Don’t be surprised when the elderly English Transformer farts and a parachute POOFS out of his ass or when the family dogs are humping then the doghouse explodes. Definitely don’t be surprised when the tiny sidekick Decepticon starts humping Megan Fox’s leg or that there are like SIX sidekicks and five of them are ridiculous stereotypes. This is where Michael Bay’s perverse interests lie and giving him more money means that he just ups the ante on all of it.

There’s a scene where Shia LeBeouf is stricken with A Beautiful Mind and starts scrawling weird alien symbols all over his dorm room. His walls are adorned with posters of movies and half-naked supermodels. Which poster does he begin to paint over?

Bad Boys II.

SOME OF US STILL VIEW THE WORLD THIS WAY

Imagine you were born in -- Jesus Christ -- 1997. Kurt Cobain and Biggie are as irrelevant as classic rock. You never saw a good episode of The Simpsons. You’ve never known what it was like to grow up as an American feeling relatively safe under Clinton. Nay, while you were relatively conscious when planes flew into the World Trade Center (but you didn’t understand it) and as you rose through the ranks of elementary school, the adults kept talking about terrorism. Being a 12-year-old, you like robots and explosions and Spider-Man. Your cousins are probably getting limbs blown off in the Middle East (whatever that is) and you don’t really know why except that your parents and teachers tell you it’s for your freedom. Meanwhile Jack Bauer is punching Muslims on television. You just got your first hard-on and look on the internet for porn when Mom and Dad are asleep. All you know about other races is what you’ve seen on TV -- rap videos, sitcoms, those boring political dramas your parents watch. You stayed up late without your parents noticing and watched Species on the Sci-Fi Channel. All the while everything is a bomb waiting to kill you. Technology is a mystery. Even cars. What do you know? You can’t even drive yet.

Now you see Transformers 2. A film where household appliances turn into missile-shooting killing machines. Where geography makes no sense because you haven’t been anywhere. Where your best friend is your car-which-turns-into-a-robot. Where even the weird Italian stereotype robot wants to fuck Megan Fox. Where a robot made of construction equipment has wrecking balls for testicles. Where there’s a Decepticon with a murderous tongue tentacle who poses as a slutty college girl with no explanation or reason. Where the black stereotype robot has a gold tooth. Where the villain has a helmet like a Pharaoh and the Sun-Destroying-Laser is hidden in a pyramid in the desert. Where the bad guy wants to destroy the Sun for completely unknown reasons except for the fact that he’s evil. Where heaven is full of robots. And it all makes perfect fucking sense to you.

I submit to you, then, that Transformers 2 is a perfect depiction of a 12-year-old’s Freudian fever dream of what the world is, oversimplified with lots of juvenile dick jokes. The line dividing reality and cartoon doesn’t exist and things just happen because the world’s confusing and you don’t really understand cause and effect yet. And surely cars can turn into robots because you saw it on TV and science can do anything.

It’s the feeling I got watching James Bond films as a kid, where I didn’t understand why Agent 007 was traveling to five exotic locales in two-and-a-half hours but I knew who the bad guy was because he sat in a chair. Transformers 2 recreates that by completely lacking basic connective tissue. I don’t know what I watched, but I know I was amazed that it happened.

LOGGING INTO ROBOT HEAVEN: THE DEATH OF REALITY AND CINEMA

My nightmares from now on will be about what Transformers 3: Megatron Unleashed: Succumb to The Doom of Your Perceptions will be like. He put Earth in debt in order to make this film. How will he ever be able to top it? Will Transformers 3: God is a Decepticon be the film that bankrupts cinema?

Why does this keep happening? Why are summer films getting increasingly expensive and longer? I await the summer blockbuster that changes the way summer films are made. What is the film that will finally doom the form and make Hollywood collectively say “No, this will never happen again.” I’m betting on Transformers 3: Cannon Robo Overdrive.

Wikipedia tells me that Michael Bay keeps having trouble introducing a Transformer that turns into an aircraft carrier. Holy shit. Suggestion for next time: make The Moon a transformer.

Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly seemingly made Southland Tales to show his distaste for traditional Hollywood storytelling by making a borderline nonsensical film that only pretends to be some kind of socially conscious Phillip K. Dickian sci-fi piece but might just be either a brilliant piece of anti-cinema or a mess of pretentious wank. Or both.

Michael Bay did nearly the same thing, but with racial stereotypes and completely unintentional.

FURTHER READING

io9 reads {Transformers 2} as “a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot,” and I’m inclined to agree.

Devin Faraci on CHUD gives an objective criticism of the film, though I don’t think the film is interested in being an entertaining summer film. In fact, I don’t think the film is interested in existing in the traditional sense. I think it’s interested in existing in the same way that a tornado is. He also digs Bad Boys II.

DRUNKEN COMICS 002: I DUNNO WHICH HURTS MORE: MY LIVER OR MY BRAIN

I’m not gonna lie, Internet: this time it was Cactus Cooler with vodka in it. We’re calling it a Motorhome Mimosa. We bought Cactus Cooler months ago and only drank a couple of them, at which point we were startled to find out that it's just orange-pineapple soda with a cute name and not actually flavored like a cactus. It's tasty, though.


