Verse Chorus Verse: Jeff's Capsule Reviews from 6/8

Does it bode ill for my reviews when I can't think of a clever thing to say while convincing you to follow me behind the jump for capsule reviews?  It probably is, isn't it?  Ah, well.  I just finished watching the screen adaptation of The Black Dahlia.  I mean, I'd heard that movie would be bad, but there were wrong casting decisions, terrible direction, and some bad mistakes in adapting Ellroy's skeezy epic to the screen. As a quasi-fan of Brian DePalma, it's a painful, painful movie to watch.  And I blame it for my inability to bring you a witty intro: the movie is a like a form of slow-acting toxin to the higher brain functions. Anyway, after the jump:  lower brain function reviews of Empowered: Ten Questions for the Maidman, Invincible Iron Man #504, Witch Doctor #0, and more.

EMPOWERED: TEN QUESTIONS FOR THE MAIDMAN:  Maidman -- the cross-dressing vigilante of Adam Warren's Empowered universe -- gets his own one-shot with alternating black and white sections by Adam Warren and color sections by Emily Warren. It was a book I wanted to deeply like, but really only admired. You can read this one-shot as a deconstruction of Batman (Maidman is one of the few non-powered superheroes in the Emp universe and easily the most feared), a deconstruction of Batman analogs (in some ways, this is the funniest issue of Midnighter never published), or maybe even a spoof of the cape industry's current trend in Mary-Sueisms.  Alternately, you could also take it as a face value, with Warren using the same gimmicks to get the reader to like Maidman that Johns or Bendis or a host of others use these days -- (a) introduce character; (b) have everyone talk admiringly of character; (c) show character doing something impossibly awesome; (d) profit.  Empowered: Ten Questions... shows Warren as being as skilled a practitioner of the current bag of comics writing magic tricks as anyone currently working.  I'm glad he at least has his own little universe to toy about with, but I wish I could get more worked up about a more-or-less OK one-shot...in no small part because I worry about him getting it yanked out from under him if the sales aren't there.  Vexingly OK.

INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #504:  Really interesting to read a book where the regular writer is caught off-balance by the obligatory line-wide event when the same guy is writing that event, too.  I mean, that two page scene with Tony and Pepper is really quite good for what it is.  But the meat of the issue, where Tony goes to Paris because one of the hammers of the Worthy has landed there, is underwhelming. Fraction clearly built the issue to that last page climax but it feels like that's the only thing he's trying to  accomplish.  So when you get to that last page, it definitely has some punch to it but it also eaves you feeling super-empty and annoyed immediately after.

Also, that last page what feels like part of an ongoing tug-of-war between Fraction and Larrocca. Instead of focusing on rendering that kinda-important pile of stones Tony is on top of, Larroca focuses on the building beside it.  It doesn't feel quite like a "fuck you" from one collaborator to another, but it does suggest painfully opposing goals\.  $3.99 price-tag + ineffective storytelling + forced event crossover=AWFULness.

POWER-MAN & IRON FIST #5: Similarly, last issue of this miniseries turned out very meh in the end despite my modest expectations.  Wellinton Alves' work ended up rushed and ugly, and Van Lente's script tried to do wayyyy too much in too short a time.  Not only do both heroes have romantic relationships resolved in this issue, but a mystery is solved, fight scenes are had, and the creepy Comedia Del'Morte are...well, frankly, I have no idea what happened to them.  It's a shame because I was won over by so much less with that back-up story from Amazing Spider-Man. (On the plus side,with very little rejiggering, Van Lente and Alves could re-tool this as an arc of the post-Morrison Batman & Robin and it'd fit right in.)  I'm tempted to get all Rex Reedy on you and say this puts the EH back in "meh," but I won't...in part because it was AWFUL.

SECRET AVENGERS #13: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! No. CRAP.

WALKING DEAD #85/WITCH DOCTOR #0:  Although I like the swerve Kirkman made with this storyline a few issues back, I don't know if there's really much more going on than that.  I suspect as we come 'round issue #100, Kirkman's biggest flaw --his ability to dramatize character development is rudimentary at best, and so he has to have scenes where his characters explain their motivations to one another for us to get it --  is getting more and more apparent. While I'm at it, Charlie Adlard's biggest strength -- drawing a large cast of characters to keep them easily identifiable without resorting to any flashy tricks -- may also be hindering this book:  the dramatic scenes either run to the inert or the occasionally overheated.  Energy, ambition and craft have gotten these guys farther and higher than anyone would've suspected and I in no way mean to diminish their achievement.  But I think if this book is going to make another 85 issues, they're going to need to shake up their skillsets for a change, not their storyline. OK stuff.

As for WITCH DOCTOR #0, despite having very little interest based on the material I'd seen online, I ended up enjoying the hell out of it.  Everyone [by which I mean at least me] has always wanted to write a biologic explanation for vampires, a la Matheson's treatment in I am Legend, but writer Brandon Seifert really goes to town here. Lines like "his saliva's got the usual bloodfeeder chemistry set-- vasodilator, anticoagulant and an anesthetic--plus some interesting mystical secretions.  I think one's a anterograde amnesiac--" make my heart go pitter-pat, and Seifert has a lot of them.  I can easily see how it might feel dry to some, but to me it showed a commitment to research and world-building I think you really need to make a series about a doctor (even a mystical one) work.  As for Lukas Ketner's art, it's enjoyably quirky, especially when it chooses to go detailed and when it decides to loosen up: panels of this remind me of Wrightson, others of William Stout, and still others of Jack Davis, and I could never figure out when the next swerve was going to happen.  VERY GOOD stuff and I'm definitely on-board for the first few issues of the regular title now.

WOLVERINE #9:  Not the most recent issue I know, but so much more satisfying than issue #10, I figured you'd forgive me for writing about it instead.  I mean, to begin with:  God damn, this is some gorgeous looking work.  Daniel Acuna (who I guess is doing both the art and the colors) really sold me on this story about a mysterious assassin (Lord Deathstrike) and Wolverine both trying to hunt down Mystique on the streets of San Francisco. But I should point out that there's three full pages of wordless action that feel perfectly placed in the script and I think writer Jason Aaron should really be commended for having the confidence to let the art do its stuff.  And there's also a hilariously over-the-top assassination scene at the beginning that I loved.  I suspect this book is going to have diminishing sales in no small part because Aaron just can't keep away from writing Wolverine's adventures with a strong dash of the absurdly extreme, and a larger audience for this character really want this stuff served straight-up.  I can understand that desire (especially when you get issues like #10 where it's Logan vs. the Man with the Jai-Alai Feet) but when you get such an artist who can sell you on both the sweet & sour sauce of Aaron's mix of awesome and absurd? It's really pretty satisfying.  This was one hell of a  VERY GOOD issue.

UNCANNY X-FORCE #11:  I guess this is what you can do with okay art and good characterization--you can make me care somewhat about stuff I wouldn't ordinarily care about. I missed out on the original Age of Apocalypse stuff powering the plot here and yet, thanks to a forty-issue Exiles habit, I'm pretty familiar with what's going on.  In fact, arguably I'm too familiar as I felt like I was at least a beat or two ahead of the plot at all times.  But at least some of the time I was surprised by what the characters said or how they said it.   I still quietly pine for the awesomeness of the first five issues, but this was on the high end of OK for me.

SECRET AVENGERS #13: Seriously, though.  Do you need to know why I thought this was terrible?  Well, let's just say when your plot about a Washington invasion hinges on the fierce determination of a congressman who also happens to be a magical negro mutant, and that leads to Lincoln from the Lincoln Monument and all the dinosaurs from the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History rising up to hold the line, then I think it's safe to say things have gone wrong.  Weirdly, I could've bought it in a DC book -- for whatever reason, I expect the surreal and the schmaltzy to intermingle more freely there -- but here it seems like a big ol' misfire.  Again, to sum up:  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! No. CRAP.

And that's my week in pamphlets.  As for my TRADE PICK....

BAKUMAN, VOL. 5:  Oh man, how I love this series.  It's not an easy sell, I know, and I'll be the first to admit that first volume is more than a little forced.  And in fact, here in volume 5, there is still a surprising number of misfires:  for example, there's a chapter here about an artist who is so committed to proving his worth to his writer that he draws pages outside her window in the middle of a blizzard and it's really treacly and ineffective. And there are more than a few hilariously cynical moves by the writer and artist to pander to their publishers:  in more than a few places, the editors and publishers of Shonen Jump are treated with a degree of reverence that borders on the fanatical.

On the other hand, Bakuman has changed my understanding of how manga is created so much I've since read other titles with new eyes --I doubt I would've enjoyed my thirteen volume romp through One-Piece nearly as much without it. And even more than that, I'm totally a sucker for the way Ohba and Obata have introduced so many different young manga creators and then blurred the lines between enemies and allies so much you realize none really exist.  As a book about the comics industry properly should, Bakuman is very much about who you have to decide to trust and the possible long-term implications of those choices.  But it's also a book where competition doesn't preclude comradeship and that totally hits a sweet spot of insecurities and needs I didn't really know I had.  Really, the series is so very far from perfect it's kinda painful...and yet the last four volumes now have been some of my favorite reading of the last year.  VERY, VERY GOOD for me, but you really not might feel at all the same.

Six Slices Of Terror: Graeme Looks At Some Fear Itself Tie-Ins

So, last week I did lots of Flashpoint tie-ins, so I thought I'd play fair and read lots of Fear Itself tie-ins this week. Well, it was that, or give you my terrible joke in place of a real review of ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #159 ("Peter Parker may be taking a long time to die in this "Death of Spider-Man" arc, but Brian Michael Bendis has successfully killed off one thing pretty quickly: Any interest I had left in this series." Yeah, I know. But it's Crap, let's be honest). So: Let's get fearfilled, shall we? FEAR ITSELF: DEADPOOL #1: I'm sure I should like this more. God knows, playing Deadpool as Ambush Bug and making fun of Fear Itself has a lot of potential, and I like the repeated Doctor Who in-joke (In-jokes are cool) (See what I did there?), but after a fun start - I like the idea that families in the Marvel Universe would consider buying security systems to keep them protected from super-powered terrorists - it quickly turns into something that's not got enough jokes to make it worth reading. Then again, I've never really thought Deadpool was anything more than Eh.

FEAR ITSELF: THE DEEP #1: Oh, let's be honest; it's The Defenders. Why no-one at Marvel wanted to let it be called The Defenders, I don't know, but nonetheless: Dr. Strange? Namor? The Silver Surfer? She-Hulk, subbing in for a Worthy-Hulk who's off doing nothing in the main series? That's totally the Defenders. As an opener, it's slow but has potential, if potential that I worry is going to stay weighed down by the resolution presumably being handled in the main series at some point. A low Okay for now, though.

FEAR ITSELF: FEARSOME FOUR #1: If you want to know what's wrong with Fear Itself as an event, you could do worse than pick up this issue. No-one really gets properly introduced, with the exception of Man-Thing - who isn't even one of the titular four - and Nighthawk (who seems curiously out of character, with parodic Frank Miller Batman narration, but I've not really been keeping up with him recently, so maybe he's been doing that for awhile), and the situation gets a lip service intro that just confuses matters even more than they already were. Why is everyone so afraid? Well, if you believe Howard the Duck, "the news has been pumping it into us for a good long while, but now it's outta control..." although we don't find out why. So, instead, you have characters who are essentially meaningless unless you knew them already running around trying to do something that doesn't necessarily make sense because of something that doesn't make sense either. Awful, in other words.

FEAR ITSELF: THE HOME FRONT #1, 2: One of my genuine surprises about Siege was that Siege: Embedded was one of the best things about it. After suffering through Civil War: Front Line and World War Hulk: Front Line, I thought, "Wait! Maybe they've got this "ground level tie-in" thing right, finally!" And then I read these two issues, and... They're just a mess, with Speedball going undercover in an organization dedicated to hating him for... some reason (And then they find him out! But Miriam Sharpe, the woman whose son died in Civil War and who got Tony to side with George Bush and who, let's be honest, no-one has actually thought about for years, saves him from a mob because, hey, everyone can get past their fear, right? Right?) in a garishly-illustrated, horrendously-written story, backed up with pointless two-pagers by Howard Chaykin - Seriously, he's gone beyond phoning it in with these; he's now texting his assistant to phone it in for him, it feels like - and apparently a random series of shorts with various Marvel characters dealing with the still-unexplained-in-the-main-series psychic fallout from the main series. And it's all just there, with no shine or energy. It's checklist comics, flat and Awful.

FEAR ITSELF: SPIDER-MAN #1,2 : Right up until the last page of the second issue, I was thinking to myself that this was the tie-in that was doing everything right. I felt engaged in the story, and it felt as if Chris Yost was doing far more heavy lifting explaining thing than anyone else (Showing what "The Fear" actually means on a human level - I really, really like the line "That's one of the benefits of the mask. I can weep openly pretty discreetly," for some reason - and managing to connect it to the Asgardians story from the main series, with Spider-Man asking himself "Is this what happens when the gods abandon Earth?" Which, you know, I'm glad someone is trying to tie everything together). Mike McKone's art is great, as well, clear and bold and all in all, this feels like a great little mini... up until the last page of the second issue, when we get the teaser for the next page, and all of the small scale stuff that's working beautifully gets thrown out in favor of seeing Spidey up against the Worthified Thing next issue. Now there's something to be afraid of: Watching someone make a tie-in work, only to get that solution wrenched out of their hands at the last moment in favor of one of many "The Worthified Thing vs. Hero X" stories that are going to appear in the next few months. That said, there two issues are Good.

FEAR ITSELF: YOUTH IN REVOLT #1: In comparison, this is just Awful, with Sean McKeever trying to fit way too much into the book at the cost of credibility and clarity: Of all the heroes Steve Rogers asks to lead a new Initiative, it's one of the Slingers? And he manages to get an army of super-heroes together in how short a time? And they can all get to Washington DC even though the rest of the country is apparently a mess because of The Fear how? Still, it's good to know that, despite everything going to hell, there's still time for overly familiar soap operatics between generic superheroes that have no discernibly different personalities. And then - get this, we've never seen this before and especially not in The Home Front series - the regular people are so scared they turn on the superheroes! Shocking! Or, perhaps, just shockingly familiar, and filled with no characters that seem to be worth caring about.

One thing about reading all of these books together: You realize (a) how little there is to mine from what Fear Itself has given us so far (Apparently either "People are afraid and the superheroes have to stop them doing something bad" or "The Worthy have hammers and like to fight people"), which seems... odd, and wrong somehow. Shouldn't the idea of a world gripped by fear, even if it is for reasons that make no sense yet - The mention of a "Fear Wave" that I thought was in Spider-Man seems to have been my imagination, brought on by the timeline of "The Fear," weirdly enough - have some more weight and potential to it? I feel that, for all its claims of being a new Civil War, Fear Itself is like a bad photocopy of Blackest Night, but even more repetitive. But surely we're going to get some kind of midway point reveal that will change everything, right? Right?

