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the year in reading: 2008
One of my New Year's traditions (at least since 2004) is to take a little time to crunch the numbers on the books I read the previous year, as well as to announce a few highlights. (Past years' results: 2007; 2006; 2005; 2004.) As for this year, I read a total of 51 books, which is about average for me, although down a bit from last year's 58. Here's the breakdown: Fiction: 16, the same as last year. The highlight here, far and away, was Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, a book I'd put off reading for some time, but which emerged as easily the best book I read this year. Other highlights in the field of fiction are a few books I'd read before (Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, Carole Maso's The Art Lover, and Patrik Ourednik's Europeana) and at least one that I should probably have read long ago (J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey). Miranda July's book of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, deserves a mention here as well. Books on film / film criticism: 7, down four from last year. Highlight: Carol Clover's canonical text on gender in the contemporary horror film, Men, Women, and Chain Saws. (You can browse my notes here, if you're so inclined.) I also re-read Chris Radley's great Cronenberg on Cronenberg volume. Graphic novels / comics anthologies / books of cartoons: 22. Up fifteen from last year, which means that the "season of comics" I wrote about here and here actually turned into something more like a year of comics. I make no apologies about this: this avenue of my reading provided me with no shortage of highlights, including the four volumes of Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men, the first volume of Warren Ellis' Planetary, Neil Gaiman's Marvel 1602, and the Daredevil Omnibus Companion (a volume which, for my money, is preferable to the actual Daredevil Omnibus). Less escapist stuff included Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi's Complete Persepolis: neither one is the masterpiece that some people have claimed, but both do very good work in expanding the field. Valuable re-reads included the Robert Crumb / Harvey Pekar collaboration Bob & Harv's Comics, Paul Pope's 100%, and Dan Clowes' Ghost World. Assorted nonfiction and polemics: 4. Among them, three constitute highlights of the year: Oranges, an early work by John McPhee in which he examines the citrus industry; The Ecology of Games, a MacArthur-funded anthology of writing about video games, adolescence, and literacy (see more notes on this book here); and Getting Things Done, the infamous productivity guide parodied here. Surprisingly, I read no books of poetry or literary criticism this year. I spent extended time with Gertrude Stein's How To Write and John Ashbery's Hotel Lautreamont but did not complete either. The following authors wrote books I read for the first time in 2008, and also wrote books that I read prior to 2008: Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Joss Whedon, Frank Miller, Alan Martin, Warren Ellis, Michael Ondaatje, Lynda Barry, J.D. Salinger, and John McPhee. What did you read this year that you enjoyed? Labels: book_commentary, comics
Sunday, January 04, 2009
depression in comics (part two)
Way back when, I promised a second post on "Depression in Comics," and then I got busy with traveling and the Blog-A-Thon, and it fell by the wayside. So my second entrant in the series is not from the world of superhero comics but rather from the webcomics underground: specifically the comic Achewood. Achewood takes place in a fairly absurd universe, but creator Chris Onstad has used the recurring character of "Roast Beef" to do one of the most long-running investigations of depression that comics has to offer. [Beaten out only by Grand Prize Winner Charlie Brown?] Here's Roast Beef in the early days, back in this strip from 2002: And here's Roast Beef from this week, as he looks through an issue of Martha Stewart Weddings: Roast Beef is really the character who got me hooked on Achewood, so it is only proper that he gets a shout out here, as we continue with our Raccoon Salute To: Depression In Comics! This is a three-part series, but the third part will be a while in coming, for two reasons: one, I have to track down a copy of the graphic novel in question, and two, I am currently over 1,000 miles from my scanner. Labels: comics, mental_illness
Saturday, May 31, 2008
depression in comics (part one)