You guys think cactus juice isn't widely available due to a fear of accidentally drinking needles?


ULTIMATUM 004: MY BILE IS ON FIRE

(Loeb/Finch/Bin Laden)

For those of you lucky enough to not know what Ultimatum is, let me explain it so you can feel as bad as the rest of us: Jeph Loeb writes the Marvel Universe like an issue of Spawn. David Finch draws the Marvel Universe like an issue of Spawn, but an issue of Spawn drawn by David Finch.

Either way, it’s stupid. Stupid stupid stupid I hate it so much fuck you.

The plot: Magneto has some sort of evil plan because he’s a bad guy. In the process, lots of Marvel characters get killed in gruesome ways because that’s edgy and cool and it makes for cool poses where the hero holds his fallen comrade’s body in his arms like a groom carrying a bride over the threshold. This pose is LAME.

Page 6: Dormammu binds Doctor Strange in his own belt-scarf; Strange’s head swells and explodes like a John Carpenter flick but his body is left relatively intact. It’s a really sickening panel.

Yes, everyone: Jeph Loeb wrote a comic book where a head a sploding is not entertaining, but off-putting.


Page 12: Nick Fury: It’d help if there were a ROSCOE’S on this Godforsaken planet.

Yes, everyone: Jeph Loeb wrote a comic book where, amidst a planetary crisis, a black person bemoans the fact that he can’t get any chicken. Is this a fucking Jerry Bruckheimer movie? Goddamn.

A couple panels down: Nick Fury: I was wondering when you bungholes would show up.

Yes, everone: Jeph Loeb wrote a comic book where a grown-ass man uses the word “Bunghole.”

Pages 19 - 20: Angel goes solo to attack the bad guys. Sabretooth bites off Angel’s wings and immediately gets an arrow in the eye.

Yes, everyone: Jeph Loeb wrote a comic book where a shirtless Fabio thought he could take on the megalomaniacal bad guys all by himself and nobody questioned the stupidity of it.

Page 22: Thor-Girl lops off Magneto’s arm. Magneto’s reaction: “!”

Yes, everyone: Jeph Loeb wrote a comic wherein a Holocaust survivor makes a Metal Gear Solid reference.


Jeph Loeb is ruining comic books and we’re all letting this happen. We're the Germans who elected Hitler.

I’m not even talking about superhero comics. The ACTUAL MEDIUM is worse for Ultimatum existing.

Jeph Loeb's other recent atrocity was Ultimates 3. Read why Ultimates 3 #1 is the worst comic ever published by a major company.

SECRET SIX 009 & 110: MORE LIKE SECRET SEX

(Simone/Scott)

Secret Six is a sexy comic -- the only superhero comic that battles Uncanny X-Men in sexiness. I’ve talked about it before and I shall talk about it again. It’s sexy. Sex sex sex.

Issue #9 is a Battle for the Cowl crossover.

Fuck!


Despite this tie-in nonsense, it’s a great standalone issue that doesn’t require very much knowledge of a crossover I don’t care about. All you need to know: Batman died, everyone’s wondering who will take up the mantle. This issue also features an appearance from Nightwing, who for some reason has billy clubs like Daredevil… why exactly? I hate Nightwing.

Issue #10 is less fun, as its mostly sets up the next story arc, with the Secret Six working for slave traders, but it certainly makes for good drama. It also reveals how reader can continue to root for our “heroes” -- the villains have to be a hundred times worse.

Funny thing about Secret Six: it’s a comic where our “heroes” throw the heads of henchmen through windows to scare other henchmen, but this is acceptable and welcomed. Ultimatum, however, is a comic book where Doctor Strange’s head explodes, and it is largely unacceptable and vomit-inducing. Why is that?

We can attribute this to the fact that Ultimatum is a stupid, stupid comic and Secret Six is one of the best non-Grant Morrison superhero books being published today -- it’s entertaining and well-written with characters that jump off the page and are infinitely lovable despite the reprehensible things they do.

Sad state of superhero comics: the characters of Secret Six are more alive than other superhero characters -- they bicker, have sex, make mistakes, and backstab one another left and right. They’re more human than the Justice League of America… yet they’re the villains?


DEAD RUN 001: SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE PROBABLY

(Cosby/Nelson/Biagini/Romero[Uncredited]/Miller[Uncredited])

Review of the first four pages of Dead Run #1:

Dead Run is an exciting, fast-paced cars-meets-corpses comic where the Road Warrior jams a cigarette into the eye of a Zombie Barbarian (Zombarian?) as he runs it over. Badass.

The strongest part of the book is the expressive, frenetic, anime-inspired art by Francesco Biagini. Never before has a zombie motorcycle gang looked so runoverable or so stickcigarettesintheeyeable!


Review of the rest of Dead Run #1:

When this inevitably gets optioned by a Hollywood studio I’m going to be very very cross.

