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What's your favorite superhero's political leaning?

Itsy Bitsy Spiderman. He sings! He dances! He's throwin' the horns! You owe it to yourself to watch the demo.

(via seebelow)

Mike "Creator of Hellboy" Mignola's The Amazing Screw-On Head was a bizarre little one-shot comic that was weird, even for him. It told the story of Screw-On Head, a robotic secret agent with interchangable bodies working for Abraham Lincoln, and his battle versus the evil Emperor Zombie.

It was awesome.

The Sci-Fi Channel recently made an equally weird half-hour animated special out of it, with the potential for a series, I think. It is possibly even more awesome, thanks to Paul Giamatti and David Hyde Pierce lending their vocal talents to Screw-On Head and Emperor Zombie, respectively.

You can watch the whole episode online here. Watch it. Love It. Fill out the survey and ask for more.

I just picked this up and I'm really excited about it. I am such a geek.

Speaking of comics, Warren Ellis' new project at Marvel, Nextwave, looks like it's shaping up to be some seriously good fun (Motto: "Healing America by beating people up"). Marvel seems to be getting behind it in ways I'd never expect them to, including creating a really bad theme song for the series.

<shameless plug>
On a non-comics note, MPR News's own superhero, Bob Collins, has a new political blog, the rather oddly-named Polinaut. It's a good read. (I was referred to as a shill for MPR over the holidays, so I figure I might as well run with it.)
</shameless plug>

And finally, I feel I should inform my reading public that Natural Citrus Listerine� Antiseptic Mouthwash cleans your mouth by burning a layer of skin off. Consider yourself warned.

That is all.

I was just yesterday discussing the joy I take in seeing that celebrities can be geeks, too. Wil Wheaton's got video games, Vin Diesel's got D&D, and Christopher Lee can recite the "One Ring to rule them all" poem in Elvish.

But Nicholas Cage just blew them all away in one swift stroke. He named his son "Kal-El".

As in Superman's birth name.

Holy cow.

Jesse Reklaw has made it his mission to illustrate other people's dreams, calling it Slow Wave. And it is amazingly good stuff.

Some favorites:

Dogs, Men, and Me
The Human in the Race
All-Knowing Ham
(Untitled story about a hairball)
Proper Saber Use
Kangaroo Meeting
(Untitled pasta story)

Enjoy!

B.D. has hair!

Thought I'd just point out an interesting piece by Marc Singer (not that one) that argues that superheroes aren't symbols for ideas, they are embodiments of those ideas. Thankfully, Singer explains it better than I do.

I'm not feeling a deep need to write anything, really, but I thought people should be aware of A Softer World. It's a weekly web comic that skips from funny to tragic to creepy to beautiful to horrifying with disturbing ease. But, no matter what emotion it evokes, it's always poetry.

Using up the last of a gift certificate, I picked up Volume Five of Carla Speed McNeil's Finder, entitled Dream Sequence. I'd read it a while ago, in single issues, but I'd forgotten most of it by the time I reread it. The other thing it turns out I'd forgotten was that Finder is a damned fine series. Dream Sequence and Volume 3, Talisman, constitute two of the best comic stories I've read. And I'd forgotten this. It's so depressing. Of course, now I'm so jazzed about the whole thing that I feel I should be running around, throwing copies of Finder at people, yelling "READ IT! IT'S GOOD FOR YOU!!". But I can't do that because I don't have all the trades and single issues just aren't terribly aerodynamic. So, instead, I'm forced to resort to rambling on my little blog. Ah, well.

So, anyway--read it. It's good for you.

Every once in a while, Penny Arcade puts out a comic that just speaks to me.

There's about a half-dozen things I feel like I should talk about, but since most of them involve uploading pictures and thinking about what I should say about them, I'm not going to, yet, no matter how out-of-date the information is when I finally get to it, because I'm lazy. I'm pretty sure I aboused commas in that sentence. Whatever.

Anyhoo, I would like to point out--to anyone who hasn't read it yet--that Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express is a great mystery and you should read it, especially because it's one of those books with a nifty ending that people like giving away. I'm kicking myself that I'm only sitting down & reading her stuff now. She's so good!

Ever since Charles Schultz retired, I've been saying that they oughta publish the complete run of Peanuts. Sure, it got a little sappy and occasionally fell into self-parody near the end, but the early stuff is simply masterful. It deserves to be in print.

As it turns out, someone thought the same thing: Fantagraphics is publishing The Complete Peanuts: A series of nifty hardcovers, each covering around two years of the strip, in chronological order, released twice a year. And now, we do the math: There's fifty years of strips spread over twenty-five books. Released twice a year, the final book will come out in the latter half of 2016. Twelve and a half years from now. I'm not sure the comics industry as we know it will still be around in five years, much less twelve & a half.

Still, I'm glad someone's making a go of it, & I'll happily support them as long as they last.

For the last month or so, I've been saying to myself, "Oh, I should write that up in my blog" over and over and over. And have I? No. So, I'm going to get all of it all out my system in one fell swoop, review everything in three sentences or less. And away we go...

Links first:

For Transmetropolitan fans, Spider Jerusalem returns (sorta) in Warren Ellis' blog this week.

Ninja competitions!

And now the review:

I commented a while back that Bulletproof Monk was a mediocre comic and possibly a mediocre movie. Well, now I can say with authority that it is, in fact, a mediocre movie. And this after dumping everything related to the comic, except for the legend of a powerful monk and a dude named Kar.

Jack Chick is making a movie. Who's Jack Chick? Why, he's the guy making Christian tracts in comics form to convert the heathens, warning us away from Islam, Dungeons & Dragons, Halloween, Darwin, Bewitched, haunted houses, Big Brother, and pissing off Israel.

