... And Maybe An Occasional State Pun

You know, I am not a big fan of the new Killers album...

2009-03-22T12:52:00.004-05:00

Specifically, there are two songs on there I think are excellent ("Losing Touch" and "Spaceman"), two songs I think are very good ("This is Your Life" and "Neon Tiger"), one song I think is okay ("Human") and five songs I do not like. But it amuses me that the number one criticism I hear against the album is this:

"What's up with the words in 'Human'. 'Are we human or are we dancer?' What the hell does that mean?!"

Which I translate as:

"Oh my god! A band said something that doesn't make total literal sense!! They're asking me to think abstractly or poetically! This is simply unheard of in pop music. How dare they ask me to take a lyric at something other than face value?"

So obviously I think the above criticism is silly. It's kind of like how some people are so hung up (or "well hung up"?) on Doc Manhattan's junk in Watchmen. It's like, oh my God, there are a million excellent reasons to not like that movie... why are you harping on the one that makes you seem, at the very least, a tad bit homophobic? I mean just think about it for a second... why would Dr. Manhattan wear pants? If you don't want to see his nether regions, just don't look. Look at Malin Ackerman instead.

And back to the Killers lyric: maybe it's stupid, yeah. I'm not really sure if that line is deep or dumb. But hey, at least it's an interesting lyric, right? It grabbed me simply because it was a question that doesn't have an immediately clear answer, and in fact the question itself isn't clear to begin with. And I think that's kind of cool. But I'm a They Might be Giants fan, so you might expect that from me.

I'm willing to bet there's a lot of lyrics in pop music that don't make immediate sense, and I feel like that's the way it should be. What's the harm in having a song pose a bit of a riddle to you, after all? To me it just makes the song worth listening to a little more... it gives you something to think about on future listens, if you are so inclined. It is very telling that many people's idea of criticism is latching onto the most obviously different element of what's in front of them and saying "I don't like it." Wouldn't it be better if we were to embrace that difference? I'd rather say "way to go, Killers, for making a weird chorus in a pop song" than "stupid Killers, write simple lyrics". And I am perplexed that so many other people seemingly do not feel that way.

What if... what if Zack Snyder is a real-life Ozymandias?

2009-03-09T18:25:00.004-05:00

I know this is gonna sound crazy, but stay with me here, as I imagine a wild story. In this story, Zack Snyder is a far bigger comic-book fan than almost anybody knows. It's not just that he has great respect for 300 and Watchmen and their ilk... which is clear regardless of what you think of the movies... he actually loves comic books, in a deep meaningful way. They're his favorite things in the world and it saddens his soul to see them culturally and critically marginalized as they so often are.

And so Zack hatched a master plot years and years ago. While it's so deep and byzantine that its entirety is almost incomprehensible, here are the basics: Zack, in making his name through other adaptive projects like Dawn of the Dead and 300, would get himself in a position to film an adaptation what some would call the "Citizen Kane of graphic novels," Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. Zack would know well in advance that many, including Moore himself, think Watchmen "unfilmable." And Zack, secretly, would agree. But publicly, Zack would insist that his movie was a 100% faithful adaptation of the story he loved so.

Now here's the twist: Zack Snyder would purposefully make a Watchmen movie that contained many of the ideas of the original novel but he that presented them in a way that was somewhat garbled and unsatisfying to viewers... at the very least, most viewers would be filled with the notion that they were missing something, that there was something more. Whether or not one liked or hated the Watchmen film, they would recognize that in reading the book they would be treated to a deeper, more fleshed-out version of what they'd just seen on the big screen. Do you get me? People of all types, from comic fans to regular moviegoers piqued by the ideas of the film, would rally behind an idea because of Zack's film.

The end result of Zack's plan, of course, would be that people would insist on buying and reading the original Watchmen graphic novel to fill out the film's story. From there, hopefully, they would be persuaded to move on to other comics... like perhaps Swamp Thing, Planetary, Preacher, Transmetropolitan, or Identity Crisis, just to pick a few random names. All of this would bring about a massive surge in the popularity of graphic novels not just among the traditional comic-shop masses but amidst the public as a whole, and Zack Snyder would finally have achieved his dream: to make comic books culturally acceptable and maybe even cool.

Like I said above... I know it sounds crazy, right? It couldn't possibly be true. You're right, of course. But just think about my story one second longer. What do you think would tell my fictional Zack Snyder that perhaps he'd been successful? What would be his television screens heralding an end to nuclear tension, what would cause him to throw up his arms with childish delight and scream "I DID IT!!!" like Watchmen's Ozymandias?

Well, I bet it would look a little something like this:

(this image is not doctored. It is a screen cap from Amazon.com taken at about 5:00 PM eastern today, Monday March 9).

Well, damn it all, Mr. Snyder. The more I think about it the more I don't like your movie. But I am in total awe of what you have accomplished.

I am not kidding when I say that this is probably the best news I personally have seen in weeks.

Now, who feels like reading some other quality graphic novels?

In case you're wondering what I thought about Watchmen

2009-03-06T09:25:00.004-06:00

I did not like it. In fact I thought it kind of sucked. Going by various movie ratings systems, I'd give it one and a half stars, a D, a frustrated frowny face, or one thumb down and one thumb sideways but about to be capitulated by the weight of Watchmen's mediocrity.

(And yes, Virginia, there will be spoilers).

Basically, for people like us (that is, comic book fans), Watchmen is going to be judged two ways: as an adaptation, and as a movie. I'll try to talk a little bit about each.

As an adaptation, one can look at how the film follows either the letter and the spirit of the book. It's obvious that the Watchmen film doesn't do too hot in the "letter" department; it is not really close at all to being a perfectly-copied transcription from comic to screen. Curiously people involved in the creation of the film keep insisting it is--why?? It would be pretty impossible, in the feature film format, to translate every detail of Alan Moore's tome, and I didn't expect the movie to... I'm just flummoxed that so many people are saying how faithful the film is when it really isn't. Certainly some scenes are truly right out of the book and often times these are pretty cool; mostly I loved Rorshach's scenes, especially the early ones, which seemed to treat the Watchmen comic as a shooting script. That was nice to see. But as the film progresses, scenes begin to deviate more and more wildly from the source material.

However, that is not necessarily a criticism of the movie so much as a remark on its press. I have always believed that what's really important in an adaptation is how accurately it captures the spirit of the original work. When it comes to the Watchmen movie, I'm not sure I'm ready to comment on this point yet. Seeing it last night I was fairly certain the movie missed a lot of important elements of the comic, but thinking it over a little... I don't know. I was trying to think about the thematic implications, for instance, of the fact that Dr. Manhattan is the enemy Ozymandias turns the world against instead of some manufactured space-alien threat. And I think that works. What it does, in my opinion, is neatly emphasizes the otherness of Dr. Manhattan in a way the book didn't yet in a way that is still keeping with the feel of the book. Similarly last night I was pretty convinced that the movie didn't understand Dan Drieberg--in the book the dude is pretty much a sad sack apologetic loser with a costume fetish, whereas the movie seemed to make him out to be more of a regular Joe caught up in a crazy world. But the more I think about his scenes I think it's possible that his schlubiness is just played subtlely and is not absent. At the very least, the movie preserves his costume fetish quite clearly. I really don't like Dan's outburst against Adrian at the end... that seems out of character... but I would need to see the movie again to really get a grasp on this character. So I'm gonna leave the "spirit" question open for now.

Where I think this film fails, then, is not as an adaptation but as a movie itself. And my key argument here can be summed up in one word: "pointless." But let me go back to all the press about Watchmen for a minute. I can't tell you the number of times I have heard the phrase: "Watchmen the movie will do for comic book movies what Watchmen the comic did for comics."

It is here, my friends, that the movie fails.

You see, Watchmen the comic came at a time when superhero comics needed a swift kick in the ass. It brought levels of realism to a medium that few had ever taken seriously before--be it political, scientific (kind of) or emotional. Watchmen did better than make a comic-book universe ala Marvel or DC ... it made a world, a world that seemed incredibly real, with characters so well developed and situations so complex we might as well have been hearing about them on the nightly news. Simultaneously the book also achieved a new standard for comic storytelling as art by crafting an impossibly dense, symbolism-laden literary narrative that put graphic novels on the same grounds as their prose brethren. This is what Watchmen did for comics... it, along with Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Art Spiegelman's Maus (all three in 1986), forced people to see comics as a valid and powerful art form.

And then we have Watchmen the movie, a movie which purports to do the same thing to comic-book movies (and it's important to note that it is doing this of its own accord, not because it is an adaptation of a story that also did this... that's why I'm talking about it down in this section). And the problem is that the context for this movie's release has kind of doomed it already. Watchmen the movie tries, like the comic, to give us a world that asks "what if superheroes were real?". In doing so it shows us a terrible world, horrific images of violence, and soul-crushing hopelessness... it shows us more of these, in fact, than the comic originally did. And one might assume from how Zack Snyder talks (he has said as much, in fact) that his goal here is to get us to think about superheroes and their films a little harder than we have been... instead of Alan Moore's "what would a good superhero comic really look like?" we're to ask "what would a good superhero movie really look like?"

Unfortunately for Zack Snyder, we know what a good superhero movie really looks like. In fact we know what a superhero masterpiece looks like. It's called The Dark Knight. It has all the psychological/emotional realism and character depth that the Watchmen comic has, and an excellent story to back it up. It is not only, in my opinion, the best of the comic book movies but it is also a fantastic movie in its own right. It is also, incidentally, better than Watchmen by leaps and bounds.

See, my primary thoughts during the Watchmen film were: "this is really violent" and "this is long and boring." The violence I see as Mr. Snyder trying to wake us up from our superhero malaise like Moore did in 1986. But, dude, that happened last summer. In fact if superhero movies have a "1986" it would pretty clearly be "2008"--besides Dark Knight there was Iron Man, which was completely different in tone from the Batman film but also a fine flick that showed more lighthearted superhero adventure movies could also be done quite well. Of course there were awful comic book movies too, but, hey, it's not like every comic that came out in 1986 was worth reading.

As for the "long and boring" part... I realize that for me this is the real sin of the Watchmen movie: I did not enjoy watching it. That could be and probably is a comment on me, but it also, I think, reflects on the movie. There is not that much fun to be had here. Dark Knight, although two and a half hours long, was a wild ride that you didn't want to be over. Watchmen, although only about 15 minutes longer, felt like much worse.

I think that works hand-in-hand with its pointlessness. At no time did I feel like the Watchmen movie needed to be made. Fans of the comic probably did not get the fun of seeing a beloved work adapted in a satisfactory fashion, and more importantly, I feel like casual comic-book-moviegoers will be hit with a sense of redundancy, because Watchmen the movie does nothing to inject life into the superhero movie genre that Dark Knight and others did not already do better and more entertainingly.

I guess the true lesson of the Watchmen movie is this: even after 2008, superhero movies can still be strikingly mundane.

Here is something neat I realized today: most of the great comics authors are alive, and accessible.

2009-02-24T22:32:00.006-06:00

I realize this may be a silly thing to say, and it probably needs some clarification, but my basic point is this: most of the authors of comics that speak to us on a meaningful level are still alive, breathing, at least somewhat accessible and probably still creating. And how cool is that?

Yes, of course, a lot of fantastic comic authors have passed: Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Will Eisner... basically the guys that, if you take a course in comics as a medium, you will learn about right away. And there is no denying that these folks and more from their era are incredible talents. But I'd venture to say that their work is, pardon the pun, not as "alive" for us as that of more modern creators. Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Craig Thompson, Marjane Satrapi, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Chris Ware ... just a brief, brief list of the industry's "big names" who are still around and working for us as we speak.

This is really strange when you compare comics to any other art form. The jump my mind first makes here is to rock and roll. Even with my more modern and sometimes not-mainstream tastes, there is at least one death in the music industry that has significantly affected me, and that is Freddie Mercury's. The music of Queen is so important, so "present" to me that every once in awhile it truly hurts me that Freddie isn't around to share his gift any more. And over in the prose world, well, the medium of the novel has been around so long that there's probably a better chance your favorite authors are dead than not (Orwell? check. Nietzsche? check. Milton? check -- and yes Milton is technically a poet. So sue me). But if I was to take all the comics that have affected me in a serious emotional way--all of their writers would still be alive. All of them.

I feel like I need to mention here that this is not really true of comics artists, and the most glaring exampe of this to me is Jack Kirby (who, yes, was a writer too, but it's his art that I really love). How cool would it have been if the King could have ever worked with Grant Morrison, for instance? In fact it seems like a fair amount of the really impressive comic artists are no longer with us... there I would put folks like Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Mike Sekowsky... the giants of the golden and silver ages. It is strange that I connect the titans of comic art with the golden/silver age, but its best writers with the contemporary period. That is probably the subject of a whole other post. For now I will just say that I suspect quite a few comic readers probably feel this way, and leave it at that.

Back to the topic of writers: beyond the point that all these great comic authors are alive, I want to re-state that a good number of them are accessible to folks like you and me. Going back to my rock and roll example, the odds of me actually getting a personal message to, say, Bruce Springsteen, is astronomically small. The odds of getting a response are even less. I think this is true of the prose world as well; I adore Chuck Klosterman but I don't see myself ever getting to engage in a meaningful dialouge with him simply because I'm not sure how I would get in that situation. Yet, when it comes to comics, I can pop on Facebook or MySpace and friend most of these amazing writers... and some of them will even write to you! And failing that, there are always conventions, signings, etc. that give you at least a little face-to-face time with these folks. Or there are e-mail addresses, or even snail-mail addresses, that might elicit a response. Or ... well, you see what I mean.

I guess my point here is that all us comics fans are really quite lucky. See, I kind of have this feeling that at some point soon (maybe a decade?) graphic novels are going to explode in popularity, primarly as their acceptance in the classroom/library world continues to grow. But right now, graphic novels are a relatively new and niche art form, and only in the past few decades has a lot of really fantastic work been done in it, especially on the writing end. And this timing is fairly fortuitous for us, because it means that there are a lot of quality artists who still have the time and ability to talk to the fans who really care to get in touch with them (this is not a luxury most rock stars, for instance, have... where would they find the time?). And frankly, I feel like this is something we should take advantage of--not to the point of obsessive fanboy stalking, of course, but, hey, why not write to your favorite creators online? Even if they don't have time to respond, I'm sure it's nice for them to know that their work has had a positive affect on you, and this is whether they work for the Big Two or if they're an indie cartoonist. This is something I have been trying to do lately and it hasn't let me down so far. And I'm not sure how much longer we as a fan community will be able to do this so... sink your teeth in now, guys!

Well that was a hell of a game.

2009-02-02T17:24:00.002-06:00

For two teams I could hardly care about (well, I cared about the Steelers a little, thanks to having Hines Ward on my fantasy team), I found last night's Superbowl really, really interesting. It dragged a little in the third quarter but man, wasn't it pretty exciting? For me the play of the game was not Santonio Holmes' nigh-unbelievable catch to secure the Steelers' win but James Harrison's interception and 100-yard runback touchdown. Man, that was incredible.

I guess it's good the game was exciting because most of this year's commercials kind of sucked. Those GoDaddy ones... what the hell? I will not visit that website on principle. I also found the Budweiser clydesdale series pretty lacking. I loved Alec Baldwin's Hulu commercial, though. Also another thumbs up to Pepsi; that McGruber commercial (starring SNL's Will Forte and Kristen Wiig and also some other guy?) was awesome!

I enjoyed the movie trailers I saw for the most part; I was totally apathetic about GI Joe until I saw the shot of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow dueling. That looks pretty great. Also I'm majorly psyched for Transformers 2; there were some funky-looking robots in that commercial... did we maybe see a glimpse of the rumored Constructicon combiner robot? Was that the big guy beating up Optimus and lunging at the screen at the end? Time will tell.

I found the Boss' halftime show fantastic, although honestly for me it did not top Prince's from a couple years ago (Prince had the benefit, though, of playing to a Bears/Colts contest). Still, Bruce sounded lively and sharp. I tried to nail down his setlist before halftime and I only guessed two songs correctly, "Born to Run" and "Workin' on a Dream." "Glory Days" should have been obvious but I always forget that song exists. I would never in a million years have guessed he'd play "Tenth-Avenue Freeze Out" but that was one of the coolest versions of that song I've ever heard. And you can't beat Bruce's crotch coming at you in HD.

I also really enjoyed the episode of The Office, which ran us through the emotional wringer between Stanley's heart attack, Pam's parents, and Michael's depression. Good thing those Jack Black/Cloris Leachman scenes were there to balance it out. I honestly think my favorite part of the episode, though, was Andy's dabbles into criticism: "I could be a food critic. 'Those muffins are bad.' Or maybe I could be an art critic. 'That painting is bad.'"

So, all-in-all, a fantastic night of television from NBC... that was the most fun I've had watching the Superbowl and surrounding programs probably ever. Great job, peacock!

So who will we see in the 2010 Superbowl? The Bears? The Patriots? A Jonas Brothers/Miley Cyrus halftime show?! I would really like to see at least one of these things... but if the mood was right... oh, I could go for all three.

My Super Bowl predictions:

2009-02-01T09:07:00.003-06:00

Steelers: 8, Cardinals: -2, Bruce Springsteen: one million, the advertisers: -4, the new episode of The Office airing after the Super Bowl starring Jack Black and Jessica Alba: also one million.