AIR 009: JUST TO GET THE TASTE OUT OF MY MOUTH

(Wilson/Perker)

See? I’m being diverse this time. Only two superhero titles, one whatever-the-hell-Dead-Run is, and one proper comic book where the only person who wears tights is a ballerina.

[Too bad I sobered up and forgot to finish this. I’ll do it utterly sober, totally rambling, and two weeks late. Fuck.]

Vertigo books worry me. Have you seen the monthly sales charts? Have you seen how much these things sell? Scalped will probably last because it’s got overwhelming support from critics and those readers-in-the-know. Ditto Northlanders and DMZ. The franchise books (Unknown Soldier, Madame Xanadu, House of Secrets) aren’t going anywhere until low sales decide they need to (see: Human Target). Fables is currently the longest running book, and people love it. The Unwritten might enjoy the same success. We’ll see.

Hellblazer, however, will never, ever go away.

Which leaves Air, which I assume is too weird for most readers to get into. It doesn’t have the immediately overt fantasy trappings of, say, Fables, but it’s not as real-world and gritty as Scalped. How do you even explain Air to someone? Fables is “All the fairy tale characters are real and interact with one another,” Scalped is “a crime drama taking place on an Indian reservation,” but what of Air? It’s about a flight attendant with a fear of flying who is caught between a terrorist organization and some mysterious good guys… or so it seems. Also, she’s capable of traveling between dimensions. It’s such a hard sell, and Vertigo’s other hard sell, Young Liars, has already been canceled. Is Air next?


I don’t remember what happened in the previous installment (my own lack of reading comprehension, I assure you), but #9 feels like one of those winding down episodes that you’d see at the end of a season of The Sopranos or Mad Men. There’s not a whole lot of adventure or excitement except that our heroine, Blythe, is carrying a device to hand off to the good-guys-who-might-be-the-bad-guys.

Air is about many things: religion, geography, technology, transdimensional aeronautics -- with post-9/11 concerns slathered all over -- but it’s also about airline travel (“airport hijinks,” as G. Willow Wilson herself deems it). This issue returns to that form as Blythe solves a fairly mundane airport problem (compared to previous issues) via lucky synchronicity and suddenly remembers that the world is a big complicated place where serendipitous things happen -- using the micro to see the macro.

Air is a good comic that’s shaping up to be a great comic. Wilson’s a bit of a newbie to the form professionally and each issue of Air is another installment of an artist honing her craft. Let’s be patient. It’s only nine issues in, for God’s sake.

It seems like Air’s been getting mixed reviews all over the place, which makes me wonder if we should rate a Vertigo book on the same standards that we rate a G.I. Joe comic. Do we praise a Transformers comic as being “okay for what it is” yet trash something more ambitious like Air for its failings? Does one of the few comics with a non-exploited female hero deserve a bit of a pass on principle? We need more Airs, and less… everything else.

COMIC STUDY 001: NORTHLANDERS #17 (Wood/Lolos)

I’M A SUCKA FOR THEM MOJITOS

Read the first issue of Northlanders here.

Jesus Fucking Christ -- I just HAD to get drunk and talk about a bunch of superhero comics (and The Unwritten), didn’t I? Why didn’t I down a Mojito and wax on about American Virgin, Chris Ware, and the validity of minicomics? A startling lack of mint leaves in the house, for one thing.

Don’t worry, though: I’ll make up for it right now and spend an entire blog post talking about a single comic: Northlanders #17 by Brian Wood and Vasilis Lolos. It’s a Vertigo book about Vikings. I haven’t read any of it until now but critics and readers rave and this particular issue has been buzzing on the ‘net as a great little standalone issue.

Also, this one’s about two Vikings beating the mead out of one another.

Sounds like it was worth three bucks.

HINT: I HATE buying single issues.

HINT: I also realize that single issue sales keep books I like from getting cancelled.

HINT: I STILL hate buying single issues.

HINT: Can we please change this shit?

Oh, right. The cover.

[Takes break to search Google photos of cool, refreshing Mojitos. Finds a recipe for Mojitos and makes a solemn vow.]

MJOLNIR’S GEOMETRY OR “I THINK I JUST THREW MYSELF INTO AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS”

The cover of Northlanders #17, “The Viking Art of Single Combat,” perfectly represents the interior.

First of all, proof that a lack of background does not equal bad art*. Imagine how busy that would look if there were mountains and Valhalla and guitars behind the sharp object swinging.

*See also: Katsuhiro Otomo

You’ve got two blood-spattered Vikings about to SMASH CLANK CRUNCH one another, beautifully rendered by Massimo Carnevale, which I assume is not his real name but an awesome nom de comik. If it weren’t for the warm-yet-muted palette, it could easily be an awesome ‘70s four-color Jim Aparo cover or something. On its own the cover’s fine, but what really makes it great is the layer of diagrams describing every detail of this one action pose -- the pivoting torso, the trajectory of the sword, the weight of the axe.