Arriving 6/15/2011

(which is something else entirely, actually)  

Five Wednesdays in a month, means at least one will be tiny. Looks like this is exhibit A!  Still, the new WALKING DEAD TP is in, so that might make up for it single-handedly....

28 DAYS LATER #24 ALPHA FLIGHT #1 (OF 8) FEAR ARCHIE & FRIENDS #156 ARCHIE & FRIENDS DOUBLE DIGEST #6 AVENGERS #14 FEAR AVENGERS ACADEMY #15 FEAR BATGIRL #22 BATMAN #711 CAPE (ONE SHOT) LEGACY ED CAPTAIN AMERICA CORPS #1 (OF 5) CINDERELLA FABLES ARE FOREVER #5 (OF 6) CONAN ISLAND OF NO RETURN #1 CROSSED PSYCHOPATH #3 (OF 6) DAKEN DARK WOLVERINE #10 DARKWING DUCK #13 DC COMICS PRESENTS JLA BLACK BAPTISM #1 DC UNIVERSE ONLINE LEGENDS #10 DEADLANDS ONE SHOT DEADPOOLMAX #9 DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS #8 EMMA #4 (OF 5) FEAR ITSELF HOME FRONT #3 (OF 7) FEAR FEAR ITSELF YOUTH IN REVOLT #2 (OF 6) FEAR FEMALE FORCE AYN RAND FLASHPOINT DEADMAN AND THE FLYING GRAYSONS #1 (OF 3) FLASHPOINT GRODD OF WAR #1 FLASHPOINT LEGION OF DOOM #1 (OF 3) FLASHPOINT WONDER WOMAN AND THE FURIES #1 (OF 3) GEARS OF WAR #17 GENERATION HOPE #8 GLADSTONES SCHOOL FOR WORLD CONQUERORS #2 GODZILLA GANGSTERS & GOLIATHS #1 (OF 5) GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES #1 (OF 4) GREEN HORNET #16 GREEN LANTERN MOVIE PREQUEL ABIN SUR #1 HELLBLAZER #280 HULK #35 INVINCIBLE #80 INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #505 FEAR KIRBY GENESIS #1 LADY DEATH (ONGOING) #6 LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #14 MALIGNANT MAN #3 (OF 4) MICKEY MOUSE #309 NORTHLANDERS #41 POWER GIRL #25 RED SONJA BLUE ONE SHOT RUSE #4 (OF 4) SIMPSONS COMICS #179 SNAKE EYES ONGOING (IDW) #2 SONIC UNIVERSE #29 STAN LEE SOLDIER ZERO #9 SUPERGIRL #65 SUPERMAN BATMAN #85 TEEN TITANS #96 THAT HELLBOUND TRAIN #1 (OF 3) TINY TITANS #41 UNCANNY X-MEN #538 UNDYING LOVE #3 WARLORD OF MARS DEJAH THORIS #4 WITCHBLADE #145 X-FACTOR #221 X-MEN #13 X-MEN PRELUDE TO SCHISM #3 (OF 04)

Books / Mags / Stuff AL WILLIAMSON ARCHIVES SC VOL 02 ANYAS GHOST GN ARKHAM ASYLUM MADNESS TP ASTRONAUT ACADEMY ZERO GRAVITY GN BLACK & WHITE IMAGES FIFTH ANNUAL COLLECTION BLEACH 3-IN-1 ED VOL 01 BOMB QUEEN TP VOL 06 TIME BOMB CAPTAIN AMERICA RED MENACE ULTIMATE COLLECTION TP CORNBOY GN FANTASTIC FOUR BY WAID & WIERINGO ULT COLL TP BOOK 01 GREEN LANTERN BRIGHTEST DAY HC HELLBOY LIBRARY ED HC VOL 04 CROOKED MAN HULK HULK NO MORE HC HULK TP GRAY INCORRUPTIBLE TP VOL 04 JUSTICE LEAGUE CRY FOR JUSTICE TP LEGION LOST HC LEVEL UP GN LIL DEPRESSED BOY TP VOL 01 SHE IS STAGGERING MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS TP DIGEST HULK RUNAWAYS TP VOL 05 ESCAPE TO NEW YORK DIGEST SECRET WARRIORS PREM HC VOL 05 NIGHT SIXTH GUN TP VOL 02 STAR TREK CLASSIC MOVIE OMNIBUS TP (RES) TEEN ANGELS & NEW MUTANTS SC TERMINATOR TP 2029 TO 1984 UNCANNY X-FORCE PREM HC DEATHLOK NATION UNCANNY X-MEN TP QUARANTINE VADEBONCOEUR COLLECTION OF IMAGES #12 VAMPIRELLA MASTERS SERIES TP VOL 04 VISIONARIES WALKING DEAD TP VOL 14 NO WAY OUT WELCOME TO ODDVILLE HC WOLVERINE AND JUBILEE PREM HC CURSE OF MUTANTS

What looks good to YOU?

-B

Tilting #203 is live

Find it at CBR, all about how the market is likely to respond to DC's reboot plan.  

I thought I was clear, but, man, already the talk back threads are filled with people who don't seem to have much reading comprehension?

Anyway, chat here, as well, if you like.

-B

Wait, What? Ep. 43: The Men from W.A.F.F.L.E.

Yes, here we are in "deep cover," doing our best to pose as the type of fiends who would cause all kinds of trouble to the Doom Patrol.  Graeme McMillan and I are the men from W.A.F.F.L.E.!

(If the Waffle Window wants to make us official mascots, we'd bothBE  honored and thrilled....)

But since pictures are only worth a thousand words, and we have at least ten times that to offer you every week, here's Wait What, Ep. 43 for you -- everything you'd want to know about our takes on DC's September reboot, with perhaps an Alan Moore imitation or two thrown in.  It's an hour and fifty minutes of end of days frivolity, available to you on iTunes or right here, more or less right now:

Wait, What? Ep. 43: The Men From W.A.F.F.L.E.

Thanks for listening and, as always, we hope you enjoy!

Savage Symposium: PAYING FOR IT (Part 4 of 4)

And here's the big wrap-up to this week's discussion of PAYING FOR IT! I hope you relished it as much as I.

Question 5: And then my last question for you is “Did the argument work for you, or change your thinking on this issue whatsoever?” I mention this because that while I really didn’t much like the underlying book, I’m fairly naturally inclined to be on Brown’s side on this. I live in San Francisco, and, of course we’re known for liberal positions on sex, and I’m all for sex work to be very legal, but I also want to be sure that the workers are safe and healthy and well cared for and compensated. And that almost certainly entails some kind of regulation because humans are messy messy creatures. I’ve never seen a prostitute, and really don’t want to (heck, even the one time I was in a strip club [in Portland, to pick up a keg of beer for a party] I thought it was one of the most dehumanizing experiences of my life -- I can’t even imagine what sex would be like in that kind of transactional way), but I certainly support the underlying notion that consenting informed adults should be able to do much of what they want to with their own bodies. Brown didn’t sway me away from my view of “regulation is needed”, however. I don’t know if you’re closer or farther from me, but did this book change your perception, even fractionally?

ABHAY: Do I think that romantic love and marriage are evil institutions which we should replace with widespread prostitution?  No. No, I think he’s fucked in the head. You know, congratulations to the guy for finding something that works for him, but I’m not attending any church that tithes by the half-hour. As for his other, less obviously batshit arguments-- I thought he had a good response for “wouldn’t you-as-a-kid be ashamed of adult-you.”  The rest are a blur already, though.  When I do bad things, I just do bad things and be a bad person, and I say to myself “well, whatever works,” and that’s good enough for me...?  If I take music off the internet (hypothetically), I don’t spend my time trying to make idiotic arguments about the RIAA being evil, in some weird attempt to make myself feel better about being a fucking thief.  I’m too busy listening to free music and enjoying the sweet, sweet fruits of crime. Hypothetically.  Brown really reminded me of those people, the “I’m not stealing-- I’m sticking it to the RIAA” crowd, so shrilly insistent on their nobility, even though no one really cares how noble they are and plus they get to listen to free music.  See also, potheads who say things like “it comes from the Earth.”  So do tarantulas.  Theft, hookers, strippers, drugs, arson-- those things should just be their own rewards.

TUCKER: I do think the way prostitutes and sex workers get treated is fucked, and should be changed. I thought that it should be legalized before I read Paying For It, and I still feel that way after reading it. On the subject of regulation--I just feel like that’s a waste of my time to engage with. Do I think aliens should be allowed to come to Earth? Sure I do. But I’m not going to continue that thought experiment past that “sure I do” and start coming up with a bunch of future magic rules regarding these visits, because it’s a pointless exercise. If Chester Brown cares that much about sex workers and legalization, let him continue on the roads to changing the rules surrounding it, and let him propose various kinds of regulatory or non-regulatory solutions to those legalized prostitutes who live in the future. I’ve got my own pet issues that I worry about and donate money to and wish more people cared about, and I’m content to focus on those.

JEFF: I think trying to argue for the legalization of sex work by talking about a john’s experience is absolutely 100% the wrong way to argue for it, but it seems to be the approach johns go for, time and again.  I’m no expert on the subject, but hasn’t it been pretty definitively established that any culture in which sex work is illegal punishes the workers much harder than they do the customers?  Even in states here in the U.S. where johns have their pictures telecast on late night TV, that’s nothing compared to the women who end up even more openly shamed, charged with crimes, and just generally shat on.  Arguing that sex work is legal because it would make the lives of johns easier is such a fucked up and entitled argument. It sounds like someone arguing for the more humane treatment of animals in slaughterhouses because it’ll make the food taste better.

And maybe that’s why Brown assembles everything into PAYING FOR IT in the way he does: he believes any dude will gladly pay for sex if we can just get rid of the social stigma, the restrictive laws, and the lie of romantic love.  Therefore, if he can appeal to men about the benefits of legalized prostitution, the world will change for the better (because men are the ones who run the world and they’re going to be the ones who will make the change, right?), not just for johns,  but for sex workers as well. I dunno.

I do think that by showing sex work from the point of view of a john, he makes some stellar points why people should not engage in sex work. Although he doesn’t dwell on it, Brown goes from a guy who tips at every encounter to a guy who thinks, in mid-coitus, “Unfriendly, not very pretty, no blow job -- no tip for this one.”  He starts as a guy who thinks, “In the future, I’ll try to limit myself to ten minutes of sex in a thirty minute appointment,” and becomes Mr. “That she seems to be in pain is kind of a turn-on for me, but I also feel bad for her.  I’m gonna cut this short and come quickly.” [Emphasis is mine.]   When our encounters with fellow human beings become economic transactions, bit by bit we unlearn what’s important about interacting with other people -- and what’s important is literally, just that, interacting with other people -- and begin making sure the economic transaction is worth our money.

The point of paying for it is to make sure we get what we want, but over time the human interaction in sex work becomes something beside the point, as we slip down the rabbit hole of obsession and fetish. Maybe Brown didn’t continue exploring the path of “hey, I really enjoy hurting women while having sex,” but I think it’s safe to assume there are johns in the same situation who would and have: because the other person’s say in it is already (at least partially) compromised by the money, and your sense of compassion is already that much more eroded by all your transactions -- you’ve already gone from “In the future, I’ll to try limit myself...” to “...and come quickly.”

Another problem with turning human interaction into an economic transaction is it further distorts and complicates human beings’ ability to be honest with one another.  Sex workers will sometimes not want to have sex with you, just as lovers will not always want to have sex at the same time, but a sex worker will not be the lover that pushes your hand away and tells you why it’s not going to happen.  Sex workers have to have sex, because that’s what they do.  It doesn’t stop there, as we all know:  sex workers have to have sex when they don’t want to have sex, and most of them feel pressured by various forces (the money, the view of themselves as good at what they do, the knowledge you will not come as quickly if you don’t think they are enjoying themselves) to convince you they really want to have sex and they want to have it with you.

We pay a price as human beings when we force ourselves to go so heavily against everything we’ve been hardwired to feel. Many soldiers suffer from PTSD when they go, again and again, into the place in themselves that requires them to survive, to act contrary to every instinct that is telling them to flee.  And I think it is the same for many sex workers who force themselves to act contrary to every instinct and become something for you to fuck, again and again, no matter how they really feel about it.

Most of us get depressed when we have to smile at the asshole at the other end of the counter and all he’s doing is saying something incredibly stupid about who’s stronger, Hulk or Thor, or when we have to laugh at something our stupid boss tells us.  That horrible fake smile the check out person at the grocery store gives us when they hand us our change?  The look in their eyes that reveals they dislike you deeply while they’re thanking you for their business?  Brown thinks a future where being greeted by that smile and that look when we open the door to our bedroom is a really good one.  He doesn’t mind a world where we’re depressed about smiling or laughing, because he’s free of the burden of working up the confidence to talk to an attractive woman.  It seems like a spectacularly bad trade to me.

For a guy who insists that he sees sex as a deeply spiritual, Brown apparently doesn’t believe in a spirituality that requires personal sacrifice -- or as he puts it when one of his prostitutes argues for romance, “Yeah, effort.  Romantic love is work.  Call me lazy, but I don’t want to do the work.”  Although I feel sex work should be legalized and regulated, there’s a lot to recommend the world of effort -- where even when we fail to connect, we learn something about ourselves, about other people, about the way the world works.  Otherwise, we all risk becoming whores, not in the “sex for money” way of it, but in the way Henry Miller defined it in Tropic of Cancer, in the way I thought of the term when I saw Chester Brown’s face at the back of his book, his kind and not-unhandsome face which many women wouldn’t require payment to caress (unlike some of the damaged and ugly people who would never know intimacy if they weren’t willing to pay), his satisfied, reptilian face that would rather pay for it than get to know a woman he didn’t find attractive, or work to keep loving a woman he did:

Germaine was a whore all the way through, even down to her good heart, her whore’s heart which is not really a good heart but a lazy one, an indifferent, flaccid heart that can be touched for a moment, a heart without reference to any fixed point within, a big, flaccid whore’s heart that can detach itself for a moment from its true center.  However vile and circumscribed was that world she had created for herself, nevertheless she functioned in it superbly.

Savage Symposium: PAYING FOR IT (part 3 of 4)

Question #4: Question 4: Structure of the argument and choices of presentation.  I don’t know if I would have thought this if it weren’t for the appendixes, but it seems to me that Brown undercuts his own argument pretty deeply. I absolutely believe that the ending of the book really trumps much of what Brown was saying throughout, but that’s not even what I’m talking about. I’m thinking more of “most sex workers aren’t slaves” or “...aren’t on drugs”, yet as I was reading the book I thought “that woman is a sex slave” and “that one is clearly faced on something” -- and this is Brown reinterpreting through comics a recollection he had based on a jotted note on his calendar, presumably intended to support what appears to be a conscious argument. So, like, if I’m getting this feeling at a fourth-hand distance, what must the reality be like? Further, I’m not even sure that Brown picked the best examples to support his own argument -- if you really want to establish that these transactions are healthy and sane, then shouldn’t you be showing all sides of it? Most of the women were maddeningly not-people, and I kind of want them, not the customer, to tell me that they are safe. So, my question becomes: did the choices that were made of what and how to argue work for you? Not “do you buy the argument?”, mind -- more that if the argument is well constructed.

