Early on in Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo scripts an interaction I found really interesting. Kaneda goes to the school nurse’s office to see if she can shed some light on a pill he found. Four pages:

The interesting bit is that the nurse reveals her pregnancy to Kaneda and his reaction is… nothing. He dodges her reveal in a way that both ducks any responsibility on his part and turns her reveal into a setup for a crude joke. He’s cognizant of what he’s doing, I think. The sad face in the reveal panel makes that obvious. But that doesn’t stop what he does next. In fact, it probably fuels his response. A baby isn’t even on the radar for Kaneda. That’s somebody else’s problem.

The nurse only moves a couple times in this sequence. She stands up from her chair to rush Kaneda out of the office before he gets caught, but after he kisses her, she’s frozen in place. At first, it’s clearly due to pleasure. Kaneda pulls away from the kiss, causing her to lean in. I like the way that she rests on the table after the kiss, presumably due to wobbly knees. She continues leaning on the table during her confession. It’s something solid that she can hold onto while she gets ready to shift the axis of her entire world. And when Kaneda shuts her down with a joke, she’s still leaning.

The body language here is ill. The way she tries to hold the kiss, the glow when she first grips the table, and then the way her head and body slowly slump over the course of three pages. It reminds me of this episode of Chris Onstad’s Achewood:

Kaneda walks around with dynamite in his mouth, and he’s an expert at using it. He’s cruel, and more than willing to use and abuse someone else to get what he needs. The sheer cruelty inherent in asking for a favor and then completely dismissing one of the most important things in someone’s life is incredible. It doesn’t make him wholly unlikable (it sorta does), but it’s a clue that, hey, this guy? Straight up delinquent.

On the flip side of that is the fact that nobody is completely evil. Everybody has someone they tell fart jokes to, or a girl that they get all goofy around. Kaneda is brutally callous, but when dealing with people he cares about, he’s fiercely loyal. He’s more than willing to go to the mat for his friends, and if that means killing somebody to get the job done? So be it. If that means beating up a greyed up little kid… hey. Fair’s fair. No one takes shots at the family and walks away.

I saw Attack the Block the other week. It’s working in a similar lane, in that it humanizes what would normally be pure goons in other movies. David Allison over at the Mindless HQ talked about this in detail in the review that made me interested in the flick to begin with. Both Akira and Attack the Block show the people behind the crime, for lack of a better phrase.

Neither of them are about redemption, either. Both Kaneda and Moses learn something and maybe figure out how to be better people, but that’s not the point of the story so much as it is a side effect of the story. Kaneda goes from his small world of high school, pliable women, and violence on the weekends to a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the old rules are dead, but old skills may come in handy. Things get bigger, and Kaneda is forced to operate on a scale and in situations he never considered and isn’t necessarily cut out for.

“Soandso is a hero” is a simplistic way of looking at things. The best person has flaws, and the worst person has good qualities. It’s a matter of seeing deeper than just the surface level for either side and considering the person as a whole. Kaneda is the right man for the right time. He has heroic qualities, but villainous ones, too.

I’m in the middle of rereading Akira after a couple of years off. I’m a third of the way through or so. I don’t remember what happened to the nurse, but now, I’m seriously and genuinely wondering what went down with her and the kid. Figure I’ll find out as I work my way through the rest of the series, though.

Flashpoint: Grodd of War is about a telepathic gorilla killing half of Africa while taking over the continent as a sort of Planet of the Apes/superiority thing, maybe you saw this dumb comments thread about it.

You know you’ve got a weak bench as far as characters go when the most prominent black characters in a story set in Africa are five unnamed and generic child soldiers, four of which die on the spot. Isn’t that weird? Sure, everyone’s been murdered or whatever, but are child soldiers a better shorthand for “This is Africa” than grown men with machetes or AK-47s? Like, are child soldiers the new spear-chuckin’ African pygmy cannibals? Is this a thing I need to mark down in my hand-written appendix to the Big Book of Racism!?

It’s so hard to keep up these days. And I have dreams, too. I was hoping that either those dudes who walk hyenas or have that ill fashion sense would be the next signifier for “This is not Monaco, this is Baghdad Mogadishu,” you know? Have you seen these guys? They’re all the way swagged out, like Dipset at their prime crossed with those cats who were cool in the ’70s and rock bright orange double breasted suits these days like they’re all that. Imagine if that was the face of Africa.