Alternatively: Steelers 16, Cardinals 14.

The official soundtrack listing for the Watchmen film has debuted on iTunes

2009-01-31T08:50:00.005-06:00

and I like it. I like it a lot, in fact. It seems that they've managed to include a version of every song referenced in the book except for Elvis Costello's "The Comedians," which in my opinion is not a very fantastic song anyway. A few of the versions included (those of the Dylan songs Moore cites) are covers, and that is going to be divisive to some, especially regarding the first track...

1. My Chemical Romance - Desolation Row
2. Nat "King" Cole - Unforgettable
3. Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin'
4. Simon & Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence
5. Janis Joplin - Me & Bobby McGee
6. KC & The Sunshine Band - I'm Your Boogie Man
7. Billie Holiday - You're My Thrill
8. Philip Glass - Pruit Igoe & Prophecies
9. Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah
10. Jimi Hendrix - All Along the Watchtower
11. Budapest Symphony Orchestra - Ride of the Valkyries
12. Nina Simone - Pirate Jenny

So, okay. Pretty much no one is going to argue with the Hendrix version of "All Along the Watchtower." Lots of people think he made that song better. I do not, but I like his version all the same and I could see where one would not necessarily want three songs sung by Bob Dylan on the same soundtrack, so the lack of Dylan's "Watchtower" is no biggie. But My Chemical Romance covering "Desolation Row"... hm.

Early internet reaction to the song seems very negative. This is doubly understandable because a lot of people hate My Chemical Romance, and because their version of the song is a total 180 from Dylan's. When I listened to the preview clip on iTunes I hated it too, but I decided to download the song anyway to listen to the whole thing, just to be sure.

And you know what... in my opinion, it's not that bad. Yes it is totally different from Dylan's. It is definitely MCRed-up. But I can see getting used to it. The song is going to play over the end credits of the movie and that's a fine place for it because then you don't have to pay attention but you can. And I get the feeling that the mood of the song is going to fit well with whatever changes Zack Snyder & co. have in store for the end of the movie. But you know, I like My Chemical Romance anyway; I think Gerard Way is a fantastic comic-book writer (one of these days I will do a post on that) and I thought the band's Black Parade album was a great mash-up of Pink Floyd, Queen, and Meatloaf. So I guess I have a positive bias here. You can preview the video and start to make a decision for yourself; I'm guessing you will probably hate it:

But, even given my semi-like for the cover, it does not compare to the original. SO here's what I'm going to do, and I recommend you follow suit. If you buy the Watchmen soundtrack, download the original "Desolation Row" from Dylan seperately. Then re-order the songs on the soundtrack so Dylan's version is the first track you hear, and My Chemical Romance's the last. That way you have the option of more easily ignoring the MCR version of the song, just like you will in the theater. But the commercial appeal of putting a super-popular band's new single front and center on the soundtrack album is pretty clear, so I'm not mad that Warner Bros. did it. I assume they won't be mad when I tweak the album for my own personal enjoyment.

As for the non-Dylan parts on the disc, I definitely approve. It seems the songs included here that were not quoted by Moore still fit both the period of the music he's referencing and its mood very, very well, such as Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" and Nat Cole's "Unforgettable." To me, the soundtrack listing is the result of someone really thinking about the music, and that makes me happy. As a result I shall purchase this and, hopefully, enjoy it. And that is kind of my sentiment towards the Watchmen movie as a whole.

Allow me to say a few words on the criticism of Final Crisis

2009-01-30T14:15:00.003-06:00

because there is a lot of it, and frankly a lot of it is pissing me off.

I'm going to come out guns with blazing and say this: I think 90% of the people who are saying Final Crisis is the worst thing they've ever read, terrible, trash, garbage etc. simply don't understand it. Furthermore they don't think they should have to work to do so.

This is what a lot of Final Crisis defenders have said and continue to say across the internet, and it tends to get a lot of backlash, but I really think it's true. And before you decide you hate me for being an elitist prick, let me explain...

Final Crisis is a dense book. That much is pretty obvious. I read it, loved most of it, and I still am not sure if I even have the basic plot in my grasp (I think I do, but some of the stuff in #7 threw me). I am going to have to read the series again (plus Superman Beyond, the two Batman issues, and Final Crisis Submit) to get a hold on it, and I will probably have to read it many more times to appreciate most of its depth. And I'm not sure why that's a bad thing. In fact I think it's great. Economically, it makes buying each book a better investment, because I am going to spend hours on every issue of Final Crisis. The same cannot be said of most books on the stands.

So, okay, I like it and I don't understand it. I'm not saying it's great yet, but what I am saying is I think it's interesting and more importantly that I had a damn good time reading it so this book has value at least to me. And I can't stand all the people out there who are completely denying that the book has any merit when they probably haven't thought about the book at all. I would wager a significant portion of them read #7 once, didn't get it, and said "fuck this series, only fanboys would enjoy it." Because you know what, that's just a bad attitude.

Here's the thing: most of these critics seem to think that every comic they read should be accessible... that somehow, they are entitled to a book that they can pick up, get everything they need to out of it in 5 or 10 minutes, bag and board it and put it in a box never again to see the light of day. Why do people think this?

I will guess: because many people do not read comics for artistic exploration or literary challenges... they read comics for short bursts of relatively simple entertainment. And there's definitely nothing wrong with that. The thing about Final Crisis though is that it probably is not for those people.

And I think, because this book has Crisis in the title, people feel more compelled to read it. I would imagine that that's where some of the more livid protestors of the book come from. But that's simply not true. Just because a book is "important" to a comics universe doesn't mean it is a necessary read. No one is putting a gun to your head telling you you have to read this. You can get all the essentials of any of the Crises from Wikipedia, after all. But because it seems as though people feel like they have to, and then don't want to invest the time and effort into figuring out what they've just read, there are a bevy of uber-dramatic overreactions of hatred towards this particular series.

But look, here's the thing. There are very few legitimate critics who would say that a Shakespeare play, a Vonnegut novel, a T.S. Eliot poem or an Ingmar Bergman movie (for instance) is "too dense" and thus "garbage." The complexity of each of those artists' work only enhances its quality. And what I'm saying is, why should a Grant Morrison comic, or any comic, be held to different standards than any of those art forms? The idea that comics, or even the subset of superhero comics, must be accessible and easily understood to be good is clearly wrong, at least if one believes that comics can and should be regarded as art like any other. Which, obviously, I do.

(speaking of Vonnegut, doesn't Slaughterhouse-Five emply a jumbled time effect not dissimilar from Final Crisis? Were the Trafalmadorians secretly influenced by Darksied? We will never know!)

I am not saying that every comic on the shelf should be as demanding Final Crisis. Far from it. There are plenty of quality movies, books, poems and plays that are easily understood. What I am saying is that to go absolutely bananas because a book like Final Crisis would dare present a challenge to a reader... that is silly, and wrong.

And in case you're wondering, yes, I take this personally because I really like this book. I liked the breakneck pace, I liked the character moments thrown in amidst the chaos, I liked the seemingly hopeless odds that our heroes bring us back from, and more than anything else I love the metatextuality of the story, the idea that Superman is so great in the DC Universe and ours because he is the best story. Let me say that again. I love that aspect of Final Crisis. It means a lot to me. For that reason, and many others, I cherish the fact that Final Crisis is in my comic collection.

And the thing about opinoins is it's cool to have yours... if you didn't like it, fine, say that. It's also totally okay to say "I don't have the time or the interest to invest in figuring this book out, it's not for me." You can't argue with that. Where all this criticism crosses the line is when people assume that because they didn't like or understand it, it is poorly written and is no good to anybody. And what I'm saying is, that's patently wrong. It's good to me, damn it, and I'm going to enjoy the many hours I spend re-reading it trying to figure out what the hell just went on.

So we're gonna nail him on comics, then.

2009-01-29T15:07:00.004-06:00

Far be it for me to quote the Onion (I'm sure enough of your friends do this for you) but how could I let Tuesday's story about our new President go unmentioned?

Read "Obama Disappointed Cabinet Failed to Understand His Reference to 'Savage Sword of Conan' #24".

And allow me to give you the accompanying priceless graphic:

Best picture ever? Perhaps.

I have read and heard a lot lately about how comedians are scrambling to get something to mock Obama for. A few folks (Jamie Fox and SNL's Fred Armisen) have gotten laughs out of his strange speaking cadence, but other than that, what is there? SNL seems to have settled on, for now, making jokes that Obama is simply too cool. Until our new President makes a serious policy flub or reveals a somehow unseen nervous tic or something... there's not a ton to work with that's actually funny.

The Onion's present answer is to turn to comic books. And honestly I think that is pretty cool. If our humor regarding one of the most powerful men on the planet comes from insinuating that he knows obscure facts about a mid-70s Marvel fantasy comic and not that he, you know, ruined our country in a shockingly brash display of idiocy... maybe times are not so bad after all. Besides, it's attention for a medium I love. One might argue that it is negative, mocking attention, but I don't think so. After all, if comics are the source of Obama's mockery, we must think Obama is pretty okay... and he thinks comics are okay so... well I'm not very good at math, but I think if you use the transitive property or something it turns out that we're probably all okay with comics too.

I have to point out that I'm a little dismayed that Obama seems to be a clear-cut Marvel fan (the Onion even takes up this point). I truly wish I could sit down with our new President and discuss the neat subtleties of Geoff Johns and Phil Jiminez's Infinite Crisis. I do. But hey, I'll take the Spidey/Conan love in exchange for four to eight years of good leadership. I think that's an alright price to pay. Maybe one day Illinois Lt. Governor Pat Quinn and I can have a tete-a-tete about JLA, if he's not too busy. A guy can dream.

I listened to the new Springsteen album "Working on a Dream" twice in succession

2009-01-27T17:14:00.006-06:00

and I am not really sure what to say about it. I made the mistake of reading two reviews in the press last week (Jim Derogatis in the Chicago Sun-Times and Spin's featured review) and they were both fairly negative. This unfortunately prepared me to not like the album, but I don't think that's the case. I think I kind of like it. I know I like some of it a lot.

So let's start with the beginning. This is the first Springsteen-with-E-Street album I can think of since Born to Run that doesn't start with a high-energy rock song to get you going--instead it starts with an 8-minute tune called "Outlaw Pete" that totally builds to a deliberate rock pace but takes its time getting there. This is kind of jarring for someone who's used to his Boss records starting off with "Badlands" or "The Ties That Bind." The thing is once "Outlaw Pete" builds to that mid-to-fast rock tempo the rest of the album pretty much stays there until the last couple cuts. There aren't many sensitive valleys, there's little balladry, except for maybe bits and pieces of songs. There's no "Magic" or "I'm on Fire" to bring things down a little. So, yeah, strange.

Mostly, though, I like these songs. "Outlaw Pete" is cool and I really like "My Lucky Day." I'm also a fan of the songs that immediately follow. The album starts to wane for me a little in the middle as Bruce brings in some styles that don't seem to fit, such as the blues/garage rock "Good Eye," where a combination of odd production choices and an affected singing voice make for a jarring listen. I think the album recovers fairly quickly, though, with "Life Itself" and "Kingdom of Days" before hitting what I would consider to be the only really bad song on here, "Surprise, Surprise," whose lyrics (mostly just repeating "surprise, surprise" over and over again) are stretching it even for Bruce, who often can turn silly into poetry but for me misses with this one.

I'm not really sure why this album seems kind of unliked, though. I get the feeling from reading a lot of reviews that people consider it toothless because it's a generally happier record than Springsteen tends to make. Well, that's okay, right? I mean I think the reason I love Bruce Springsteen's music so much is because it covers the emotional spectrum so well, from energizing hope and optimism to down-and-out, nothing-to-live-for despair. This album's 13 songs almost completely reside more in the former category than the latter, and maybe that means that as a whole it is a less satisfying listen, but when thrown in with the Boss's other songs I think tracks like "My Lucky Day," "Working on a Dream" and "Life Itself" will find their home nicely.

I would like to say that I am pretty unequivocally on board with the way this record sounds. I really like producer Brendan O'Brien, who worked with Bruce on The Rising and Magic and more famously produced huge and noteworthy works for Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine. I think he has made the E-Street Band sound amazing on his records with them, and I hope their collaboration continues.

Another definitely great thing about this record, and I'm stealing this from Jim Derogatis' review, is that this surely means another Bruce tour is coming soon. That, if nothing else, is a reason to be happy to see this record on the shelves.

The first (Comic) Book Club meeting has come and gone

2009-01-25T20:48:00.003-06:00

and I am really thrilled with how it went. Really. It was a lot of fun getting 13 intelligent people together to discuss a graphic novel we'd all read. No one talked over anyone else and everyone respected everyone else's points... I do not believe I have ever had a discussion centered around comics like that before. Beautiful!

As you know (if you have been keeping up with posts as of about 5 days ago) our first book was Hellboy vol. 1: "Seed of Destruction." I promised that I would share some thoughts on the book if I felt so inclined, and I do. I reckon I will make this a monthly fixture, actually... it will be a good record of some of the ground covered in (Comic) Book Club (and if you're wondering if I simply must put the word comic in parentheses like that every time I talk about the club... yes, I must).

So first off: I liked this book a lot. I had never read anything Hellboy before; I saw the movie a little while after it came out and I don't recall being too impressed. I wasn't sure what I'd think of the comic but it had been something I'd always wanted to try. Turns out that was a good instinct, because "Seed of Destruction" was a really pleasing read.

Let me talk about what I think the book does right. First of all, the art is fantastic, and probably the #1 reason people are drawn to Hellboy. Mignola's style is an interesting mix of Jack Kirby and Frank Miller (in a nutshell: it loves both geometry and shadows) and there really is no one else who does work like it. My only experience with Mignola before was on the atrocious Cosmic Oddysey from DC... there, the art was the only thing that made the story even worth glimpsing at, and Mignola set loose on his creator-owned stuff is so much better than Mignola otherwise.

Another very cool thing about this book is how its story is a humongous mash-up, a Frankenstein's monster of both genre and story. When I read it I noticed how it incorporated a ton of different genres--besides the "horror" it classifies itself, there is superhero, sci-fi, and mystery to name a few. A few of the folks at the club pointed out another merging that I had missed--namely, that Mignola loves to incorporate all sorts of different mythologies as well as historical figures into his Hellboy universe.

And what's great about that universe is that all of these seemingly discordant things casually exist with each other and it's not even an issue. In the first pages of "Seed of Destruction" there is a super-hero lounging around with some soldiers, wearing a coat and drinking tea. That's all we see of the cape-and-cowl set in this book but it's enough to let us know that it's there, alongside monsters from Hell and real Russian mystics and myths both Lovecraftian and Mesopotamian.

The effect of this is that Mignola creates an incredibly rich universe just begging to be developed; "Seed of Destruction" itself has a fairly straightforward plot but there are so many elements within it that leave doors wide open for other stories, and I think this is the magic of it. We discussed at the club whether it was artistically or economically motivated--or perhaps both--but Mignola shrewdly teases us with details about Hellboy's world time and again, ensuring that Hellboy stories can--and probably should--be told forever. Indeed I don't think I've ever read a first volume of anything, except maybe Neil Gaiman's Sandman, so open to possibilities of where the series could go. I get the feeling that, rather than create a character or a comic, Mignola set out to create a brand, a universe... hell, there could be a Hellboy comics company that would support books of all genres. I'm not sure that such a decision would be sound financially, but there definitely is room for it in Mignola's sand-box.

What I didn't like about the book? Almost nothing. My friend/logo designer Marc brought up, and I agree, that perhaps some of Hellboy's narration is a little repetitive; Marc postulated that this is probably the scripting influence of John Byrne, who helped Mignola out on this first volume. Given that some of Hellboy's monologue can skew a bit towards sounding like Wolverine, I will agree with that assessment.

In final summation, Hellboy vol. 1 was awesome. I am almost certainly going to read vol. 2 soon, but how soon is not certain, as February's book (chosen by me) shall be Watchmen, just in time for the movie... get ready guys...

Here are some more cool blogs to read!!

2009-01-22T13:22:00.006-06:00

This is something I like to do from time to time... point out good stuff on blogs other than mine, because a lot of these sites are cool enough to demand exposure, and because it is a great filler for when I don't know what else to post!

...

The last two times I did this I worked the blog name into a pun, but I won't do that this time. A few of those blogs that got my pun treatment have since stopped updating, and I can only assume it's because of my terrible jokes. So, Mark and Emily, I am deeply, deeply sorry. I should be... punished?

Okay, that's the only one, I swear.

ANYWAY:

Covered: This is a really cool art blog whereby indie comics artists do their own versions of classic comics covers. Lots of fun to look at! Here is yesterday's entry, by The Man Who Loved Breasts artist Robert Goodin:

Deep End of the Long Box: This blog, run by my friend Mike, is premised on the treasures (or crap) you find when you finally read those comics you bought years ago for the sole reason that they were super-cheap. I think this is a really unique and interesting concept; I don't believe I can name any other "random back-issue review" blogs. Visiting his page is like spinning the big wheel on the Price is Right... you never know what you're going to get, and maybe Drew Carey will heckle you a little bit.

