the song is not the same when we’re
created: I sent off 2010 and welcomed 2011 in style. Quality over quantity, right?

-AOL jawns: Comics for movie buffs, Digital December mop-up with a retailer and Archie

-Tom Spurgeon at Comics Reporter interviewed me and whoo, look at the size of that thing. I go in on a lot of subjects–fashion in comics, race and why Iron Man 2.0 is a vote of no-confidence for black folks and comics, the importance of art and story, what news stories journos should cover… click through, read it, tell me what you thought. The response on Twitter and Spurgeon’s intro was super flattering, so now I’m wondering where all the haters at.

all played out, played out, all played out
consumed:

-As I type, I’m watching Ohio State beast Arkansas (as of the first half) on ESPN3. This is the future. I’d pay money for this service if it carried full seasons for the Buckeyes, Hawks, or Falcons.

-How come every sports broadcast ever has a blonde lady down on courtside/sideline? That’s definitely a trend, right? Holly Rowe on ESPN, Doris Burke on NBA 2k11. It’s always two dudes in the booth and one lady on the field.

-Buckeyes won, Pryor got MVP.

–Dark Horse Presents coming back is pretty cool. I missed out on it the first time around, but I liked the Myspace stuff they put up.

-Seneca update: he posted his top 10 list, get at it. He also liked Silent War.

-I figured out Black History Month 2011. I’m going to keep it under wraps, but what I’m thinking will probably be more work for me, but less time spent thinking and fighting on the page.

-You want to enjoy life? Every payday, take twenty or thirty bucks and buy yourself a fat steak. Cook it yourself on the stovetop or grill, seasoned as you like, and maybe some broccoli or corn on the cob or something to go with it. Then sit down with it and a nice movie and tune everything out while you eat.

-Bonus round: make it a point to carve something you don’t like entirely out of your life.

-This is what I do: open a billion windows on Wikipedia by accident. This week’s haul: Mass extinction, Doomsday event, wormwood star, Chang’e, Giewont, Year Without A Summer, Pararaton, Eschatology, and False Vacuum. I’ve liked been interested in eschatology ever since I was a kid, probably pre-teen even, and I usually find myself lost and reading about it once a month. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Tough to wrap your head around. It’s too big.

–I like DrawThisDress.

-I’m a little behind on Persona 3. I just met Ken, the kid, but he hasn’t joined up yet. The story hasn’t quite coalesced just yet, though it’s flirting in that direction. I know that the Kirijo group did something, but that’s about as far as it goes. It’s interesting, though. I should probably play it more often than a few hours a week before bed.

-I watched Gurren Lagann, thanks to Netflix. It was good, maybe a solid B if I had to put a figure to it. The most interesting parts were the mecha bits and the way the spiral played out thematically and literally (in terms of story structure). I’m glad I didn’t buy it, because I don’t know that I’d ever watch it again. I liked it, but I didn’t like it. There were some good set pieces, and the structure was fascinating, but sometimes it got all Gainaxed out. Dropping a slow paced flashback episode into the middle of the sprint to the ending was a crap choice, too.

-I’m looking forward to that FLCL blu-ray, though. Fooly Cooly was dope pretty much throughout, and when I rewatched it a couple years ago, I got even more of the jokes. It’s just thoroughly on point.

-Been thinking a lot about space vs entertainment lately. I own a lot of books I’m not in love with that are just taking up space. I purged a lot of DVDs a while back, too. My new rule is that if I don’t see myself enjoying it more than once, I don’t buy it on physical media. The only exception right now are floppies, but since I can just trash those and I don’t buy that many anyway, it’s not a huge deal.

–DC Universe Online looks interesting, but I played Final Fantasy XI for like six months before I realized I was paying to do boring jobs. I’m wary, but I might cop it if I get too curious/find people to play with. My biggest problem with MMOs is that grinding blows and partying up with strangers tends to blow. The time sink/addiction thing isn’t really a problem for me at all. Discipline, right?

-Did y’all hear that some professor felt so guilty about having to say “nigger” when reading Huck Finn that he’s producing a volume with “nigger” replaced by “slave?” What a big fat crybaby, man. Get over it.

-If you’re down to buy four dollar digital comics, do us all a favor and stop buying digital comics. Don’t encourage that nonsense.