But yeah, child soldiers, cool, got it. There’s what, 200,000 kids serving in rebel armies, many of them against their will? No, wait. 200,000 boys, I mean. The girls get raped and murdered. (They call them wives.) But yeah, yo–that’s an intensely powerful idea, right? A swarm of children, a couple million dead, a million-some orphans, millions more who’ve had their lives ruined. That’s a powerful idea right there, the sort of meme that burrows deep down into your brain and rattles your fillings. I think it’s that combination of lost innocence and malice, “kids are patriotic robotic, operate catapults and goose-step over innocence/innocents,” it’s positively sexy. Some good drama in there, some really easy emotional hooks.

It’s a comfortably brown concept, too, isn’t it? We don’t really have that over here. Asia, some of the wilder parts of Europe, Mexico, a bunch of Africa, sure, but ’round here? Nah. Closest we get is gang violence, I figure. Child soldiers. Ill-fitting clothes, big guns… It’s a little edgy, but it’s just distant enough to play in Peoria. And it’s so Africa. A few panels of these little kidlets will give us some verisimilitude.

And man, how about the best guy in Grodd’s army being a white Scotsman who is cursed to become a gorilla? I mean, that’s pretty cool. Golden gorilla–that idea has legs. More like that.

Oh! I just remembered something. I read an interview with the writer of this thing, Sean Ryan, a while back. I made a joke about it on Twitter, I think. I don’t remember right now. Quoth the weblog:

SR: He really doesn’t. They ignore him. A thing I wanted to touch on in the story is how Africa is often ignored. There’s awful things happening in Africa all the time in our own world and we don’t really know about it. It usually takes some kind of celebrity to point it out to us. So that’s sort of what’s going on in Africa in Flashpoint. Grodd has taken over Africa and turned it into a mass grave, but the world could care less. They’re more focused on Aquaman and Wonder Woman.

Sure enough, on the first page, Grodd is all “I slaughter half of Africa… and most people don’t even know my name. Location, location, location.” while chilling on a throne made out of human skulls. Real world reference: complete! CHEA!

Most of all, though. Most of all. I liked that the most significant human character–the only human character left to protect Africa, the only one with a name–is that piece of crap Batman knock-off Catman. He goes down fighting, too, before Grodd pulls his head off. I wish he got some lines. He’d probably say something pretty cool. “You’ve murdered Africa, you maniac! You blew it all up!” Should maybe workshop that line. Seems a little familiar.

Catman: his return to fame was in a Kevin Smith comic (strike 1) as a fat pathetic loser (strike 2) and then he become a SUPER COOL TRAPPER HUNTER WOLVERINE GUY! in another comic (that’s three, clear out, B). He’s a regular old American fella, ain’t doing no harm. He lives with lions, and he just really gets them, you know? Like really, really really. Overhigh girl at a party talking about how beautiful the universe is, man, it makes me wanna cry it’s so unbelievably beautiful gets them.

Count it: five unnamed brown child soldiers (four dead [killed by a child], one living), one Scotsman turned golden ape (he dies), the hero of Africa (a white dude who’s probably from Nowhere, Connecticut in Mowgli drag [ooh, can we tie in the white man’s burden somehow?]), and a continent that’s implied to be a giant open grave, conquered by monkeys who are, at best, smart enough to get a high school diploma.

That smells like Africa to me, bwana.

(This was going to be maybe 150 words long, but took a weird turn around “Isn’t that weird?” and I couldn’t stop for some reason. This is a comic that makes you want to be mean to someone. Turns out somebody likes this piece of crap, though.)

Charlie Huston’s The Shotgun Rule builds to a fever pitch maybe halfway through due to the fact that the chapters are alternating between a point in the future where things are quickly collapsing into trauma and violence and the present, where the characters are being pushed toward that future. This weird double vision keeps pushing you, and every time you cut away from one path to check in on the other, the other path becomes more and more important. You read each page at the same pace, but the scenes push you along until the tension becomes almost unbearable.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira has a scene that reminds me of that, though the specifics are almost entirely different. It’s in Akira Volume 2, if you want to follow along. The images in this post are abridged from the scene, but should neatly illustrate what I mean.