GeniusBoyFireMelon: I'm not sure why this blog is so named... perhaps it's explained in an earlier post... but I know that its author, Timothy Callahan, is one of my favorite writers in the field of comics criticism (it is sadly a small field, but Mr. Callahan would be awesome no matter how much competition there was). I own his book Grant Morrison: The Early Years, which is a fantastic look at Morrison's career from Zenith through Doom Patrol, and I really really hope that a book covering Morrison's later stuff (JLA, All Star Superman, Final Crisis, Seaguy, etc.) is on the horizon. He's also written a book on the Legion of Superheroes called Teenagers from the Future. The point is that his writing on comics is thoughtful, incisive, and awesome. He often reviews hordes of comics that come out every week, and I always love to hear his opinions.

You Ain't No Picasso: Screw Pitchfork, this is my source for indie rock on the net (and actually, comics do come up every now and again). You will often find cool videos or new MP3s; there seems to be a focus on obscure, neat covers (I must have downloaded like 60 different songs Of Montreal covered off this site). Bonus, if you go there soon, down at the bottom of the page you can catch a video of this really sweet Pepsi commercial featuring The Who's "My Generation." Seriously, it's really cool.

Actually, you know what... watch it here. Then go to this site because it will show you more cool things like this:

Happy Inauguration Day!

2009-01-20T08:29:00.001-06:00

Reminder! (Comic) Book Club has begun!

2009-01-19T14:45:00.006-06:00

This Sunday is the first official meeting of Stand-Up Comics' (Comic) Book Club, a project near and dear to my heart. I am really excited about the prospects of this club and through it I hope to both discover some great graphics literature and maybe turn on a few new people to the medium as well. The first book was chosen by Pat, one of the other owners of Stand-Up, and he has picked...

Mike Mignola and John Byrne's Hellboy volume 1: "Seed of Destruction." I have never read a Hellboy comic before and I only saw the movie once years ago, so I am pretty excited. I'm glad, at any rate, that the first book we're reading is one I am unfamiliar with, because exposure to new texts is the point of this whole thing. I also like Hellboy as a choice because he kind of straddles the line between superhero/mainstream and indie, and because he's a character that facilitates the discussion of the relationship between comic books and other mass media, which I believe is a really important topic these days, especially inasmuch as it's one of the main reason that kids hesitant to read will pick up a comic book over, say, Of Mice and Men (note: Of Mice and Men is a really fantastic story. But maybe if kids saw Lennie kicking ass in a weekly cartoon series, they'd be more inclined to read it, huh?).

I've not yet done my homework and read the book, but that's partially because I've been busy and partially because I want the thing to be really fresh in my mind come Sunday. I'm also going to take notes. Pat will be leading the discussion on the book but I may come up with some interseting thoughts about it on my lonesome, so you may see an analysis of this thing a little bit down the road.

At any rate... Hellboy vol. 1, "Seed of Destruction," 4:00 PM Sunday, at the Lansing, IL Baker's Square (southwest corner of Ridge and Wentworth). It's gonna be a sweet time.

It's not often I feel the need to pimp bands who play at my shop

2009-01-18T16:23:00.005-06:00

because, to be honest, many of them are not very good. Every so often, though, a standout act will make themselves known. I had the pleasure of listening to one such band last night. In a show filled with talented acts of different genres (also of note: Kindle, Virus Attack, The New Yorker), I could not get enough of the second band to play, a group called Nate & His Kite.

These guys are awesome, awesome, awesome. To me, they kind of sound like a mix of They Might Be Giants and Queen... although that description probably doesn't do justice to any of the three bands it refers to. But my musical knowledge does not go deep enough to find a true analog for Nate & His Kite, whose musical styles include straight-up guitar rock, Billy Joel-style piano kickassery, bits of electro-pop, and most amusingly, vaudeville. Sadly they do not have any videos on YouTube, and there doesn't seem to be a way to upload MP3s to Blogger, so I can't embed any music of theirs. But if you trust my taste at all, I recommend you venture over to their MySpace page and listen to at least one of their songs. I would first recommend "NES <3", the song I first fell in love with, which has an outro you can't get out of your head. If you want more, listen to "Sway" for a taste of their amazing arrangement abilities and backing vocals (this is where I most see the Queen influence).

These guys are truly fantastic; I cannot stress enough that if you live in the Chicagoland area, you should check them out. Their next show is Tuesday, January 27 at the Elbo Room, and I reckon I am gonna be there. Now the question is... will YOU?!

Oh, Batman.

2009-01-15T12:52:00.003-06:00

I'm not gonna spoil anything but... man. Final Crisis #6 was a weird reading experience. I can't think of too many comics where the weight of what happened didn't really hit me til after I put it down. I guess that's a good sign that I'm really caught up in what's going on.

There were a lot of twists, surprises, and otherwise notable goings-on in these pages, and there is a great interview with Grant Morrison about this biggest one of them all over at the Wizard website (note: this DOES include spoilers. Hell, even the html page name contains a spoiler). And although I don't want to talk about the meat of the interview yet, except to say that when you think about it what he says should be fairly obvious (once I read it it was like, "well duh, why didn't I think of that?"), I'd like to pull out this quote, more related to comics in general, which I really liked:

Once you've seen "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight," why bother doing realistic superheroes because now the movies can do them better than anyone. I kind of feel that what it does is free up comics to be a little bit wilder. We've got great artists who can sit there with their pencils and draw anything. They're not limited by budgets. We shouldn't be following the storytelling techniques of Hollywood because they can do it really well. Comics can do all kinds of other things. They can be really crazy and wild and can really stretch the imagination and be really progressive.

This is a point that I feel bears repeating again and again and again. Why do people insist on seeing realism in super-hero comics? The Dark Knight has done the realistic superhero better, I think, than any comic ever could. But there is this feeling among certain comic creators and fans, I think, that comics are just cheap movies, or prototypical storyboards that somehow become more legitimate when they're put to the big screen. To put it bluntly, this is a stupid way of looking at things. Morrison and other creative comic talent (off the top of my head: Geoff Johns and Joe Kelly are two other examples--and I will speak about Joe Kelly's excellent I Kill Giants book at length later) are showing us that comics should not be beholden to the standards of Hollywood, but rather to their own set of standards, which cannot do everything a movie can but which can do some things better.

I think Scott McCloud would be proud.

Here is an amusing thought about national security.

2009-01-14T09:16:00.004-06:00

With pretty much every comics shop on the planet preoccupied and dealing with President Elect Barack Obama this week... just think about how much comic-related stuff Secret Service agents have been forced to wade through in the interest of security. Every blog post about the Obama variant, every comic-shop email that talks about Amazing Spider-Man #583... it's probably all being scrutinized at this very moment.

So, my friends in the Secret Service, I hope you enjoyed my first post on Marvel Comics' Obama variant cover to this week's issue of Amazing Spider-Man. And I trust you understand that when I said the Spider-Man meeting President Obama was a Skrull, I was joking. I further hope that you did not assume these "Skrulls" to be a threat to our great nation because, well, they're clearly not. They may pretend to have a master plan but really a 20-minute battle in Central Park plus a Norse God of thunder will make their best-laid plans crumble like so many George W. Bush attempts at logical argumentation. Also, please tell our new President that Norman Osborne should not, not, NOT be trusted under any circumstance. Yes, he is sauve and has cool hair, and he has nice suits and stuff. But seriously... I think he's up to something. I'm not saying anything about anything but you may want to ask a Peter Parker what he thinks about this. Or maybe ask Gwen Stacy... OH WAIT.

I trust the real Obama will do a better job than the Marvel one.

Bang Camaro II is released nationally today!

2009-01-13T16:47:00.003-06:00

That means the album is now available in Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Hot Topic stores around the nation. So hey... go buy it!!

Seriously... this is a really cool album from a group of guys who deserve to be famous. And I think they're well on their way... appearing on Conan O'Brien is nothing to scoff at, after all. And trust me when I tell you that this is one of the most fun albums I can imagine listening to... these songs will simultaneously make you smile and fill your veins with blood red rock. I think the disc's standouts for me are "She's Gone (Critical)," which is a song about launching your crazy girlfriend into space (it even employs a David Bowie/"Space Oddity"-style countdown for the bridge) and "The Hit," a sensitive ballad about not lying to girls so you can fuck them (I think that's what it's about... I dunno, I just listen to the song waiting for the sweet guitar solo to kick in).

Here. Just look at this video of the first single from the album, called "Night Lies."

Did you look at it? Okay, good. Now go buy the album, okay?

I guess I can't hate on Fredric Wertham so much anymore.

2009-01-12T22:37:00.004-06:00

But let me start from the beginning; over the past week I've been reading a book called Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero. It's written by a Mr. Danny Fingeroth, a former Marvel editor and comics scholar. I had the fortune of meeting him at the New York Comic-Con this past year, where he graciously signed my copy of his previous work, Superman on the Couch. Mr. Fingeroth is a really cool guy and, I feel, an important writer when it comes to comics-as-academia. So it is that I happily grabbed a copy of his latest book.

Disguised as Clark Kent aims to tell the history of superhero comics through the lens of Jewishness--it explores the Jewish creators, themes, and heroes that were the foundation of the comics industry, from Superman creators Siegel & Shuster to Will Eisner to Stan Lee and beyond. I have to say that, while I am proud to add Disguised as Clark Kent to my bookshelf, I did not find it to be as revelatory as Superman on the Couch. Perhaps it's because I myself have no Jewish background (other than attending a Jewish preschool because it was the only game in town, but that's neither here nor there), but I didn't find this book as a whole to be as incisive as Fingeroth's last one, which concerned itself with more psychological and philosophical themes. That said, there is a lot of good stuff to be found in Disguised as Clark Kent, but for me, the real joy of this book was the chapter on Dr. Fredric Wertham.

For the uninitiated: Dr. Wertham was the psychologist responsible for the 1950s comic-book witch-hunts, which sought to blame the rash of post-World War II juvenile delinquency on Batman & Robin (a homosexual power fantasy), Wonder Woman (a lesbian power fantasy with BDSM overtones), EC's horror comics (full of immoral tales that glamorized a life of crime and other malfeasance), and their four-colored ilk. Wertham first published his ideas in the infamous text Seduction of the Innocent, which led to a series of Congressional hearings with many top comics publishers of the day. Wertham did a damn fine job of humiliating and damaging the comics industry, striking a blow that some would say it has never recovered from (there are still people today who will tell you, sadly, that Batman and Robin are lovers and therefore negatively influence children). Wertham's influence led to, among other things, the creation of the restrictive Comics Code and the crippling of William Gaines' EC Comics, one of the most creative publishers of the time. The result of this is that the name Fredrick Wertham has a monolithic quality in comics circles... he is hated. He is the enemy. He is the comic industry's devil, or, for Futurama fans, the comic industry's Robot Devil.

(above: Dr. Fredric Wertham as a robot. Note the top hat he festively waves around as he kills the comic industry we all love so.)

Disguised as Clark Kent, while not excusing Wertham's actions, tells part of his story that makes them a lot more interesting. Wertham was, as you might have guessed, a prominent child psychologist. Fingeroth brings to light that Wertham had other interests besides fighting comic books... he was actually quite invested in social services. In his day job, he spent a lot of time with underpriviledged, minority children at a nearly free clinic he helped establish in Harlem, which had some interesting and important results. Perhaps the most striking fact in Fingeroth's entire book is this: "His findings on the effects of segregation on African-Americans played an important role in the Supreme Court's landmark school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954."

Wow.

So here is this guy who most people like me loathe... to the point of wishing he never existed... and it turns out that he was a major component in ending segregation in schools. That kind of complicates things, doesn't it? I mean, if we were to weigh "comic books being socially respected" against "black children getting equal education as their white peers"... there's really no contest. If comics had to take the hit, so be it... you have to respect that other element of Wertham's career.

But that's not all. Let's return to Wertham's attack on comic books. Even here Fingeroth deepends our understanding of the situation. He suggests that Wertham's hatred of comic books may have been racially motivated... which is not to say motivated by racism. Fingeroth points out that the Jewish Wertham was similar to many early Jewish immigrants to America--cultured, educated, fairly erudite individuals who valued high society (one might picture the mascot for "The New Yorker"). It was not uncommon among those of Wertham's type to feel embarassed by later Jewish immigrants, who were often impoverished, uneducated, and decidedly lower-class... the types of people, in other words, who formed the backbone of the comics industry. Wertham, Fingeroth suggests, felt that his Jewish brethren were doing irreparable harm to culture by peddling their "low art," and felt responsibility as a more noble representation of the Jewish people to put a stop to it.

Of course this doesn't make Wertham's crusade any more correct. Fingeroth points out that Wertham had no formal training in the arts or in any kind of cultural studies... he was merely an opinionated man who used his high status in the field of psychology to launch attacks on aspects of American culture he deemed unfitting. I think we would all agree that this is a pretty poor thing to do, especially when coupled with, as suggested, a condescending embarassment for his people. And yet, this picture of Wertham--a man motivated by the drive to do well for his culture, its art and his race--it makes him so much more interesting than this fire-breathing dragon intent on destroying the comics industry because he was offended by Wonder Woman's skimpy get-up.

The rest of Disguised as Clark Kent is full of value; it's certainly a great read for anyone interested in the history of comics or of the Jewish influence on America's popular culture. I'm not sure I buy all of the connections Fingeroth draws between Judaism and comics; then again, I'm not sure I don't. Some of it feels like a stretch but Fingeroth admits that much of the book is his own conjecture. Given that, the book certainly succeeds in its mission of showing how Jewish concerns inform many important aspects of comic book culture as we know it, thereby influencing an important part of the American cultural landscape as a whole.

I feel like Fingeroth's chapter on Wertham, though, is absolutely essential reading. Once a year I give a talk on comic books to a class of library science students at the University of Illinois. Wertham has always come up, and I'm happy that now I have this much to say about him. I find I am now forced to respect the man, despite vehemently disagreeing with a lot of his work. But you can't detract from Brown v. Board of Education, and in the end, I guess you can't really fault a guy for trying so hard in any endeavor. And I'm ashamed to say that I never really thought about Wertham as a human being before. If nothing else, Danny Fingeroth's book has made this man seem to me all the more real, all the more interesting, and maybe just a little bit noble.

In comics, Obama being alive is like Superman being dead.

2009-01-11T13:05:00.004-06:00

Or so it seems, as over the past few days the shop has been flooded (relatively speaking) with requests for next week's Amazing Spider-Man #583 featuring President Elect Obama fist-bumping the titular hero in a relatively poorly-drawn picture by Todd Nauck:

(Apparently Mr. Fantastic & co. didn't get rid of all the Skrulls...)

(Okay, obviously I'm just joking, but wouldn't it be funny if a plot point of this issue was that there is still a Spider-Man Skrull running around?).

And, I don't know how I feel about this. I mean, it's gonna be alright for business. It could have been AWESOME for business if we had anticipated just how popular this book would be... and talking with some other shop owners, they didn't do that either. I kind of feel like Marvel should have just overshipped a shit-load of these books, made them totally returnable, and said "trust us, these will sell out." It is a bit hypocritical to blame Marvel for making the same mistake that I made (namely, not knowing how popular this book would be), but on the other hand they've been in the business a lot longer than I. (Props to Marvel, though, for rushing out a second printing ONE WEEK later. That is slick.)

And gimmicky stuff like this, I dunno, it gets to me. Like, it is cool that Obama is president in the Marvel U and it is cool that that is driving people into comic shops (note: it is cooler, by a gagillion times, that Obama is president in the Real U). But few to none of these people will come back. And that is not anything to blame anyone about... it just makes me sad. So the point of this post, I guess, is to say I'm sad. Also I am apparently a 15-year-old high-schooler whose favorite band is From First to Last or something like that.

This could be good for comics, don't get me wrong. The Death of Superman was beneficial for a few years (and also was probably very, very bad in the long run, but who has time to think ahead in today's economy, am I right?!), and the Death of Captain America good for a few weeks. It just kind of breaks my heart a little when people rush into shops to get some milestone issue and don't ever come back. It's like, guys, comics have more value than that. There are great stories and artwork inside lots of them (potentially already inside Amazing Spider-Man, which I understand has been pretty solid lately). And the only way to really convince people of that is to sell them their gimmick book and do it with a good attitude and a smile on your face and hope they come back to read a little more. Of course situations like this make it hard to please customers because the product is obviously going to be scarce (I already ordered more second prints of this Spider-Man issue than I would normally order first prints of any other Spidey book). But the ones you do please... hopefully, they'll come back.

I guess having a guy in the White House who reads Spider-Man and Conan doesn't hurt.

(And can you imagine a Conan comic featuring Obama? Dark Horse, get on this).

In other comics-plus-black-people-in-major-media-outlets news, Newsarama's Matt Brady for some reason has an article about black Kryptonians over at MSNBC, which you can find here. And unlike all the Obama coverage, which just kind of grinds my gears a little bit in a stupid way, this article actually bothers me.

First of all, click that link and check out where it's placed within the MSNBC website. It is: the "Technology and Science" section. Um, what? Unless Krypton is a real planet and scientists have just discovered some new skin pigmentation on some of its residence, I don't see this as science or technology. The fact that the story probably most appeals to "science-fiction nerds" is, I'd wager, the reason it is under that heading.