ABHAY: I didn't spend too much time with the appendices.  As a life-long Democrat, I'm rather predictably more favorable towards hearing about prostitution than Libertarianism. My family crest has "Prostitution, not Libertarianism" on it, with pictures of Gary Hart and Ted Kennedy underneath.  I got a big whiff of "the market" off the appendices and ran the other way.  Banging whores I want to hear about, but the elaborate rhetorical edifices that libertarians construct around their orgasms-- no thanks.  That's really not of significant interest of me. Especially not when Brown's "argument" relies in part on Canada's socialist health care system taking care of, e.g., the probably-underage hooker screaming "Ow" over and over while Brown fucked her.  The market and property rights didn't make sure that her pussy was okay after whatever Brown subjected it to; socialist health-care did.

There's one, though-- Appendix 3. Which-- I don't judge Brown for having sex with women for money, at all, in the slightest-- but I judge him for writing Appendix 3 because I think it's some fucking astoundingly silly shit.  I think early reviews have been exceptionally kind maybe to the point of sycophancy with respect to Appendix 3.  Appendix 3 is the one about how Chester Brown thinks the universe might operate when prostitution is "normalized"-- here's just a tiny quote from it:  "The next day, Mary tells her friends about the date.  They all have sex for money too, so none of them are shocked."  It goes on and on about Mary the Hat Clerk who Fucks For Money (Whose Mom is Also a Prostitute ... Because, I guess, Hey, All Women Are, Deep-Down...???).  And it's him describing this enchanted wonderland, Chester Brown's Whoresylvania, this magical gumdrop land where everyone is thrilled to be selling their bodies for money, rainbows sell blowjobs to marshmallows, Snuggles the Dryer-Softener Bear will kick-fuck you to climax for $100 a half-hour, et cetera.  I was not sympathetic to Appendix 3, but I suppose I imagine freedom as being something more than letting poor women decide how much they charge people to fuck them-- I guess I'm a dreamer, that way.

The other one that jumped out at me was Appendix 14 ("Exploitation"), where...Here's a quote:  "Yes, some prostitutes are exploited when most or all of their money is taken by pimps, but not all prostitutes are exploited."  That sounds reasonable-- I'd like to believe that's true, that "not all prostitutes are exploited."  However-- like Brian, I had the same reaction that...  at least a few of the prostitutes Brown actually fucked?  Exploited!  So exploited! I don’t think I agree with Matt Seneca’s argument that ALL of the women in the book are exploited-- but the foreign women raised what I hope are obvious issues. Brown seems oblivious to the fact he's promoting the benefits of being a white guy who has impoverished third world women chauffeured to his country to reduce the cost of his sexual degeneracy.  Maybe someone who worships the market blindly would be okay with the West literally ejaculating onto the faces of the Third World, but I don't know if "some are exploited, some aren't, derpdy-derp" even begins to acknowledge an iota, a sliver, a fucking fraction of the issues of consent that raises...?

Plus: I just think it's ludicrous that Brown removing any indication of the race of the prostitutes, that people are buying this ad copy that he's somehow "protecting the women" rather than himself.  Toronto's maybe the most multi-cultural city on the North American continent-- who the fuck thinks that anyone is out there saying to themselves, "Aah, the fact that Chester Brown drew the girl saying 'No Speak English' with Asian features means that it must be Susy Kwan, and I must punish her!  Your time is nigh, Suzy Kwan!"-?  That city is bursting with minorities-- Chester Brown's not outing any of them with "No Speak English."  For me, removing the women's races spoke to something darker than that.  He's drawing this comic about him running around buttfucking all these whores, but then, like, oh, saints preserve us that anyone might think there are any racial implications to the whores he's selecting.  Heavens forfend!  "Buttfucking the hookers, I applaud, but let's not bring race into this.  That would offend my delicate sensibilities."  I think doing that was a way of closing off any consideration that Brown was not just a heroic participant in the market, stabbing his property rights into dry vaginas with his half-erect penis, but also to prevent the reader from recognizing Brown as being the beneficiary/perpetrator of imperialism.

(Plus, on just a I’m-a-Creep level: I guess I was curious what kind of girls he sought out once given a level of choice that he'd not had in his life previously?  After the Knives Chau character dumped him, did he seek out young Asian girls to obtain a weird sort of revenge that he couldn't admit to himself?  Maybe I was the only one that had that question, but ...)

But do I think any of that "undercuts his argument?"  Oh, I don't know.  I don't know that I care too much because I'm not especially invested in the argument-side of what Brown was doing. I certainly don't care if guys go to see prostitutes-- I guess based on the foregoing that I’d prefer for people to buy local, though, as it turns out.  And I don't care if it gets decriminalized or regulated-- though I think I'd probably wind up preferring regulated since I live in the actual real world, and not Brown's Whore-Epcot, where we'll all get paid by the Canadian government to draw comics and we can pay the checkout girl at Anthropologie $100 for a half hour of analingus.  The city I live in decriminalized marijuana but failed to regulate it, and that’s had pluses & minuses-- based on that experience though, I suspect I’d prefer some efforts at regulation. There’s something to be said for zoning, at the very least (though I did enjoy when drug dealers converted the KFC in my neighborhood into a “pharmacy”). But besides that, I guess since I didn't need persuading to Brown's point-of-view, the question of whether his arguments do or don't hold up to the reality he's presenting didn't really matter to me, as I viewed this 40-something year old guy's need to even "make arguments" to feel good about the lifestyle he found for himself as maybe being the true tragedy of the piece, far moreso than the peculiarities of how Brown obtained sexual gratification.  It's a comic about a guy who keeps telling himself he doesn't care what other people think and then spends the entire comic proving otherwise.  It succeeds for me maybe despite Brown, not because of him...?

TUCKER: I don’t know how much further I can go down the “I think this book is crap evidence for anything serious” road without seeming like I hate Brian, Chester Brown, comics and myself. I don’t! And yet, the appendixes are curdled with stuff where Chester just says “nah, it ain’t that bad” and then he footnotes some book he read that he introduces by explicitly saying that it agrees with his point of view, and I’m left wondering: what the fuck? Guys like Steve Coll make sure to footnote page numbers and present actual quotes when they’re writing about war and corporate crime, hell, the guys who wrote the Kurt Cobain bios I read in high school even took the time to tell you where the actual words “Kurt really loved shooting up heroin” came from. Chester writes things like “human trafficking: not a big deal” and his footnote says “the best book I read about how human trafficking wasn’t a big deal is called ‘human trafficking is not a big deal’ and you should read it”. Man up, dude. Where’s all this information coming from? Who said it? Why are they right? What page is that line you’re quoting from? Take this appendix and compare it to the backmatter of any serious non-fiction book on anything--the superrunners of Africa, the original Friday Night Lights, a book about the collapse of AT&T--and you’ll see a pretty major difference in terms of what rules you’re supposed to follow when you’re playing the research paper game.

JEFF: Although I feel like I’ve been the designated Brown apologist throughout this discussion, the appendices are indefensible, plain and simple.  Everything Tucker says should be printed on a slip of paper and inserted into every edition of the book.  Unlike in the cartooning section of the book where I think Brown is in control of every choice he makes and presents exactly what he wants, I really can’t imagine Brown wants to present himself as a sloppy researcher truly uninterested in being challenged on what he thinks (or giving people the materials to do so)...and yet that’s precisely how the Brown of the appendices comes off.  They are, to put it lightly, a horrible misfire that undercuts the majority of the book.

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Savage Symposium: PAYING FOR IT (Part 2 of 4)

Here's Question #3.  

Question 3: Craft Versus Presentation. PAYING FOR IT has a rigid grid, which is common for Chester Brown’s work, but he’s moved to an eight panel grid for this book, while LOUIS RIEL, for example, was a six panel grid. I personally found this choice (despite the now white bordering) to be incredibly cramped and, because of the smaller panels, “not comic-y”. This isn’t helped, in my mind, by the camera choices, which are a whole lot of middle shots, or repeated shots (virtually every sex scene is staged in the exact same way). Brown also (and stop me if I’m piling on here) simplified his style, to my eye, for the smaller panels -- many faces and figures are barely rendered, and while there is still a fair amount of cross-hatching and whatnot, the overall impression is very different than you’d take from RIEL. Again, purely for this reader, at the end of reading PAYING FOR IT (especially because there’s so much text at the back) I found myself thinking “Just why was this a comic, again?” because I think that I believe that it would have functioned just as well as straight text. I mean, all the way to the point that there’s really only one scene that I can recall as visually interesting, and that involves Brown’s penis. Is my assessment too harsh? Is this “good cartooning”?

ABHAY: I'm not an expert on this kind of thing, but. Like, I don't know if any of this is going to make any sense, but I guess how I think about it: 6-panel grid, you're dealing with square-r panels than an 8-panel, which has composition & storytelling implications, i.e. with the 8-panel, you can do more storytelling via the composition, by putting a character on the left-side or the right-side of a panel.  That's more "meaningful" with a rectangle-- it has more potential storytelling value.  So, as an example on pages 37-41, when Brown's about to go to a prostitute for the first time, he's on the left side of the panel through-out that sequence until he hands the prostitute the money when he "crosses-over" suddenly to the right side of the panel.  Which has a meaning we can read into it, on its own terms.  Is it an intentional choice?  Fuck if I know, but we can think of it as being one as it makes a sort of sense, and write little essays about it, and blah blah blah yay blogs.  I don't know about generally-- like, compositionally, I don't know if there's any difference in applying shit like the rule-of-thirds between the two-- I couldn't tell you that, and just glancing through PAYING FOR IT, I don't see that Brown's a stickler much for rule-of-thirds especially. (Rule of thirds is a camera thing that... you put objects of interests at the intersections of horizontal and vertical 1/3rd marks, and it helps to create a clearer image; I feel like photographers talk about it more though I've overheard comic artists talking about it among themselves, a couple times).

But all that said, I'm not a huge 8-panel fan anymore-- I think it traps artists in "cinematic" language and thinking, solutions.  You know: 6-panel's the language of Kirby and Jeff Smith-- I think it's more of a cartoonist's dialect, than 8-panel which I've always thought writers got off on more, maybe...?  Like, I think you're more likely to hear about Dave Lapham's STRAY BULLETS (which was all 8-panel, of course) from comic writers than comic artists...? Guys who want comics to be movies--  that's what goes through my head when I see an 8; that's the weird prejudice I have. (12-panel-- I couldn't tell you why, but 12 panel seems just really ugly and inelegant to me. I really-- I find those noxious, and I couldn't tell you why. 16's seem like a cartoonist thing and not a writer thing-- I love a 16, but it's ... it's MTV; you look at how Miller used it in DARK KNIGHT and he's just moving constantly-- he's less rigid about his grid than Brown, but the grid still drives him towards this absurd hyperactivity that I'm really fond of. 9 panel... people say the 9's are tough to do-- I can see how that'd be, having to deal with vertical rectangles instead of horizontal rectangles.  So I don't know-- I think this is the kind of shit you need hands-on-paper experience to understand, more than I have).  Anyways, with re: PAYING FOR IT, I think he made the right choice because he needed to linger in scenes, and it seems like he wanted the camera to be more of an objective presence than a subjective one (which I think was a very strong choice, personally); plus, long scenes in limited locations.  6 panel's too dramatic / bombastic for that-- Jack Kirby's WHOREFUCKING DINOSAUR, or whatever, that's what I'm seeing in my head (and it's magical!); 16's too jittery -- imagine watching Chester Brown fucking hookers through one of those Battlestar Galactica cameras, or like it's the D-Day scene of PRIVATE RYAN-- 16's would freak people out too much; 9 panel might have worked but... I just think a 9 would have made it even less visual. I think he'd have lost the benefits of ... a horizontal rectangle is how we actually view the world, so he'd have lost the benefits of peripheral vision...?  Those panels of Brown walking through Toronto, where you can see the setting around him--- I thought those were the best panels in the book...?  I really enjoyed those as drawings.  But I couldn't tell you if it'd have subjectivity/objectivity implications.  I don't think so because... well, one could hardly accuse the "camera" in WATCHMEN of being overly subjective. I don't know.  Maybe I have something against 9's, I don't know.  I don't know.  I always thought the Europeans had the better idea, where if you look at, like, Hugo Pratt, Franquin, Herge-- everything's on 4 tiers, but within any one tier, they'll do 1, 2, 3 panels depending on what they need, so they have the rigidity of a grid and the timing of a grid, but with some flexibility, more sensitivity to story.  It's the difference between classical music and jazz.  But Brown's comics seem like classical music, so him using strict grids makes sense to me.  PAYING FOR IT, it fucking ain't exactly CORTO MALTESE.

I think the sex scenes looking the same was on purpose.  Or should have been on purpose.  Brown has all this anxiety about the act-- he calls it "vaginal intercourse" at one point (I liked that part), but as drawn-- he doesn't draw it as being some crazy big deal.  I liked that choice personally-- I thought it suggested more self-awareness from Brown than the rest of the book.  It's what made the lecture scenes kind-of so sad for me, that he seemed like he had some ability to see what was funny about himself, buried under all that rationalizing. I was more interested in that, his capacity to see himself as a silly person, his humanity than his mere capacity to reason.  But.  Also: I certainly didn't have a problem with repeating panels! Well, actually, those were distracting for me because having an interest in repeating panels, I spent ... I spent more time thinking about how Brown was approaching the repeating panels than I did thinking about the ethics of prostitution.  Brown didn't just copy-paste-- each panel of the "repeating panels" has minute differences-- at least if he repeated, I couldn't catch him (and I would say that I tried unusually hard to).  Which... I guess Brown can't afford a computer or digital art tools-- and has a heightened interset in having original art to sell or display at gallery shows-- but... Those repeating panels are the kind of thing where knowing how to use Photoshop or Manga Studio might have really sped the plow for the guy...

As for whether it "needed to be a comic," or if it took advantage of the form, I think maybe.  I guess some people think it could have just been an essay instead...?  It's not the most visually gratifying comic, no, I'll grant you that.  But I don't think an essay would have been quite as creepy-as-fuck or as clinical in its depiction of the sex work, and the work would have suffered without those things.  He’s trying to “de-mystify” the prostitution experience, and an essay would leave too much to the overactive imaginations of his readers-- and fail for that reason.  Also, with an essay, we’d have been stuck purely with the dreary "I know things" Chester Brown, and ... that wasn't the part of the book I was interested in so...

TUCKER: The only other things I’ve read by Brown are The Playboy, I Never Liked You and Underwater, and I thought all of those ill-prepared me for how uninteresting this book was on a visual level. I think this is a comic because Brown couldn’t have written a book about the same subject and gotten that published. By drawing it--even in this stilted, precious fashion that I freely admit has certainly grabbed the admiration of a wide swath of intelligent readers and critics who I believe are worth paying attention to--he’s able to get away with what struck me as an basic inability to recognize the emotional suffering (potential and/or actual) of the women he encountered throughout the last decade or so that he’s been doing this. I don’t think he would’ve escaped that criticism as thoroughly as he has if he’d been forced to write an actual book.