There are a few distinct stories going on in this scene, and they’re all headed for the same end goal. Kaneda and Kei (or Kay, I’m not picky) are rushing toward Akira’s refrigeration unit in an attempt to somehow find Tetsuo and maybe find out the truth about Akira. Ryu and his boy are trying to evade the military and infiltrate the facility. The Colonel and the military are trying to beat Tetsuo to the bottom floor. Another guy is keeping an eye out for Ryu for revenge. Tetsuo is making his way toward Akira.

Kaneda/Kei, Ryu, and Shikishima make three strains. Add Tetsuo–that’s four. The four strains twist in and out of each other’s way before the big finale, trading characters or blows. There’s a clear time limit, and a lot of confusion, and the result is that everyone’s rushing everywhere. Hover vehicles are exploding their way down the elevator shaft, dudes are getting shot and stabbed, and everyone’s sprinting toward the finish line, whether that involves wading through sewage or moving in formation down an elevator shaft.

The only exception is Tetsuo. He’s positively strolling toward Akira, walking with his fur collar around his neck and his hands in his pockets. His body language is casual, but focused. He’s amused by all the stuff going on around him, but clearly far from concerned. He’s murdered a dozen soldiers already, so he knows that he can handle whatever gets in his way. He runs into trouble exactly once while descending, and he survives that with nary a scratch. He’s a teenager blessed with extraordinary and seemingly unstoppable power–he’s just as cocky as he deserves to be.

The net result of these four strains playing off each other is pretty great, from a pacing point of view. This could’ve been a dead sprint, with everyone trying to get to one spot before everyone else. Instead, Tetsuo slipping in and out of focus as the conflict goes on makes things much more tense than an out-and-out sprint would be. Everyone is rushing, shouting, and worried. Scientists are telling the Colonel awful news, Ryu is worried about being detected and/or stabbed, and Kei is trying to get to where she needs to be.

And then there’s Tetsuo. Walking.

My favorite page in this scene… my second favorite page in this scene is akira-book2-descent-01.jpg, the bit where he’s riding the elevator down alongside some seriously ominous sound effects. His posture and the giant panels are just insanely well thought out. He doesn’t have a care in the world, because what thing can kill him?

Just the fact that he isn’t worried about what’s going on is worrisome. It’s like sitting in a room full of panicked people, and being panicked yourself, when you spot one person sitting right in the middle of the room with a huge grin on his face. It’s unsettling. Tetsuo’s casual demeanor here makes the entire scene, which is probably around a hundred pages long. His calmness is scary. It ratchets a simple chase scene up into real tension. You can’t read this slowly. Toward the end, where Tetsuo gets these huge, spacious panels or entire pages to himself, things become even worse. Every panel Otomo spends on on Tetsuo moves him closer to his goal. Every panel on the other strains show us characters who are out of their depth and don’t know it.

Flicking back and forth and allowing Tetsuo to directly touch a couple of those strains is an inspired choice. It demonstrates a direct and brutal contrast in approach between the characters. Tetsuo is Jason in the woods, walking calmly after the screaming coed. He’s a predator, and that sneer on his face is never going to go away. More than that, though, it suggests a certain level of finality to the entire chase. What does he know that we don’t?

This isn’t 1:1 analogous to The Shotgun Rule. That book made its tension work by introducing us to characters and then giving us glimpses of the horrors to come. Here, the three non-Testuo strains demonstrate a complete and total loss of control on the part of the characters, turning them into something that is subordinate to Tetsuo and his powers.

The high tension, shouting, and action makes you want to read through those sections quickly. It gets your heart going and you have to find out what happens next. Following that with scenes and panels intended to slow you down and force you to absorb the panels is like that stutter when you switch gears when driving manual. You’re not accelerating any more, but you’re still going, and then bam, you’re going again, and hard. Pause, go, pause, GO.

One last thing.

akira-book2-descent-08.jpg is my favorite page. Tetsuo beginning to turn to Akira on top, the Colonel trying to talk him down, and then Tetsuo turning and really looking into the darkness?

Cripes.

stuff i made

-A quick preview of Adam Warren and Emily Warren’s Empowered: Ten Questions for the Maidman, a one-shot released last week that was pretty dope.

–Graphicly just redesigned their site, and I took a quick look at what works.

-This is the remix: I took this post about X-Men First Class and turned it into this post, inviting dozens of comments from idiots about race. That sorta thing is sorta why I hate writing about race for a mass audience, because sucker ducks always got something to say. Whatever though. I’m gonna go sleep on this pile of money.