And the text of this article... my lord. In case you couldn't tell, I am a pretty liberal guy. I balk at some folks' insistence that there is a "liberal media." And yet... this article would almost make me believe. Check out winning lines like "an America finally enlightened enough to elect a black man as President." I'm glad that Matt Brady of Newsarama is qualified to tell us that we are now enlightened. I am sure the millions of non-racist Americans of decades past can now breathe a sigh of relief at this inconsequential article's assertion that America is finally enlightened.

Sorry. This just pisses me off. First of all, it isn't news. Who cares that we can now glimpse black-skinned people on Krypton, besides Matt Brady and apparently someone at MSNBC? I mean, Krypton is an alien world. It's not like Kryptonians being black relates at all to real people being black. The color of any Kryptonian's skin should be fairly meaningless to us readers because we have no idea of the social, cultural, or political backgrounds that come along with it. Black Kryptonians might as well have been orange or magenta; it should change our interpretation of the story not at all.

Second, does no-one proofread these things? This article is really poorly-written and condescending. There are fragmented sentences and opinions expressed as facts. It would be fine for Newsarama, but MSNBC. Science and Technology?!

I guess in the end I just feel like, if comics are going to break in the mainstream news, it should be over something that matters. And sure, Barack Obama's appearance in does, to a degree, matter (black Kryptonians do not. And I think James Robinson and Geoff Johns might agree). But, for instance, no one came rushing to the shop when Oprah Winfrey picked Sara Varon's Robot Dreams for her Kids' Reading List last year (the first time she had ever recognized a graphic novel). This story, maybe the biggest achievement for comics in the mainstream in 2008 (besides potentially The Dark Knight/Watchmen) was not really covered by the news. In fact searching MSNBC's website for "Sara Varon" turns up nothing. "Black Kryptonians," though, gets a hit. I just feel like there is something fundamentally wrong with that.

In a weird bit of synchronicity, the Spider-Man issue in question is #583, while the Superman is #683. Anyone who wants to have some fun: figure out what major comic book will next hit issue #x83, and then conjecture how can a black person make a noteworthy apperance in that book.

Meanwhile, I will be dreading the hordes of callers who want their Obama book. Fortunately, they have only a week to wait, and they have the inauguration of our new President to hold them over.

Where have I been?!

2009-01-10T19:53:00.004-06:00

I mean, seriously. This nigh month-long absence is pretty unacceptable on my part. I'd like to thank Evie of Awesomed By Comics for giving me/the shop a generous shout-out in her last post, thus inspiring me to write again. Since I've kinda missed a lot of stuff, I think the best thing right now would be to do a quick kind of recap post, briefly running down a lot of the important things I've missed in the realm of things that matter to me. So, in no particular order:

Secret Invasion: Kind of anticlimactic, awesome last page.

Batman RIP: Is awesome.

Final Crisis: Is awesome to the maxx!

Grant Morrison: Should bear my intellectual children.

Brian Michael Bendis: Is still, in my opinion, a really good writer, and I loved the first post- SI New Avengers.

Mortal Kombat vs. DC: Shockingly very cool. Highly recommended.

Fox vs. DC (via WB): If Watchmen doesn't come out on time, I might cry.

The holidays: Busy and overrated.

Bang Camaro on Conan O'Brien: Incredible. I have now stood where Conan has stood in relative position to the Camaro drum set. This is probably the closest I will come to being a rock star. I love it.

The recession: So passe. Let's be hiply ironic and go spend money on frivolous things like comic books, okay?

The winter weather: Also passe. Cleaning off my car is so 9:00 AM this morning.

Blackened, Chicago's premiere Metallica tribute band: Is playing tonight at 10:00 PM at JJ Kelly's in Lansing. I am going to see them. My friend Jim is in this band and they are very good. If you like Metallica and/or talent, you should check them out.

Take Cover, Chicago's hottest new cover band: Will be storming your area soon! (probably not but hey, this is my own project and I'm psyched about it. Check out entertaining videos at myspace.com/takecovernow)

Blog entries that are phrased in such a way that they could have been taken from Rorshach's journal: Satisfying. Must investigate further. Hrm.

I think that covers about everything I would've talked about in the few months I haven't been reliably blogging. I promise I will be back with regular posts soon. YEAH!

Dear my friends, have you ever wanted to be more literate?

2008-12-11T12:21:00.004-06:00

Well now's your chance!!!!

But in all seriousness... I'm using my blog and Facebook to get out the word about something we're starting over at the comic shop I own (Stand-Up Comics, if you didn't know, which you probably did). It's an idea I've had since before we opened the shop and I think it's high time we got it done... a Comic Book Book Club, or, if you will, a (Comic) Book Club.

Basically what happens is every month a member of said club will pick a graphic novel for everyone interested in participating to read. Around the last Sunday of every month, all club members who want to will congregate at the Baker's Square down the street from the shop at about 4:00 for refreshments and discussion of the book at hand. It's like what Oprah does except with books by Grant Morrison instead of Toni Morrison (to all store customers: yes, I used this same joke in my email announcing the club. I feel like it's funny enough to re-use. We'll call that nepotistic continuity, and thanks for that term TJ!).

There is definitely no obligation to being in this club; you can opt in and out certain months if necessary. All that you have to do is, if you want to be part of a discussion on a given month, you'll have to have your own copy of the book in question, and you'll have to have read it prior to the discussion. If you already own the book that's cool, and if you don't you can buy a copy at Stand-Up for 10% off (we will spotlight our "book of the month" in the store).

And I feel it's important to note that almost any graphic novel or trade paperback is fair game for the club--mainstream or indie, superhero or not, it makes no difference as long as the book is accessible to newcomers (for instance, picking volume 6 of "Y the Last Man" is probably not a great choice, but volume 1 is!). As I mentioned above it's up to the club members to pick the book we read each month; we will probably do something like assign choices in the order in which people joined. That said, us shop owners have the first few picks and then we'll turn it over to our customers. I already know what the first month's book (chosen by Pat) is, and I think it's a great mix of indie and mainstream, but I will be announcing that soon...

We'll be starting this off in January, which is only a few weeks away. If this sounds like something you might be interested in please let me know. So far response has been really positive and I think we will have a pretty sizable club. If you've ever been curious about graphic novels or wanted to expand your library, this would be a great way to do it!

So, in summation, I apologize for using my blog/Facebook for what is essentially store promotion but I feel like this is an exceptional circumstance. Thanks for reading folks!

Looks like we're gonna get that Dr. Pepper after all.

2008-11-17T13:15:00.003-06:00

I didn't believe it would happen. I was for sure it was a marketing stunt tied to a product that would never, ever see the light of day. But now we're six days away from the release of Guns N Roses' fifth original studio album, Chinese Democracy, and all I can say is "holy crap." That and "man, that Dr. Pepper is gonna taste so sweet."

For those of you who don't know, back in March soft drink company Dr. Pepper made an announcement to Billboard.com that it would give a free can of its product to everyone in America (except, and this is for serious, ex-guitarists Slash and Buckethead) if Chinese Democracy actually managed to come out at any point in 2008. For a record that's been in the works for 14 years, it seemed like Dr. Pepper was making a pretty safe bet, writing a check it would never have to cash.

(if you want to read the original news release, it's here).

I didn't even flinch when I found out in August that a track from this supposed new album was going to be on Rock Band 2. After all, one song done does not an album make, and Axl had already released a new song for the End of Days soundtrack in 1999.

But then a few weeks ago something fairly jarring happened... BestBuy.com was promoting that Chinese Democracy had an honest-to-God release date of November 23, 2008. And then about a week later iTunes was reporting the same thing, and it began to pre-sell digital copies of the album with a full track list up and the title track available for instant download. And all of a sudden it looked like my cynicism was misplaced... 2008 would usher in Chinese Democracy, after all.

And then my cynicism turned elsewhere, to that article on Billboard.com that my friend Vince had pointed me to more than half a year ago. And I thought, "there's no way Dr. Pepper is going to make good on this. What are the odds?"

Well, I'd say they're pretty good. Check this out.

In short: on November 23, anyone who wants to can go to the Dr. Pepper website, enter some personal information, and get a coupon for a free can of Dr. P. The coupon will arrive in 4-6 weeks and will expire in February 2009.

So this is pretty good news, I'd say. New GNR by the end of the week (that's this Sunday!), and a free soft drink in the next couple of months. Not bad atall. And incase you're wondering... I like the new Guns song in Rock Band 2. It is a little industrial-sounding, sure, but it's got a really catchy chorus and some sweet guitar action at the end. But don't take my word for it...

(it should be noted that I don't play this song in the game a lot, at least not on guitar, because that riff is hard, man!)

So yes, I am eagerly awaiting this album. I love GNR's first four studio efforts and while I'm not so deluded as to think this will live up to their best work, I'm certainly not going to count it out before I've heard the thing.

Couple that with new releases from The Killers and Bang Camaro later the same week and this is a really exciting week in music for me.

My roommate made this at Baker's Square tonight

2008-11-12T22:40:00.005-06:00

and it was so awesome that I felt it was necessary to share.

Here's his Halloween costume, in possibly the best picture to ever be on Facebook:

(he's Rorshach, not, as some have suggested, "the skinny white kid in the hoody," which of course is still a super-popular costume)

And for good measure, here's another picture from my phone, taken at the Halloween party I went to after my friend Laura thought it would be hilarious to put scotch tape around my friend Dwight's face. And of course it was:

If you're having a bad day, just stare long and hard at these bad boys.

Man, I am SO glad Obama won the presidency.

2008-11-04T23:29:00.003-06:00

Now I won't feel silly for wearing this shirt for at least four more years.

FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! ...... too soon?

... Actually, you know what... I was gonna leave this post as a joke but fuck it. I'm gonna be serious for a second.

The shirt above, while awesome, is also incredibly apt. Artist Alex Ross knew exactly what he was doing when he cast Barack Obama in a (the?) classic Superman pose. See, to people like me and Alex Ross Superman stands for one thing above all else--hope (don't believe me? Read his Kingdom Come). And following Obama's campaign and watching his amazing acceptance speech just now, it is incredibly clear that above all else this is what Barack Obama stands for too--hope that we can elevate ourselves out of our economic and social drudgery and move ourselves ever closer to the perfect America we all feel we can be. There is one key difference between Superman and Obama, of course--while Superman can only inspire change, Obama can actually affect it as well. He kid about it in his campaign but I kind of feel like it's true--it seems that we have a version of Kal-El as our president for at least the next four years.

On an interesting related note, at the end of the Obama rally in Chicago's Grant Park, after the President-Elect and his VP's families came out to greet the crowd, I heard a familiar song coming over the TV through the park's PA system. It was "The Rising" by Bruce Springsteen, off The Boss' post-9/11 album of the same name. If you read my blog regularly or know me, you'll know that Springsteen is one of my favorite musical artists. I never really made the connection before but, just like Superman and just like Barack Obama, what Springsteen seems to care about most is hope. Sure many of his songs are full of tragic characters and situations, but anyone really familiar with his body of work will know that almost every one of his songs is about getting out, getting away from that tragedy... rising above it, if you will. My very politically active friend Craig (who actually worked on Obama's state senate campaign at the beginning of his career) told me that his favorite Springsteen lines are from the song "Badlands" (my favorite Bruce song, FYI) and it's this bridge:

For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside
That it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive
I wanna find one face that ain't lookin' through me
I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these badlands

I think what we have done tonight, America, is elect the man who is going to do that (metaphorical) spitting. We'll come on up for the rising, we'll save the world from threats both at home and abroad. We've elected the spirits of Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen of Long Branch, New Jersey, and of Clark Kent of Krypton and Smallville, Kansas. We've elected Barack Obama, and at least for one night the nation's got an injection of hope that it so desperately needs. I can't wait to see where we go from here.

Me am voting for John McCain!

2008-11-04T09:35:00.002-06:00

Him am what best for our country!

Voting is important.

2008-11-03T11:13:00.004-06:00

This much should be obvious, yet to many people it is not. A quick check of statistics online shows that turnout for the 2004 presidential election was just a little better than 60%; this was up about 6% from 2000, but frankly, it is still not nearly good enough.

Now I'm sure that in the past few days you've heard a lot of people going about how crucial it is for everyone to get their asses out of bed and make a choice tomorrow. Unfortunately I am going to join their numbers for a brief moment, with a couple arguments for why I feel it is necessary that every US citizen who is able visits a polling place tomorrow.

In a nutshell, the crux of my argument is this: Democracy does not work without the consent of the governed. The dictionary definition of democracy is "government by the people," after all. How well is our democracy performing, then, when only 60% of those who are able to have a voice exercise it? Democracy can only reach its theoretical fullness when 100% of those governed are doing the governing, right? This is the only sure way to garauntee that the will of the majority of the people is heard. And this seems a small, small price to pay for what should be the most fair form of government. And how hard is it to go vote, really? It takes maybe 20-30 minutes out of your day... you might look at it as just another form of paying taxes, by which I mean that it requires a necessary (and in this case small!) sacrifice on your part to keep society running the way it should, which hopefully is in the best interest of everybody (the difference here is that this tax takes your time instead of your money). I think it is interesting, in fact, that paying taxes is enforced harshly by almost everyone in power while it seems that only some in power care about voting... but that is a topic for another time.

Of course we're talking about hundreds of millions of people here, and I think that always leads people to think "who cares if I vote, there are plenty of other people who will vote like I do, so what I have to say won't end up mattering." Of course examining this statement even a little shows that this is a logical fallacy (thus, those professing it are fallases... get it?!). See, this is a bad way of thinking because it assumes that you're the only person thinking that way. After all, to be honest, there are very few elections I can imagine where one vote would determine the entire outcome (shitty Kelsey Grammer movies notwithstanding). But the problem is that many, many people think this way, and then the issue becomes not about one vote but about, say, one-hundred million (ala 2004). It should go without saying that those one-hundred million votes could have (and I think you could reasonably argue would have) drastically altered the outcome of the election and the future of our country. Kind of makes thinking that your vote doesn't matter look kind of silly, huh?

I would be remiss if I did not consider, however, that there are some people who truly feel that their best choice on election day is to not vote at all... and I don't mean because they'd rather sleep in, or go home early and watch TV, or anything like that, but because they do not have faith in any of the candidates and wish to, in a way, opt-out of being governed. This is a symbolic gesture, of course, not a literal one, but I will concede that this is a perfectly valid reason not to vote if my generous readers will concede that most people make this choice out of laziness, not out of conviction. But if you, my friends, truly do not support any candidates up for election this year, it is your right as a citizen in a democracy to not vote for them. Similarly, to re-visit this analogy, it is your right as a citizen in a democracy not to pay taxes. Henry David Thoreau famously opted to not pay them, as did Wesley Snipes. There are punishments for that, yes, but you still must recognize that it is your right to not consent to being governed, just as it is the government's right to take the approrpriate action for said lack of consent. The issues that blossom out of your feeling like you do not want to be governed are myriad and complex and I couldn't possibly talk about them here, but it is still important to recognize that this is valid stance to take on election day.

Of course this whole time I've been talking from a very idealized, almost theoretical standpoint, both about the idea and process of voting and about how democracy is actually run. The last few elections in particular have been plagued with accusations of voter fraud and other such illicit conduct, and these are things that would not happen in an ideal situation. However, only crazy conspiracy theorists think that our situation is absolutely hopeless and that we can't do anything, and I am not one of those people. I refuse to believe that there are 10 filthy rich men in an underground bunker somewhere who have already decided who the next president shall be based on the almighty dollar... no sir, the only Illuminati I believe in consists of representatives of all of the Marvel Universe's super-teams (and besides, this theory that money governs all would fail to explain, among other things, the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter). I truly believe, and maybe this is stupid of me, that it will be us, the common man and woman, who will decide tomorrow who runs our country for the next 2-6 years. To think otherwise is probably not supportable, and probably the result of laziness.

Now, because this was such a serious post, I'd like to end by sharing a couple video clips I really love from an episode of South Park. This is one of the few episodes that I do not agree with philosophically; however, it is damn funny.

Now... vote or die, motherfuckers.

When is a vacation not a vacation?

2008-10-20T09:37:00.004-05:00

When you spend most of it working, of course.

(That was me doing my best Riddler impression).

But seriously, I'm about to take off for a few days on a mission to sell comic books--and I don't mean "sell" in the "thank you, sir, that will be $5.98, are you sure I can't interest you in a copy of the latest issue of AG Super Erotic Anthology?" way, but sell in the "please, for the love of God, accept these as viable literature" way--although I will be doing a bit of the first one, and hopefully the second one will lead to the first one, but anyway...

One of our customers at the shop is an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois (my alma mater) and she teaches in the library sciences graduate school. This semester she has a class on children's literature, and she has devoted a day of that class to graphic novels. Since she's super-cool, she's asked me to come down and address the class for about the first half of it (that's about an hour and a half... yikes!). So for the first (but hopefully not last) time in my adult life I get to play the role of teacher and graphic novel sage. Tomorrow I'm going to sit down with the class's reading and take notes, then add that to my own background knowledge that I want to share on the topic. I will be addressing a roomful of prospective librarians, some of whom possibly have never read a comic until (unless?) they did the homework for this week. As libraries are one of the most important places for comics to establish a foothold in our culture, I take this to be a fairly serious and exciting task. And I will do anything I can to elevate the comics discourse in libraries above that of the idiotic head children's librarian in Lake County, Indiana, who after telling me that she "didn't really get comics" asked me if I'd "ever read the one with the animals" (she was referring to Maus!) and said that she thought it was silly (yeah, that Holocaust sure is hilarious).