One of the oft-repeated truisms of the comics world is that part of the appeal of Marvel Comics is that their heroes are flawed in ways that their target audience can appreciate. Spider-Man has to deal with financial worries and social geekiness, the X-Men are basically hated pariahs, etcetera. And then there's Daredevil, who has the flaw of being handicapped (he's blind), but who also, throughout his run, has struggled with some pretty serious depression. The recent Ed Brubaker issues on Daredevil have been like a fucking case study: (Clicking on the sample panel here will take you to a scan of the entire page, if you want to see it in context. It's worth a look to get the full impact of the example.) Sheesh. Looks like Daredevil could use a good therapist. But is this even the best example of depression in comics? Stay tuned for Part Two! Labels: comics, mental_illness
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
about that skrull
So, those of you who read my blog at the Raccoon page (instead of somewhere else) may have noticed the Skrull / McCain PSA over on the left-hand side of the page. Skrull-related humor is pretty much the province of comics geeks only, but for the benefit of the non-comics readers in the crowd, I thought I'd try explaining. Skrulls are an alien race in the Marvel Universe, with the unique evolutionary advantage of being able to shape-shift. (In their natural form they're green, with a ridged chin.) They've been standard-issue Marvel Universe villains for close to fifty years now (they made their first appearance in Fantastic Four #2, 1962). Anyway, this summer's big Marvel Comics crossover event is Secret Invasion, a plotline that involves a Skrull infiltration of various super-teams and powerful organizations. So any Marvel Comics character could (until the end of the plotline) secretly be a Skrull in disguise. And it got Skunkcabbage and I to thinking... if it could happen in the Marvel Universe, could it happen here? Which brings us to John McCain. I've never really been a "fan" of McCain's, but it seemed like, years ago, he at least occasionally took stands that caused him to break from his party's ranks, and thus at least earned my respect as a man of principle. But in recent years that seems to have changed. For those of you keeping score, McCain's voting record made him the 45th most conservative Senator in 2001... and the 8th most conservative Senator in 2008. Has he sold out his principles in the name of wooing the party base? Has he simply dedicated himself, as never before, to the key tenets of conservativism? Or is he not "himself" at all? In conclusion: John McCain is a Skrull. QED. More here.
Monday, April 21, 2008
the season of comics II / comics as knowledge-system
The season of comics continues unabated, with three or four more graphic novels lying in wait to be read, including the gigantic Daredevil Omnibus, kindly loaned to me by my Film Club compatriot Skunkcabbage. Reconnecting with comics, with the Marvel Universe in particular, has been providing me with very real pleasure this winter, and I've been speculating as to why that is. There's probably a way in which the much-remarked-upon escapist or power-fantasy aspects of comics act as to temporarily stave off some of the depressing realities of adulthood (in the same way that they temporarily staved off some of the depressing realities of adolescence) but I don't really think that tells the whole story. Late last night, K. and I discussed the idea that comics form a "knowledge-system," a body of deeply specialized / obscure (yet knowable) information that is rewardingly vast and crannied (yet navigable, and ultimately finite). Similar knowledge-systems might be things like jazz, or World War II history, or contemporary poetry. There is a certain pleasure, if you're a geek, in diving into a system of that sort, and learning the way that information functions in it. Who are the key figures? How are they related? What are the central narratives? What's the chronology of key events? These questions are a very satisfying sort of mind-candy. With comics—particularly Marvel Universe comics—I have the advantage that the central roster of characters is pretty familiar to me, and has been since I first learned my way around the Marvel Universe knowledge-system in, oh, 1984 or whenever. Plunging back in mostly means learning where the stories are now—what's happened in the interval since I stopped reading. (Or filling in blind spots: hence my interest in the Daredevil Omnibus—Daredevil was never really a character I read when I was younger.) I've argued elsewhere that comics characters should age in more-or-less real time, but I'm learning that a stable roster of characters provides a certain orienting structure within the knoweldge-system, which is definitely making it easier for me to re-enter it.