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something i like
Four pages from Mike Mignola, Duncan Fegredo, and Dave Stewart’s Hellboy: The Fury, a series that’s going to be positively apocalyptic and more worthy of your attention than pretty much any other ongoing comic:

There’s something incredibly pure about Hellboy these days. Mignola and company have been pumping out quick series or one-shots that do a lot with a little. With The Fury, we’ve got three issues that can go in any direction, save for maybe the death of Hellboy. Then again, we’ve already seen him maimed, so that might not even be off the table.

This intro is enormously effective. It brings to mind a ton of things. I look at it and see a boxer’s long walk to the ring. It’s the stranger riding into town while strangers grip their pistols and spit. It’s Deebo walking up and everyone in the hood going silent. It’s the beginning of the big war conference in any movie ever, where warriors bang shields and monsters roar at the moon. Lightning strikes either as a show of approval or as an omen of disaster.

“Now I am become Death,” the witches say as they look on their handiwork. “The destroyer of worlds.” They’re not as powerful as they thought they were, and now they’re wracked with doubt and guilt. Then they spot a lone figure walking out of nowhere, and begin creating stories about him to suit their purpose.

“It’s Odin out wandering the world.” Wise and all-seeing, Hellboy is the all-father in human form. Wikipedia tells me that Odin is “related to ōðr, meaning ‘fury, excitation,’ besides ‘mind,’ or ‘poetry.'” There you have the title of the series and the tone. The Fury is the epic poem of Hellboy’s life. Hellboy’s stuck in a Homeric tale, and he’s almost at the end of his run.

“He carries a hammer. Thor then.” He’s the thunder and the lightning, destruction and health, a terrifying protector. A hammer is used to build and destroy. Sometimes that’s the same thing. The myth parallels Hellboy’s journey, too. Thor battles Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent.

Hellboy is every god, every hero, every messiah, and not in some stupid Joseph Campbell sort of way, either. He’s fighting something that is the ultimate evil, so it stands to reason that he has to be the ultimate good. The only thing that matters is beating her.

This is the eschaton in progress, where evil breathes in before pulling the trigger and heroes stride down off the mountain, glorious in demeanor and unafraid of death.

It’s Mignola synthesizing all of his interests, from myths to ghost stories to Jack Kirby comics, and creating something fearsome.

More than anything, though, this has what a lot of theoretically exciting cape comics lack. This is exciting. It builds tension. This is how you do the slow walk.

Funny coincidence. Marvel’s Fear Itself, courtesy of Matt Fraction, Stuart Immonen, Wade Von Grawbadger, and Laura Martin, features the Asgardian host battling an ancient evils. I picked up the first issue and found it overwritten by far, though the art was nice. It had a bunch of people telling you why something’s scary or dangerous instead of that thing putting the fear of God in your heart. What little tension there is isn’t earned at all.

Fear Itself didn’t feel effortless like this does. The Fury is a snowball rolling down a steep hill, and the weight of the past few years does it wonders, but the difference is still striking. Maybe that’s unfair. I don’t think so, though.

There’s a gang of Hellboy available digitally. Read ’em in order, or check out The Island and the Third Wish, Makoma, or Buster Oakley Gets His Wish. I like those a lot, especially Makoma and Buster. Corben and Nowlan are beasts. Nobody should be able to draw cows as cool as Nowlan does.

-What’s it take for you to stop reading somebody’s work?
-Do you let a creator’s personal beliefs change how you perceive their work?
-When’s it appropriate to dislike somebody as a person, rather than as an artist?
-We tackle all of these questions and more in a free-wheeling podcast I probably should’ve given a meaner name.
-It’s an interesting question, though.
-I can separate the work from the artist nine times out of ten, but sometimes you learn too much and feel all uncomfortable.
-Feel free to chime in.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-Here comes a new challenger!
-See you, space cowboy!

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–Podcast Alley feed!
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X-Men First Class!

It was pretty much the only comics movie I was really looking forward to this year (unless I forgot about something, but I doubt it), so I caught X-Men First Class while I was on vacation last weekend. Overall? I dug it. It’s not the best-written or best-directed Marvel flick, but it has a strong visual style all its own, and it being set in the non-swingin’ sixties apparently counts for a lot for me. I’d rank it as being better–for whatever better means, I guess “more enjoyable” at this specific point in time–than the other X-Men and Spider-Man flicks. Better than Iron Man, even. It’s less cute, and there’s no Robert Downey charmingly stumbling his way into your heart.