So that's what I'm doing with the next few days of my life. It doesn't feel a ton like a vacation, but it's definitely something I want to do. If anyone has anything they feel I ought to mention in my talk, please post it in the comments section, and hopefully later in the week I'll have a report on how things went.

As bonus trivia for you comic-lovers, here's my professor/customer's reading list for Wednesday's class session:

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, Superman for All Seasons
Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi, Houdini the Handcuff King
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics chapter 3: "Blood in the Gutters"
Sara Varon, Robot Dreams

I've read all of these books before, and I like them all (Robot Dreams was a hell of a surprise... some of you more comic-saavy folks may want to check that one out). I think that I may try to convince the prof to swith Superman for All Seasons out for All-Star Superman if she does the class again next year... it may be a little heavy conceptually, and it's a little longer, but I think it shows more of what the comics medium can do.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go pack!

Y'know what movie I'd like to see?

2008-10-10T00:08:00.003-05:00

"Nick and Nora's Infinite Crisis." It's basically the same as the closely-named movie currently in theaters, except that Nora (who, we will remember, has never had an orgasm) gets whisked away to Earth-2 when the worlds split (because on Earth-2 the female orgasm hasn't been invented yet).

... God, is there anybody who's going to get that joke? (and yes, let's please assume that there is a joke to get)

Alright, I'll throw in one that's a little more common denominator: apparently my downstairs neighbor doesn't come from Earth-2... if ya know what I'm sayin!!!

Yes, that means I can hear her having sex right now.

Well, I think I've done my job for the night. See ya!

I love Action Comics

2008-10-09T00:17:00.007-05:00

so I'm really going to miss it starting next month.

Hell, I'm gonna miss all my Superman books. My one monthly Superman fix right now is coming from Superman/Batman, which I think is currently, by far, the best it's ever been... call me crazy, I really loved that "Lil' League" story. All-Star Superman has finished its magnificent run, and I'm really sad to say that. Superman writer James Robinson is proving that he really doesn't know the first thing about writing the Man of Steel (lecturing the citizens of Metropolis? Dude, I don't care how good your Starman was... bad call)...

But back to Action. Action has been quite excellent for some time. I absolutely loved the "Superman and the Legion" story a few arcs back, and the "Braniac" story that finished up yesterday was off to a great start. As I've said before, Gary Frank's art is fantastic and it's a shame he hasn't really had many noteworthy mainstream projects before, and Geoff Johns is someone who knows what to do with Superman... at least mostly.

But now we've got to deal with New Krypton.

In case you haven't heard the news (or read the latest issue of Action) here's the deal: Superman is no longer the "last son of Krypton." We are indeed about to have a whole city-full of super-powered aliens descend on Earth, all in that pretty Alex Ross "coming down from above" art style.

(I love Alex Ross, but you have to admit his cover poses are pretty generic).

Anyway... I am really not a fan of this "New Krypton" business. To tell you the truth, I think it's a terrible idea.

The reason? To me, Superman ought to be the only Kryptonian still alive and kicking in the DC universe. This is one of the defining aspects of his character... that no matter how much he loves his adopted home and how much he tries to fit in, he will always be alone. It's bad enough we have to deal with his cousin Kara (whose book DC is tying into "New Krypton" to increase sales... pretty sneaky, sis) ... and then there was that "third Kryptonian" story in Superman about a year ago that was totally pushing it (she was a gardener hanging out on Earth?! WHAT?!). If you have to give Superman someone from his home planet to pal around with, make it Krypto (just please don't give him caption boxes). Superman having a Kryptonian dog is cool. Superman having a city of Kryptonians to go chill with... definitely not.

The obvious response to this criticism, I think, is to say "what DC is doing here is testing Superman in a way never before done; they're going to define his character even better by putting him next to a ton of Kryptonians and showing him and us that maybe his being the 'last son of Krypton' is better for him than he thought."

Well, maybe. My response to that is that we can and have done those kinds of stories without resorting to thousands of Kryptonians floating around. What about all those Daxamite stories, for instance? I know there've been a couple Superman tales that deal with the super-powered sister species of Superman's people coming to Earth and not fitting in at all (which, come on, we know that's where New Krypton is going)... content-wise I can't imagine this new story will be that different from those older ones, and I definitely don't think it's worth the price of completely removing the idea that Superman is his planet's remaining survivor. That's just too important and too unique to the mythos of one of fiction's great characters. But don't take my word for it...

"Think about it, Rao. Wouldn't bringing life onto a planet that is inherently unstable add to the beauty of the life? If at any moment it could explode.... Truly, it would only be perfectly beautiful, a perfect piece of art, if one single life-form escaped. To remember, to mourn, to despair."

Neil Gaiman wrote that, and Despair of the Endless spoke it, in the graphic novel Sandman: Endless Nights. It is, to be honest, probably my favorite part of that whole book because in two panels Neil Gaiman shows us the true origin of Superman... he is Despair's little project to the universe, a being who should embody the suffering of an entire race because he is alone forever.

So apparently I have some good company in thinking Superman should be the last of his kind. And that's not to say that I want Superman to be some emotionally unstable wreck or something... actually it's saying the opposite. Because, see, in that quote above... Despair is wrong. Her intent is that this being she imagines (who just happens to be our Kal-El) will manifest despair more than any other being in the universe... but the total reverse is true. Superman doesn't cry, Superman doesn't feel bad to the point of depression... Superman goes out there and beats all the odds (I mean, my god, the second-nastiest of the Endless has it in for him!!) and gives himself completely to bettering his new home of Earth. Being the last survivor of his race isn't a cause for sorrow... for Superman, it's a motivator to do good, perhaps the most important one he has... because he doesn't want to see what happened to Krypton happen to Earth or any other world again. And I just don't see why DC is trying to take that away.

See, regardless of how "more alone" Superman feels after not jiving with these newly-restored Kryptonians... he's still not the last one any more. That particular motivator is gone... and with it, we have a Superman that I find is significantly less unique, and a good deal less interesting.

... I'll always have All-Star, huh?

Where to go after Watchmen?

2008-10-02T15:58:00.003-05:00

This is perhaps the most important question facing comic retailers now (besides, you know, "will there be an economy tomorrow?"). Anyone in the business can tell you that since the release of Dark Knight sales on this classic Alan Moore graphic novel have gone fucking crazy. This article says it all: Watchmen sold nine times more copies in the month after Dark Knight debuted than they did in all of 2007. Holy shit, that's amazing (further amazingness: someone who comments on that article does the math to figure that roughly 3% of the people who saw Dark Knight went out and bought a copy. All things considered, that's pretty phenomenal).

I personally have sold probably about 10 copies of the book to friends since that trailer came out (and PS: thanks, guys, for making me your comic hook up!). The best example of this I can think of is at my buddy Kevin's wedding, two weeks after the launch of Dark Knight, where no less than three people told me within the span of an hour that, based on the trailer, they wanted to pick up the book from me (great wedding, Kevin & Amanda... love you guys!).

So here we are a few months later, and my friends have finished the book, to positive reviews (it is rare, I've found, to meet someone who doesn't like Watchmen.) And now several of them are saying this: "I would really like to get into more comics. What do you recommend?"

Of course this is awesome to hear, but it is also a dangerous precipice. I feel like Watchmen, for the past two months, has been acting as comic-land's ambassador to the normal world, touching the hearts and brains of people who either had no opinion about the medium due to lack of exposure, or who simply thought that comics were ZIP! BANG! POW! just like Adam West's Batman. And now, it is so, so important that we don't shuffle these potential converts off on the latest issue of, say, Trinity or Wolverine Origins (not that there is anything inherently wrong with these books... but we must aim higher).

No, this takes a lot of thought. To answer the question of where to go next, I took a look at our store's graphic novel rack (aiming to stock the essentials and partially succeeding!) and I thought, "what would someone who enjoys the emotional and intellectual depth of Watchmen really be impressed by?" Because the thing is, and I almost hate to say it, comics hardly get better than Watchmen. It has its peers, but I'm not really sure that anything in the medium tops it. But you can't use that mindset to tell people who read it "sorry, there's no other comics worth reading," because it's not good sense from a business or an artistic standpoint (and it's totally false!). Instead, you have to try to find something that will be just as engaging and interesting as Watchmen to a non-comics reader. So it is that I came up with three answers, all famous runs of comics now collected in trade paperbacks:

Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. This has the immediate benefit of being by Watchmen's author. I think people who've read that big yellow smiley-faced book will come at this series with a positive bias, which may have already gotten them over the biggest hump that prevents people from reading it (which, in my experience, is that it's ostensibly a whole comic series about a swamp monster... for some reason, some find this unappealing). It's full of that character depth that Watchmen packs in, and I feel like it kind of does to the tropes of horror what Watchmen does to those of superheroes... it makes them serious, gives them weight and gravitas. Few are the people I find who end up disliking Swamp Thing once they've checked it out, but, as I said, for me it's sometimes been a challenge to convince people to read it at all.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman. This one is kind of obvious... it's probably the most welcome comic in literary discussion (except perhaps Maus), but it's obviousness shouldn't hurt its contention here, in my opinion. Sandman was the first of the "serious" graphic novels I ever read (followed by Swamp Thing, and then a whole world of wonderful populated by Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Art Spiegelman, Mike Carey and more), and it's hard to deny that it's a wonderful read. The scope of the story may be a little daunting for a recently Watchmenized reader to want to commit to (10 books, some quite lenghty), but I think it's a series that someone sympathetic to the medium will not want to stop reading once they start. Sandman also has the excellent ability to be a gateway to even more comics, most notably Lucifer, which I believe only me and a few friends consider worthy of being in the same pantheon, but whatever.

Brian K Vaughn's Y the Last Man. Until Dark Knight, I would have considered this to be the best way to sway people over to reading comics. I saw it work myself at a Thanksgiving party I had a few years ago... the first few volumes of this swept around my living room on the recommendation of a friend, and I'm pretty sure no fewer than five or six people started reading the excellent story of Yorick Brown that night... a few were compelled to keep going after the party! I think there's something about the way this book is set up that is just so gripping... the plot just grabs you and doesn't want to let go. Brian K Vaughn is a master of pacing, something that has served him well in netting a sweet TV writing gig or two... and I'd go so far as to say that pretty much anything of his (except maybe his super-early Marvel and DC work) is incredibly new-reader friendly, but Y: The Last Man has got to be the king of that. It also has the benefit of having no elements of traditional superheroics or fantasy (well, maybe just a little fantasy), in case these new readers are still a little wary of capes in their literature.

There are tons of great comics series out there... I myself had quite a few "honorable mentions" that in the end I just didn't feel would make as strong a choice as the ones above, but some of those are Runaways, Walking Dead, Ultimate Spider-Man, and Animal Man. Does anyone else have input they want to share here?

Bear in mind, the ultimate goal (for me) is readership retention. And it's not just motivated by business (of course that helps)... no, my main driving force is really artistically based. I truly believe that there is a humongous world of fantastic literature out there that people have ignored for decades because of the stigma of "picture-books"... and thanks to Dark Knight and Watchmen and maybe series like I named above, we are at a point where we can change that.

How's that for good news?

Hey! Go to this show!

2008-09-25T00:09:00.006-05:00

Bang Camaro plus Leslie and Sound and Fury at the Double Door (1572 N Milwaukee Ave), today, Thursday September 25th in Chicago, Illinois. Doors at 8:00, show at 9:00, a mere $10 to get in... how can you go wrong?

I should mention I am performing it in. For real this time. ROCK!

Also, Bang Camaro just posted a new song at their MySpace called "She's Gone Critical"... I'm pretty sure I heard this song during soundcheck on their last tour and they referred to it as "Girlfriends in Space," which in my opinion is a cooler title... but it's a sweet song no matter what. You can hear it at www.myspace.com/bangcamaro.

Anyway, hope to see you at the show!

I'd like to announce a new blog project.

2008-09-23T15:56:00.003-05:00

I'd like to. But I've got nothin'.

...

Okay, sorry. Here we go:

I was talking to my friend and fellow Chicago Camaro Choir (C3?) member Andy over the weekend, and he mentioned that he was thinking about starting up a blog specifically for and about C3 (yes!) members and goings-on. I told him that I thought this was a stellar idea, and he ran with it, making the excellent Chicago Camaro blog at chicagocamaro.blogspot.com. There's already a few posts up there, mostly recapping the awesome events of Lollapalooza that, if you read my blog, you'll know I missed out on (and I totally made peace with that but, not gonna lie, the fact that they got to meet KG makes me more than a little jealous).

In the future, you will probably see posts from me on that blog over yonder, and I'll definitely keep up some Camaro posting over here as well. So please add it to your "favorite blogs" list if you have one... or make such a list and then add it if you don't. The link will also be over on the right-hand side of this blog permanently (as soon as I finish this post, that is).

And since we're on the topic, I thought I should pimp a few more of the blogs that I've taken up reading since my first post on the matter when I started this here blog. So, with puns a-blazin, here's a few more reads you might want to check out:

- For news on the comics industry and pop culture in general, this blog can't be beat. (Sorry, that one's kind of obvious, but honestly I consider this site, part of the Publisher's Weekly webring, essential reading for anyone interested in the comic business. And it updates a ton!)

- Found by following a link on the above site, I am totally awesomed by this blog. (That one was even more obvious. What can I say? These are easy names to work with. It was harder to work in the actual names of my friends like in the first post... but I don't personally know the people who do these blogs).

Alright, to make up for it, I'll try one for me.

- This guy may not Garknow too much, but I like it when he posts funny videos.

How was that?

Jesus Christ, how about some good news?

2008-09-18T13:26:00.003-05:00

I mean, I would really like to hear something positive right now. Between the stock market plummeting, Hurricane Ike, houses exploding in Munster, and Frank Miller single-handedly trying to destroy comics, is there anything freaking happy to say about the world? I feel like Adrian at the end of Watchmen, sitting in front of his massive display of TVs, looking at all of the shit going on and knowing that one way or another, catastrophe is coming.

I actually went to ask.com and typed in "is there any good news?" on a whim. And it sent me to this site, the Good News Network. Top story: "Toyota Joins Climate Group to Cut Corporate Greenhouse Gases."

Well, it's not much. But it's a start.

Rock Band 2 is out today!!!

2008-09-14T08:19:00.000-05:00

Goodbye! Metallica am very good band!!!

2008-09-12T07:56:00.003-05:00

Death Magnetic am not released today. Me am so very excited! Me did not know they could ever release something more exciting than St. Anger, but now me don't see it!

Me admit, me not crazy about early Metallica. Kill 'Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and ... And Justice For All am boring, simple, tuneless records. But they am really start to turn it around with black album!

... Okay, me must admit, me kind of hate Load. But me cannot get enough of Reload (Maryanne Faithful's voice is heavenly!!!). Then they am not release Garage Inc., which was artistic but dull, and then S&M, which was completely necessary and skinny!

But then. Best album am ever released come out. St. Anger. Me am never spent me money on something so full of driving rhythms, excellent solos, and precise, meaningful songwriting. St. Anger am masterpiece! Me love St. Anger so much, me listen to it every day since me buy it! Me think that St. Anger a sign that Metallica should continue making music forever and ever.

That why me so excited about Death Magnetic. Me am cannot wait to hear how it continues the subtle themes set up in St. Anger. Me am going to go wait in line at store to buy it right now!!! Me will listen to it for the rest of me life!

Metallica rocks!!!

Here are some things I learned from Las Vegas.

2008-09-11T10:35:00.006-05:00

1. The two best places to eat in Las Vegas if you are not rich are Ellis Island for the $6.95 steak dinner and the Rio Carnival World buffet. I actually already thought this already, but this trip confirmed it.

2. It can rain in Las Vegas. Seen it with me own eyes, I did.

3. The Bellagio has a really nice display of flowers in its lobby. ... What?!

4. Fort Wayne is an infinitely worse place for a retailer summit. The two Diamond summits we've gone to in the past were way more gaming-focused than this one, probably because Alliance Game Distributors is based out of Fort Wayne. At this summit, people actually talked about things we care for... COMICS! Also the free swag was geared a lot more toward a store like ours. And there was TALENT. On hand for the weekend: Brian Michael Bendis, Billy Tucci, Terry Moore and Jimmy Palmiotti. Which leads me to point four...

5. Jimmy Palmiotti is an incredibly awesome guy. I'm not a real big fan of his writing, I must admit (Countdown soured me on a LOT of people). But he's a really good artist, and on top of it, he may be the nicest comics professional I've ever met. He was signing promo copies of his new Jonah Hex issue at the DC booth Monday and I sheepishly asked him if he wouldn't mind signing my Kevin Smith Daredevil trade, which he did the art for. Not only did he sign the thing but, without me even asking, he drew a sketch of Daredevil on the front inside cover! It was incredible, man. Jimmy Palmiotti, you rock.

6. Indie comics need more support. This summit filled me with an intense desire to stock more Dark Horse, Image, and other third-party titles. I think it's partially because these companies make a real effort to talk to the retailers, explain where they're coming from, and help us out with promotional material. Dark Horse, especially, are great guys with great products. The company that impressed me the most, though, was...