-Brief, because I got these Best of 2010 posts to do.

talktometalktometalktometalktome
David: ain’t nothing
Esther: Secret Six 29
Gavin: Azrael #16, Ant-Man and Wasp #3, Avengers Prime #5, Ozma of Oz #3, She-Hulks #3, Ultimate Captain America #1, Irredeemable #21, WWE Heroes: Undertaker #2

Acme Novelty Library 20, Afrodisiac, American Vampire, It Was the War of the Trenches, King City, Parker: The Outfit, Pluto, Thunderbolts, Twin Spica, Vagabond 9

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chris ware – acme novelty library #20

official page

I’ve never been able to get into Chris Ware. I’ve liked the odd bit of context-less art. I think there was a New Yorker cover that I liked and maybe some spot illustrations elsewhere. I could recognize the skill, it just never hooked me. I even bought Jimmy Corrigan at one point, and it’s sitting in my closet unfinished. I tried it, didn’t like it, dropped it.

Acme 20, though. I haven’t read any of the prior volumes, and to be honest, I barely even know what the series is about. I’d heard some advance buzz from some reliable friends, though, and that led to me throwing it on my Amazon list, which is where I put everything I’m thinking of getting. My good buddy Lauren Davis picked it up for my birthday as a surprise (she is the first person to a) reveal that she knows I have a wish list and b) actually buy something off it).

I read it on a long train ride and was blown away. I knew nothing about it going in, other than it was about a dude and each page was a single day in one year of his life. Acme 20 goes from pre-verbal to death for this guy Lint, and it’s just an amazing work of comics art.

Rather than doing the cheap thing and presenting a highlight reel of Lint’s life, where we see him win at hide and seek, be prom king, marry a hot model, or whatever, Ware instead focuses on a range of events and emotions. We see sadness, happiness, and later on, we find out that some things we’ve seen are far from the whole picture.

Ware uses the page-a-day to his benefit, hiding facts and truths between the pages and between the years. Reality slips and slides as time goes on, with jarring shifts in Lint’s status happening completely off-screen and sometimes never even being explained at all. You have to take things as they come, a lot like you do in real life.

In the end, Ware didn’t make a story about lies or sadness or guilt or happiness or whatever. He just told the story of one guy’s life, for better or for worse. And it was fantastic.

kou yaginuma – twin spica

preview, official page

When I was a kid, I was really, really into certain things. I liked arachnids, especially scorpions (in theory). I liked turtles, and even had an ornery pet painted turtle. I liked drawing. I also really, really liked space. I never had a telescope, but I tore through library books about astronomy. Reading about stars, thinking about walking on the moon, and checking out comparison charts of planets… I ate all of that up. It was cool, and really hard to truly understand. It was so different, right? But you grow up and you grow out of things. I can’t remember the last time I sat down and drew something, you know? Things fade out.

I hadn’t thought about that in years, but Twin Spica brought it all back. I didn’t expect to like it. The art looked way too cute, the lead was this tiny little girl, and it didn’t look like the kind of book where people smoked cigarettes in dark bars and got shot in alleys. I’d seen it around, judged it by its cover, and was like, “Well, maybe if I get bored.”

I got bored one day and read it. Reaction: stunned surprise. Yaginuma made me remember a little bit of what it was a like to be a kid and be endlessly fascinated by the unknown. The endless memorization just because, the spacey daydreams, and just trying to wrap your too-small hands around as huge of an idea as “outer space” come across with a clarity I didn’t expect.

There’s a real love for the subject matter in Twin Spica, but rather than being cloying, overly subservient, and impenetrable, it’s delivered in a way that the love is transferred to the reader. You can tell exactly how much Asumi, the main character, enjoys space. It’s a little bittersweet, too, due to the presence of Mr. Lion. He’s the representation of the dangers of space travel and past tragedy, but even then, he’s there to support Asumi and nurture her interest in space. In the end, her sacrifices and setbacks stand right next to her triumphs and all of it just reinforces her resolve.

As far as showing you what it’s like to be a kid and just entranced with something, just positively drowning and not even caring because it’s endlessly fascinating and infinitely wonderful, Twin Spica nails it.

Acme Novelty Library 20, Afrodisiac, American Vampire, It Was the War of the Trenches, King City, Parker: The Outfit, Pluto, Thunderbolts, Twin Spica, Vagabond 9

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jacques tardi – it was the war of the trenches

I’ve liked war comics since I was a kid. My uncle had some Sgt Rocks that I tore through, sometimes literally, and I thought the action was really great. I liked normal people doing things, and being in a military family, it was cool. Not enough about the USAF, I figure, but good enough. Garth Ennis adjusted my view of war comics years later, by focusing on the people, rather than the action.