Anyway, I have Opinions:

-Michael Fassbender as Magneto as Simon Wiesenthal was a good look. Magneto in the comics is… I don’t want to say soft, but he’s very comic book. He’s simplified, boiled down into that superhero/supervillain dichotomy. In X-Men First Class, he’s much more human, and even more relatable.

-I hadn’t realized how much I liked the character, the idea, of Magneto before this, but yeah: I like him a lot. There are two key lines that were blown in the trailer that I think are significant. I’m copy/pasting from Wikipedia, since I saw this days ago and already forgot, but:

Professor Charles Xavier: We have it in us to be the better man.
Erik Lehnsherr: We ALREADY are.

and

Professor Charles Xavier: Listen to me very carefully, my friend: Killing will not bring you peace.
Erik Lehnsherr: Peace was never an option.

-My Magneto is probably similar to Morrison’s–he’s a mad old terrorist, but he’s not entirely wrong, either. He’s extremely powerful as a symbol, which I already knew and enjoyed, but X-Men First Class added a human component that I enjoy. The conflict in the comics comes from the fact that Magneto becomes what he despises (a Nazi) out of a desire to protect his race. Goofy comic book plotting.

-What I like about Magneto, what those lines unlocked, is that 1) he’s lost and he knows it and 2) some people deserve to die. It’s part of why crime fiction, and more specifically, Frank Miller’s The Big Fat Kill, are so appealing/interesting to me. Morality through immorality/amorality. Who puts the bullet in the head of him that deserves it?

-Magneto is convinced of his race’s superiority (and he’s technically correct), but he’s also come to accept that he is broken. He’s a martyr in his own mind, and the one person willing to do what must be done in order to protect his kin. His life doesn’t matter, so long as he spends it for his people.

-Peace isn’t an option because his peace was stolen decades ago.

-Fassbender, man. SO manly. I’d watch a sequel that was him terrorizing his way through the ’60s and ’70s. Magneto the Jackal.

-I liked James McAvoy as Xavier, too. He wasn’t as revelatory as Fassbender, but his callous, arrogant Xavier worked. The little touches, like the way he used groovy while hitting on coeds or how he didn’t really get the mutant struggle, were great, too.

-Rose Byrne as Moira, Nicholas Hoult as Beast, Caleb Landry Jones as Banshee, and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique were all pretty okay. Good enough that I would watch them in sequels, but not standouts.

-January Jones was terrible.

-The major cameo was as great as everyone else has said, and the Cerebro sequence was pretty cool, too.

-Kevin Bacon was great. It’s like he saw Stephen Dorff as Deacon Frost, one of my most favorite roles ever, and was like, “Yo, I can top that. Sebastian Shaw? Son, I got this. Watch.” Fassbender > Bacon > McAvoy > everybody else > January Jones.

-I like Zoe Kravitz. I thought she did a fine enough job with a poisoned chalice. And I mean, her mom is Lisa Bonet and her dad is Lenny Kravitz, and she looks it. Instantly made my top ten dead or alive list.

-The list changes constantly, but right now we’re looking at Rosario Dawson, Anna Karina, Scarlett Johansson, Aubrey Plaza, Rashida Jones, Salma Hayek, Josephine Baker, Aki Hoshino, Lucille Ball, Sade, and Erykah Badu. That’s eleven. Vivica Fox or Lisa Bonet might rotate onto the list soon, too.

-But yeah, let’s talk about what I didn’t like.

-It sucked to be black in the sixties, and that goes double if you’re a mutant, apparently. Edi Gathegi as Darwin died in one of the dumbest scenes in any movie anywhere and Kravitz turned evil because dot dot dot.

-Darwin basically served two purposes in the movie. He was there so that when someone said “slavery” when talking about mutant rights, the camera could focus on his face. He was there to die to give Shaw some cheap heat.

-Here’s a scene, paraphrased fairly faithfully:

Shaw: What’s your power?
Darwin: Evolving to survive anything.
Shaw: Survive this. *puts a fireball in Darwin’s mouth*
*Darwin dies slowly over the next minute while making a sad face*
*white people are sad*
*every black person in the audience leans over to the nearest black person like “niggas always gotta die first”*

:negativeman:

-Get outta here. Really? It wasn’t even a shin hadouken. That was a medium punch joint at best. It looked like a gadouken.