There’s a lot to look at, just on the cover. You can go over every detail, every arrow, line, and label in the diagram layer, or just step back enjoy the two figures about the tear one another in half.

Ditto for the interior.

It’s almost a representation for the scripted creation of art itself. We writers can put all this Alan Moorish detail into what goes into a single panel -- how many lights are on in which building, what constellation it’s meant to represent, the number of sweat drops on a character’s forehead directly proportional to her distress, whether her unders are matching colors (and what this says about her personality as expressed through her lifted eyebrow) and by god! This is art and it’s serious business! Can’t you see how much choreography went into this scene! Do you realize how much research we put into getting every detail of the period correct?

Meanwhile the reader will just glance, think “Cool” (if you’re lucky) and turn the page.

And you know what? The artist did MOST of the work there. Stupid writers, claiming all the credit.

You, see, that diagram is a script -- essential to building the art below (okay, let’s just pretend even if it isn’t). Remove the diagram, and you still have the art and a cool cover. Remove the art, and you have a bunch of arrows and lines. Still, it represents the art, and that counts for something, right? It took a lot of work for someone to think about. And write down. And tell someone else to draw.

THIS is why aspiring comic book writers outnumber aspiring comic book artists.

NOW LET’S READ THE DAMN THING

There are three ways you can read Northlanders #17. I suggest you go through each way and enjoy a different experience each time.

You can follow along with me if you like.

#1: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF PUNCH VIKINGS AS TOLD TO ALEX HALEY

Let’s read just the words. Yes, you can do this. Mostly. It’s harder than it seems. A good comic has art that draws your eye. This is a good comic, of course, but try not to look at the pictures. Just this one time for me.

Look, I even drew arrows so you can follow along. I don't do that for just anyone.

The captions don’t hold up incredibly well by themselves, nor were they meant to. They have more substance than the diagram stuff on the cover, making for a conversational account of feuds and Viking life. They fare best when they’re not specifically commenting on what’s going on in the panel. When they do, they really need the art. They were written that way, so it’s unfair to judge thus far. The point of this is to realize how the words and the pictures interact, anyway.


#2: PUNCH VIKINGS: THE NEW ADVENTURES

This one’s the easy part: just look at the pretty pictures and maybe the word balloons, since there are only a few, most of which are ejaculations: “Fucker,” “Argh,” and so forth. Those play more a bit more directly into the story than the captions do.

Ah, how easy it is to read through a comic and pay minimal attention to the art. Let’s rectify this oversight right now.

POW BAM ART SWOOSH! This thing reads FAST. How incredibly awesome is Vasilis Lolos’ art? Really incredibly awesome, right? He brings this wonderfully kinetic manga sensibility that feels like Brian Lee O’Malley gone all ugly.

My favorite part is how Lolos depicts motion. His sword swings and punches disappear in motion blur via thick speed lines. It’s not bad art -- they just move faster than he can draw them.

Lolos loves his jagged lines. He uses them for everything in this issue: as motion lines, to create impact bursts -- he even makes sound effects with them!

To evoke another Western mangaesque creator published by Oni Press, I get the same feeling from Lolos’ art that I get from Corey Lewis -- nosebleed-inducing freneticism. Pray he continues to get work.

#3: PUNCH VIKINGS IN STEREO


Okay, let’s try reading it like a real comic. Y’know, the kind with words and pictures that interact even though the words and pictures in this issue only sort of indirectly interact.

Here’s the basic premise: two Vikings from feuding clans duel while the numerous caption boxes give us the background of the fight, some Viking quotes, and details the finer nuances of two Vikings CLANG CLANG CRUNCHing one another: the incident that made Egil Sleggja turn from a dick-waving warrior into a morose punchbastard, the rules they no longer follow, and the usefulness of a dagger.

It’s a bit of a struggle to read, as the captions demand a pacing that clashes with the hyperkinetic art. The drawings beg to be read swift as a shot arrow but the captions want you to take your damn time. It’s for your own good, you know.

It’s a ripping good fight comic, this issue, but it’s so much more than that. The narration gives us reason. Why fight for your lord? What’s at stake? Why not retreat? It seems banal the way I put it but it’s a consideration most of us with our cushioned seats and our newfangled “recorded music” don’t think about. We Americans have a volunteer army that can fight our battles. Our landlord can’t make us go raid the neighbor’s house. I can drink tea and write about a comic book and dream about cool, refreshing Mojitos.

While you might argue that the narration Claremonts (yes, that’s a verb) the whole thing, you might also be wrong. It supplements and enhances the art, yes, but it’s also essential to the book’s enjoyment. This is best seen in the ending of the story. Reading just the art, it’s a bit of an abrupt ending. The battle reaches its climax, and that’s the end. A sad, pastoral scene with birds flying around and bodies in the sand. The narration, however, provides a final quote gives it meaning: this is the end of the story for these characters, but not the end of the story at large. It’s unsure about the future -- a question mark at the end of a mere vignette within the epic of humanity. Like the ending of Battlestar Galactica*.

*This is not up for discussion.