JEFF: I see your point, Mr. Stone, but I gotta at least partially disagree: Brown is a cartoonist.  It’s all he’s ever done, at least professionally.  Do you really think the reason he’s not gonna do a book of prose is because the graphic novel is easier to slip past the gatekeepers who published and positively reviewed, I dunno, Frey’s A Million Little Pieces?

TUCKER: I don’t think it’s a gatekeeper type situation. I just don’t think there’s anything substantial here that would merit attention if the book were in a purely prose form. Brown isn’t open enough about what’s going on in his life for this to be an impressive (or interesting) memoir, and he hasn’t done enough hard work for this to be a valid political or sociological treatise. This thing only exists because the standards that comics extends towards non-fiction are incredibly low and the field itself is so barren. Basically, if you can spell your own name and draw yourself in a functional, recognizable fashion, you’re going to look impressive alongside the shit that populates most non-fiction comics.

JEFF: I agree mainstream reviewing standards are pretty lax: apart from a genuinely good turn of phrase or two (such as referring to Brown as looking like “a praying mantis with testicles”), Dwight Garner’s review in the NYT was about as softball a review as it gets.  Although maybe I’ve been steadily acclimated by Brown’s (and compatriot Joe Matt’s) willingness to previously discuss their own sexuality in detail:  Garner refers to the book as “squeamish-making” which is pretty much how I felt, say, when encountering “The Man Who Would Not Stop Shitting” in ED THE HAPPY CLOWN or Brown showing us all how to “Do The Chester” (as Peter Bagge called it) in THE PLAYBOY (or I NEVER LIKED YOU, I can’t remember which) but which I didn’t really feel here.

As for the six v. eight panel grid, if I remember correctly, Brown in the past used to draw his panels one at time on a separate sheet of paper, and then connect them on the page later.  Assuming he still does so now, it’s highly possible Brown drew every panel in the book then decided on a grid that hit a page-count that allowed him to tell the story he wanted in a format that was still affordable.

I don’t know.  Maybe I’m giving too much weight to Brown’s previous work (work I’ll gladly confess to not having revisited in a very long time, and I should also cop to never being able to get into UNDERWATER, not even a little) but his work has always seemed to be about neutrality and, for lack of a better word, disengagement.

If you read the first five issues of YUMMY FUR when they were published, I think you’d get the impression Brown was an ironic provocateur, putting a man’s head on the end of Ed’s penis, showing a guy shitting until the toilet overfilled, showing vampire girls from Hell cavorting nude...and placing all of that next to New Testament texts of Jesus.  But if you take Brown’s statements in interviews at face value (which I do), he was in fact engaging in an act of purging:  not only from the stuff he considered disgusting (pissing, shitting, body horror, and other stuff that came up while creating ED in a stream of consciousness way) but from religion. Brown had been raised religiously and, up until a certain stage in his life, had believed in Jesus.

While the impulse is to say his New Testament stories are Brown purging himself of religion, it’s more accurate to say he was trying to purge himself of the results of purging religion, if that makes any sense.  His New Testament work is stripped clean of anything that might suggest the stories are untrue, of any of the knee-jerk reactions of a disappointed believer.

Brown wants, more than anything else I think, to be a rationalist, to present things neutrally and cleanly, without judgment. If the text sections of PAYING FOR IT are unbelievably awkward, I think in no small part that’s because Brown has never argued for anything in his art before.  He has hit the age of fifty without ever trying to espouse anything (except, I suspect, in the aborted UNDERWATER), which makes him relatively unique as a creative artist.

All of which is to say:  I think Brown’s cartooning in PAYING FOR IT is perhaps a perfect distillation of Brown’s work, in which he tries, at every opportunity, to withdraw anything he sees as an emotional manipulation of the reader.  The list of what he decides to leave out is pretty mind-boggling when you think about it:  close-ups, panel variation on the page, fucking facial expressions. So for me, the eight panel grid isn’t as emotionally distancing as Brown’s refusal to move in tighter than a two shot.  Brown, Seth, and Matt are barely even cartoons; they’re schematics in a diagram, a notation that allows you to keep track of who is saying what.

I understand why Brian would reject this but I think it’s both daring and intriguing:  what’s left of cartooning when you take out what most people think of as the cartoony stuff? It’s a question we’ve seen Kevin Huizenga and Chris Ware explore, but nowhere to the degree we see here. (Or to put it more honestly, it’s never resonated with me as much as it does here.)

We are able to recognize what’s going on, certainly, and we are able to come to conclusions.  My point is, is if Brown were a lesser artist, we would never be able to see anything but what he wants us to see.  We could only hypothesize on what was going on by recognizing the work’s internal bias and extrapolating its opposite.

But, here, I do think it’s very easy to see Brown in ways he wouldn’t “want” us to see him, or in ways that aren’t what he would think of as germane to his point, but we’re still able to see those things precisely because he has gone to such great lengths to try and bleach out all bias beforehand.  That’s the work of a pretty great cartoonist to me.

CHRIS: I have very little to add here, save to say that the most interesting thing about the art and layout for me was all the empty space at the end of chapters. Sometimes it worked as a void where all the things Brown is choosing not to discuss are hiding. Other times it punctuated what amounted to a punchline. But as often as not, it really just felt like Brown ran out of panels about that particular bit. From what I remember of Brown’s earlier work -- I believe I’ve read I NEVER LIKED YOU and THE PLAYBOY -- he always did a lot with negative space, and I liked the disconnected, almost dreamlike feel it gave to those works. It’d be a shame if the explanation for it was as prosaic as “he was just pasting shit down to fit a page requirement”, but even if that is the sole motivation, it worked with the varied panel sizes and brushstrokes of those other books far better than it did here.

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Savage Symposium: PAYING FOR IT part 1 (of 4)

As part of the 10th anniversary of The Savage Critic on the web, and since we had such a great time last year doing it with WILSON, we've decided to try and do several Savage Symposiums this year, leading with one "mainstream" and one "alternative" title. Abhay is leading the superhero one, which should see print in about two weeks, and I ended up leading this one, for Chester Brown's PAYING FOR IT.  

I asked the gang five questions, the first two of which are presented here for your reading pleasure. A question a day will follow through Friday.

Since we didn't know what our reactions would be until after the book (s) were released, I found that I wasn't a huge fan of PFI, and my questions are generally pretty bitchy. That said, I think you'll find this to be fun reading.

I suck REALLY hard because I've got no art for this, and if I have to go find some (or, more likely, scan it myself) this won't get up for another few weeks...

Anyway, enough preamble, let's get to it!

Question 1: Memoir Versus Polemic. PAYING FOR IT is subtitled as “A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being A John”, but I actually wonder how much you found that to be true? Perhaps this is an issue of definitions, but (to me) a “memoir” doesn’t try to lead one to a point. I think that it is true that memoirs don’t need to be as strictly honest as one expects of an autobiography (or as Will Rogers said, “Memoirs means when you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad ones you did do”), but PAYING FOR IT strikes me much more as a constructed argument that attempts to use the autobiographical form, than a memoir in and of itself. Plus, it pretty much cuts away right when it gets to what I felt was the most interesting point of the memoir -- how does a monogamous paid relationship actually work? Anyway, am I splitting hairs here? Does it succeed as a memoir? Does it succeed as a polemic?

JEFF: A good set of questions here, Bri, and I think it’s not that you’re splitting hairs with the book so much as trying to [and hopefully this will be my only exasperating pun] find a convenient hole to put it in.

Certainly, Will Rogers’ definition of a memoir doesn’t jibe with the current use of the term and hasn’t for at least a decade, if not longer. In fact, it’s probably more true to define today’s memoir as exactly the inverse:  the memoir is the refuge of drug addicts and alcoholics, adulterers and participants in incestuous relationships, crooked cops, career cheats, wastrels, rakes, and -- worst of all -- writers with literary ambitions.

But just because your definition is outdated doesn’t mean you’re wrong.  One of the many, many problematic aspects of PAYING FOR IT is that it’s neither one or the other.  It’s a memoir and it’s a polemic, and it’s not just an argument for the legalization of unlicensed sex work, but it’s also an argument against monogamy and romantic love, to boot.  (And based on how Chester Brown draws himself, you could also imagine it’s the weirdest Mr. X story ever told, but maybe only I did that.)

PAYING FOR IT  is like Thoreau’s Walden except with blow jobs instead of trees, and Walden generally doesn’t get dinged for mixing its autobiographical elements with its polemic ones.  I think PAYING FOR IT’s failures (and its successes) transcend whether it works as a memoir or a polemic. As you point out below, Brown’s admissions and adherence to his definition of a memoir end up puncturing some of his most crucial arguments.  But what appears to be your take on the book -- “PAYING FOR IT is a polemic, and a bad one because the things Brown shows contradict his points” -- show an impressive lack of generosity toward the creator.  Maybe it’s a bad polemic because it’s not supposed to be a polemic?

But then, that does beg the question -- what the fuck is this book, anyway? Having that question unresolved makes this book absurdly hard to write about in more than the most superficial way. I hope I can get a better take on what it might be and how it functions as we proceed.

I will say this, though:  PAYING FOR IT has given me a lot to think about and I think that makes  it, at the very least, a “not-failure.”

ABHAY: I don’t think I read enough memoirs to have strong “genre expectations” where they’re concerned.  I think it succeeded for me as a memoir-- just maybe not one concerning prostitution. For me, it’s a story about this guy, growing old alone, alone except for some equally, uh, “eccentric” artist friends, and his desperate need to rationalize to them something unusual he finds that makes him happy, however little they seem to care.  He can’t accept just being a quote-unquote “bad person,” or accept that Joe Matt’s stepmother judges him, or simply keep his personal life to himself—the story is his struggle to make what he’s doing not only acceptable, but “right”, morally correct, until at the end, he’s “succeeded” and reasoned & rationalized & pontificated his way to something almost resembling a happy ending.  As a story about prostitution, I’m not sure if it meant much to me.  But as a story about people’s need for acceptance, just to be accepted as you grow older, maybe about friendship—looked at that way, I suppose that I think it succeeds quite a bit.  I think it’s a very sad comic, though. I don’t know that it succeeds in a way that Brown intended, to the extent that matters.

So, I think I differ with most of the reviews I’ve seen in that I think cutting away from the “most interesting point” was the best choice Brown made.  I’m not sure if this is intentional or not by Brown but...  by doing so, he presents this relationship with this woman he “loves” as being secondary to telling Seth about it.  I think it’s a more meaningful and telling detail that we saw THAT instead of him expressing his love directly to his employee.

(I don’t know.  It’s that weird thing with memoirs where… are we supposed to judge his life?  He’s selling his life. But I know people get queasy about that sort of thing, and heck, I suppose I do too…)

As a polemic though, I’d suggest it’s a failure.  But come on:  how many people are really buying this comic with an open mind?  Political art in general for me-- there’s always that thing of “congratulations on blowing the minds of the well-meaning liberals trying to impress one another with how cool & laid back they are.” Still—he’s debating Joe Matt and Seth…?  Clarence Darrow’s not really breaking a sweat with those two, by the looks of things.  To succeed as a polemic, Brown would have had to have engaged with the world around him, and talked to educated, engaged people with differing viewpoints on the issues, instead of beating-up on straw men.  He’d have to have been Joe Sacco, instead of drawing himself lecturing Seth. Plus:  Brown presents himself as being a broken weirdo riding a bicycle.  I don’t think it really challenges reader’s prejudices to find out that broken weirdos bicycle to-and-fro brothels.  (That absurd scene of Seth telling Brown to “get a girlfriend” – sure, sure, there are probably acres of Canadian women, waiting for a hoser with a Schwinn ten-speed to pedal into their lives.)  While it’s perhaps true that odd guys like prostitutes, it’s certainly been my experience that way, way more guys than fit that  description have paid for sex, just thinking of people I’ve known or met, friends of friends, etc. I’ve known a wide range of guy-- most of whom I’d call “decent” and “normal”-- who’ve paid for sexual encounters, and none of them have been like Chester Brown.  Hell, it’s been ALL of our experiences, thanks to Tiger Woods.  Eliot Spitzer.  Hugh Grant. Etc.  I think Chester Brown damaged his case by virtue of being Chester Brown...?  Maybe that’s cruel, though.

TUCKER: I thought it succeeded as a memoir under the most basic “googled a definition of the word” rules. This is some stuff Chester Brown did, some conversations he remembers having, and his personal beliefs on the subject of prostitution. That’s enough for it to be a memoir, in my book. I’m inclined to agree with Abhay in that I think this story ends up being a lot more about the fact that Chester Brown has some unusual and unpopular beliefs that end up making this a memoir more about how Chester might be a pretty unusual person than it does a book about prostitution or any other subject he might have planned on. I’m going to forget about the appendix and remember Seth calling him a robot, basically.

On the question of whether its a polemic or not--I can see where people might say that it is in terms of the way Chester presents his belief system, but I just can’t take it seriously, and I’ll just go ahead and say that I find it absurd that anyone else would do so. The appendix to the book reads like one of those 9/11 truther websites, only this is about why human trafficking isn’t that bad because Chester underlines the word “want” in the phrase “they want to be trafficked”, and the hits go on from there. I wasn’t totally surprised by the junior high school library card essay club nature of the notes half in the back--by the time I’d gotten there, I’d already seen the way Chester “debated” these subjects with his friends--but I was still a bit surprised at how much effort seems to have been put into presenting a dilettante's attempt at rationalizing his behavior as if it were on the same level as a Pulitzer winning investigative team. Early on, Chester shoots down a perfectly good argument from Seth (in the Odysseus/romantic love discussion) by asking if Seth has any stories to back it up. When Seth says “if there is one, I don’t remember it”, Chester chooses to use Seth’s lack of proof AS proof...for the Chester Brown point of view. That’s the kind of “argument” going on here, and while I’ve got zero problems with that as local color for a memoir, and would go so far as to say that re-reading all of the Seth scenes alongside Seth’s own appendix makes it an even better memoir, it’s one of the main reasons that I don’t see any reason why someone would engage with this thing as a political animal. I’d point anyone towards Seth’s own words who argues differently.

CHRIS: I'm going to bypass everyone else's definitions of memoir and look at PAYING FOR IT based on what I assume is the reader's expectation for any memoir, be it a conquering hero's victory lap, the confession of a scandalized figure, or Some Quirky Person's Quirky Story: to get some insight on the subject of the memoir.

On that level, PAYING FOR IT didn't work for me as a memoir. I knew going in that Chester Brown was a Canadian cartoonist that championed the patronization of sex workers over monogamous romance. I knew he was friends with Seth and Joe Matt, and that he used to date that lady from MuchMusic. I think I even knew he was a libertarian. If the reader didn't know any of that, they can read the dust jacket of the book or skim his concise Wikpedia entry.