7. Radical Comics needs to be famous now. I'd venture most of us haven't even heard of Radical Comics. That is a sin that Stand-Up Comics intends to rectify post-haste. Radical's only had a couple series out thus far... Hercules and Caliber, a western retelling of the Arthurian story. Take a look at these books. From a purely visual standpoint, they are beautiful. Radical was kind enough to give us free copies of the complete series so we can read them and see how the story is, but I'm guessing from the level of care they put into their product that it is awesome as well. They have a lot of great books coming down the pipeline, which Stand-Up will be carrying and promoting. On top of that they are really superb people that truly care about the business and are also very friendly (they even gave me some fantasy football tips... in fact I didn't understand what a RB/WR truly was til I talked to some of their staff). It is a mark of a really invested business that when they ran out of free copies of their books Monday, they had someone drive up from LA with a truckload to pass out on Tuesday. I'd have to say that Radical had the most impressive showing at the Vegas Summit. On the other end there is...

8. Marvel Comics just doesn't care about retailers. They had almost zero presence at this show, including a booth that had but two folded-up promo posters thrown across it, and almost no staff. They will make excuses as to why their booth was completely empty all weekend. "There was miscommunication with Diamond" was the party line. Hm. Well, they knew when the show was, and they knew when their PEOPLE should be there... why not their display? And if Radical, a super-indie company, can have their guys drive free shit out to Vegas on a few hours' notice, can't Marvel do a little something? Listen, I felt a little bad for Marvel because they totally got attacked at breakfast on Tuesday (the supplier Q&A)... late books was the topic, and the crowd of retailers was angrily yelling that editors need to do their jobs better, even being fired if they miss a deadline for a death in the family or something like that. That is a little extreme, but it does touch on the point that Marvel, as a company, does not seem to have their shit together. And it's really telling that the rep Marvel sent to this convention, David Gabriel, would not address the issue of late books at all, instead passing the buck to editorial. Well, David, you're the rep to the stores here. You need to be able to say something other than "it's not my fault," which is really all you were interested in saying... about anything. The thing is that Marvel has us by the balls because almost every comics store anywhere has a devoted throng of Marvel Zombies banging at their doors for the latest drawn-out crossover. But if Marvel was an indie company, I'd say they'd be doomed to failure. Thumbs down.

9. DC has a really interesting Sgt. Rock series coming out. I never would have thought I'd want to read a Sgt. Rock book, but here we are. Billy Tucci's got a series in the works about a group of Japanese soldiers from WW2 that have to go in and save Rock and co. when they get trapped in a bad place. It's called Sgt. Rock: The Lost Battalion. This is based on a truly story of a Japanese regiment that always got the shit jobs because that's what the US government thought they were good for in that era. The amazing thing is that, to help promote this book, Tucci and DC brought a couple of this regiment's surviving members, and one of them even signed promotional posters with Tucci. I'm not gonna lie, this was really moving... and damn good promotion too.

10. I think I can tell prostitutes apart from other scantily-clad women. I'm gonna say it's the high-heels. Not many people would choose to wear high-heels while walking down the Strip, right?

I love Las Vegas.

2008-09-06T11:04:00.005-05:00

I seriously fucking love it. Like, it's my favorite vacation spot that has ever existed ever ever. And I'm leaving for there tomorrow morning at about 6:15 AM... hooray! The sweetest thing is that I'm going for work because there's a comic book retailer conference running September 7-9, so I get to charge almost the whole trip to the company credit card (which, yes, is kind of like using my own money, but it just feels better). I won't be playing poker with the company's money, but I could... apparently gambling can be a tax write-off because it can be construed as "networking." Ah, tax loopholes.

I noticed something weird earlier, while trying to figure out if I can make all my luggage carry-on (I can!), and I thought I would share. On the website of the TSA (the Transportation Security Administration... a branch of the federal government) they have a neat little table that lists questionable items and whether or not it's okay to bring them on the plane. You can see it here (and it's nice to see that there are very few "no"s). One of the weirdest items on the list, though, is a category called "Toy Transformer Robots."

Really. Go look at the link. Go ahead. You'll see it.

Now, Transformer toys are permitted on planes (thank God!). But the weird thing is... why is this an issue? Like, the only other toy items listed are toy guns, and this is a totally reasonable question when it comes to whether or not these should be on planes. But Transformers? Who actually lost sleep over whether or not it was okay for their kid (/24-year-old business partner) to bring his newly-acquired Universe Galvatron toy on the plane? This is just so weird.

On the other hand... would you want THIS on your airplane?

See you in a few days!

Awesome news: Super Mario RPG is now available on the Wii Virtual Console!

2008-09-03T09:52:00.006-05:00

This makes me really happy. Do you guys remember this game? It is wicked fun. Me and a few friends were obsessed with it in junior high. As you might have garnered from my earlier post on (Final) Fantasy Football, I am a bit of an RPG nerd. I am also a Nintendo nerd (there's a reason the Wii was the first of the current-gen systems I bought--I love Nintendo's characters!). So combining the two... how can you go wrong?

I mean, really. I thought maybe there was some nostalgia-colored glasses making me love this game, but I just spent about an hour playing it, and it truly does a great job, in my opinion, of combining the Mario franchise with tropes of an RPG. Everything from play style right down to the music is an interesting mix of these two worlds. And it's a Square game from the 90s, which probably means it's excellent anyway (among my top five video games is Final Fantasy VI/III US, released by Square in 1994... this decade also saw Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy V, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Evermore, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears, Chrono Cross, and Final Fantasy VIII... okay, let's forget about that last one).

And this game was more or less unavailable to those of tiny pocketbooks until a couple days ago... a quick search of eBay shows it's gonna cost you about $50 to gamble on a used copy and $100 to get a mint-in-package version. Of course it's only $8 on the Wii. This is, obviously, a steal.

Nine times out of ten, if you ask me what I think the best current-gen gaming console is, I'll say XBox 360... which is probably the right answer. But the Wii definitely has its benefits, and the virtual console is one of the big ones. The ability to play classic games for relatively cheap is pretty stellar, especially when it's classic games you haven't seen for years. Good job on this one, Nintendo.

If turnabout is fair play

2008-08-30T09:56:00.001-05:00

shouldn't Poison have a song called "Alice Cooper"? Shouldn't Alex Chilton have a song called "The Replacements"? Shouldn't Bad Company have a song called "Bad Company"? And shouldn't there be a band somewhere named I'm a Giant Douchebag which has a song called "John Mayer"?

Did anyone else think Final Crisis: Superman Beyond was awesome?

2008-08-28T09:34:00.004-05:00

I sure did. I mean, I was really excited for it, so I wasn't sure it would live up to my expectations, but it did. I've read it twice now (and no, I'm still not totally sure about everything that's going on) and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

For those who don't know: this is a comic book from Grant Morrison and Doug Mahnke that is partially 3D (with glasses included!) about Superman traveling through the multiverse to fight off some cosmic evil so he can obtain the elixir of life and save Lois from a fatal injury (sustained in Final Crisis #2). Boiled down, what we have is: Morrison writes Superman traversing the multiverse in 3D.

How could this not be amazing?!

(Spoilers will follow!)

I really enjoyed the fact that this book brought up a lot of previous Morrisonian concepts, such as Limbo (where forgotten characters go to die) and a heavy dose of meta-fiction (although I'm not entirely sure what Superman Beyond has to say about that topic yet). It's got a killer existence-spanning plot that involves the Monitors as they investigate the poison known as "stories" (what did I say about meta-fiction?), and apparently some Dark Monitor who wants to erase all of that from life. Yeah, it sounds f*cking crazy, and it is. That's the beauty of it.

There could hardly be a better creative team for this book. Doug Mahnke's kinda-weird art is fantastic in two dimensions (he's one of my favorites, truth be told) so adding a third could only make it cooler, and you know how I feel about Grant Morrison. Somehow he manages to bring back the fantastical nature of silver-age stories, the joy of reading something completely out-there, yet he grounds it in a modern (post-modern?) sensibility, with sharp dialog and a truly suspenseful plot. This is a watermark of much of Morrison's work (I'm thinking All-Star Superman) and I'm glad it carried over to Superman Beyond, which will surely go down as one of my favorite comics this year.

It is a little dense, yeah... a little tough to breach, especially on the first read-through. But as I said before, I really don't find that to be a good point of criticism against a comic... I actually think it enhances the reading experience by giving you something to work for, something to find in the text. Couple that with the pure joy of a 3D Superman battling for the life of his beloved Lois... recipe for success, my friends.

Rating: * * * * *

As a side note, you know what else is awesome? Runaways. The third volume launched yesterday and I really dug the first issue. I'm a little bummed that more people don't read this one. Check it out, guys.

I woke up early to download Rush's "Moving Pictures" album for Rock Band

2008-08-26T08:55:00.006-05:00

and it isn't up yet. Apparently there are technical difficulties. Rumor has it there are problems with the song "YYZ," which has no vocal track. This leaves me bored. This also leaves me with time to post, so I'm gonna do one up that I'd been thinking about for awhile. I already listed my top 5 songs for the forthcoming Rock Band 2... but right now I'd like to take a look back and name my top 10 DLC (that's downloadable content) for Rock Band 1. These are songs that I feel are so awesome that it is a sin to not have them in your RB1 collection (unless you have the game on the PS2 or Wii... in which case, you don't really have a choice. Sorry guys):

10. Vesuivius, "The Promised Land" -- I must be a shitty movie critic, because The Rocker totally bombed, failing even to make it into the top 10 weekend movies (it got beat by Death Race and The House Bunny?!). Still, I love the movie, and I love this song, a free download to help promote the film (again, an obvious failure). This is the first really "hairy" track in the game and it truly lets you rock out arena-style on the drums, which also facilitates the aping of Rainn Wilson's previously-mentioned rock faces.

9. The Cars, "Just What I Needed" -- Awesome song, really fun to drum. It's got a driving rhythm and I always feel like a rock star when I hit the crash cymbals in the chorus. Singing it is a blast too.

8. Bang Camaro, "Rock Rebellion" -- Any Bang Camaro song is awesome, obviously. It's unfortunate that the Rock Band mic really hates more than one person singing into it, because this is the kind of song you need a dozen or so people to belt out (especially if some of those people know the harmonies!).

7. Oasis, "Don't Look Back in Anger" -- The funny thing is I didn't really like this song til I was playing with my friend Todd and it came up as the second to last song in a random setlist. Todd pointed out that it was awesome to put a ballad right before the end, which hopefully would end up being a rocker (it did). It was at that point I realized that Rock Band is short on true ballads, thus making this song important to the game. It is also super-fun to drum, giving some of the best/most doable fills of all the songs available, in my opinion. When this song inevitably gets played at Rock Band parties, I make sure I'm behind the drum kit.

6. Boston, "Peace of Mind" -- Another song with a really driving rhythm, it's just EXCITING. Pretty much every part is good for this song, although my first choices are drums or guitar (I love singing it but Boston singer Brad Delp hits some ungodly notes in there). Even though this clearly isn't the biggest song in Boston's excellent catalog, it is my favorite.

5. The Police, "Roxanne" -- I tend not to play this song a lot, but I get a perverse thrill from watching lots of my friends do it. This tune is a great party song that almost everyone knows and that any man with balls (metaphorically, perhaps not literally) will attempt to belt out just like the Stingster. In particular, this song makes my list because of my friend Craig's rendition of it. Too cool.

4. The Who, "Baba O'Riley" -- Though I was slightly dissapointed with the Who mega-pack, one cannot deny the epicness (sorry to use such an internet term) of this song. Once Rock Band 2 comes out and you have the ability to make your own setlist for almost anything you do, I reckon this song will go at the start of a great portion of those setlists. I mean, that intro alone... man. It gets you pumped.

3. Boston, "More than a Feeling" -- Even though "Peace of Mind" is my favorite Boston song, I think "More Than a Feeling" is more essential to a Rock Band library because more people, by far, know it, and like "Roxanne," that will make more people attempt to sing it. Unlike "Roxanne," this song also has awesome instrument parts for everyone involved (my favorite is probably guitar). It is a joy for this to come up at Rock Band parties when my friend Dwight is there, because he will sing it and he will crush it (even hitting the high note near the end of the song... it is truly impressive).

2. The Police, "Message in a Bottle" -- The second-best memory I have from one of my Rock Band parties is seeing five people crowded around the mic belting out the seemingly endless outro words "sending out an SOS!" This was too cool. In fact, here's a picture:

So, yeah, this song has one of those infectious vocal lines that almost anyone can take a crack at. It also has, in my opinion, the most fun drum part in the entire game. It's a winner all-around.

1. Oasis, "Wonderwall" -- But my favorite Rock Band party moment is due to this song. Some folks were playing in another room while me and some friends were gathered around a poker table. All of a sudden, this song starts... and poker stops. We all start singing along. There must have been at least 10 people in on this. It was pretty amazing. And not only that, but I think that bringing people together like that is kind of what rock and roll is all about. For Rock Band to imitate that aspect of the rock music experience is impressive. And the sheer fact that "Wonderwall" is probably the best-known, most singable song of all the Rock Band DLC means that it, without a doubt, takes my number one spot.

A quick check of the Rockband.com forums show that "Moving Pictures" still isn't up... damn it.

Rush is awesome.

I've finally found a fifth movie to bring on my hypothetical tour bus.

2008-08-21T14:20:00.008-05:00

Which is great, because for years when friends and I would talk about the top five movies we would HAVE to bring on tour (yes, we talked about this), assuming we ever went on tour (which we never have and probably never will), my list was always one film short. I only could really think of four rock-and-roll movies that made me happy and that made me feel good and inspired about music, which I think is an essential ingredient for a tour bus movie. Here's what I had (in no particular order):

1. This is Spinal Tap
2. School of Rock
3. Almost Famous
4. High Fidelity

Then I went to the theater last night and saw this film:

And lo and behold, my list is complete.

In a summer that's been pretty full of good or great movies, The Rocker is something of a surprise. I knew I would enjoy it because I A) love The Office and B) have an inappropriate love of hair metal, the genre which owns Rainn Wilson's character Robert Fishman as the movie begins. But I didn't think it would actually be a pretty sweet movie (and I mean that in two ways)... it made me smile and laugh consistently, and it made me want to immediately hop in an RV with my friends and hit the road as soon as I stepped out of the theater.

Put your fears aside, friends: despite the trailers, this movie has more to it than silly slapstick (I think most of that actually gets shown in the TV spots). It's not completely farcical... despite the fact that it's fairy-taleish, it is also somewhat grounded (except for a scene in the opening of the movie, and I wonder if there isn't something to the fact that the film only shows us fantastic, unbelieveable things in the faraway land of the 1980s). I mean, it's not incredibly likely that what we see in the film could happen, but it is possible... that's what makes the story inspirational. Is it corny? Yeah, a little. Less corny than School of Rock. Also quite funny.

For musicians, there is a lot to enjoy about this movie, a lot that rings true (as my friend Matt pointed out, we all know what it is like to fight for the attention of people who could care less that we are there). For non-musicians, I still think there's lots to like here... one of my favorite things was the running gag of Rainn Wilson's "rock" faces while drumming, and all it takes to laugh at that is a sense of humor. I'm gonna try to learn some of those for the next time I rock out to Vesuvius' "The Promised Land" on Rock Band.

Other things that are cool: good cast. Rainn Wilson is awesomely funny, and the rest of his band is great as well. It turns out the lead singer/songwriter of the fictional A.D.D. is a real-life musician named Teddy Geiger, and his musical ability is positively... radioactive? (GET IT?!)... but seriously his stuff is pretty good. Keyboardist/nephew to Fish Josh Gad is great, and I'd like to see him in more. Bassist Emma Stone (Jules from Superbad) is really good on screen as well, and also super-pretty, so there's that. It's nice to see Christina Applegate, who plays the coolest mom ever (a total MILMSLT... see the film). There are some cool cameos as well, including a handful from SNL and a surprising one from 30 Rock... oh, and a Beatle.

Past the opening, there weren't really any parts of this movie that made me think "oh, come on!" which is weird for a recent studio comedy. I never stopped enjoying the film, and I really want to see it again, which I will assuredly do when it moves down to the $5 club. So it is that I highly recommend The Rocker, especially if you are an aspiring musician and want to feel good about what you do. Or if you just want to enjoy yourself for a few hours... that's a good idea too.

Rating: * * * *

Maybe I came down a little hard on monthly books last time

2008-08-17T12:43:00.011-05:00

so to make up for it, here's a list of five monthly titles that I really enjoy. They're not necessarily my favorite monthlies (though some would make that list, I think) but they're books that often surprise me with how fun and engaging they are... books that help make my weekly comic purchases exciting. In no particular order they are...

Action Comics: It's really amazing that Geoff Johns is able to write so many books and not have a bad one in the bunch. He and Grant Morrison (and maybe now James Robinson?) pretty much define the DC Universe at the moment, and it couldn't be in better hands. Out of all of Geoff's books, though, Action is the one that always catches me off guard (in a good way)... I think I came into this title a couple years ago not expecting much from a monthly Superman book, and what Johns has delivered has consistently been among the best Superman stories I've ever read, stories that both touch at the heart of the character and are full of great villains and exciting plots. There hasn't been a bad arc since One Year Later thanks to him and his awesome team of artists. Eric Powell was a stud on "Escape from Bizarro World," and Gary Frank is a talent that has always deserved more recognition. I'm glad he's finally getting it.