Monday, March 10, 2008
nonlinear fictions
As promised, here's the second half of what I'm thinking of as my Well-Intentioned Hypertext Rant, in which I argue that even literary / narrative works that aren't traditional hypertext as such are often nevertheless designed to be rewardingly navigated in non-linear fashion (hypernavigated?). Ready? Here goes: "[M]y [earlier] examples are all non-fictional, a little bit of a cheat on my part given that this whole thread got started discussing the merits (or lack thereof) of hypertext as a literary / fictional form. I'll grant that most fiction is designed to be read sequentially, although I'd point to the existence of a "scene selection" menu on nearly every DVD out there as evidence that people value and appreciate non-linear ways of navigating narrative as well. (I can only think of one filmmaker who has successfully resisted the popular pressure to segment the DVD release of their movies this way: David Lynch.) This also gets a little trickier when moving out from the level of the individual text into a "mega-corpus" of related stories, or a storytelling ecology. If we were Star Wars fans, we might read Star Wars tie-in novels in the order of their publication, or in the chronological order that continuity prescribes, or just randomly: each contributes another puzzle-piece to the overall Star Wars mega-corpus in a way that traditional hypertext theory very tidily provides a framework for describing. Comics continuity works similarly: only the most hard-core X-Men collector(s) can even begin to make an attempt to read the overall "story" of the X-Men in the order in which it occurred: the vast majority of readers are instead navigating the mega-corpus in partial, fragmentary ways, assembling the logic of it as they go. Again, hypertext theory provides a very handy way of thinking about this kind of reading. Mythic narrative systems work similarly: Dan [another commenter on the thread] observes that "[r]eligious texts can be read for narrative or as fiction, but that kind of reading generally doesn't involve skipping around." That's definitely true for the Old and New Testament, but less true for the heavily-annotated Torah, and even less true for pre-book mythic systems like the Greek, Egyptian, or African myths, which can be appreciated as fiction or narrative but have no coherent sequential order. Thanks for putting up with me while I indulged my need to be this guy. Labels: comics, fandom, hypertext, narrative, spirituality
Friday, March 07, 2008
the season of comics
Of the last five books I've read (see sidebar), all five of them are graphic novels. That's the first time that that's happened in the five years I've been keeping a reading log. I think there are a few factors that might contribute to this, besides the fact that graphic novels are generally pretty quick reads. It's winter, and an especially gray and dismal-looking winter, and the lure of something brightly-colored is appealing. Also, my grading load has increased this semester, and it's hard to want to read more lines of black text on white paper when I'm done with a few hours of reading student drafts. But probably most prominent is that Film Club has begun patronizing comic book / video store / geek haven Brainstorm, and it's one of those local microbusinesses that you just can't help but want to support. Labels: book_commentary, comics, personal
Sunday, March 02, 2008
media commentary round-up
Those of you interested in more critique of Knocked Up might do well to check out this post, from the Reverse Shot blog, which argues the trenchant point that "Knocked Up is a fairy tale for the benefit of lovable geeks in need of a little maturation ... the film proves that there's truly no limit, no reality unbendable, no prostration not taken for the filmic sake of a boy's redemption." My own read (below) is a little different, but that's still nicely put... Second bit for today is Chris "Exploding Kinetoscope" Stangl's long rant on Spider-Man III, also very nicely written, even (especially?) when saying things that I disagree with almost completely. For instance, when he writes that "Ghost Rider is the best Marvel Comics movie": "It's the only recent comics movie that embraced its premise, accepted that it is a movie about a flaming skull-head motorcyclist with supernatural powers ... Every other attempt has been self-important, confused by the reputation that these stories are 'classic', or that superheroes are a modern mythology. The perceived naiveté that studios and filmmakers attempt to filter out is the greatest asset of superhero books, birth to Bronze, and it doesn't do to replace it with a gimpy pseudo-sophistication. Steve Ditko drew like a drunk person. His preposterous anatomy and woozy, teetering bad perspective is more key to Spider-Man than making sure than making sure light reflects photorealistically off of costume fabric." From the same piece: "[Comics'] breezy craziness, real-life problems filtered through the wildest spur-of-the-moment giganticized fantasias, they don't lend themselves