LETS TALK ABOUT OUR FEELINGS OR “THE ANNOTATED PUNCH VIKINGS”

I don’t necessarily think that this comic was meant to be read each of the three ways (especially not the second), but the execution of the issue allows for a study of the interaction of text and art. The script needs the art, but does the art need the script? Not necessarily. Granted, Northlanders is a writer-driven series and without the script the art wouldn’t exist, but gimme a break -- I’m making a point here.

Inevitably, “The Viking Art of Single Combat” is a fierce little fight comic (oh, the PUNCH KICK CLANG!) with a smart use of the narrative captions that enhance rather than muddle the story. Too often do comics simply use them as less-fun versions of thought bubbles (I’m looking your way, Justice League of America) or (to a lesser extent these days) describe what the art is already doing (I’m looking your way, Claremont/Byrne-era Uncanny X-Men). Jesus Christ, I wish I could make comparisons that aren’t superhero books.

Lately, I’ve taken to skipping captions entirely, at least in superhero comics*. They’re largely irrelevant and big fluffy wastes of the reader’s time. Imagine a Jackie Chan movie where you suddenly get audio commentary from Jackie’s brain every fight scene**. Who cares what Nightwing has to say during this particular brawl? Who cares what Nightwing has to say ever? Who cares about Nightwing***?

I say thee nay. I care about Vikings.

*I’ve also lately taken to skipping most superhero comics entirely, but that’s what a tangent sounds like if this weren’t at the end of an essay.

**Actually, this sounds like a great idea. JCVD better watch out.

***Devin Grayson and Chuck Dixon excluded.

Drunken Comics #1: For You I Do This

I drink a salty dog (with vodka, not gin), read comics, and wax wax wax:

THE UNWRITTEN #1: WHAT IS IT WITH COMICS AND BORING ANALOGUES

Marvel proved with Squadron Supreme back in the ‘60s that you can use characters you don’t own if you create an approximation of the character you intend to steal. Watchmen did this in a smart way by having characters that only vaguely resembled the characters Moore was trying to evoke and ultimately felt starkly original because he’s a brilliant writer. Warren Ellis did this in The Authority by making the Batman and Superman characters gay lovers. They soon flourished and are themselves distinct except when crappy writers are on the book.

The Unwritten, on the other hand, uses obvious analogues of Harry Potter… why, exactly?

The premise of The Unwritten -- kid grows up as the inspiration for his father’s fantasy novels, may or may not be a fictional character come to life -- is brilliant. For some reason -- and the script acknowledges this -- it’s a total rip-off of Harry Potter complete with sidekicks and the anemic Max Shreck villain.

My only hope is that there’s something to the derivativeness. Imagine you find out you’re a fictional character. Someone dreamt you up on a typewriter. How would you feel if you were also unoriginal?

It’s an existential issue Peter Milligan would explore, but Peter Milligan isn’t writing The Unwritten. Maybe Mike Carey will address it. Don't screw this up.

Regardless, you should buy the first issue of The Unwritten because it's only a dollar.

ULTIMATE WOLVERINE VS HULK #6: SCREW YOU WILLINGHAM

It’s just occurred to me: Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk -- with its harems and in-half-rippings and its delectable Gammahulksex -- is exactly the kind of comic book that stupid Bill Willingham warned us of in that ridiculous column about “superhero decadence” that I made fun of. Quite frankly, I don’t give a shit about morality and fictional characters as role models. I want Wolverine saying things like “So help me God, I’ll turn you into coleslaw, you green bitch” and “I’m a mutant… I’m on humanity’s shit list.”

Bring it on.

My favorite part of Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk is the Hulk/She-Hulk sex. Not only is it appealing in a strictly base pornographic way (HELL YES MONSTERS FUCKING), but the sexuality of a character like She-Hulk is something that warrants examination. She’s Amazonian in a way that Wonder Woman is not (for a Warrior Princess, Wondie’s kind of delicate and feminine, huh?), and her skin is GREEN. GREEN. She’s a muscley nonwhite woman, yet she’s got serious staying power. I attribute it to latent homosexuality amongst fanboys.

The penultimate page is laid out in a 4-tiered, 12-panel grid. Funny thing about 12-panel grids -- they’re economical in that you can put a ton of information on one page (Part 3 of The Dark Knight Strikes again uses like 24-panel grids) but there’s something mechanical about having 12 panels of repeating size and shape.

Look at Panel 1, wherein Hulk grabs Nick Fury. Why is this presented in the same manner as a talking head (Panel 9) and Nick Fury mounting a horse (Panel 11)? If anything, the physical threat to the character should be bigger than a bunch of panels of people talking.

Unless you’re doing an Alan Moore circa Watchmen thing and giving every frame of the book the same treatment (and thus making the REALLY big moments matter).

Also, the last line in the issue is pretty funny.

THE LAST DAYS OF ANIMAL MAN #1: AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED PETER MILLIGAN SAID THE LAST WORD ON THIS ONE

My basic rule for superhero comics: if I’m not interested on Page 1, I’m not interested in reading the rest of it.