Comic Book Comics: from the minds of the guys who brought us Action Philosophers comes this graphic look at the history of the comics medium that is both historically accurate and pretty hilarious. These guys really know their stuff... they've done their research, and they know how to put together an entertaining read. I am almost positive that if classes on comic books ever become common at a university level, this will be a standard text. I was fortunate enough to go to a college where there was such a class, and I know that if Comic Book Comics had been available then, it would have been assigned reading for sure. It helps, for me, that writer Fred Van Lente (who also does a lot of work at Marvel) and artist Ryan Dunlavey (who does a lot of those funny character-packed spreads for Wizard and Toyfare) are really cool guys... I had the fortune of meeting them at the New York Comic-Con, and they signed my copy of issue #1. I'm excited to see where these two vibrant creators go after their look at their home medium... politics, perhaps?

Final Crisis: I'm really bummed that so many people are down on this series. And, I mean, let's be honest, the reason why is kind of clear... it's dense. You have to read each issue at least twice to grasp what is going on. But to me, that's awesome. It makes buying this book so completely worth it, probably moreso than any other title on the stands. I love books (both comics and prose) where there's new things to discover in every crevice, new treasures unlocked upon every rereading, and Final Crisis is the epitome of a series like that. In a story filled with Evil Gods in human bodies, hilarious Japanese superheroes, one of the most badass villains ever (Libra!), and a hell of an awesome plot about the laws of reality being changed so that evil can finally win... my favorite thing about this series is that it is so completely worth four dollars. This is not decompression, my friends, this is hypercompression. This is also a damn cool way to tell a comics story.

Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane: I have to admit it: I'm a sucker for these high-school Spider-Man stories. The fact that Spider-Man just fits so well in that setting is one of the reasons I love Ultimate Spider-Man, and it carries over into this book, which most probably feel is strictly for adolescent girls. Well, I'm okay with that, because that doesn't change the fact that this book is really good. It has been a guilty pleasure of mine since the Sean McKeever/Takeshi Miyazawa days (PS: Miyazawa is an amazing artist, and McKeever is one of the best new talents DC has), and now I don't even feel guilty about it anymore, thanks to its new writer, Strangers in Paradise's Terry Moore. This is a really sharp assignment on Marvel's part, and I'm sad that Moore's "season two" is only going to last five issues, because I'm pretty sure I could read this book forever. Guys, I know it sounds a little girly, but give it a read... especially if you like Ultimate Spider-Man, you may be pleasantly surprised.

Batman Confidential: Man, this book is cool... which I would not have expected to say, given that I never had any interest in Legends of the Dark Knight, basically the prototype book for this series. I think what got me was the premise for the first arc: Batman vs. Lex Luthor. It's a great idea, and one I wanted to see played out, and so started my compulsive owning of this series (see last post). The thing is, once I started, I never felt like not buying this book. I didn't necessarily think the first arc was fantastic, but it was not bad either, and I stuck around because wanted to read Michael Green's Joker story (this guy is a really good comics writer, by the way!), which I loved. I enjoyed the Wraith story from Tony Bedard and Rags Morales alright (good art, neat idea!), and I am just loving this current outing from Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire, which deals with the first time Catwoman and Batgirl meet. I'm not sure what it is, but this book just works for me. It has a great sense of humor, is full of action, nails the characters, and looks amazing! I cannot say enough about Maguire's art here... it's just so cute and attractive. I love the scene where Batgirl has to chase Catwoman through a nude hedonist club. I mean, just picture Kevin Maguire rendering a scene where a hyper-tense and nervous Barbara Gordon has to take off her costume (mask on, please!) and chase the sensual and perfectly-comfortable-with-her-own-body Catwoman through a nudist club. Yeah, it's great. I also feel like Fabian Nicieza is unduly ignored as a great comics writer... his recent stuff for DC has been fantastic, and I think his time on the 90s X-books has given him an unfair black mark in many comic readers' mind. I realize that the point of Batman: Confidential is to have rotating creative teams, but for my money Nicieza and Maguire could do this book forever. This story is just so good!

Comic fandom is a subculture like any other, and as such we have our own rites of passage.

2008-08-14T21:52:00.003-05:00

I experienced one of those rites earlier this week, as I undertook the spiritual journey known as "The Cleansing of the Long-boxes."

(and yes, I'm writing again!)

I mean, seriously. We all do it... probably out of necessity, I'd wager. At some point, you just fit another box in your room, or basement, or wherever it is you keep your comics. And then what do you do? Probably nine times out of ten you just find a new place to put those new boxes. But then, every once in awhile, you do it--you roll up your sleeves, you dig in there, and you clean out your collection.

This is kind of a horrifying thing... especially if you have a ton of comics. One of our customers told me he did this right when we opened and pared 25 boxes down to 15. That's impressive, but I reckon that there's folks out there who have to do this with hundreds. Fortunately for me, I have six and a half... that's only a few hours work. My rule was to yank anything I didn't see myself rereading. Sometimes this was an easy call and sometimes it was not, but after making a day's work out of it, I'm happy with my results.

It's funny that this process is often undertaken out of necessity for space, and then very infrequently, because it strikes me that we should all do this a lot more. It helps our wallets, and it helps our culture.

But let me explain.

Cleaning out one's collection invariably means re-evaluating what series one buys on a monthly basis (because it will be some of these comics you may be considering getting rid of). The majority of mainstream comic fans will be able to tell you that there's at least a couple books on their pull list that they just don't enjoy reading. There's any number of reasons they keep buying the books--they want to complete a run, the covers look cool, they feel loyalty to the character or creator--but what likely is the original reason they started buying the title (they like it!) is gone. I am guilty of this as much as anyone, and the temptation is greater for me because I buy books at cost, not retail. That has, as you might imagine, led to a lot of fat in those aforementioned long boxes. Well, no more.

I think, my friends, it is time for this blog to institute another rule. My rule about line-cutting didn't go over too well, I grant you, and I think that it needs some serious revision--but remember, these are only proposals, open to debate and discussion. But anyway, my next rule applies only to the comic-buying populace, and it is this:

If a book you buy fails to sustain your interest over a period longer than two story arcs, DROP IT AND DON'T LOOK BACK.

You may be asking yourself, why is a comics retailer proposing that we not buy books? Well, like I said, it helps our wallets, and it helps our culture. Obviously it helps your wallet, as the reader. But as a retailer, I'm pretty sure it even helps me, in the end, and it does this in the same way it helps the comic-book culture.

I see it happening two-fold: if people stop reading series they don't like, we (hopefully) stop ordering them (which already saves us money) and sales will decrease at the wholesale level. A big enough drop in sales will cause a re-evaluation of what the book is doing, and, one hopes, the book will come out better for it. Of course this is not the only reason a book changes direction (why, All-New Atom, why?!) but it is one reason.

The second way, I think, is more important. It seems to be pretty rare that so many people would drop a title at the same time that it would affect a change in direction... it happens, but not a ton. But the second way reevaluating pull lists helps our culture (and my wallet) is on the individual scale: if you're not spending all your money on crap titles you only get out of tradition, you have more money to spend on good stuff, like graphic novels you've always wanted to buy but never quite had the cash for. I mean, if you think about it, cutting three-four books from your pull list gives you the cash to pick up about a graphic novel a month, and it opens a doorway into series that are better than the drek you just dropped. I firmly believe that if the top 50% of our customers cut five books from their pull list and instead started buying trades of Y: the Last Man, we would in the end make more money (you can't buy just one!) and end up with a more literate group of comics readers who would thirst not only for more Brian K. Vaughn but also for more interesting, off-the-beaten-path stories. Of course sometimes people who drop books because they don't like them don't end up buying other things, but I'm okay with that too (as long as they pay for the books the ordered, damn it!). Even those people will have a richer reading experience because their monthly books will be hopefully unburdened of crap, and that will give them, in the end, a more favorable outlook towards the comics medium, if only subconsciously.

This is kind of the approach I've taken. I'd rather amass a collection of Ultimate Spider-Man trades than continue to get Justice League of America, which, let's face it, has hardly been good since 2005. In the end I think I cut six or seven books from my list of about 30. Some I still question (do I really want to drop Ultimate Fantastic Four? I mean, just because Lucifer is genius doesn't mean Mike Carey's superhero stuff is wonderful... but it's good), and with some it feels like a weight has been lifted (goodbye, Amory Wars. Jesus Christ, why is Coheed & Cambria's music so awesome yet their comics are incomprehensible and bad?!) In the end, my collection will be better for it, and so will (maybe) my finances. But if you all do this, I don't suppose I need to worry about my finances, do I?

But anyway, what I'm saying is that I think it's good to periodically take a hard look at what you've got your local comic shop (mine?!) pulling for you. Chances are there's some of it you don't really want. Maybe you should tell them that... you'll end up liking your comics even more! And while you're at it, buy Blankets. It's really awesome.

Yup, I was right. No way.

2008-07-31T13:11:00.001-05:00

So I just now found out that I am NOT actually going to be joining the Chicago choir for Bang Camaro at Lollapalooza.

I'm not that bummed about it, cuz I don't think I really believed it was ever happening. Ah well, there's always the next Chicago show.

Dude. No way.

2008-07-30T22:27:00.002-05:00

Remember that post about Bang Camaro earlier in the week?

When I made that post, I wasn't sure this was happening. In fact I was pretty sure it wasn't, because, what the hell?! But now I am pretty sure it is.

I am going to be performing at Lollapalooza this week, on stage with Bang Camaro!

Friday, 11:30 AM, MySpace stage.

I say again... what the hell?! Is this really happening? I half-expect to show up to sound check and the band will be like "oh, not YOU." But as the days go by that looks less and less likely.

From what I've been told... I get a VIP pass for Friday. That means I go backstage, at least on the MySpace stage. Which, by the way, Bang Camaro is sharing on Friday with with Rogue Wave, the Kills, Mates of State, and Steven Malkmus & the Jicks... an impressive line-up of indie rock to be sure (these are all bands, by the way, my college radio station played when I DJed there. Except Bang Camaro. I wonder if they have jumped on the Camaro bandwagon yet). I'm not sticking around at Lolla the whole day (not long enough, for instance, to see if I can get backstage at Radiohead) but I will certainly be there long enough to at least meet Rogue Wave, which is a band my brief exposure to has made me pretty sure I like.

I'm just so elated about all this... geez.

And in case you're wondering, this post does have a point or two. I swear. Point one is that I'll be able to have something of a Lolla report from the inside (let's call it "inside-ish"), and that's fun. I'll try to get pictures and document stuff like I did on my last couple road trips. Point two is fuck you, this is my blog and I'll write about what I want to.

But no, seriously. In a way, I want this blog to be a document of my life and thoughts at the time of writing, and so it is that I can't go without covering this. Sorry guys. I'll get back to criticizing comics next week, I swear. For now... let's ride this.

(But, I mean, what's the deal with Black Panther, anyway? Am I right?!)

Freakazoid came out on DVD for the first time today

2008-07-29T15:28:00.010-05:00

and I think the world is a better place for it.

For those of you who don't remember Freakazoid, it was an animated show brought to us by Steven Spielberg in the mid-90s, following The Berg's (that's his hip, abbreviated name... didn't you know?) hit cartoons Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs. But it was also bred out of the sensibilities of the WB's other hit cartoon, the one I talked about ad naseum a few weeks ago... the one starring this guy...

Who is that handsome devil, anyway?

... At any rate, Freakazoid was a show that was part comedy, part superhero, and was even originally being developed by Batman's Bruce Timm and Paul Dini (according to the features on the DVD, they left the show when it took its more comedic bend, and the character of the Creeper we see in one of the later-day B:TAS episodes resembles what their Freakazoid would have been like). And the interesting thing about Freakazoid, the thing that made me hunger for purchasing the DVD today, is that it is really funny. Like, still. Especially for those of us who grew up on a steady diet of Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, and Batman.

I don't really want to go into a huge dissection of Freakazoid's humor, mostly because I'm no expert on comedy, but also because the show is just, to use a word I kind of hate, completely random. The senior story editor says it best on the DVD featurette: there was no formula Freakazoid episode. Every episode was different, and anything could happen from one to another, from fighting cultured cavemen complete with a New Englander's snooty drawl at a school dance, to our hero wondering at a gummi museum with Ed Asner's cop character Cosgrove, to an argument with Wakko Warner and the Brain on whose show Spielberg likes best. But don't take my word for it...

The point is that this show's humor could come from anywhere. Some of is it silly and slapsticky, other bits play off having a fair understanding of the workings of fiction, while other aspects still rely on non-sequitur lines and characters (this is, I think, my favorite part of the show, and Ed Asner's Cosgrove embodies it). It all adds up to a really satisfying, surprisingly funny watch... I daresay that episodes of Freakazoid could live alongside middle-year Simpsons and The Critic in pretty good harmony. It may not reach the heights of those shows, but seriously... it is really good.

Hooray for DVDs!

It is really weird to find a video of yourself on YouTube

2008-07-28T20:19:00.002-05:00

but kind of cool, too.

I don't know why I didn't think to search for this before, but last night I got the urge to see if anyone had put up video from the couple of Bang Camaro shows I'd performed in, and I did indeed find a capture of one song, from the June 5th Milwaukee show. You can hardly see me in the video... I'm on the far left in a Masters of the Universe t-shirt (which got a lot of compliments that night), and you definitely can't hear me, but it's still cool. Plus I'm pretty sure you can hear my friend Laura hoot when the lead dude says something about "the guys who came up to rock with us on stage."

Though generally I am against using blogging as a form of self-aggrandizement, I am pretty proud of having done this with such an awesome band as Bang Camaro, and besides... they may be popping back in my life later this week...

(what does he mean?!)

I'm not really a "manly" kind of guy

2008-07-22T15:40:00.016-05:00

believe it or not. I'm not fascinated by cars. I don't drink any beer labeled with the words "Bud," "Miller," or "Coors" (well, okay... maybe Miller... if there's nothing else to drink and I really want a beer). I'm not fascinated by shooting and/or killing things. I'm not threatened by intellectual women... I think. But there is one thing I do that is totally part of the macho, manly world of man-ness. I play fantasy football.

It all happened very slowly, you see. A couple years ago was my first season with the Chicago Bears (watching them, not... you know). I started being a loyal viewer because a local bar offered a free halftime buffet during their games, and a couple of my friends invited me to go early on in the season. Well, who am I to say no to a free buffet? Needless to say, this became a near-weekly tradition. Then a year later, my friend Mark sprung a trap on me. "You watched football last year, so now you're ready for fantasy" was something like what he said (I am going to dramatize this conversation to make it seem cooler, and to make up for gaps in memory). "I don't know," was my response. "I hardly know anything, except that I like the Bears." "It's easy," he replied, "and we're just playing in an auto-draft league, so you can learn stuff as you go along." I didn't even know what "auto-draft league" meant in those days. Ah, to be young again.

I think at first I said yes just to do something fun with my friends, at Mark's insistence that it would indeed be fun. But then...

Then I started getting really into the game. I learned a little about the positions, the points, the players. And I started to win. Well, okay... the first week I lost TERRIBLY. Like, got clobbered. But THEN I started to win. The more I won, the more interested I got, and it helped that a few of the ten people in the league were equally in to it, because this pushed me to constantly check my roster and research my players to end up with, hopefully, the best possible starting team come Sunday afternoon. I ended up winning the season, though technically the final game tied between me and my friend Steve, so we had to have an unofficial playoff in which I slaughtered him.

But WHY do I find fantasy football interesting, when almost no other sports fascinate me? I mean, I'm not trying to say I think sports are boring... I'm just not a sports kind of guy. I can enjoy an occasional game of baseball, basketball I just don't find that fun, and hockey is awesome but I know dick about it. So why does football, fantasy football, intrigue me so?

I'll tell you why. No, I'll show you.

It's because I've been playing these things for years and years.

I love role-playing games. My favorites are the ones that are turned-based strategy where you move guys of different classes and abilities around a map and try to vanquish your opponents, like the above-pictured Final Fantasy Tactics. I cannot tell you how many hours I've spent playing this game. I think I've been through it three times in total, which may be a record for video games I own (at least ones more complex than Super Mario Brothers 1). It's ridiculously fun and engaging, for me in no small part because of the necessity of figuring out how character classes and abilities best compliment each other to make, if I may say so, the "winning team."

Obviously trying to figure out what weapons best compliment your resident Chemist or if you should upgrade him to a White Mage for better healing abilities is not exactly the same as deciding whether or not to sit a risky Quarterback when he's got home field advantage against an easy team but a string of off weeks behind him. But the parts of your brain engaged in making these decisions are, I think, the same. What's also the same is that thinking up strategy for these games will take over your life. You will sit at a computer and read up on tips, thinking about whether or not to risk losing your level 34 Archer with awesome equipment in a battle against an evil demon lord, or whether or not it's worth it to drop a great kicker on bye week because you don't have any other free slots and you need to pick someone up for a couple points. And in the end, I think that's what keeps me interested in these types of games... the fact that you have to think about it a lot, and that if you think about it the right way, and have some luck, you can triumph over evil (your friends) and win back the magic of the kingdom (bragging rights).

above: Drew Brees debates whether to throw downfield to Andre Johnson, or to cast Firaga on Morgana the Terrible.