Brown's decision to minimize any aspects of his life that didn't involve being a john is understandable, if frustrating. Like Abhay, I think his conversations with Matt and Seth were the most illuminating and engaging narrative spine. But to structure the book as essentially a catalog of all his paid orgasms, and then seemingly take pains to genericize all but the Yelp Review-iest portions of said orgasms made large stretches of the book a slog for me. For an act that he posits is so 'sacred', he might as well have written a 'memoir' about all of the times in the past eight years that he's scored cocaine, or shoplifted a book, or shit in someone's hat. Actually, I bet all of those would have more variety in their telling. Unless of course Brown decided that to 'protect' others that he would draw all of the hats as a Seth-style fedora, and change the names of the stolen books.

As a polemic, it succeeded in feeling like a polemic. But I had the same reaction as Tucker to the level of argumentation. It didn't help that a few years ago I read Against Love: A Polemic -- at the behest of a Canadian girl, now that I think of it, what's with Canadians? -- and it covered much of the same ground, except it was written by a college professor who understands how to argue and cite resources. I didn't find it any more compelling than Seth's argument, but I could at least admire the structure.

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Question 2: Entertainment Versus Argument. I’m not certain that I’ve read anything much like PAYING FOR IT before, primarily because I think that it mostly functions as an argument above all else. This isn’t why I, as an individual, read comics (or, for that matter, consume most other media) -- it isn’t that all work would need to be fiction, but more that non-fiction work should either be properly objective (like, say, LOUIS RIEL) or “entertaining” (like, say PYONGYANG or even PERSEPOLIS). Even in cases where it’s clear that the author has a clear point of view on what they are discussing (say, MAUS), I expect to be “entertained” by the story. Does this make me a obnoxious reader? Is this expectation fair to the work, and were YOU entertained by it? For me, I really flashed back to CEREBUS #186 more than anything else, and thought “am I supposed to be enjoying spending my time with this?” I can’t ever imagine reading this again, whereas I go back to my first four examples on a fairly regular basis.

JEFF: Aughhhhhh!  Can I just say that for a moment, here?  Aughhhhh!

I think your questions do a fantastic job of laying down a framework for discussing the book, B, but I’m finding myself reacting more to your framework than to the book itself.  Let’s just say that there are three levels of struggle going on with me here:  (1) I’m struggling with whether your very common-sense definitions are inappropriate just for this book, or for art in general;  (2) I’m struggling with how to define PAYING FOR IT, which is great at resisting classification and terrible at accepting it; and (3) I’m struggling with whether I can consider the book a success even if I decide it fails at what I decide it’s trying to do.

Whether or not entertainment was PAYING FOR IT’s intent, I was entertained by this book.  I was entertained by how Chester Brown looked like Mr. X.  I was entertained by how much Joe Matt came off as selfish, insecure, more than a little weaselly, and yet still fully rounded as a character. I was especially entertained by Appendix 3, in which Chester Brown creates the world’s worst argument for prostitution by imagining a future in which everyone has sex with anyone they don’t find abhorrent as long as they are paid -- it was like reading a Jack T. Chick tract from Bizarro Earth!  I was entertained by CB’s drawing of himself in tighty-whities.  I was entertained by the time I spent trying to imagine how Brown might score on tests for mild autism.  I was entertained by the idea Brown thinks he knows the lives of sex workers because he’s been a john, and how that might be similar/dissimilar to the way viewers might think they know the life of a creator because they’ve beheld their art.

Entertainment isn’t the right word in many cases here.  Maybe it’s something like “engagement”?  For example, I’m reluctant to say I was “entertained” by the scene in which Brown admits to being turned on by the woman who keeps saying “ow!” while he has sex with her -- but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was...I dunno, enthralled?  Trying to figure out why Brown would admit such a thing took up a certain amount of active thought, you know what I mean?  Is Brown trying to portray himself in a neutral light?  A positive light?  Is he trying to play “fair” with the reader?  Was he totally unaware of how dehumanizing it is to portray every sex worker as faceless?

For that matter, why does he think someone will recognize a sex worker’s face from a caricature?  Why does he think he can’t create new faces, new names?  Why does he tell us he drew “their bodies accurately, or as accurately as my memory allows”?  If Brown sees sex “as  sacred and potentially spiritual” (as he tells us in Appendix 15), why does he remove every emotional component from his sexual encounters?  Why does Brown have a nimbus of light in many of his panels, but not others?  Why does every sexual encounter have that nimbus?  Is that his definition of the spiritual?  Why does that book end with the picture of Brown?  Why did I shudder when I saw it?

These considerations don’t “entertain” me, but I find them engaging as hell.  And I feel a certain appreciation for Brown for allowing me to consider these things because he stays so true to...whatever the hell he’s staying true to.  Because he stays true to it, I’m able to come to some conclusions I wouldn’t have been able to if Brown had been more willing to manipulate me or prevaricate.

ABHAY: I think I’d classify it as a “personal essay.”  Those are pretty common.

I don’t know if I’d call PAYING FOR IT “entertaining”, but I’m not sure if we all have the same definition of that term.  (Especially as I’m not a PERSEPOLIS fan).  But it’s a provocative piece of work, and maybe that has its place, too.  I think it’s more provocative and suggests more for the reader to think about than a number of the other comic memoirs I’ve read (e.g. FUN HOME, say)-- and so I would think at least some select audiences would find it “entertaining,” by virtue of that fact. There were a few pages where I was creeped-out by what he was showing or the fact he’d made the comic at all, namely page 1 to the final page that I read.  I think I had the same reaction as Jeff to the author photo.  I went “UGH” or “YIKES” a couple times out loud.  Whether that’s “entertaining,” or we need a different word for it, I don’t know, but I have no regrets. (Seth’s line about Brown & Joe Matt was certainly funny).  My reaction to most comics is “What were they even trying to do?  Why did they even bother? Why is this taking place at an AA meeting?” So, I prefer being skeeved-out to feeling nothing. And I definitely got to feel skeeved-out lots and lots, so.

And heck, some of the jokes were funny—I certainly hope that Brown bicycling away from his “conquests” was meant to be humor, at least.  Enough of it was funny to me that I guess I took the non-lecture chunks to be intentional black comedy and not something unintentional.  Though, I thought there was some fine unintentional comedy, too.  You know, part of the comedy of PAYING FOR IT for me is that Brown’s looking at the rest of the world, saying “Look at how crazy all these OTHER assholes are.”  I think that’s fucking hilarious.  It’s funny for me that Brown can’t abandon his need to judge the rest of the world, no matter how shitty his life gets-- the Good Lord knows that’s the road I’m on, so here’s to the good life! Did Brown intend it as a comedy, that the ultimate endpoint of the world-view expressed in alternative comics is a bald man thinking the rest of the world is crazy while he grunts over his imported sex slave hiding her face with her hair so she doesn’t have to see the skeletal rictus he calls an O-Face?  Maybe not.  I don’t know.  Is it technically comedy when you’re the only one laughing?  I don’t know.  I don’t know.  Are we supposed to judge his life?  Here we are.

I don’t think I’m interested enough in the subject matter to have sought it out for myself if we weren’t doing this. There’s an old Dennis Miller line, back before he became so awful— something like “The most interesting thing in the world to me is my orgasm, and the least interesting thing in the world to me is your orgasm.”  You know, I bought the Winshluss PINOCCHIO the same week—I’m much more taken by that.  I thought that was significantly, significantly more impressive.

Since I didn’t need persuading on the issue of prostitution-- I’m basically okay with whatever people want to do—for me, it’s nothing I’m especially excited about because the book didn’t add to much more than an exercise in “Look at me.”  Maybe that’s true of all memoirs; I’m just not a memoir guy-- I’m too self-centered. I get my “Look at me” needs filled quite sufficiently by the internet.   This comic would be very impressive if the internet doesn’t exist—but as it does... You can read the diaries of a prostitute at the McSweeneys site, not exactly a hotbed of lasciviousness—discussion of such things is not particularly hidden from view or noteworthy.  And the act of an artist revealing something startling and unseemly about their lifestyles for their commercial gain—shit, I don’t know why anyone would find that very surprising.  I suppose these things are rare for comics but … so is intelligence, wit, craft, not-hating-women-constantly, charm, originality—shit, once we start making that list, we’ll be here all fucking day.  And-- and I don’t know.  I’m rambling.  Sorry.  So, in conclusion, I think Frank Miller said it best when he said, “Whores.”

TUCKER: It’s probably worth mentioning that I only read and decided to participate in this questionnaire after reading Abhay’s above response.

BRIAN: And I just want to jump back in here and second that Winshluss PINOCCHIO recommendation...

TUCKER: Lemme third that one for you. That Pinocchio book is incredible.

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Graeme Will Review 9 Comics In A Flash: Flashpoint Month 2, Weeks 1 & 2

As promised yesterday, here're the Flashpoint-centric reviews I was meaning to write, before I launched into a Fear Itself diatribe... FLASHPOINT #2: If there's an award for the most exposition-filled comic of the year, it'll have to go to Flashpoint. Almost every character spends a ridiculous time just explaining things to other people in this series; I almost want to see a spin-off series called Barry Allen and AltBatman Explain It All with the two heroes tackling different subjects each month. And yet, somehow, despite everything, it works. Maybe it's because there's a sense of things slowly being put into place - The introductions of Aquaman and, to a lesser extent, Wonder Woman in this issue feel appropriately important, and I like when they appear, after their mentions in the previous issue - or, more likely, it's the comedy and "big idea"-ness of Barry's "Clearly, I need to get my powers back" scheme (Where was this Barry Allen in Geoff Johns' Flash series? Decisive, bold, actually doing things instead of running around and being confused and frowning... This is a Flash I would have enjoyed reading about!), which walks the fine line between genius and stupid so well that I have no idea what side it's actually on. For the second month, I am genuinely surprised that this is better than expected, and actually Good. That said, next month, it'll probably all go to shit, right?

FLASHPOINT: ABIN SUR - THE GREEN LANTERN #1: Well, I'll give Adam Schlagman this: He can do Geoff Johns very well. In just one issue, he's already got both the tied-up-in-continuity and inflated-sense-of-its-own-importance of the regular GL series down. Of all the Flashpoint stories so far, this feels most like a What If? story, especially with the final page recasting Flashpoint as Blackest Night in terms of prophecies. Felipe Massafera does a fine enough job, and I'm sure the synergy folks are very happy to see Sinestro look like his movie incarnation. Let's say tenuously Okay if you like that kind of thing.

FLASHPOINT: BATMAN - KNIGHT OF VENGEANCE #1: Jeff's right, it looks lovely, but there's nothing here that really catches my interest. Azzarello doesn't make Thomas Wayne that interesting, it all feels pretty much like an undercooked Elseworlds Batman book and who hasn't read too many of those already? Eh, and that's mostly for the art.

FLASHPOINT: CITIZEN COLD #1: In theory, I really like The Flash, and equally in theory, the Rogues are a large part of that. I like the idea of a bunch of supervillains who are just pissy about one particular hero, and who have a sense of camaraderie and bros-before-superheroes mentality. That said, almost everything Geoff Johns has done for the Rogues has never worked for me, and this series, with Scott Kolins writing, is like everything I don't like about the Johnsian approach to the character in one sensitively-rendered-in-pencil-and-overpowering-colors package. Crap, even before you get to the "So, DC is really ripping off Jimmie Robinson's Bomb Queen? Really?" set-up.

FLASHPOINT: DEATHSTROKE AND THE CURSE OF THE RAVAGER #1: I've never liked Deathstroke, and making him a pirate really doesn't do anything to change that. Like Citizen Cold, this is one of those comics that seems to think that bad people doing bad things because they're bad is inherently interesting, and... Well, it's just not for me, really. Eh, because it's probably fine for people who are into this genre. If nothing else, there's some interestingly Sean Philips-ish inking on Joe Bennett towards the end of the book that I'd like to see again.

FLASHPOINT: EMPEROR AQUAMAN #1: And after two books where the set-up of "Bad Guy Is Bad" turned me off, here's one where I liked it despite myself. That's not to say that Tony Bedard's script doesn't have flaws - The structure is all over the place, and the dialogue tends towards the melodramatic - or that Ardian Syaf's art (Very late 1990s, not as Kuberty as recent appearances) is spectacular, but there's something not just about seeing Aquaman as a bastard, but the specifics of his plan to destroy the surface world - Yes, it's Aquaman as more successful Namor, pretty much - that hooked my interest. Okay, although I doubt I'll pick up the rest of the series because I'll be surprised if the threads I'm interested in don't get resolved in the main Flashpoint book.

FLASHPOINT: FRANKENSTEIN AND THE CREATURES OF THE UNKNOWN #1: It's very, very much early days for this series still, but I'll admit it: I really like Jeff Lemire's take on Frankenstein, and am happy to see him write the post-Flashpoint ongoing series announced today. Ibraim Roberson's art is... just there, really, neither exciting nor disagreeable, although it's weirdly reminiscent of William Tucci's work for some reason. An Okay opener, and enough to get me to stay on for what's next.

FLASHPOINT: SECRET SEVEN #1: Firstly, Enid Blyton must be rolling over in her grave when she sees what Flashpoint has done to her beloved creations. Second: This is really just Milligan writing a Shade series again, and I'm loving it. It's not his Vertigo Shade, of course (Sadly), but there's enough hint of that ("Why am I talking to this thing? It isn't real. I feel the same way about myself. No. I have to get a grip. I'm real."), mixed with some Ditko-esque lunacy to make me a very happy man indeed. Admittedly, like Frankenstein, this acts more as a taster to get me involved in the post-Flashpoint version of the book (Justice League Dark, which is a terrible name but a promising looking book), but even so: It's Good.

FLASHPOINT: WORLD OF FLASHPOINT #1: Ah, finally, a comic that challenges Flashpoint in the exposition stakes! I guess it makes sense, but I'm clearly a sucker for this kind of thing because this was one of the more enjoyable tie-ins to me, even though nothing really happens until the last half of the book. That said, I like the Runaways-ripoff set-up enough to have some weird goodwill for the book, even if I'm not sure it's got enough legs even to take it to the end of three issues. That said, it was Okay, and I might even pick up the next issue. Who knew?

Fluff Itself: Graeme Gets Into Marvel's Summer Event Book

I really meant to write capsule reviews, honestly; I got mailed the first two weeks of Flashpoint tie-ins, and thought "That would make a good post," and then I started writing about Fear Itself and got into a bit of a rant. So Flashpoint will come tomorrow, and instead, here's me getting carried away about Marvel's big summer event book. FEAR ITSELF #3: Maybe I was far too into the whole DC mindset last week when this came out - In a week like last week, I really didn't feel like I had any choice but to dive into the DC mindset; they really won the comics internet last week, didn't they? - but... I can't be the only person who sped through this issue, got to the end and thought "This is it?", can I?