-Darwin was wasted, but that’s symptomatic of the larger problems with X-Men First Class.

-He was an extra character. The movie is too full, and pretty much just Beast, Magneto, Mystique, and Xavier get a chance to shine. Banshee gets something like seven whole lines, doesn’t he?

-So, because the cast is so full, everyone’s motivations are… thin. Angel is okay with being ogled as a stripper, but hates how the humans look at her wings. That makes a kind of sense–she’s in control in one area and not in the other. But apparently she hates the latter so much that she signs up with a genocidal mutant after less than a month of even knowing that other mutants existed, deserting her mutant friends with not a second thought.

-Oh, and right before she does that, an off-screen human is like “Take the mutants, they’re hiding in here! Just don’t kill me!” just in case you don’t get that no one likes them. Racism! (Eyerolls!)

-Nobody beyond the main characters have much of a reason to do anything until Darwin bites it.

-“Hey, do this.” “Sure, okay.”

-“Boy, being a mutant sure is cool.” “Yep, sure is. :)”

-“Man, humans sure do hate us.” “Yeah, they do :(”

-But really, the worst part is that both black mutants die or turn evil in the same scene. What part of the game is that? You make a movie out of a series that borrowed heavily from the civil rights struggle and then cut out all the negroes?

-I’m not saying I want balance, one good and one evil. I think that’s dumb, to be perfectly honest. But at least let me believe that black mutants have actual reasons to do things or have powers that aren’t lame. “I can survive anything. Oh wait, no, I’m dying!” is crap!

-It’s doubly crap because of the pro-mutant slogan that pops up a few times in the movie. Say it loud: “Mutant… and proud.”

-The pregnant pause is part of the slogan.

-It’s like the moral of the movie is “Black, er, blue is beautiful!”

-I can totally buy evil black mutants. It makes sense, it’s feasible, blah blah blah. But I didn’t buy it here because the writing team barely even tried to sell it. They just threw it out there.

-Boring. They got to do better next time.

-The Nazis got what they deserve, though, so that’s okay.

-On the flipside… there’s a bit where a Nazi quarter (did they call them quarters? it’s worth 25 Nazi Cents I assume and has a swastika on it) turns into the X-Men First Class logo. That’s probably not the best message to be sending at the beginning of your big fat civil rights metaphor. I don’t know whether that’s because Nazis barely count as people or because it sets up a really terrible unintentional comparison.

-“Mutants?! More like Nazis, am I right, fellas?”

-Next time: tighter script, better colored mutants (I’d settle for a real gully version of Bishop or uh… actually Frenzy would be kinda dope, as long as they go real raw with her), and more Fassbender. Fewer sad white people, fewer characters with no motivation, fewer scenes with January Jones stinking up the spot.

-“Magneto was right.”

-Oh yeah, better music in the new one, too. This one was forgettable. X-Men’s got to be a sexy franchise, and the ’60s were a great time for music. Throw some period joints on that fire.

stuff i made

–A reprint of an old post about The ‘Nam

–A preview of the Static Shock Special, which I had previously discussed in March. I wasn’t really going to pick up the special until I saw the preview. I’m still a little grossed out, to be honest, but it’s clearly a good faith effort on the part of the creators involved. Comics will make you feel weird about things you like, man.

–I wrote up Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal: Last of the Innocent. It’s good. Buy it.

–Digital ComicsAlliance: this week, I tackle the DC digital pricing scheme with veiled drug references, overt drug references, and references to going on a blackout bender with friends.

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something i like
From Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal: The Last of the Innocent, two non-consecutive pages that I liked a lot:

I read and reviewed this book while sitting in a room I haven’t slept in for four years. I took a trip back home for a week, and it’s been sorta weird. The first thing that happened when I got back into town, like right after I got off the airport shuttle, was that the lady at the desk recognized my last name, asked if I was related to a couple people, and told me about my aunt holding back on a recipe. The rest of the trip has been a whirlwind of sideways nostalgia, where everything is too small or out of place or weird or different from how it was four years ago/when I was a kid. (though small is almost definitely a metaphorical thing, now that I’m looking around my room and mentally comparing it to my apartment)

This latest Criminal is about a man coming home after five years away and being completely seduced by nostalgia for the way things were. The gap between then and now shakes him up early on, but later, when he’s conversating with old friends and having a good time, he starts thinking about how great then feels and how broken and corrupt now is.