to streamlining and encapsulation for movies. These worlds don't adhere to the strictures of any other fantasy storytelling logic; they are overfilled with illogic, incompatible rules, the sense that anything goes because only the target audience is reading. The time may have come to accept that the fancy of 12-cent smilin', jolly adventure is necessarily crushed under the pressure of hundreds of millions of dollars." Hmm. And while we're on the topic of "the business," another review I read lately is this one in Variety, reviewing the new Hostel sequel. Not too interesting a review, in and of itself, but it includes this very interesting tidbit: "[I]t's the ladies who drive horror-movie ticket sales, dragging their male dates along, not the other way around." Double hmm. No citation, which leads me to want to pull the old Wikipedian protestor on this one. Can it possibly be true? Other critics, say, this one, in the process of panning Hostel Part II, seem quite content to refer to the audience as "straight males" getting off on "the visual correlation between torture and sex," which seems more likely to me (and more likely twice-over than Roth's own claim that Hostel Part II is "more of a feminist film than anything," which pushes my Dubious-Meter way into the red). But if anyone knows about box-office numbers, it should be Variety, and when I look at my circle of friends, the only people I know who are really into horror are women. ... OK, one woman (hi, Lindsay), thus making this like the most unscientific approach to the question imaginable. But there's been a lot of ink spilled over this whole "torture porn" thing, and only one other piece of writing I've seen that remarks on the genre's appeal to women: specifically this piece, in which the author (Chris Stangl again) follows up the observation with the words "I do not know or particularly care what that means, one way or the other." (Interestingly, he also rejects "torture porn" as a label for these types of films entirely, pointing out that "pornography" has traditionally been the designator for "the spectacle of real bodies in unsimulated physical acts.") And finally, there's this piece by Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, taking the stance that these films are an extension of the more global view that women are weak, "morally unfinished," and "expendable." Whedon sums up his bafflement memorably: "All my life I've looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I've shorted out ... I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn't that tradition eventually fall apart?" OK, that's enough round-up for one day... Labels: comics, media commentary
Thursday, July 12, 2007
book reviews: march 2007
A temporary break in the workload allowed me to get a chance to breathe yesterday, so I spent it making this collage and hanging out at LibraryThing reviewing books I read back in March. (April reviews coming soon, if all goes well, although I'm getting a new batch of papers today.) Anyway, here they are: Crypto Zoo, by Rick Veitch Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood, by Martha Nochimson Baby by Carla Harryman The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula LeGuin Cross posted to Raccoon Books. Labels: book_commentary, comics
Friday, May 04, 2007
some recent book reviews
So here's the last bunch of book reviews I wrote. If you'd prefer, you can get a more steady stream of book reviews by subscribing to my LibraryThing RSS feed or by just occasionally visiting this page at Raccoon Books. Batman: Year 100 by Paul Pope In this book, Pope plants Batman in the 2030s, which permits him to riff mightily, telling his tale with verve and style, but ultimately the stock elements of the State-controlled dystopian setting erode some of the freshness on display. It's still a blast to read, but ultimately it doesn't hit as hard as the best Batman stories out there, or as Pope's own unfinished masterpiece, THB. Godland Volume 1: Hello, Cosmic! by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli Groundhog Day, by Ryan Gilbey Deer Head Nation, by K. Silem Mohammad Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers by Henry Jenkins The Mother's Mouth, by Dash Shaw Labels: book_commentary, comics
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
still ill I'm still struggling with a winter cold that showed its first symptoms on December 20. There was a brief period in the middle where it looked like I might be getting better, but the cold roared back into life on Friday and has been pummeling me full-bore ever since. So the grand total here is, what, nineteen days? Unbelievable. Although it did enable me to lie on the couch last night and watch four consecutive episodes of Heroes and not feel guilty about not doing anything else. My verdict: it's flashy, breezy, unreservedly stupid on occasion, fun but low on import. "Candy," said my viewing partner, and that's a pretty good one-word summation. I could probably say something thoughtful to fold it into the larger thoughts about "seriality" from last