Ignoring the fact that everyone in the entire world saw Bucky's death coming - and, in case you hadn't, Bucky even makes a point of announcing it midway through the issue when he says "What, you want to grow old and retire?"; there's winking at the reader, and there's flipping them off, and I'm genuinely not sure which this was. Also, Bucky's death was one of the variant covers for the issue, released online before the issue actually came out - thereby spoiling the one "surprise" in the issue, it has to be pointed out: Nothing interesting really happened in this issue. We got lots of what should be filler material (That Hulk scene? Seriously, what was the point?), and four pages retreading last issue's "transformation into the Worthy" scenes, only this time, it's the Thing! And he can speak English, unlike the Hulk! And... Oh, I give up.

Unless you really, really care about Marvel minutae, this is a pointless series that's so amazingly self-satisfied that it can't see its own irrelevance. Bucky's death aside, the major event of the issue is apparently "The Thing destroys Yancy Street!" Well... yes, but so what? The importance of Yancy Street isn't explained anywhere in the book, so it's meaningless, four pages that just seem like the other Worthy transformations and have no other impact. Everywhere else, characters tell you how important everything is ("Sir, we... you're masterminding a global response to a cataclysm of unknown size and escalating intensity"), but it's all weightless, a feeling not helped by characters who change their minds purely because the plot demands it (#1: Odin is pissed at Thor, pissed at the humans and leave Earth. #2: Odin gives a speech about why the Earth is screwed and how Asgard won't get involved. #3: Odin lets Thor escape, go back to Earth to save the day and even gives him his hammer - "Here. You'll need this. You can't say your father never gave you anything," he says, another smirky moment by Fraction that utterly undercuts whatever drama he was going for - and... why, exactly? Well, because Thor says "I wanna go" and Fraction needs him to rejoin the Avengers next issue. It's just ridiculous).

Also: This is the end of the third issue - essentially halfway through the series - and I still don't feel like we've really had anything explained to us beyond "There's this guy that Odin is scared of, and he's back, and he's turning everyone into monsters with his magic hammers, and so that should stop." Why is the series called Fear Itself? I have no idea (That's not true, the tie-ins suggest there's some kind of "fear wave" going around, but that's not been mentioned anywhere in this series). Who is the villain, and what does he want? Similarly, no real idea. Why is he turning people into monsters with magic hammers? Again: Who knows. I'm all for mad ideas and moving past talky comics, but shouldn't we have had some explanations by now? Or, failing that, more interesting things happening?

(I know, I know: That's what the crossovers are for. Each issue ends with a handy key: "Follow The Thing's rampage in Fear Itself: Spider-Man #3" because, you know, having the core series do something with the bad guys it's spent so many pages introducing would just be old-fashioned. I wonder what this will read like as a collection: "Hey! The Hulk's gone bad! I can't wait to see what happens next! Wait. Why doesn't he show up again? Oh, never mind! The Thing has gone bad too! Man, I can't wait until he... Hang on, he's gone as well. What's with all these Nazis? Stop showing me the Nazis!")

In so many ways, this feels like it's a parody of an event comic instead of the real thing. Fraction seems to be writing the whole thing ironically, inserting completely out-of-place dialogue in places that jolts you out of the experience and points out how stupid things are, and the plot just careers from event to event without any momentum. Really, truly Awful, and only saved from being Crap by the fact that Stuart Immonen and Laura Martin make it look far, far more beautiful than it has any right to be.

Backwards Lap: Capsule Reviews from Jeff

Yes, dammit.  I am currently committed to this capsule review thing, if only because it forces Hibbs and Graeme to also write reviews and my WASPy upbringing inherently enjoys guilting people into stuff. After the jump: comics from last week, last year, and a very cool fan letter.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #169-173:  Still pretty much a mixed bag for me, but I do love how loose story plotting becomes during this period:  issue #169, for example, teases J. Jonah Jameson showing pictures proving that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, but that's barely more than three pages of the story and the rest has Spidey beating the crap out of people he encounters essentially at random.  #172 is the debut of the Rocket Racer, but he gets only the opening four pages and then the rest of the book sets up the return of the Molten Man...and even then, interestingly enough, the cliffhanger is Spider-Man being drawn on by two armed security guards.  (The first page of #173 is Spider-Man getting shot by one of those cops and escaping, only to get jumped by bystanders, one of whom has been taking mail-order kung fu lessons.)

I know I carp on this again and again but: although none of that shit would pass muster in your basic Bob McKee workshop (or, as I recall, Dan Slott's advice sessions on Twitter), it's very fun in the right doses and it helps contribute to that "man, anything can happen" feeling...even when every issue opens and closes with a fight scene, and you have Molten Man coming back from the dead and then dying for the fifth or sixth time.

All that said, the highlight of this batch of issues for me was the following letter from issue #169:

Yup. It's that Frank Miller, approximately nineteen years old, saying everything it's taken me the last thirty-five years or so to try and articulate...and doing a better job of it.  I'm heartened but not surprised to find out Miller's a fan of Andru...but the mention of John Buscema is a little odd.  I wonder if that's why the two of them worked on that very odd issue of Daredevil years later?

Anyhoo, it's all pretty low-stakes stuff but I honestly think it's OK or better. The nostalgia factor bumps it up to a low GOOD for me, but I don't think I should really factor that in.

CRIMINAL: THE LAST OF THE INNOCENT #1: I really shouldn't read interviews.  If I hadn't perused Brubaker's interview with Spurgeon over at Comics Reporter, I think it'd be easier for me to see this as an excellent take on the "guy kills his cheating wife" crime tale with the metatextual stuff being a nice little bonus. But having read the interview, I walked into this expecting the metatextual to be meaty and satirical and a brilliant insight on nostalgia and it was...just kinda okay.  I'm hoping there will be a way that stuff goes a little further: it seems to me that Criminal has always been packaged in a nostalgic way -- Sean Phillips' amazing covers clearly reference those Gold Medal Books, among others -- and I think it might be uniquely suited to comment on more than the "wow, now we think of the past as somewhere safe but it was fucked up, too" element of nostalgia, but the "we even miss the fucked up stuff" element that is a little more distressing.  Is it a form of innocence to pine for something evil? Or is it a sign of corruption? I think this book is going to address this stuff (god, I really hope so), but the first issue didn't really deliver on that for me.  It's still GOOD, mind you -- well-written and lovely as hell, but I'd been primed for something great.

FLASHPOINT: BATMAN: KNIGHT OF VENGEANCE #1:  Thomas Wayne as Batman? Don't care. The Flashpoint version of The Joker? Don't care.  Art by Eduardo Risso, colored by Patricia Mulvihill?  I didn't care...until I saw it. Risso's art is just eye-wateringly good and in the sewer fight scene he has this neat trick of using the page turn to up the surprise by reversing the angle or tightening the focus (or, in some cases, both).  A fight between Batman and Killer Croc in the sewers isn't anything we haven't seen before but I don't think I've ever seen it quite like this. I wish the story had been more than your usual alt-universe blather, but danged if this didn't strike me as a GOOD stuff, anyway.

HELLBOY: THE FURY #1:  Also, in the "Holy Shit, Look At This Art!" category is this book, which somehow manages to be jaw-droppingly beautiful from the first page to the last.  Like Flashpoint: Batman, I don't really care know or care what's going on, but the art by Duncan Fegredo (and colors by the amazing Dave Stewart) and the pacing of Mignola's script miraculously negates all that.  I felt flashes of dread and wonder and, more than once, something like awe.  (I guess this'll sound obvious to you if you've read the issue, but reading it made me feel exactly the way I did when I first watched John Boorman's Excalibur, that same weird mix of the epic and the creepy.) I always feel weird giving books VERY GOOD ratings or higher based on nothing more than just the art but here we are.  Amazing stuff.

JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #623:  The art didn't fry my burger this time around but I'm still enjoying the story and Gillen's take on Loki.  In fact, the mix of classic myth and the story's own sensibilities reminds me of the stuff I'm reading in the Simonson Thor Omnibus.  I wish the art didn't look so wispy, but I think I'm gonna give this one a VERY GOOD, nonetheless.

Arriving 6/8/2011

Looks like another solid slate of funny books this week!  

15 LOVE #1 (OF 3) ALL NEW BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #8 AMERICAN VAMPIRE SURVIVAL OT FITTEST #1 (OF 5) ANITA BLAKE CIRCUS OF DAMNED INGENUE #4 (OF 5) ANNIHILATORS #4 (OF 4) ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #219 ATOMIKA #12 (OF 12) (RES) BATMAN AND ROBIN #24 BATMAN ARKHAM CITY #2 (OF 5) BIRDS OF PREY #13 BLACK PANTHER MAN WITHOUT FEAR #519 BLUE ESTATE #3 BOONDOCK SAINTS MOB WAR #2 (OF 2) A CVR BRUNNER BOOSTER GOLD #45 (FLASHPOINT) BREED III #2 CALIGULA #2 (OF 6) CHARMED #10 DC COMICS PRESENTS IMPULSE #1 DEADPOOL #38 DEAN KOONTZ NEVERMORE #3 (OF 6) DOC SAVAGE #15 DOCTOR WHO FAIRYTALE LIFE #3 (OF 4) DONALD DUCK #367 EMPOWERED SPECIAL #2 10 QUESTIONS FOR MAIDMAN FEAR ITSELF DEADPOOL #1 (OF 3) FEAR FEAR ITSELF FEARSOME FOUR #1 (OF 4) FEAR FEAR ITSELF SPIDER-MAN #2 (OF 3) FEAR FEMALE FORCE KATHY GRIFFIN (ONE SHOT) FEMALE FORCE RUTH HANDLER CREATOR OF BARBIE FLASHPOINT CITIZEN COLD #1 (OF 3) FLASHPOINT DEATHSTROKE THE CURSE OF RAVAGER #1 (OF 3) FLASHPOINT EMPEROR AQUAMAN #1 (OF 3) FLASHPOINT FRANKENSTEIN CREATURES OF UNKNOWN #1 (OF 3) FORMIC WARS BURNING EARTH #6 (OF 7) GHOST RIDER #0 POINT ONE GLAMOURPUSS #19 GREEN HORNET AFTERMATH #3 (OF 4) GREEN LANTERN MOVIE PREQUEL KILOWOG #1 GREEN LANTERN MOVIE PREQUEL TOMAR RE #1 GREEN WAKE #3 (OF 5) GRIMM FAIRY TALES #60 A CVR QUALANO HULK-SIZED MINI-HULKS #1 INCREDIBLE HULKS #630 IRON AGE ALPHA #1 JERICHO SEASON 3 #6 (OF 6) JIM BUTCHER DRESDEN FILES FOOL MOON #2 JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #624 FEAR KA-ZAR #1 (OF 5) KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #174 MEGA MAN #2 MORIARTY #2 MORNING GLORIES #10 MYSTERY MEN #1 (OF 5) NETHERWORLD #2 (OF 5) NEW AVENGERS #13 PUNISHERMAX #14 RED ROBIN #24 ROBERT E HOWARDS SAVAGE SWORD #2 SAMURAIS BLOOD #1 (OF 6) SAVAGE DRAGON #171 SCALPED #49 SCREAMLAND ONGOING #1 SPACE WARPED #1 (OF 2) SPAWN #208 (RES) SPONGEBOB COMICS #3 STAN LEE STARBORN #7 STAND NO MANS LAND #5 (OF 5) STAR WARS OLD REPUBLIC #1 (OF 5) LOST SUNS SUPER HEROES #15 SUPREME POWER #1 (OF 4) TERRY MOORES ECHO #30 TITANS #36 TOTAL RECALL #2 ULTIMATE COMICS SPIDER-MAN #159 DOSM UNWRITTEN #26 VAMPIRELLA #6 VERONICA #207 (VERONICA PRESENTS KEVIN KELLER #1) WARLORD OF MARS #7 WOLVERINE #10 X-MEN LEGACY #250

Books / Mags / Stuff BAKUMAN TP VOL 05 BALTIMORE PLAGUE SHIPS HC VOL 01 BATWOMAN TP VOL 01 ELEGY BINKY GN VOL 02 TO THE RESCUE BLEACH TP VOL 35 BOYS DEFINITIVE EDITION HC VOL 03 BRIGHTEST DAY SER 1 AQUAMAN ACTION FIGURE BRIGHTEST DAY SER 1 ONE THIRD CASE ASST CAPTAIN AMERICA FIGHTING AVENGER GN TP CAPTAIN AMERICA NO ESCAPE TP CELLULOID HC (A) CONGRESS O/T ANIMALS HC DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER LITTLE SISTERS OF ELURIA PREM HC DISNEY MICKEY MOUSE HC VOL 01 DEATH VALLEY FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND #256 FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST 3-IN-1 ED VOL 01 GENERATION HOPE TP FUTURES A FOUR LETTER WORD GHOST IN SHELL STAND ALONE COMPLEX GN VOL 01 ISLE OF 100000 GRAVES HC MISTER X HC BRIDES OF MISTER X & OTHER STORIES MODESTY BLAISE TP VOL 01 GABRIEL SET UP NEW PTG (O/A) NARUTO TP VOL 51 PREACHER HC BOOK 04 STAN LEE TRAVELER TP VOL 01 SUPERMAN CHRONICLES TP VOL 09 SWEET TOOTH TP VOL 03 ANIMAL ARMIES TEZUKAS BLACK JACK TP VOL 14 X-MEN ALPHA FLIGHT PREM HC DM VAR ED

What looks good to YOU?

(I'm especially looking forward to Dave McKean's CELLULOID HC

-B

This Time, John Stewart Is A Bad-Ass... IN VIOLET: Graeme on War of The Green Lanterns

I'm keeping this intro short so you'll all scroll past and read Brian's post about today's massive DC news, but: COMICS. WAR OF THE GREEN LANTERNS: I love Green Lantern, but in recent years, it's become a weirdly distant love. I'm not going to lie - It's not me, it's him. The bloom dropped off the cosmically-powered rose somewhere after the (very enjoyable) Sinestro Corps War, and Blackest Night aside, I've found it increasingly hard to care about all the various colors of rings and the amazing amount of navel-gazing required to keep up with it all - and this from someone who likes Millennium. Nonetheless, I've found myself buying every issue of this crossover between Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps and Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors for reasons that I can't quite understand, and it's... Okay? Maybe? Perhaps? It's this thing that I know isn't actually good, and yet, I can't help myself but enjoy it.

I can't pretend that there's not an amazing variation in quality depending on what series is telling the story; Tony Bedard and Tyler Kirkham in Corps aren't up to the same standards as Peter Tomasi and the visual double-entendre-loving Fernando Pasarin on Warriors, which itself isn't as slick as Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke on GL, and it makes for a weirdly choppy reading experience, as well as one where it's really tempting to ascribe all the ideas you dislike (John Stewart's entire portrayal, for example) as being down to one of the lesser talents of the enterprise on some level. But, despite that, there's something oddly compelling about the way that the book is managing to make what are, ultimately, small changes in the overall mythos of the series into seemingly massive deals.