It Was The War of the Trenches works in that same lane of emotion over action. Tardi delivers several short anecdotes about World War I, with large panels and clean rendering. He’s not doing anything particularly flashy, but he is creating an effective and believable world.

The characters in the book are transient and almost anonymous, with only their names and locations separating them. We get a brief moment to get to know them before being subjected to the horror or inanity of war. Men die screaming for days upon days, others are shot for having human reactions, and still others let themselves become monsters. We don’t see the Germans all that often, but when they do appear, they’re just as normal as the French.

That anonymity works in the book’s favor, particularly in terms of delivering the book’s point about war. You’re left feeling like you just read about the same person experiencing several different events, trapped in a hell not of his own making. It Was the War of the Trenches isn’t as mean as something like Kyle Baker’s Special Forces, which just laid on the sarcasm so thick you can read it as being played perfectly straight. It is, though, a mean book, one with no patience for the ideas of glory in war, a just war, or any war, period. Nobility? Honor? Patriotism? It’s all a joke, and the punchline is dying while trying to hold your own guts in, weeping quietly and asking for your maman.

Tardi depicts war as a faceless meat grinder, one that destroys you and your loved ones regardless of how they feel and who they are. There’s very little in the book that tops the scene where a man who is clearly a vet is battered by a crowd who is angered by his talk of peace. It’s that sort of thing, that willingness to stand behind nationalism and send your boys off to war, that Tardi opens up and dissects. No one’s happy to be in this war. They’re tired, filthy, and sick of dying. And in the end, who wins the war doesn’t matter, because everyone who fought it is dead.

darwyn cooke – parker: the outfit

I bought The Outfit the day before New York Comic-Con. I’d intended to read it on the plane, but things didn’t work out. Instead, I read a third of it sitting on the convention floor, the final third elsewhere, and the middle third during one of Marvel’s panels. I’d finished copying down whatever scant news they’d generated and gotten the post ready to go by about halfway through the panel. Corporate panels are mostly boring, though, especially the Q&A parts, so I figured I’d wrap up a book that I was enjoying.

I think I hit the part in the middle, Book Three, while Peter David was talking about some comic I don’t read. And everything tuned out after that, because I was hooked. This is how comics should work. They can take something very simple, like two men robbing a night club or the life of a crime boss, and turn it into something incredible. It doesn’t have to be something with gutters or melodramatic dialogue. The art doesn’t have to stay the same throughout, as long as the shift makes sense thematically.

Cooke shifts styles several times in Book Three. Structured mostly under the concept of “The Lowdown,” a weekly crime mag, Cooke details several heists and they each get their own style. One’s a novel excerpt (positioned as a true crime story) with spot illos. Another looks like a those goofy cartoons where everyone’s face is always facing the camera and grotesque. Styles upon styles upon styles is what he has.

The contrast between what I was reading and the announcements I’d just written down for Marvel were striking. The Outfit is based on a novel that’s over forty years old, but it was full of old ideas made fresh and clean. The experimentation in format took those ideas and fired them at your face, rocketing off the pages at escape velocity. Mean, vicious, and undeniable.

The Outfit isn’t a graphic novel. It’s not even just a good story, another solid graphic novel from a guy who already has more quality under his belt than most people get. It’s a classroom. It’s a lesson in storytelling, in how to put together a comic, and how far you can stretch the formula before it isn’t a comic any more.

Here’s the answer: it will always be a comic. Comics can do anything. All you have to do is stretch.

The Damon Albarn Appreciation Society is an ongoing series of observations, conversations, and thoughts about music. Here’s the first:

I’ve been learning The Beatles lately. I’m fairly unfamiliar with them, with only a passing knowledge of their catalog. I know “Come together! Right now! Over me!” from a pickup truck commercial (and it was probably the Aerosmith version), I believe, and bits from movies or karaoke. I started with Revolver, because that’s what people said was their best album, and listened to it about ten times over Christmas weekend.

What’s most surprising, I think, is how infinitely singable this record is. Something about a song like “Eleanor Rigby” demands that you sing along. It’s compelling, but not in terms of content. The lyrics and vocals aren’t that complicated, is what it is. They’re simple, especially when compared to the diva’d up songs (word to 0:40-1:00, can I get an amen?) that I usually need to sing along to. It’s pop, in the purest meaning of the word. It’s popular and appropriate for a mass audience. Paul McCartney’s singing voice is conversational, almost, and a little bit haunting. It’s a sad song, but a catchy one.