I was not interested on Page 1 of The Last Days of Animal Man.

Flipping through it, however, the art stood out. What initially bugged me about Grant Morrison’s brilliant run of Animal Man was how Chas Truog’s interiors never quite held up compared to Brian Bolland’s covers (I've sense gotten over this silly bias). Chris Batista’s linework seems an attempt to appropriate Bolland’s style, but a lot of his character renditions evoke Kevin Maguire -- the master of facial expressions. I’d love to see him on a quality book.

I gotta say, though, that the design of the villain on that page is so lame that it HAS to be intentional.

Anyone else noticing this trend of DC hiring older writers to work on weird fill-in stuff? You’ve got Len Wein on Justice League of America, Jerry Ordway on Justice Society of America, and Gerry Conway on Last Days of Animal Man. This isn’t a point, just an observation.

CROSSED #5: SHIT’S FUCKED UP

The Zombie Craze in comics is on its way out in favor of incessant Obama covers. People still love The Walking Dead, but that’s because it’s a quality book. My hypothesis is that most zombie comics suck because they pull their punches. To write zombies you have to be not only a total bastard, but a sick fuck.

Guess why Garth Ennis is the perfect candidate to write a zombie comic.

Ennis is less interested in sociology and psychology as Robert Kirkman is, but he manages to out-mean 28 Days Later not only in zombie violence, but in human atrocity. Wisely, he has his infected people talk, and they say the most heinous things imaginable.

Crossed #5, unlike previous chapters, is mostly character interaction and minimal actual violence. Oh, right: also, Garth Ennis is capable of restraint when he wants to be.

Garth Ennis is a mean man.

UNCANNY X-MEN #510: REKINDLING THE FLAME OR

I know Matt Fraction’s Uncanny X-Men is great because CBR’s Hannibal Tabu hates it. He hates everything good and proper and always gives glowing reviews of Transformers comics. He is what’s wrong with comics.

Uncanny X-Men is what’s right with comics.

Ignore that it’s a superhero comic with a painfully convoluted history -- or is that the appeal of X-Men? No it isn’t, I say. It’s about pathos and identification and everybody loves Wolverine. GRAAR SNIKT SNIKT

Fuck that, you don’t need to know anything about the X-Men to enjoy this. You’ve got the super-X-headquarters under siege. You’ve got a chick with a purple energy mind knife! There’s a chick with six arms! And swords! Beast drinking a coffee! Wit! Cyclops doing stuff!

Also, Greg Land’s art is a bit dynamic than usual. He’ll be a great artist yet if we keep making him render fight scenes. And stop swiping from magazine covers. Models = maybe not the best source to base human characters on.

Thanks Matt.

Television: Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

I've seen quite a bit of important/interesting television the past few days. Now I want to talk about them.

I'd talk about Kings, but the damn thing is two episodes in. Let's wait until I have more to say about it, shall we?

DOLLHOUSE: OKAY, HERE'S THE BIT YOU'VE BEEN BEGGING FOR

Remember when you heard that Joss Whedon was making another TV series? Remember all the expectations and preconceived notions you had about it? Remember how you thought of how much you loved Buffy, Angel, and Firefly?

The disappointment with the first episode of Dollhouse is pretty well-known. It promises a formulaic "mission of the week" style show, as glossy and lifeless as the mindless Dolls it employs -- more CSI: Miami than Firefly.

While increasing numbers gave up or cried betrayal with each episode, I insisted it was getting better. Each subsequent episode had a bit more personality, more focus on the non-dolls, more overarching plot. Still, it was an episodic "mission of the week" show.

With Episode 6, "Man on the Street," we're finally given the show we deserve. The promos promised the usual bits to make sure we watch: "Things will never be the same" in "an episode you'll never forget" and the like. Turns out the promos did not lie. There aren't any "mission of the week"-style proceedings. Instead, there's lots of Tahmoh Penikett, the cuddliest superhuman on television (except maybe Greg Grunberg). Patton Oswalt as a billionaire entrepreneur in a role with a surprising amount of poignancy. People find out things and expectations are blown apart. It's good television.

My knee-jerk reaction is to say that something like this should have been the first episode, but I know better than to listen to my knees (see: my piece on Battlestar Galactica below).

Whedon has deemed the first seven episodes as "The Seven Pilots," meaning that each one has to sell the challenging premise of the show to keep people watching. However, this episode is a break in the formula of the other episodes; it almost needs rigid structure of the previous episodes to qualify it. With an established formula, the break in this episode is all the more powerful.

Better yet, with each new episode we watch the show come alive and display more personality -- just like the dolls.

Clever move, Joss. Why did I ever doubt you?

BREAKING BAD: METH-HEAD IN THE MIDDLE

Five episodes in, and I already know what Breaking Bad is about.

It's about the human body.

Walter White lives a relatively healthy life style. He doesn't smoke, nor does he drink very much. He's depicted eating veggie bacon for breakfast. Despite all this, Walter has lung cancer, an atrocity of the body where cells just rapidly grow without rhyme or reason, an unfortunate glitch in the body's programming. Cells meaninglessly dividing to no end whatsoever.