I mean, the three big plot points from the crossover so far, nine chapters into the ten chapter story, are as follows: The Guardians are possessed by the personifications of the various multicolored lanterns, with the exception of Parallax. Parallax has returned to the core Green Lantern, restoring the yellow impurity to the rings. Mojo has been destroyed, robbing the Corps of its moral center/resting ground. Only one of those things is not restoring the franchise to the way it was before Geoff Johns took over, and even in that case, there's still plenty of time to get those Guardians free of the lantern god thingies.

What fascinates me about "War of The Green Lanterns" isn't the breathless "OH MY GOD IT'S US AGAINST EVERYONE ELSE AGAIN" plotting - Seriously, by this point, Hal, John, Guy and Kyle should be used to the idea that they will be the only ones standing against the Corps for one reason or another - but the oddness of reading Geoff Johns undoing his own run in front of my very eyes. It completely changes the whole story for me, and turns what should be just a run-of-the-mill crossover that misses the energy and immediately-graspable high concept that even new readers can understand of Blackest Night into something much, much more compelling... if for almost entirely the wrong reasons.

Given that we already know that the DCU is being rebooted in a few months - and that the final part of "War" is also the final issue of the current run of Green Lantern, I fully expect Hal Jordan to either die or become a Guardian of the Universe at the end of this storyline, thereby bringing Johns' run to a surreally over-the-top close that even he isn't in full control over... I'll be there to pick it up, even if I'm not entirely sure why.

Preliminary thoughts on DC's announcement

I think the "official" one that DC wants you, the consumer to see is the US Today one, but I think that Bob Wayne's statement is probably the better one to look at.  I'll reprint this below the jump...  

Here's Bob Wayne (I could link you to Rich, but he doesn't need more hits):

******

A LETTER ON THE DC UNIVERSE AND SEPTEMBER 2011

To our comics retail partners,

In the time I've worked at DC Comics, I've witnessed any number of industry defining moments. But today, I bring you what is perhaps the biggest news to date.

Many of you have heard rumors that DC Comics has been working on a big publishing initiative for later this year. This is indeed an historic time for us as, come this September, we are relaunching the entire DC Universe line of comic books with all new first issues. 52 of them to be exact.

In addition, the new #1s will introduce readers to a more modern, diverse DC Universe, with some character variations in appearance, origin and age. All stories will be grounded in each character's legend - but will relate to real world situations, interactions, tragedy and triumph.

This epic event will kick off on Wednesday, August 31st with the debut of a brand new JUSTICE LEAGUE #1, which pairs Geoff Johns and Jim Lee, together for the first time. (Yes, this is the same week as FLASHPOINT #5.)

We think our current fans will be excited by this evolution, and that it will make jumping into the story extremely accessible to first-time readers - giving them a chance to discover DC's characters and stories.

We are positioning ourselves to tell the most innovative stories with our characters to allow fans to see them from a new angle. We have taken great care in maintaining continuity where most important, but fans will see a new approach to our storytelling. Some of the characters will have new origins, while others will undergo minor changes. Our characters are always being updated; however, this is the first time all of our characters will be presented in a new way all at once.

Dan DiDio, Bob Harras and Eddie Berganza have been working diligently to pull together some of the best creative teams in the industry. Over 50 new costumes will debut in September, many updated and designed by artist Jim Lee, ensuring that the updated images appeal to the current generation of readers.

The publication of JUSTICE LEAGUE #1 will also launch digital day-and-date for all ongoing superhero comic book titles - an industry first.

On Wednesday, June 1st, this initiative is expected to be announced in a nationwide feature article, and we're hopeful the news will be picked up by media outlets around the world. Throughout the month we'll reveal more details of our plans with articles in both the mainstream and comics press and on June 13th the Diamond catalog solicitations for all of the September titles will be released, followed by the June 29th street date of the print version of Previews.

DC Comics will support this initiative with an innovative mix of publicity, promotional efforts and retailer incentives designed to maximize your opportunity to increase your DC sales. We will discuss additional details of these incentives when we get closer to solicitation later in June.

We'll be updating you more through email as September nears. But today, I hope your share our enthusiasm for this historic news!

Sincerely,

Bob Wayne SVP, Sales DC Entertainment

***********

SOME of my thoughts, in chaotic and jumbled order:

1) FIFTY TWO new #1's? First off, that's insane, second off, that's FUCKING insane. Who on earth will buy all of those? The DCU is roughly 35-ish monthly ongoing titles now -- is Vertigo rebooting, too? I don't *think* it is? So they're increasing the line by 50%-ish?

2) This CAN ONLY work if we get a big wave of civvies coming in... but 13 titles a week is way way way too much for civvies. Two or three a week might maybe have been possible?

3) full line-wide day and day is potentially huge because of the ripple impact it might have. It will take very very very few current customers moving channels to have a catastrophic cascade impact along and down the chain. Maybe as little as 3-5%? If we're not netting more NEW readers (and I DO NOT MEAN "Marvel readers switching loyalty") (And see above) we're really running the risk of the entire comics market collapsing in fairly fast order -- and I'm including things that aren't superheroes.

4) this smells more like a jumping off point to me, for a lot of current readers -- especially the "super fans".  I wonder what Garret thinks?

5) There was a time to do this: after the First CRISIS. Or maybe after the "Final" one. I don't think the economy/market is (at all) in the right place to absorb this right now.

6) FIFTY TWO new superhero #1s? Are there 52 strong creative teams out there? Editors who know how to shepherd a story properly? Seriously, DC hasn't shown the editorial strength to have more than 8-12 (maybe) "on all cylinders" have they? I'M NOT TRYING TO BE MEAN ON THIS -- but the consumer reality in the comics market is that readers judge this kind of initiative by the "WORST" element of it, not the BEST.

7) Fuck, they should have staggered out the launch over a few months... 1 (or 2, maybe 3) new books a week until they were up to their "right" number. I bet a LOT of people would try the "new" DC if the DCU was just 12 titles total in month #1

8) DCU Editorial, per Didio, has by and large been a cycle of events -- generally with "big beats" hitting every two-ish weeks (sometimes more frequently)... for like the last 6-7 YEARS. But here's the thing: structurally these kinds of beats can be generated because of history -- "starting over" would appear on the face to eliminate that particular crutch?

9) The last time they tried anything EVEN REMOTELY like this it was a critical failure, and largely a commercial failure. Those three words? "One. Year. Later."

10) I don't want to trade the numbering on the "legacy" titles for the short-term bounce of a #1. In 2011 THAT BOUNCE NO LONGER "STICKS". It is no more than a 2 month bounce any longer.  In my secret heart, I was praying for the other way around -- that they'd go back to "old" numbering on everything -- GREEN LANTERN would be #487, or whatever it would have been.

11) Does this mean that all of the backlist on my racks will now be dead weight? If they're rebooting Superman continuity, do I want to have ANY copies whatsoever of 98% of the in print Superman backlist?

12) This part fills me with dread: "a more modern, diverse DC Universe, with some character variations in appearance, origin and age. All stories will be grounded in each character's legend - but will relate to real world situations, interactions, tragedy and triumph." DC is not Marvel, and, I think the appeal of DC over Marvel is the more fantastic nature of much of the characters/cosmology. "The New Blue Beetle will be a Filipino Transexual character" (or whatever) doesn't sound like a recipe for success to me, though.. and DC's track record on "diversity" actually succeeding with the audience is fairly poor.

13) They've done REALLY well in keeping this on the downlow, though, haven't they?

14) Following up on #11, does this imply we're going to go 6-ish month without any NEW DC backlist? Will DC be smarter about WHAT gets collected and what doesn't?

15) FIFTY-TWO new #1s? Jeebus.

16) If this hits, it *could* hit big; but if it fails, it will be catastrophic.

17) JUSTICE LEAGUE by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee sounds like something I could sell mountains of -- if it was the lead of the month. First, are the other 51 teams at that status (answer: no. Because there are not 51 other creative teams of that weight IN ALL OF COMICS), and, second, will it get lost in the other 51 books?

There's more, I'm sure -- this is pure gut reaction, without any long think behind it.. look for something more reasoned, I suspect, in the next Tilting at Windmills in about two weeks...

-B

Hibbs Swirls from 5/25

I already promised Jeff and Graeme I'd be reviewing today, so the reaction to THE BIG NEWS is going to have to wait a little bit, let me charge into this as fast as I can (below the jump) (Seriously, WTF is up with me picking exactly the wrong week of the entire year to go on a "Vacation" with the boy? Universe, give me more rope!)

(Oh, and, yeah, I won't even READ a comic next week until Monday, so I'm going to pre-doubt that I'll hit next week's target)

GREEN ARROW #12: OK, so "Rise and Fall" ostensibly existed in the first place to give Green Arrow a "shocking new direction" (or some other words like that, I am sure), right? I'm sure we all remember how a judge told Oliver Queen he'd never be allowed to set foot in Star City ever again, right?

So, sure, the last page has Ollie marching back into Star like nothing ever happened. *sigh*

This title is probably everything I absolutely fear about this DC reboot all wrapped up in one pretty bow -- a new direction that doesn't have anything to do with the protagonist wahtsoever; history/important beats completely ignored; plans changed at the last possible second (Seriously, WHY go through the entire BRIGHTEST DAY exercise to bring Swamp Thing back to the DCU if you're just going to reboot the ENTIRE UNIVERSE a few weeks later?)

I thought I was going to say "Awful" when I started writing this, but the news broke between, and, ugh, all I can think is CRAAAAAAAP!

KIRBY GENESIS #0: Twelve story pages. Arguably only one has anything to do with human characters, and most of the rest are just non-story beats of character designs. The art is pretty as heck (though I had to check twice to make sure it wasn't actually Brent Anderson layouts... is it just me?), but even for that thin American buck this doesn't seem to me to be a good introduction to this new title (or is it a line of books? I can't tell from this). I'll give it a big fat EH

X-MEN LEGACY #249: I intellectually know that that cover is supposed to imply Magneto being all angry and Rogue comforting him over the horrors of the concentration camps, but it's too overwrought and over-rendered for that to work. Frankly, I get a sexual vibe from it, which is pretty wrong (especially since the issue ENDS that way) -- I don't know, I think the new fucked-up characters are all kind of interesting, and that this new direction could be alright.... but it doesn't feel like "X-Men" to me, in some undefinable fashion. OK

THE TATTERED MAN:  I'm too meta for my own good. The text piece at the back starts with Jimmy Palmioti talking about how they're always getting approached to pitch to movie and TV people. "The Problem we keep running into is," Jimmy says, "that they really don't want anything too original."

Thus this comic is absolutely perfect for these phantom producers, because it appears to be a rejected pitch for a Ragman comic.

A gory one with tons of swearing.

It didn't suck, or anything (in fact, the Savage Critic says: solidly "OK"), but man, it's hardly even disguised, how blatant the rip is. Yikes.

XOMBI #3: Still loving this... but it's going to start over at #1 again in 2 months? Really?

Ugh, I think I'm done.

What did YOU think?

-B

Inventory/Fanfare: Jeff's Capsules Reviews, Barely

Dang, man.  You try to show a little love for the website by doing capsule reviews and then next thing you know you're stuck in a Hibbs-styled Death Race 2000 "who will blink first?! Who will die last?!" event.  [Okay, Hibbs didn't say that, but I'm pretty sure that Kirby did in one his next issue blurbs...] Anyway, after the jump: What Jeff Writes About When He Hasn't Been to the Shop That Week.

BEST OF DICK TRACY TPB:  IDW just published this sucker, as far as I can tell, because it was easy as hell to do so--although I can't confirm it, I'd swear this book had been released earlier (but my current Internet/browser configuration punishes the shit out of me every time I try to research it).  Certainly, the "stories picked and introduced by Jay Maeder/project edited by Dean Mullaney" credits make me suspect some sort of re-packaging situation.

The only reason I mention that is because this book works great as a sampler for the IDW's complete Dick Tracy hardcover series, since it carefully introduces each of its story excerpts by villain and year of publication--how hard would it have been to include a pic of the cover for  the corresponding IDW collection?

Anyway, this compilation of work from Gould's long history on Dick Tracy is far from ideal--it's very much a greatest hits collection and the comparatively slim length (128 pages!) to the daunting period surveyed (forty years of daily strips!)--but it is the most convenient way to get a measure of the man's body of work without plunking down too much coin.  For example, flipping through the ones at CE, I'd assumed 1938 was still too early for me to get to the dark, brutal stuff I'd gotten hooked on in my youth but, in fact, there's a very nasty little sequence from that period where Gould shows Tracy shooting a slaver sea captain right between the eyes...in close up.  That and a sequence where Tracy is nearly killed in an improvised death trap featuring a diver's pressurization chamber made me realize I should probably pick up IDW's '38 volume as soon as I could afford it.

Also, if you're a fan of Art Spiegelman or Marti or the collage artist Jess, you might already have an appreciation for the strangeness of Gould's work, and  skimming through the latter half of this book just to see what catches your eye is a great aid to that end.  Gould's inking just got bolder and more assertive as things went on, and by the '50s, the panels are all but socking you in the eye with its linework. By then, it feels like every character has turned grotesque, and every object requires an arrowed caption to label it, a paranoid's world where nothing can be dismissed.  It's no wonder Gould took Tracy into space in the '60s to have adventures with moon people.  By then, he probably longed to look around at everyday objects again without seeing their capacity to inflict violence.

I'm conflicted about this collection because it could've been so much more, but, like I said, as a fast survey of a remarkable career, it's VERY GOOD stuff.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #165-168:  After a longish bout reading GHOST RIDER, THE HOBO OF HELL on my iPad, I'm back to making my way through the period of ASM between #121 and #200 (a.k.a. "my" era).  I'm not nearly as much of a fan of Wein on the book as I am of Gerry Conway--although his plotting was flawed as all hell, Conway had a definite emotional arc for Pete after Gwen died that kept the book grounded and tied the supervillain stuff as closely to the supporting cast as possible.  By contrast, only when the gang throws Peter a surprise housewarming party in issue in issue #163 do we get any kind of real attention paid to the guy's social life.  As D.B. Webb puts it in the letters pages of #167:  "When was the last time we saw four whole pages of Peter Parker? I'm not sure, but it was far too long ago.  These four pages were worth the thirty cents alone."

(Fuck.  Thirty cents.  Also, because issue #167 has the circulation statement filed September 30, 1976, I can tell you that the average number of copies sold during previous 12 issues of ASM was 278,909 with the single issue nearest to the filing date selling 323,762 copies.  No wonder why some of us think all we have to do is drop digital comics to under a buck and suddenly we'll be up to our necks in comic book readers again.)

(I'm not sure whether I'm one of those people or not, BTW.)

Anyhoo, ASM #165-166 has a very fun storyline with Spidey caught up in a battle between The Lizard and Stegron The Dinosaur Man which has the latter reanimating dinosaur skeletons from the Museum of Natural History and having them rampage through the streets. Issues #167 and #168 has Spidey battling both a Spider-Slayer remote-controlled by J. Jonah Jameson and "Marvel's most shocking new superstar" the Will-O'-The-Wisp.  The character apparently died at the end of #168 and was so dull I'm surprised anyone brought him back.  (But of course they did, though.)