Turns out CBR's Augie de Blieck has been thinking along similar lines as me. Of course, that's not terribly surprising. I mean, almost everyone in the industry has been thinking about this. I'm just amused by the timing more than anything else.

So, I ended up going to Fallcon, a Twin Cities comic book convention today with my friend Kate. After toodling around the floor a couple times I was left with the impression that, though I am a comics geek, I wasn't hardcore enough. Most everyone there, including my companions, was weighed down with stacks of newly-purchased comics & bootleg DVDs. I on the other hand, just had a copy of Neil Gaiman's Endless Nights that I got a good deal on. What the hell was wrong with me?

So, thanks to the Washburn and Roseville Libraries, plus some time hanging out in Barnes & Noble and Half Price Books, I've read a lot of graphic novels in the last few days. I've been considering pontificating about how comics can tell other stories besides superhero stuff and how libraries can help get them moved into the mainstream, but then I realized that I'd just be reiterating what other, more eloquent folks have already said.

So, I'm just going to constrain myself to pointing out some of the good (and not-so-good) stuff.

Potential Comics UK Zero Zero One. Playing around with comics in odd & interesting ways.

I just read the collected My Monkey's Name Is Jennifer, by Ken Knudtsen, and I have to say, it is one of the most messed-up things I've read in quite a while.

Just as Hollywood releases a movie that apparently commits crimes against physics, continuity, and the layout of Venice, they're poised to commit what could be a crime against humanity.

I have just, due to some morbid fascination on my part, sat through an entire episode of Stripperella. For those of you who don't know this show, here's what you need to know:

1. It's a superhero cartoon about a stripper who fights crime.
2. It stars the voice of Pamela Anderson.
3. It's on TNN, which has gone from being The National Network to The First Network For Men. Which means it shows exactly as many Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns and Bond movies as it used to, but now with added reruns of Blind Date and American Gladiators.
4. It's apparently trying to be "satire", which means that the cheesecake and the Freudian imagery is "smart" rather than "bizarre and groan-inducing".
5. It's created by Stan Lee.

Alex Robinson's Box Office Poison is an honest-to-god graphic novel. Chronicling the lives of four friends living in New York City, this book is exactly the sort of thing Scott McCloud loves: a book that tells a story worthy of a novel, but in a way prose could never do.

In 1992, Joe Kubert's friend, Ervin Rustemagic, was trapped in Sarajevo with his family when the Serbs attacked. He spent the next two years trying to keep his family alive and find a way out. Finally, thanks to the help of many of his friends, he managed to attain Slovenian citizenship & leave with his wife & children. Kubert decided to retell Ervin's story in graphic novel form in Fax From Sarajevo.

While the story itself is fascinating, the whole book is somewhat sabotaged by the fact that Kubert, frankly, isn't that good at this sort of thing. The art often feels like it would be more appropriate to a pulp spy comic than a story of genocide & survival. Worse, the writing often becomes overwrought and/or over-expository. For example:

A Serbian soldier: "The town is quiet...our guns have flattened them. Those who are not dead have fled...the town is ours."

Caption: "Bombs fall. Ripping. Tearing. Leaving bits of shredded flesh and bone where once there were whole bodies."

Ervin: "We are like the proverbial bad kopek, Doctor. We keep turning up." (ouch)

The overall effect of the writing is to detach you from the events--they just don't seem real after a while. Luckily, interspersed throughout the story are faxes sent back and forth between Ervin and his friends on the outside. These are important reminders that this did happen. But even those can't totally combat overwrought writing with the subtlety of a brick to the head.

In the end, however, I guess that Kubert's goal is achieved: I've been thinking a bit about the Bosnia war and the fact that the world did nothing while millions were slaughtered. I tried to think of any memories I have about it, and the only thing I can come up with is Katarina Witt dedicating her performance at the 1994 Winter Olympics to Sarajevo. That just depresses the hell out of me. I mean, it was 1994--I was actually paying attention to the news by that point & I still can't think of anything.

In one of his faxes, Ervin said, "If somebody was killing and massacring penguins the way Serbs are massacring Bosnian people, the world woud have intervened and would have taken stronger and faster measures". I can't help but think he was right.

1. LaserMonks! What a nifty idea.
2. For anyone interested in the history of comics, Trina Robbins' From Girls to Grrlz : A History of Women's Comics from Teens to Zines is a great look at the history of women's comics in America, from Archie and his clones to romance comics to undergound alternative "wimmin's comix" to the comics of today. It made me realize that I know so little about whole sections of the world of comics. My only problem with the book is when Robbins asserts, "Currently, if little girls want to read a comic, their only choice is the Archie group". Granted, her "currently" is 1998-99, so she hadn't seen things like Alison Dare yet, but I don't know how she could've overlooked Electric Girl, Leave It To Chance, and especially Akiko, which I think has one of the best female heroes in comics today.
3. Having finally seen the anime series Record of Lodoss War, I'm left with the distinct impression that it's a "you had to be there" kinda thing. I've seen many a fan page devoted to the series proclaiming how great it is, but I felt it was just OK. It's got some really nifty ideas and a pretty interesting plot, but it all feels rushed & somewhat disjointed, like the writers had a plot for 26 episodes and were told they could only have 13. In any case, I suspect that the real reason for this series' popularity is that it features a cute elf girl.

I've finally dumped a good chunk of my comics collection onto eBay. The Miracleman comics should fetch me a good price, considering their relative scarcity, not to mention the amount of controversy around it. On the other hand, I'll be happy if I sell enough of the other stuff to make back the listing fees & shipping. I mean, I still have no idea why I bought nine whole issues of Warlock and The Infinity Watch...