time, but I'm sick, so I'll let Abigail Nussbaum do it instead: "[Comic books and television] share a large number of similarities which make them ideal for cross-pollination: continuous, open-ended storytelling; a mixture of standalone and multi-part stories; large casts of characters; slowly accumulating backstories and ever-complicating settings. Perhaps most importantly, whereas film is ultimately ingested in solitude, television, like comics, is a communal medium, constantly engaged in a dialogue with its audience. More interesting, however, than the question of how comics can use television are the ways in which television can learn from comics--by far the more innovative and experimental field--about its own capabilities as a storytelling medium. [more]" (Thanks to DMF for the Nussbaum link; I'd read her whip-smart piece on Battlestar's second season a while back but hadn't poked more around at her writing since. I'm starting to think that her blog is pretty much a must-read for people who want to think seriously about television and narrative.) Post on seriality and videogames still in the works. Stay tuned. Labels: comics, media commentary, narrative, seriality
Monday, January 08, 2007
this week's thoughts on seriality (part one: comics) Finally (last night) got caught up to the present point in the ongoing Lost narrative, a project that took probably about a year. Suggestions are now being taken for new televisions shows to start in on, with priority being given to long serial- narrative-type shows over shows more made up of stand-alone single episodes. Some of my associates in the world of fandom are pushing me to watch Heroes, which I haven't seen a single episode of yet. This plan has three big "pros" in its column: Although I still consider myself a comics reader (100 things I love about comics, here), I read superhero comics nowadays only intermittently. There are probably lots of reasons for this, but one of them might be that (most) superhero comics don't seem to have developed a solution to the question of long-term continuity. I have less of a sense now than ever that any given comics arc is part of a continuous narrative that stretches back in any meaningful way. In today's comics industry, with rare exceptions, plot arcs seem designed to function as stand-alone narratives, essentially interchangeable in order, leading to an overall feeling of stasis in the universe and reducing the amount of import or weight that any given arc might carry. (Old-man griping here: this felt different during the 80s when I was reading Claremont's famously long-form run on the Uncanny X-Men.) Adam Cadre summarizes what I'm talking about in his sharply-written distinction between the X-Men runs of Stan Lee, Chris Claremont, and Grant Morrison, respectively: "[A] problem that has always plagued superhero comics is that of stasis. Though there are some amazing writers on a few of the titles, these are still commercial properties they're writing. In the early days, characters' status quo changed enormously over time: characters grew up (Spider-Man went through high school almost in real time and then went off to college, for instance), their relationships with one another changed, as did their looks and powers... but then that all stopped. Marvel's core business is no longer comics; it's maintaining a stable of properties that can be turned into movies and toys. These properties have to stay recognizable. So if a writer dares to allow characters to grow, to overcome their problems — the hard-luck college guy ends a string of bad relationships and is happily married, the android develops human emotion, the villain goes straight, a character dies a noble death — someone else gets brought in and it's 'back to basics!' Divorce the wife! Wipe the robot's memory! Make the reformed guy go bad again! Resurrect the dead chick!" Nicely put. This isn't entirely bleak: it just means that comics characters are functioning more as mythic figures / archetypes / symbol systems then as "characters," per se. (One could argue, in fact, that the best comics creators are the ones who work with this in mind—Morrison here would qualify, and possibly Paul Pope (more notes on that here)). Still, there's a way in which I can't help but feel like Marvel and DC missed the chance to do something amazing (amazing artistically, not so much commercially) by having their characters "age out." The analogy I keep thinking of is with sports: why not have the Justice League of America be a storied institution like the Chicago Cubs, with young rookies, older vets, and elderly players bowing gently into retirement? The idea of sport as long-form narrative has been explored thoughtfully (see this essay on "Hypertext and Baseball" over at the Eastgate site, or, more poetically, Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association). And it's notable, I think, that two of the most beloved and critically-acclaimed graphic novels of all time—The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen—are both centrally about being a superhero in middle age. All of that said, here's the Comics Should Be Good editors' picks for 2006, in two parts (one, two). Lots of superhero stuff on there, some of it even looks good. Part two of "this week's thoughts on seriality" will be on videogames, although whether I'll finish it within a week is anybody's guess. Labels: comics, media commentary, narrative, writing