But even those #167 and #168 are kinda awesome, because Ross Andru is working his ass off to give us New York in all its comic book glory.  Not only does issue #168 start off with a battle in the 30 Rock skating rink (where it is rendered as properly dinky) but finishes with a seven page fight scene on Times Square. Even though it's just  a throwaway panel, Spidey using the statue of Father Duffy to pull himself out  of an attacking crowd underscores for me just how seriously Andru took the work.

(Oh, and if you're into making connections between the stuff I choose to review--probably not a very good idea, I admit--maybe you can help me figure out if the final scene of ASM #168, where Stegron is able to avoid Spidey during a snowstorm but then succumbs to the cold and crashes through a frozen lake without the nearby hero even noticing, was influenced by the amazing end to the Shaky storyline of Dick Tracy, where Shaky hides from Tracy under the boardwalk during an ice storm, but then gets trapped and slowly and painfully dies with everyone searching for him just a few feet away.)

[Hey, I think I figured out where my lifelong fear of snow came from!]

They're not my very favorite issues of ASM--not by a long shot--but I'd like to think it's just some really god-damned stellar craft and not spellbound nostalgia that makes me think of these as GOOD stuff.

IRON MAN IN "CITY CRISIS":  Oh, also in ASM #167 and #168 is an ad for Hostess Twinkies wherein "Kwirkegard, a philosophically sinister villain, aims his existential depression ray at New York City's water supply."  Thanks to kids being unaffected ("because they haven't forgotten how to play!" according to a scientist pointing at a chalkboard drawing of a hot water bottle), Iron Man is able to overcome the effects of the ray.  In the last panel, Iron Man tells a bunch of kids in Central Park, "It's up to you kids to save New York.  Your laughter is the city's only hope.  Be happy, and here are Hostess Twinkie Cakes to help you!"

Um...

You guys are lucky I'm not Jean Baudrillard because I would Jean Baudrillard the shit out of that ad.  But suffice it to say: did millionaire industrialists urging on commercialism and gentrification help New York shake off its aura of filth and decay? Did it do so by rendering rational thought and history a cartoonish villain?  Obviously, the answer can only be FUCK YES.

Wait, What? Ep. 42: Cry for Just Us

Finally! Because Graeme demanded it--Wait, What? Ep. 42 is out and in it, Mr. McMillan and myself talk our changing perceptions of the our the Green Lantern and X-Men: First Class movies, review Batwoman: Elegy; Wolverine: Insane in the Brain; Superman: The Black Ring; Mr. Wonderful by Dan Clowes, centennial issues, and, yup, a reconsideration of Cry For Justice. It's an hour and forty minutes of verbal nerd-fu, delivered in audio Shawscope

You can find it on iTunes, or on the 'cast's RSS feed, or you are hereby invited to listen to it here and now:

Wait, What? Ep. 42: Cry for Just Us

As we mention, there's going to be a bit of a gap between this episode and the next as I'm taking a brief vacation to Portland, where I will have the pleasure of hanging out and talking with Graeme sans Skype and sketchy wi-fi connection, but we hope you remember to tune in for us in a fortnight or so...

We hope you enjoy and thanks for listening!

Arriving 6/1/2011

Despite the holiday today (Memorial Day), comics are STILL MEANT TO BE ON-SALE THIS WEDNESDAY. This is a radical change from previous years, where Monday-holiday meant Thursday-comics.  

But, see the caveat after the jump!

Still, I'd recommend that you check with your local comics shop before you head down there on Wednesday (especially if you have any kind of a commute there) -- while this is the PLAN, it may not be the REALITY for all stores, everywhere. Like, I'll be fairly shocked if New Comics Day start much before 2 PM at Comix Experience -- even with our cajoling the trucking company to make sure we're packed at the front of the San Francisco run, I don't even think it is physically possible for the truck to arrive until well after we're open... and then we still need to get the comics up on the rack too!

Comix Experience hasn't had a release-the-comics-the-day-they-arrive day in a really really long time. Fifteen years? More? It's been so long that I forgot exactly when... but I can tell you that Capital City was still a going distribution concern back then....

Compounding this for us is that I TOTALLY forgot this was happening, and booked a father-and-son trip (to Legoland, California) leaving at stupid-o'clock Wednesday morning... so I won't even be around to put the books up. I feel AWFUL for Matt, no less so because this is a pretty solid week of comics....

So, yeah, anyway, call ahead, is my recommendation.

2000 AD PACK APR 2011 30 DAYS OF NIGHT NIGHT AGAIN #2 (OF 4) 50 GIRLS 50 #1 (OF 4) ADVENTURE COMICS #527 AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #663 ASTONISHING X-MEN #39 AVENGERS ACADEMY #14 POINT ONE BATMAN BEYOND #6 BETTY #192 BETTY & VERONICA DOUBLE DIGEST #191 BOYS #55 BPRD DEAD REMEMBERED #3 (OF 3) CRIMINAL LAST OF INNOCENT #1 (OF 4) DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER BATTLE OF TULL #1 (OF 5) DARKNESS #91 DC UNIVERSE ONLINE LEGENDS #9 DEATH OF ZORRO #4 DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP #23 (OF 24) DRACULA COMPANY OF MONSTERS #10 FEAR ITSELF #3 (OF 7) FEAR FEAR ITSELF DEEP #1 (OF 4) FEAR FLASHPOINT #2 FLASHPOINT ABIN SUR THE GREEN LANTERN #1 (OF 3) FLASHPOINT BATMAN KNIGHT OF VENGEANCE #1 (OF 3) FLASHPOINT SECRET SEVEN #1 (OF 3) FLASHPOINT THE WORLD OF FLASHPOINT #1 (OF 3) GI JOE VOL 2 ONGOING #2 GREEN HORNET YEAR ONE #10 GRIM GHOST #2 HALCYON #5 (OF 5) HAUNT #16 HELLBOY THE FURY #1 (OF 3) HERC #4 FEAR HEROES FOR HIRE #8 HONEY WEST #4 HOUSE OF MYSTERY #38 HULK #34 INTREPIDS #4 IRREDEEMABLE #26 IZOMBIE #14 JONAH HEX #68 KEVIN SMITH KATO #10 LIFE WITH ARCHIE MARRIED LIFE #10 JULY 2011 (RES) LOONEY TUNES #199 MARVEL ZOMBIE CHRISTMAS CAROL #1 (OF 5) MINX #1 MOON GIRL #2 (OF 5) MOON KNIGHT #2 OZMA OF OZ #7 (OF 8) PHOENIX #2 RED SPIKE #2 (OF 5) REED GUNTHER #1 SCOOBY DOO WHERE ARE YOU #10 SECRET SIX #34 SHIELD #1 SHINKU #1 SOLOMON KANE RED SHADOWS #3 (OF 4) SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #225 STATIC SHOCK SPECIAL #1 SUPERBOY #8 SWEET TOOTH #22 THUNDERBOLTS #158 FEAR TURF #5 UNCANNY X-FORCE #11 UNCLE SCROOGE #404 WALKING DEAD SURVIVORS GUIDE #3 (OF 4) WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #719 WEIRD WORLDS #6 (OF 6) WHO IS JAKE ELLIS #4 WITCHFINDER LOST & GONE FOREVER #5 (OF 5) WOLVERINE HERCULES MYTHS MONSTERS AND MUTANTS #4 (OF 4) WONDER WOMAN #611 WULF #2 WYNONNA EARP YETI WARS #2 X-23 #11 X-FACTOR #220 X-MEN #12

Books / Mags / Stuff ALIENS VS PREDATOR THREE WORLD WAR BREED COL VOL 01 BOOK OF GENESIS TP BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 08 LAST GLEAMING CAPTAIN BRITAIN HC VOL 01 BIRTH OF LEGEND CITIZEN REX HC (RES) CONSTRUCTIVE ABANDONMENT HC FREAKY MONSTERS MAGAZINE #1 JADE DOOR HC (A) JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #310 JURASSIC PARK TP DEVILS IN THE DESERT LIFE WITH MISTER DANGEROUS GN (RES) MOOMIN COMPLETE LARS JANSSON COMIC STRIP HC VOL 06 OSBORN TP EVIL INCARCERATED PLANETARY BATMAN DELUXE HC PREVIEWS #273 JUNE 2011 (NET) SLAINE LORD OF MISRULE TP STUCK RUBBER BABY SC NEW EDITION SUICIDE FOREST TP WALT DISNEY COMICS & STORIES ARCHIVES TP VOL 01 WONDER WOMAN HC VOL 01 ODYSSEY X-MEN TO SERVE AND PROTECT TP

So, what looks good to YOU?

-B

Hibbs' some of 5/18

It looks like Graeme and Jeff and I are now playing Chicken again.  Which of us will blink first?  

(duh, me!)

ALPHA FLIGHT #0.1: Ugh, seriously? We're now attaching fractional numbers to numbers before #1? Given that a rational person might think "Ah, this will be about who Alpha Flight is, and what they've been doing since the last time we saw them", but no, it isn't.

Let's see if I can make my own version of a "0.1", then?

Alpha Flight is a reallyreally weird team. They had those great cameos in those Byrne/Claremont X-Men, and everyone thought they wanted more, but then it turns out that no one really has any good ideas for STORIES with them, just the sketched out concepts sound good.  Even John Byrne himself didn't have the slightest idea what to do with them when he launched a solo series.

That series astonishingly lasted for 130 issues despite it really never having much of a direction or voice, which is why they keep trying to bring it back -- the problem is that very few people who read any of those 130 issues are reading comics today.

Marvel's latest solution to the Alpha problem is somehow rebooting the team, mostly -- we're pretty much back to the "original" cast, with even Mac Hudson back from the dead... and Heather is there by his side, too. I have a vague recollection of this happening during... "Chaos War", was it? but I'm utterly fuzzy on the details, but there's no, zero, none, zilch explanation in this comic of how (OR WHY!?!?!?) they resurrected a 20-something year dead character.  I could see THAT being a compelling story -- you've been DEAD for 20 years, not just frozen in ice or "presumed missing" or something, but actually deceased, how is that dealt with by the government, or your team mates, or society.

But there's nothing like that here, and, actually, these characters are all portrayed as complete and total ciphers -- you're expected to KNOW who they are and WHAT their backstories are supposed to be... even those those appear to be mostly the backstories of older incarnations of the characters. The only one with half a personality is Northstar, and his half is "he's a jerk, but a loving gay!", which... well fine, whatever.

Anyway, I think that who this comic is aimed at is "fans of John Byrne's Alpha Flight, but not fans of anything he DID with those characters" which is actually really probably fair enough when you think about it, but is not a well coveted demographic, really, but I guess it could work somehow?

So, yeah, no personalities, just page after page of each member running off to become Alpha Flight (and, no, "... and this one is actually a meter maid; no one likes meter maids!" isn't actually a personality!), then they fight the some silly enemies in the most illogical manner ever. First up half the team fights some generic "anti-government FANATIC in an adamantium exoskeleton" who isn't espousing any kind of understandable political position that I can ascertain, and he's beating them until... until... untillllllll.... man, I don't know what happens at that point -- Marrina says "come with me, LAND MOLLUSK", then Shaman has swirly things around him, but "Citadel" doesn't seem to be confined or in any trouble, in fact he's just spouting off more, and then they vaguely cut away from that team and the enemy with no explanation of what happens next.

Next,  it's Purple Girl, who was once a member of Beta Flight, and she's the daughter of the Purple Man with the mind controls and everything.

PG here, mindcontrols the crowd to form a giant person out of people, and, erm, Alan Moore stories notwithstanding (if you're going to steal, steal from the best!), that wouldn't actually, y'know, make any forms of propulsion or combat or anything because mind control doesn't *actually* change the physical laws of our universe or anything. But, whatev, lets go with it.

Finally, Snowbird comes along and Purple Girl can't actually control her mind because Snowie shapeshifts a bunch and "Gahh - transforming too fast -- too many minds -- can't-- " and kapow that's it -- but that's not how I understand PG's powers to work, but ah, whatevs!

The giant made out of people... well, we don't know what happens there, they didn't show it, but presumably it falls apart, and several people fall many stories to their deaths, but whatevs!

Alpha then poses for a picture, despite most of them not actually doing a thing here. Anne-Marie has her legs spread. No one mentions the other fight they had, or what happened to Citadel.

Then, suddenly there's an inset panel at the bottom of the group shot where Marrina (I think?) inexplicitly starts shouting that she's an alien, and "BITE ME, EARTH MEDIA!" Wait... what?

We cut away from that from-nowhere outburst to re-establish that Northstar is a good gay and he kisses his boyfriend, but uh oh, he forgot to vote. I think what they mean to imply by the final shot is that Gary Cody is the new... well, I'm guessing Prime Minister of Canada, but it's not actually made clear anywhere in the text what he's running for, so it could be Ottawa Dog-Catcher for all I know, but it actually looks like he's just finishing the speech he's started at the beginning of the comic, and not actually won an election, so I don't really know for sure.

Wow, lousy lousy comic. CRAP.

INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #504: That may be the most violent comic book I've read since that issue of Miracleman where KM destroys London while he waits for MM to return. Gross. Also very effective in actually conveying that horror, which is rarer than rare in a crossover issue, but, still mostly gross. OK

ROCKETEER ADVENTURES #1: Look, there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to try and do "more" of Dave Steven's fun little character... but IF you're going to do it, then doing it with John Cassaday, Mike Allred and Michael Kaluta is probably the way to go. Not one of those stories was of an particular weight or consequence, yet I very much enjoyed looking at them all. Pretty pretty stuff. Fluff, too, but sometimes pretty wins. GOOD.

IN the "I don't have anywhere else to put it" department, I want to publicly boggle at the Giant game of Telephone that the internet is.

Whenever a new tilting comes out, I always spend a few days googling "hibbs tilting" and "latest results" looking for blogs and message boards I don't normally read, but even I am kind of shocked by Comic Book Resources.

A member over there took the latest tilting and decided the point of wisdom to glean from it was to decide what books should be cancelled right now. He posted threads in both the Marvel and DC sections of CBR's forums that were "WHAT SHOULD BE CUT RIGHT NOW!" and linked to the column.

People then start posting, without, I believe, reading the underlying column.

4 or 5 pages into the DC one a user from Sweden says

"I dont care at all for some american comic shop owner and that he want to sell more of the big superheroes. I enjoy many of the smaller dc comics and if they were cancelled i would vote with my wallet,punish dc by buying less Batman type."

the next reply:

"I still don't see how canceling a bunch of books is going to help anyone other than this guy who doesn't seem like he can even run his own store."

the Swede again:

"Exactly but he isnt a reader who wants a good story no matter how small or big a comic is. He just cares about selling, he doesnt need smaller,acclaimed series for that."

Which is almost exactly the direct opposite of everything I think and believe, stand for, and present in my store... wrapped up in one comment thread. Yay Internet!

As always, what do YOU think?

-B