This sort of stuff is basic, I think, the sort of universal emotions we all experience at some point. I just happened to read the book at the best/worst possible time to do so. Brubaker and Phillips came through with the execution, and the basic nature of the story (“Life was better then,” whether “better” is true or not) gives it a little extra punch. Widest possible area of effect, right? Even famous people feel that. (“Ain’t kill myself yet, and I already want my life back.”)

This is a good first issue for what will hopefully be the best Criminal yet. It feels very resonant; it’s easy to relate to. Well worth a look.

-This was supposed to go up last week, but WordPress hiccuped or something and I didn’t notice until Friday night.
-No, seriously. I didn’t forget. Shut up. Here’s proof:

-“Missed Schedule?” How does an automated post miss the schedule?
-Anyway.
-Batcast!
-Talking about Grant Morrison and crew’s:
–Batman & Robin Vol. 1: Batman Reborn
–Batman & Robin, Vol. 2: Batman vs. Robin
–Batman & Robin Vol. 3: Batman Must Die!
-I don’t think I actually hate Warren Beatty, but Esther’s memory is way better than mine.
-“Talking about” more like “Talking around”
-You know how we do
–Here’s that Wingman essay
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-Here comes a new challenger!
-See you, space cowboy!

Subscribe to the Fourcast! via:
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–iTunes Store

New York Times bestselling writer Brian Azzarello, author of The Joker and 100 Bullets, teams up with the immensely talented artist Cliff Chiang (Neil Young’s Greendale) for WONDER WOMAN #1, an exciting new series starring the DC Universe’s greatest superheroine. The cover to issue #1 is by Cliff Chiang.

I’m going to go on ahead and call this DC relaunch a success, because they’re getting me to buy a Wonder Woman comic for the first time in… years, probably, during a brief dalliance with the Greg Rucka run. It’s creator driven, obviously–Azzarello and Chiang a team that is too good for most any cape comics character–but here we are nonetheless. Also, I liked this bit from the last time Azzarello wrote Wonder Woman in Superman: For Tomorrow (two trades: one and two):

Couple other bits that seem interesting:

The world’s third-smartest man – and one of its most eligible bachelors – uses his brains and fists against science gone mad in MISTER TERRIFIC #1, the new series from writer Eric Wallace and artist Roger Robinson. The cover to issue #1 is by J.G. Jones.

I still think “third-smartest man” is a dumb gimmick (It’s on the level of “When a lady walks to me says ‘Hey, you know whats sexy?’ I say, ‘No, I don’t know what it is, but I bet I can add up all the change in your purse very fast!”), but I liked the Eric Wallace who wrote Ink and I like Mr. Terrific in theory and a few times over the past few years (Infinite Crisis talking with John Stewart, Checkmate, maybe a couple other spots). Titans, though, I’m not even remotely keen on. Fellas: wow me.

Rising superstar Francis Manapul, fresh off his acclaimed run on THE FLASH with Geoff Johns, makes his comics writing debut in THE FLASH #1, sharing both scripting and art duties with Brian Buccellato. The Flash knows he can’t be everywhere at once, but what happens when he faces an all-new villain who can? The cover to issue #1 is by Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato.

Manapul draws nice.

One bit I’m not interested in:

Welcome to a major new vision of the Nuclear Man as writers Ethan Van Sciver and Gail Simone team up with artist Yildiray Cinar to deliver THE FURY OF FIRESTORM #1. Jason Rusch and Ronnie Raymond are two high school students, worlds apart – and now they’re drawn into a conspiracy of super science that bonds them forever in a way they can’t explain or control. The cover to issue #1 is by Ed Benes.

Ethan Van Sciver? Thanks, but no thanks–I’m not the type of guy who can knowingly put money in the pocket of a Joseph McCarthy fanboy and known associate of Breitbart/BigHollywood types. Not a chance, son. Those people are human scum.

I’ll have fuller thoughts once the solicits hit in a couple weeks, I guess. I’m gonna be checking for that new Justice League by Johns & Lee, too. More details here.

The Damon Albarn Appreciation Society is an ongoing series of observations, conversations, and thoughts about music. Here’s the seventh, which is about how I listen to music, in a way.