His wife, Skyler, is pregnant. Cells are rapidly growing in her as well, but these cells are focused, meaningful: They make up a human being.

Their teenaged son, Walter Jr., has Cerebral Palsy. His mind is as sound as a teenager's can be, but his body requires the use of crutches.

Walter's brother-in-law, Hank, is a DEA agent -- a job that requires the control of the substances that people put in their bodies. He's bald and carries a huge beer gut, but is more vigorous than the milquetoast Walter, who is thin and has a full head of hair.

Jesse Pinkman is a stoner burnout who poisons his body with various kinds of smoke and booze. His body is ruined, his brain can never truly recover.

Together, Walter and Jesse cook crystal meth, that awful drug that makes your teeth fall out and sucks away the very joie de vivre from its users. Walter, being a Chemistry genius, creates the purest, most potent form of crystal meth.

When they kill a man, Walter decides that the best method of disposing of the body is dissolving it with hydrofluoric acid, which can eat through glass and metal. Jesse, in preparing to lug the corpse up the stairs, tries to convince himself it's only a piece of meat.

The disposal juxtaposed with flashbacks of Walter in his younger days trying to figure out the elements that make up the human body, only to come up short by a fraction of a percent.

Bodies in a state of destruction creating something that destroys other bodies.

Is AMC the new HBO?

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: SORRY, YOU WERE ALL WRONG

It's weird to think of the praise being heaped a show called Battlestar Galactica, considering but a few years ago the brand was known for being a cheesy cash-in on the Star Wars craze. Admit it.

The reimagining of Battlestar Galactica, however was something completely different. More than just a space opera, it was politically relevant and full of wonderful grays to make us question our characters at every move and, more importantly, make the characters question themselves. It asked hard questions about human nature and even the nature of God(s) while giving us military intrigue and the occasional space battle.

Now it's over.

Eschewing vagueness (okay, mostly), Ronald Moore and his writers brought us everything we could want in a Battlestar Galactica finale.

We have a definitive final battle with the Cylons -- a last-ditch effort for the crew of the Galactica and for the ship herself. And it's exciting. More than a space opera adventure trope, the big final battle felt exactly that: big and final. Much of the series was spent on outrunning Cylon forces and dealing with human politics on the run. The brilliant final space battle was the show's gift to us for sticking with them for four seasons. Because so rarely did it happen, it had maximum impact on the viewer. This was going to be it.

And, most importantly of all, we were given an ending.

Spaceships being a trope of speculative fiction, I always figured that the best way to subvert audience expectation would be to have the fleet arrive at Earth in our past. I imagined our reluctant heroes crash landing in one of the Thirteen American Colonies or enslaving the Hebrews in Egypt and giving the Greeks the names that have become myth -- Apollo, Athena, Hera -- those fearful gods that were so unmistakably human in their actions. Made sense.

Then they found Earth a desolate, smoking ruin, uninhabitable due to radiation. They had created their own Cylons and died for it. A brilliant twist in the quest for Earth. If Battlestar Galactica had ended there, it would have been truly cemented as the ballsiest show on television. On a medium known for being just filler necessitated by the need for commercials, Battlestar Galactica would have been remembered as a miserable, nihilistic thing: the tragedy of living in a world without the simplicity of The Force.

Ronald Moore had other plans for us, however.

He gave us a concrete ending: they find Earth, the real Earth, a fresh, unsullied planet where the indigenous humanoids haven't even developed a proper language yet. Pretty much the ending I predicted. It was not making me feel vindicated, but disappointed. I wanted my expectations subverted.

I didn't have enough faith, it seems.

For a moment, I thought I was being given what I feared: a Chariots of the Gods? ending where the Stone Age Spacemen use their technology to help advance the Earth humans -- an explanation for our existence today.

That's what they did. Sort of. Our heroes decide to shed all semblance of technology and start anew -- a tabula rasa for humanity. They disperse around the globe and send their spaceships into the Sun.

This whole thing ends perfectly: a nice little crane shot of William Adama looking out over creation.

But it's not over.

150,000 years later, the world is as we know it today. What we spent the whole series believing were the delusional manifestations of Cylon Number Six and Gaius Baltar are revealed to be something else and, Greek Chorus-style, muse about the nature of the supernatural deity and the trajectory of humanity. If humanity keeps creating artificial intelligence only to have it blow up in our faces and decimate us, what is the point of this never-ending cycle? Will this iteration of humanity break the cycle? We're only in the early stages of artificial intelligence, after all -- not quite near the technological singularity yet. What comes next? And what of God (who apparently doesn't appreciate that name) what are Its plans? An important question, as characters have been talking about The One God since the first episode. Why hasn't He/She/It/They broken the cycle? Is it even possible? Where are our answers?

It's an awkward epilogue to the series, more important conceptually than it is well-executed. But fuck it, I don't care about execution. I care about ideas. That's what Science Fiction is bloody about.