What’s more is what I tend to think of as the focal point of the song, the phrase “Eleanor Rigby,” is incredibly pleasing to the ear. It sits alone in the verse, separated from the rest of its line by a beat, and really draws my attention. Something about the name puts me in mind of the phrase “cellar door.” It’s intensely musical in and of itself and regardless of what it actually means. “El-ea-nor-rig-by” has a specific rhythm and a pleasing sound, even when spoken in plain language. The Rs flow into each other. “Father McKenzie” isn’t quite as musical, I think due to the hard K sounds in the last segment, but it still works after being setup by “Eleanor Rigby.”

(This ties into the rhythm, as well. Biggie’s “Super Nin-ten-do Sega Genesis” has much the same effect. It’s like hypnosis.)

My mental impression of “Eleanor Rigby,” the song, is partly abstracted. It’s a loose collection of pleasant sounds (“I look at all the lonely people” and then “Eleanor Rigby”) followed by coherent lyrics, and then bookended with more pleasing sounds. And you can’t not sing along with it for that very reason. It sounds good, a kind of good that demands homage. It works, and works hard.

There are a few other songs on the album I have this reaction to, though none as strong as “Eleanor Rigby.” “Taxman” is quite good, and I like the harmony (harmonial?) aspects of it (“Yeaaaaahyeah, I’m the Taxmaaaan,” “Ah-ah, Mis-ter Willll-son,” and that crazy verse from 0:55-1:12) and the way their accent alters the pronunciation of certain common words (“Don’t ask me what I want it for/if you don’t want to pay some more,” the “small/all” rhyme prior to that) makes for a very enjoyable tune. “She Said She Said” has a couple of great bits (“No no no you’re wrong” rising into “when I was a boy” before that line fades back to normal), too. “Good Day Sunshine” has the kind of chorus that I think of as superhero music. It feels like it’s rising, and is vibrant and catchy.

(I liked “I’m Only Sleeping” because it reminds me of Mark 5:22-43: “He went inside. Then he said to them, ‘Why all this confusion and sobbing? The child is not dead. She is only sleeping.'” It’s a facile connection, but a deep one that I can’t quite put out of my mind.)

This isn’t a new way to look at music for me. But it’s interesting that the songs on Revolver hit me like they did. My only other Britpop touchstone is Blur, which I do like to sing to. Do I like Blur and The Beatles for the same reasons? I’ve listened to Rubber Soul eight or nine times at this point, and I had a similar reaction to “Drive My Car,” which feels like a pounding Aretha Franklin joint and is super funky, and “Norwegian Wood,” which sounds like what I imagined Beatles songs sounded like before I started listening to them. “I once had a girl. Or should I say, she once had me.”

Long story short, though, I ordered The Beatles: Rock Band, even though it only has three joints from Revolver.

-Seventy-two!
-Year in Review!
-Can’t believe we’ve done seventy-two of these things.
-Good golly, Miss Molly.
-We liked this year, though.
-It was a big year, so we talk about a lot of things.
-You know how that goes.
-We like a lot of stuff.
-We talk about reading real books, too.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-See you, space cowboy!

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Hey, folks. First off, check out this awesome interview the 4L monarch David Brothers has done at the Comics Reporter. It’ll take you about three days to read, but it’s a good one.

So while I have the usual suspects in David, Space Jawa (is there any other kind of Jawa?) and Was Taters (is there any other kind of Taters?), I also got one from aggressively horny ducks (are there any… um…). He sent it to David, who found it buried in his spam because it came from a guy named aggressively horny ducks. That’ll happen. Why I obviously have What If #200 taken care of, our foul and fowl reader sent in his own panel because, “I don’t care a lot about continuity but this is just foolish.”

True enough, though if any panel from that issue raises my eyebrow, it’s the one of Namor punching Bullseye while saying — not yelling — “Imperious $#%^.” Imperious what? Imperious cock? Imperious fuck? Did he drop the n-bomb? What?

Sadly, to everyone’s dismay I’m sure, I totally misplaced my copy of Carnage #2. Still, we must carry on.

Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine #4
Jason Aaron and Adam Kubert

Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #4
Warren Ellis and Kaare Andrews

Read the rest of this entry �