Minutes from previous meetings of the Society: The Beatles – “Eleanor Rigby”, Tupac – Makaveli, Blur – 13 (with Graeme McMillan), Blur – Think Tank (with Graeme McMillan), Black Thought x Rakim: “Hip-Hop, you the love of my life”, Wu-Tang Clan – Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

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Aww, Mr. Death To All Print Media is buying records now? What a hypocrite.

I regularly carry around a tiny device that lets me hold two thousand songs. My mp3 collection is over twenty-five thousand songs deep, and the distance between “thinking of an album” and “being able to listen to that album” is getting smaller and smaller each day. One side effect of the rise of MP3s as my preferred format for music is that music itself has been devalued, and any associated rituals eliminated.

If I want to play an album, I flick my thumb up and down a screen that’s probably an inch and a half wide and tall. On my computer, I have hundreds of albums that I can play one after the other in a random order, and if I let it play through, I wouldn’t hear the same song twice for weeks. iTunes is Jukebox Plus, a program that can hold every song ever made and play whatever I want, whenever I want.

Music used to be something you did, in addition to listened to. You had to fast-forward through cassette tapes to get to the song you wanted, or hope you put the tape in on the right side because the text was rubbed off. I used to have a bunch of unlabeled CDs in my car that were random mixtapes. I would shuffle through them in the morning, find the one that was the least scratched, and throw it in.

There was a ritual. You had to do something to make music go. Every album was a discrete unit, rather than being part of a mass.

So, when a friend offered me the Hanna soundtrack on vinyl, I thought about it and said, “Why not?” I grew up around records, though I rarely played them as a kid. They were around, but our needle broke at some point, so they never got played. I went out, picked up a cheap turntable, spent a few hours trying to get it to work with my computer the way I wanted, and then went out buying vinyl.

I set some ground rules for myself before I went on a mad shopping spree, though. If there is going to be a ritual to my music playing, then it’s going to be with music that’s worth it. No singles and no EPs. Anything I buy would have to be actual albums that I can bump from top to bottom, rather than anything I ‘sorta like.’ I’m only buying things I already own here, in whichever format, so the outlay of cash had to be worth it.

On top of that, I decided to buy a limited number of albums a month. I would allow one strong burst at the top to flesh out my collection, but after that, one or two albums a month, max. I don’t need to waste more space in my place. I figured that setting a foundation for a library and then building slowly would be a nice way to keep myself in check and only end up with things I enjoy.

After a couple weeks, I own Big Boi’s Sir Lucious Leftfoot, Blu’s Her Favorite Colo(u)r & Celln’Ls/ GurlFriend’ 7″ (free with HFC), Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night, Chemical Bros’ Hanna, Curtis Mayfield’s Curtis, David Banner’s Certified, Ghostface’s Fishscale, Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach, Little Dragon’s Machine Dreams, Michael Jackson Off the Wall & Thriller, Outkast’s Aquemini, P$C’s 25 to Life, Richard Pryor Wanted, Tupac’s Makaveli, and Young Jeezy’s The Recession. A few of these I found used for cheap, a few were new, and more than a few were at rock-bottom clearance prices.

I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got, and I’m pleased with how this experiment is working out. I have to consider albums as their own thing now, which is a little different than queuing up a playlist. Fast-forwarding is a pain, and while selecting individual tracks is possible, it isn’t an exact science. Vinyl makes me look at albums as one whole, rather than a selection of songs and skits.

Skit placement makes more sense now. They tend to come at the top of a side of a record, rather than randomly throughout a set of mp3s. They feel like something that will ease you back into the music or serve as a reintroduction, rather than something somebody thought was funny once. Bonus tracks are gone now, too.

Vinyl requires active listening. I’ve got a few double LPs (and one triple), and you’ve got to be paying attention so that you can switch sides and play more songs. It’s more interactive than my iPod, which I find really interesting. I’m always aware that vinyl is spinning, rather than the fire and forget way I approach iTunes.

I wake up an hour early so that I can work out every morning. As it turns out, records are a nice way to keep time. I was listening to music anyway, but now I have one album to go through a day (or 75% of an album, depending). Switching sides or records provides a nice break between sets, and playing an album lets me accurately judge my time, too.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a vinyl nut. I prefer the digital format entirely too much. But, for certain specific situations? Vinyl is very cool. Another new way of thinking.