Friday, January 05, 2007
mpls II In praise of Minneapolis, I can say that I found its restaurants delicious, its coffeehouses spacious and relaxed, its independent bookstores ample and well-stocked. This comic book store deserves special commendation, especially for introducing me to the very sweet comics of Simone Lea and Liz Prince. The Walker exhibits I mentioned before I went were fine and dandy, but I think I was more personally intrigued (and humbled) by the festival happening over at The Minnesota Center for Book Arts: I'm coveting a letterpress now more than ever (as well as, um, a place to put it), but I'd settle for a copy of this book. Thanks to Darren for the tip. Labels: comics
Monday, November 21, 2005
It's been years since I've closely followed superhero comics—I haven't even been able to get around to looking at the trade paperbacks collecting Grant Morrison's highly-lauded and conceptually-interesting work on New X-Men and Justice League. That said, I'm looking forward to Paul Pope's upcoming Batman: Year 100, if only because Pope does one of the best versions of Robin I've ever seen— Actually, it's more than that: as much as I like Pope's art, I'm especially interested in his whole kooky theoretical take on how comics work as an iconographic language (developed spottily through the years in strange little essays which have popped up here and there). I'm not sure I grasp the exact particulars of the theory, but I'm certain that Pope is nothing if not alert to the storied weight that superheroes carry as visual icons: this knowledge all but guarantees that he'll do something interesting now that he has one of the most famous icons from all of comics (arguably one of the most famous visual icons of the entire 20th century) to play with. Labels: comics
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
The meme that's going around in the comics blogosphere at the moment (birthed by Fred Hembeck, believe it or not) is to blog 100 things you love about comics, and since I'm an inveterate list-maker and long-time comics lover I decided why not?: I may come back and round out this list with link-annnotations later.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
The Filth is Grant Morrison's most recent piece of long-form comics narrative, a thirteen-issue series published by Vertigo and recently collected into a trade paperback. The Filth is a pretty trippy compound of provocative ideas and strange imagery, but it doesn’t really work as a story, and over the past two months I’ve been reading and re-reading the collection trying to figure out where exactly the flaw might be found. (The post that follows will contain minor spoilers (and postmodern theory), so beware.)
In the book-length study Postmodern Fiction, author Brian McHale discusses the concept of "ontological oscillation": the way that postmodern narratives tend to set up two or more incompatible worlds and lets the text "flicker" between the different realities without necessarily establishing one as more-or-less "real" than another within the space of the story (although some may bear a greater degree of resemblance to our own "real" world than others). This model maps neatly onto The Filth: within the first three issues we're introduced to three distinct ontic worlds. The first of these is the world which seems (initially at least) to be fairly congruent with our own: the contemporary urban Britain where everyman Greg Feely works at his office job and buys pornography essentially functions as a stand-in for our own world's contemporary urban Britain. There are some minor inconsistencies—for instance, early on in the series we're introduced to a race of nanotech organisms evolved by a Nobel-Prize-winning scientist—but daily life in this first world seems like it would be more-or-less familiar.
The second world is the one into which Feely is abducted, the world referred to as "the Crack," which houses the headquarters of a secret hygiene organization called the Hand. "Are we on another planet?" Feely asks, bewildered by the funhouse architecture of Hand HQ and the blighted landscape outside. "Am I in the future? Or in virtual reality?" The answer isn't exactly any of the above, but it's clear that the Crack is a kind of para-space where the normal rules of reality don't apply: monkeys speak, giant submarines are powered by cathedral-batteries, time and space operate in unusual fashion. And then we have a third world, the least real, introduced at the beginning of Issue Three: "the Paperverse," a comic-book universe that emulates the look-and-feel of old Marvel and DC comics, featuring cities like "Omnitropolis" and super-powered characters like "Alpha-Sapiens" and "Machine Girl."