As a conceptual device, the epilogue is a brilliant move -- after seemingly answering all our questions, the show reveals that the big questions remain.

Imagine the series ending with the lovely crane shot of William Adama, having achieved his goal of finding humanity a home. It's a false ending. It concludes the characters, but not the story. It is a space opera ending for a show that is only ostensibly a space opera. It's the bloody Ewoks dancing around a fire, celebrating the love -- yub nub!

It's the perfect conclusion for William Adama, the black-and-white steadfast Captain of Humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the original series' Adama had the same characterization. Like Rorschach, he's a simple character whose significance is qualified by his situation. When he's faced with betrayal, moral grays, and failure, he falls apart. He gets drunk and sputters on the floor of his quarters. For him to accomplish his main goal and then to sit and relax in his newly found Promised Land is the happy ending for him. From there, we know he lives out his days quietly in Paradise.

If I were given that ending and nothing else, I'd be sorely disappointed, with nothing to say about such a neat and tidy -- not to mention utterly, deceptively false -- ending. I'd think "What a nice ending. I'm going to watch The Prisoner now."

Salon's Laura Miller has this to say in her criticism of the ending:

They were racing around in a spaceship fleeing killer robots, yes, but the ambiguity of their circumstances made them so much more like us than 99 percent of the people on television. It made them seem so real. When they got their answers, they became finally and irrevocably fictional.

I agree... to an extent. They get their answers, yes, making them fictional (once the whole thing turns out to be a take on Creation, they kind of have to be -- they've served their purpose) but we don't get our answers.

Adama, Apollo, Starbuck, Helo, Athena, Hera, Tyrol, Baltar, Six, Tigh -- they're not the main characters of the story. The human race is.

Hence, the importance of the epilogue. Humanity is thriving, for now... but on what path are they headed? What is its destiny? It's a mystery.

It's not a question you can glean from the ending of the main narrative. What we get from that is the Spacemen landed on Earth... and made us! How wonderful. The End. Fade to credits.

No. It's not the end. It's a false ending.

They gave birth to us, but what happens next? We're still around. The story continues, the ending unknown.

The epilogue puts a firm question mark over the face of humanity -- a move perfectly in tune with the rest of Battlestar Galactica.

Tybalt Be Trippen

In college at the University of Florida, I was in this club called Student Upstart Films, where we had the best intentions of making student films and sometimes actually succeeded in making them. It was a rewarding club because I made friends and collaborated creatively and blah blah blah.

Every summer the club would hold this project called Upstart Global where every participant would write a script, trade them to shoot, and then trade the footage to edit. When done correctly, it would be this great collaborative effort and we'd see how other people interpret our work. It's a great idea for a project... if everyone follows through. They did not.

I was given a script from a former Upstart member who was living in California. The catch? It was written by one of her students. And it was a modernization of Romeo & Juliet. Hoo boy. I had written a half-baked post-apocalyptic love story that read like someone watched a few too many Wong Kar-Wai films and in return I got the inane writing of the 9th grader.

I did not despair, though. Okay, I despaired a little and then realized that I should shoot the thing as straight as I could and it would be the funniest thing I've ever done. It was indeed the funniest thing I've ever done, and the most effort I ever put in one of my movies.

Eventually, I handed over to my friend Natalie Andres to cut (after the person who I was assigned to give it to backed out on the effort), and the cut was done in 24 hours with Pixies songs as music cues -- a hurried thing to prepare for the public screening. Yeah, they showed it in public. Considering the work I did for it, I had to do my own cut.

Rewatching it today, I cringe at some of my technical faux pas, but a lot of the comedy makes up for it. At least, I think so.

Now I take a some time to praise the actors:

Particularly, I'm a fan of Adam Bowers' performance as Romeo, who for some reason I decided should look like Fabio.

Valerie Jones, one of the better actresses at UF, takes it as seriously as possible, and it's even funnier for that.

Bob O'Linn plays Tybalt. He's not a regular player in our collective work, and it's a shame he never came back for anything else, because he's really good, especially because of his accent, which evolves from hood to redneck in the span of a couple of scenes. It's beautiful.

Rafael Gaitan does his best/worst Tony Montana impression to play Juliet's Dad. Poor Asia Johnson has to contend with that kind of powerhouse performance, and she's pretty successful.

We can never forget Shaun Spalding as Mario, whose hilarious sprint away from danger might be the bit of footage I rewatched the most times.

Then there's my good friend Kevin McMurtrey, who splits his acting prowess in two to play two characters because I couldn't secure an actress to play Romeo's Mom.

For some reason I had the incomparable Chris Heck in a thankless role as Romeo's Dad, which is a shame, as that kid's got star power. It's okay, though: I made an entire short about trying to kill him, so I repaid the debt. In blood.

That guy who plays the English bobby really sucks, though. So does that Narrator.

Right. So here's Tybalt Be Trippen. Enjoy, despite the poor video quality (YOU SCREWED ME AGAIN GOOGLE VIDEO):