Morrison spends a lot of time exploring the permeability of the boundary between these three worlds: Hand agents covertly (and not entirely benignly) manipulate events in the real world; Feely is disoriented and troubled by the high weirdness of the Crack, mostly wanting to return to caring for his sick cat in his normal life; the Superman-like Secret Orginal cripples himself by leaving behind the action-packed but comparatively innocent world of the Paperverse and punching into the perverse, morally-ambiguous universe of the Crack. And for the most part, all of this works effectively as a means of bringing dramatic tension into The Filth (although the events occuring at Paperverse / Crack boundary never really amount to more than a tantalizing digression).
But one of the difficulties with writing a postmodern narrative containing universes that lack a firm ontological basis is that events occurring in those universes begin to lose some of their weight and consequence. Ontological instablity is a condition with its own degree of tragedy, and Morrison has proven himself able to exploit this in the past (see Deus Ex Machina, the volume which collects some of his run on Animal Man, or the unsettling conclusion of his more recent three-issue series Seaguy) but in The Filth the pathos-generating events tend to be more traditional, and when they occur in a space like the Crack they have a tendency to feel featherweight: the death of Hand agent Cameron Jones from time-accelerated lymphatic cancer just doesn't seem to matter that much because the universe where it happens has already been established as a place where nearly anything goes.
Pathos in The Filth functions more effectively in the "real world," at least for a while, but by mid-series the science-fictional elements of that world have begun to ramp up, which violates the terms of that universe: we’re introduced to elements like a floating nation-ship, the Libertania, in Issue Seven and a man who can manifest clouds of "visible thought" above his head in Issue Ten. With no recognizable reality left for the weirdness to orient around, the story begins to feel completely ungrounded, and events which seem intended to carry emotional weight begin to fall flat: it's difficult to feel like the death of a sick cat is "real" when it happens in a universe where events like the destruction of a nation of over 100,000 people and the mutilation and assassination of the President of the United States seem to have no notable consequences.
There’s a lot to like in The Filth, but I’d stop short of claiming (as the Comics Journal claims) that "The Filth is the best thing Morrison has ever written." It strives for a certain degree of dramatic gravity at the same time as it systematically kicks out its own dramatic supports.
Labels: book_commentary, comics
Sunday, February 06, 2005
I've sort of given up formally reviewing zines over in the Invisible City Zines District, but since I still get review copies of things in the mail every once in a while, I figure here's as good a place as any to talk about ones that strike me.
I really like An Inside Job, a tiny zine of dream comics by Eli "Hob" Bishop (who also does the weblog Weather Head). It adheres to the standard of dream comic excellence set by Rick Veitch's Rare Bit Fiends or Jesse Reklaw's Slow Wave.
The other really remarkable zine that's come in the mail lately has been Here, a magazine archiving "the stories behind where you are." They sent me Issue 6, which features a heartbreaking article about the "Lord God bird," an interesting roundtable on gentrification, and little autobiographical sketches submitted by readers about the places where they live (in a style reminiscent of the reader-written section of The Sun).
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
You "sequential art" fans out there may be interested in checking out Prophecy Magazine, a high-end-lookin' comics anthology mag.
I'm speaking here as someone who misses the spectacular boondoggle of Buzz Buzz, the tabloid-sized comics magazine by the brilliant and frequently overcommitted Paul Pope. Labels: comics
Saturday, January 25, 2003
James Kochalka's wonderful daily Sketchbook Diary comics are now being posted online daily at James' website, American Elf. Labels: comics
Thursday, July 25, 2002
I bought a copy of the second issue of James Kochalka's Sketchbook Diaries today, and I'll be buying the first issue as soon as I can hunt up a copy.
The premise behind the Sketchbook Diaries is simple—every day, Kochalka draws a four-panel comic loosely detailing something that happened to him. He plays with his cat, he gets drunk, he engages in goofy talk with his wife. It's simple, but immensely pleasing.
I'm not sure why I love diary stuff so much, but I do, and I always have. I used to love the comic strip Jim's Journal, and I'm still interested in diary comics of all sorts, and, really, anything where people just document their days (including weblogs and journal sites).
Simple voyeurism? Labels: comics
Tuesday, April 30, 2002
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