And so I've gone from last year playing in a 10-team auto-draft league to this year gearing up for a 16-team, make-your-own-damn-squad slugfest. I'm really pumped, and I've started my research on who should fill what positions (bummer: no Bears are projected to be any good at anything). So, for the next few months, I will be the proud manager of the Vancouver Roughriders. And if you're wondering why I picked that name...

Oh wow.

2008-07-20T18:02:00.004-05:00

This is, I feel, the most appropriate response to The Dark Knight. It's how I felt Friday at about 2:30 AM, and it's how I feel now.

This was an intense movie. There were a couple times when I forgot I was watching some constructed piece of art because I was so caught up in what was going on on-screen... and that hardly ever happens to me anymore. The movie was excellently written, acted, and directed... I think it may be flawless. It's easily the best comic-book movie of the year, maybe the best comic-book movie of all time, and maybe the best movie of the year period.

Obviously the big story here is the Joker. I will always love Mark Hamill, but Heath Ledger has just taken the title of the Joker. There has never been a better portrayal of the character, ever. Like, not even in the comics. This is a rare case where a comic-book adaptation has surpassed its source material... the best us fans can usually hope for when movies tinker is a lateral move that keeps the quality roughly the same while changing some of the details, such as V for Vendetta's updating of the book's Reagan/Thatcher politics for a Bush/Blair era. Usually, though, it seems comic fans are up for disappointment, as "updates" to a character are almost never good... movies tend to dumb things down, simplify them, and in the process remove most things that are special about a character (see: anything at all about Spider-Man 3). But what the Nolans have done here is more than an update... they have defined the Joker, case closed.

And what I love about their Joker is that he takes bits and pieces of most of the key Joker stories from comics. From Killing Joke, we get a Joker bent on showing Batman that all it takes is a little nudge to make a man go insane, and we also get the (excellent!) idea of Joker's ever-changing backstory. From Arkham Asylum we get hints that the Joker is not insane but supersane (of note: his speech to Batman in the prison that he's "a little bit ahead of the curve" when it comes to living in the modern world... this would make Grant Morrison proud). From lots of stories but primarily, I believe, Batman #1, we get the televised threats that people will die each night if Joker doesn't get what he wants, and the byzantine plans to accomplish this.

But while Dark Knight incorporates pieces of all of these, they're so subtle and well-woven into the texture of the film that one hardly notices, and thus the movie avoids re-telling any story we've seen before. Instead, it takes the best facets Joker's character has previously had to offer, combines them all into one, and then makes things better.

Joker is funny. He's sadistic. He's confused. He's genius. He's the most dangerous man in Gotham, and he's a puppy waiting to get put in its place. He's a schemer and a victim, he's right and he's wrong, he's supernatural and he's incredibly human. He's the ultimate villain for Batman but maybe he's also, kind of, a hero.

And of course, Joker is played amazingly by Heath Ledger. I can honestly say that, when he died a few months ago, I felt nothing. I had only seen a couple Ledger movies, and while 10 Things I Hate About You is a funny flick, I never had any emotional investment in him or his characters. But by the Joker's second scene in this movie, I missed him. It is a real shame that we will never see Heath portray the Joker, or any other character, again.

Finally, as a film, Dark Knight gives me hope. Sometimes I think my standards for movies are too high, because I end up really liking very few of the films I see. I find many films too obvious, too cheesy, too easy on their viewers. And yet... here is a movie that is subtle, that never says what it means, that throws up conflicting messages left and right. It makes you work for meaning. And yet, it manages to provide a feast for the eyes and the heart that would make Jerry Bruckheimer jealous. I kind of think that's what all movies should do.

Last year, I saw Transformers probably five or six times in the theater. The last time I can remember doing that was when The Lion King came out. I was so young then that I can't honestly remember how many times I saw it, but I'm willing to bet it was about the same. I think that, by the time this summer's over, a third movie will rival those numbers.

Rating: * * * * *

I'll leave you with one more Batman item before we all see Dark Knight

2008-07-17T14:52:00.003-05:00

and it is a clip from the animated series. It may have been a mistake on my part to leave out the two-part "Feat of Clay" from my list of the top animated episodes (as I said, the race for top 5 or even top 10 is tough) but I think that the scene below, from "Feat of Clay" part two, may be my favorite among all the episodes of Batman: TAS, possibly my favorite in all of the Timm-verse, and it definitely holds its own against any other animation I've ever seen.

It's stuff like this that makes us all love Batman.

We're probably all going to be spending a lot of time waiting in line this weekend

2008-07-16T17:35:00.003-05:00

and the horrible realization of just how much of my life will be slipping away waiting to see a movie I already have tickets for... twice... got me thinking about the etiquette of cutting in line, especially in the instance that you have a group of friends way up ahead in the line and you want to get a piece of that sweet action.

No, wait. I don't want to talk about the etiquette of cutting in line. That's far too pedestrian. No, my friends, I'm here to bring you the philosophy of cutting in line.

(Putting it in bold makes it authoritative).

And so it is that I, a humble undergraduate of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign with a double-major in philosophy and English, would like to propose this, the Law of Line- Cutting (see?). I believe this law to be complete, meaning that there are no circumstances that it does not cover; however, if time proves this wrong, I shall come back and append the law as needs dictate.

Here is the law:

One may only cut in a line if one has associates already planted at some place in the line, and these associates welcome the cutting. The number of total allowable cutters per group of friends may not exceed the number of friends who originally staked that position in line, and this number does not change based on newcomers--it is always determined by the original number in the group. For instance, if three friends get to a movie early and wait in line, then no more than three of their friends can ever join them at that point in the line.

Think of it like a restaurant refusing to seat a group until a certain portion of the entire party is present, and then it will make sense (except instead of refusing we're allowing, see?). I think this rule works because it prevents total dickery (one guy waiting in line will not end up letting in 20) but also allows for those tricky and frustrating circumstances that pop up in day-to-day life like car trouble, a late start, or not wanting to wait for hours on end to see a movie I already have tickets for.

Obviously as this is a new law, many will be ignorant of it, and thus may deny its application. Certain people (the "cool") will, upon hearing the law explained, be totally alright with it, and maybe spread the gospel of the cutting law to their friends and loved ones. Other people (the "lame") will rigidly insists that no one cuts, ever, and to them I say "chill out, broseph." Thus spake Ericthustra.

I almost cried

2008-07-14T13:59:00.004-05:00

when I saw the just-announced list of songs for Rock Band 2.

I am obsessed with Rock Band. I admit it. It is my number one leisure activity (especially as comics and rock-n-roll are semi-work). Rock Band is the one thing I do that is all fun. And I eat it up. I can play for hours a day. I am seriously going to take off work the day Rock Band 2 comes out just so I can play through the 80-some new songs in one day, because I won't be able to go to bed happy until I've played everything new.

I have posts in mind about why Rock Band is great, why it's silly that people say "I don't need to play Rock Band, because I'm in a real one" or something like that. Let's just assume that's dumb for now and bask in the glory of these new songs:

1. AC/DC “Let There Be Rock” 1970s
2. AFI “Girl’s Gone Grey” 2000’s
3. Alanis Morissette “You Oughta Know” 1990’s
4. Alice in Chains “Man in the Box” 1990’s
5. Allman Brothers “Ramblin’ Man” 1970’s
6. Avenged Sevenfold “Almost Easy” 2000’s
7. Bad Company “Shooting Star” 1970’s
8. Beastie Boys “So Whatcha Want” 1990’s
9. Beck “E-Pro” 2000’s
10. Bikini Kill “Rebel Girl” 1990’s
11. Billy Idol “White Wedding Pt. I” 1980’s
12. Blondie “One Way or Another” 1970’s
13. Bob Dylan “Tangled Up in Blue” 1970’s
14. Bon Jovi “Livin’ on a Prayer” 1980’s
15. Cheap Trick “Hello There” 1970’s
16. Devo “Uncontrollable Urge” 1980’s
17. Dinosaur Jr. “Feel the Pain” 1990’s
18. Disturbed “Down with the Sickness” 2000’s
19. Dream Theater “Panic Attack” 2000’s
20. Duran Duran “Hungry Like the Wolf” 1980’s
21. Elvis Costello “Pump It Up” 1970’s
22. Fleetwood Mac “Go Your Own Way” 1970’s
23. Foo Fighters “Everlong” 1990’s
24. Guns N’ Roses “Shackler’s Revenge” 2000’s
25. Interpol “PDA” 2000’s
26. Jane’s Addiction “Mountain Song” 1980’s
27. Jethro Tull “Aqualung” 1970’s
28. Jimmy Eat World “The Middle” 2000’s
29. Joan Jett “Bad Reputation” 1980’s
30. Journey “Anyway You Want It” 1970’s
31. Judas Priest “Painkiller” 1990’s
32. Kansas “Carry On Wayward Son” 1970’s
33. L7 “Pretend We’re Dead” 1990’s
34. Lacuna Coil “Our Truth” 2000’s
35. Linkin Park “One Step Closer” 2000’s
36. Lit “My Own Worst Enemy” 1990’s
37. Lush “De-Luxe” 1990’s
38. Mastodon “Colony of Birchmen” 2000’s
39. Megadeth “Peace Sells” 1980’s
40. Metallica “Battery” 1980’s
41. Mighty Mighty Bosstones “Where’d You Go” 1990’s
42. Modest Mouse “Float On” 2000’s
43. Motorhead “Ace of Spades” 1980’s
44. Nirvana “Drain You” 1990’s
45. Norman Greenbaum “Spirit in the Sky” 1960’s
46. Panic at the Disco “Nine in the Afternoon” 2000’s
47. Paramore “That’s What You Get” 2000’s
48. Pearl Jam “Alive” 1990’s
49. Presidents of the USA “Lump” 1990’s
50. Rage Against the Machine “Testify” 1990’s
51. Ratt “Round & Round” 1980’s
52. Red Hot Chili Peppers “Give it Away” 1990’s
53. Rise Against “Give it All” 2000’s
54. Rush “The Trees” 1970’s
55. Silversun Pickups “Lazy Eye” 2000’s
56. Smashing Pumpkins “Today” 1990’s
57. Social Distortion “I Was Wrong” 1990’s
58. Sonic Youth “Teenage Riot” 1980’s
59. Soundgarden “Spoonman” 1990’s
60. Squeeze “Cool for Cats” 1970’s
61. Steely Dan “Bodhitsattva” 1970’s
62. Steve Miller Band “Rock’n Me” 1970’s
63. Survivor “Eye of the Tiger” 1980’s
64. System of a Down “Chop Suey” 2000’s
65. Talking Heads “Psycho Killer” 1970’s
66. Tenacious D “Master Exploder” 2000’s
67. Testament “Souls of Black” 1990’s
68. The Donnas “New Kid in School” 2000’s
69. The Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat” 1980’s
70. The Grateful Dead “Alabama Getaway” 1980’s
71. The Guess Who “American Woman” 1970’s
72. The Muffs “Kids in America” 1990’s
73. The Offspring “Come Out & Play (Keep ‘em Separated)” 1990’s
74. The Replacements “Alex Chilton” 1980’s
75. The Who “Pinball Wizard” 1960’s

Bonus Artist Bonus Song Title Decade
76. Abnormality “Visions” 2000’s
77. Anarchy Club “Get Clean” 2000’s
78. Bang Camaro “Night Lies” 2000’s
79. Breaking Wheel “Shoulder to the Plow” 2000’s
80. The Libyans “Neighborhood” 2000’s
81. The Main Drag “A Jagged Gorgeous Winter” 2000’s
82. Speck “Conventional Lover” 2000’s
83. The Sterns “Supreme Girl” 2000’s
84. That Handsome Devil “Rob the Prez-O-Dent” 2000’s

This is a great setlist. There are a few songs I don't know, and a few bands I despise (Linkin Park) but mostly I am super-thrilled to have these songs at my disposal in roughly two months. Since it's kind of been my blog's thing lately to do "five-lists," let's do top 5 songs I'm most psyched for:

5. Megadeth: Peace Sells

Megadeth is my favorite American metal band, by far, and this is a KICK-ASS song. This one is gonna rock.

4. Ratt: Round And Round

I love hair metal, and this song is one of the catchiest examples of the genre. Unfortunately, my favorite part of the tune is the harmonized crazysolo at 2:41, and harmonized parts don't transfer to Rock Band completely, but hey... still a great song. Besides, Rock Band is low on hair metal at the moment, so this is a very welcome addition.

(PS--this video is amazing. Watch it!)

3. Bob Dylan: Tangled Up in Blue

It shows great intelligence and foresight on the part of Rock Band developers Harmonix to travel a little outside the straight rock genre. The 80 songs above show a few examples of that, but none are as great as Bob Dylan. I feel that it's a major coup for Rock Band to be the ones to stick this genius/American icon into rhythm music games. Can a Bob Dylan DLC pack be far behind? (my votes: All Along the Watchtower, Like a Rolling Stone, Hurricane)

2. Tenacious D: Master Exploder

This song is going to be crazy. Crazy.

1. The Replacements: Alex Chilton

It is a little strange, I grant you, that of all the amazing songs in the list above, this is the one I'm most excited about. But, what I can say? I love this song, and it was just so unexpected... I never in a million years would have thought that this song, that I got to know as a DJ at my college radio station, would ever show up in a game like this. I can't wait to play it over, and over, and over again.

Dark Knight better be good

2008-07-14T12:03:00.010-05:00

because I'm seeing it twice on Friday... once at 12:01 AM and again some time in the night. The last time I did that with a movie, it was Star Wars Episode III, which I actually loved, and it was totally worth it (I should note, too, that those particular viewings were broken up by a straight-shot drive from Toronto to Champaign via Chicago at rush hour on an hour and a half of sleep. That was the first, and only, time I have had coffee).

I figured since I did my Batman: The Animated Series post last week, I should do one now about Batman in comics. Unfortunately I am not nearly as familiar with this aspect of Batman... unlike Superman, whose essential stories are all, I believe, on the printed page, it seems to me that the best Batman stories are found in some kind of motion picture, be it the cartoon or Christopher Nolan's excellent first Batman film. In addition, I haven't read a lot of what people consider the key Batman stuff... no O'Neal/Adams (I have read their Green Lantern/Green Arrow, though), no Kane/Finger, no Kane/Sprang. But I've read enough to be able to comment on my top five Batman comics stories, so I will do that now.

5. Emperor Joker

As you might have guessed from the image, Emperor Joker is a Superman story with not a whole lot of Batman in it. And yet, having read it many, many times, it's safe to say that Batman is the focus of Emperor Joker, the point on which the whole story pivots. And it's far more essential to Batman than it is to Superman (although, it is a really kick-ass Superman story).

Though Batman is in maybe 10 pages of Emperor Joker, the story reveals to us two very interesting things about Batman's world. One: that the Joker cannot exist without Batman. This is the dramatic crux of the story: Superman tells a God-powered Joker to simply imagine a world without Batman, and he can't. I'm not sure if that says more about the Joker, or about Batman, but it definitely says interesting things about the both of them.

The second thing, to me, is even more interesting: at the end of this story, after Superman's won the day, Batman is left with all the torturous pain Joker put him through while he was a god: dying every day, and resurrecting every night just to be torn to pieces again. This proves too much for Batman to bear; he actually goes insane. Superman, knowing that the world needs a Batman, does the unthinkable: he takes Batman's pain. If you couldn't tell from what I had to say about "Epilogue" in my last post, I really like stories where Batman fails... it's a great reminder that he is, after all, only human, and despite what he thinks, he can only take so much. And I also really like the idea that, though he could never know it (and Superman won't tell), his buddy Clark was essential in helping him out of a tough spot. This is a really great twist for such a willful loner character, and it's one that I think could bear a lot of fruit, if DC wasn't so interested in seemingly ignoring most of the events of Emperor Joker.

4. World War III

Some people didn't like what Grant Morrison did with Batman in JLA, making him a "Bat-god" who was always, somehow, on top of things. I loved it. I mean, the whole point of Morrison's JLA run was making the League into modern-day gods... why not give Batman this "power"? It's really just a logical extension of his incredible will to be the best anyway.

World War III is the absolute tops of Morrison's Batman for me, though, for mostly one reason. See, there's this part where a villain called Prometheus has stormed the Watchtower, and Batman is the last line of defense. Prometheus has the ability to upload fighting skills into his helmet, allowing him to mimic the abilities of any of the world's greatest fighters... even Batman (this, in fact, proved a "humbling" experience for Bruce before). But now Batman's ready to fight back. Using Oracle's help, Batman has uploaded a new person's set of neural and physical skills into Prometheus's helmet:

Sure, it's kind of a cheap laugh. It's also awesome. Suck it, Prometheus.

3. Tower of Babel
This is the story that got me reading DC Comics. In it, Ra's Al Ghul takes down the JLA using Batman's own files on how to do it. Meanwhile, he gives Batman one of the toughest choices of his life: stop Ghul's wicked plot, or allow him to use the Lazarus chambers to bring Bruce's parents back to life?

I had thought of a plot like this years before I ever read Tower of Babel... I mean, the notion of bringing Thomas and Martha Wayne back from the dead via Lazarus? Seemingly obvious, yet also inspired, and Mark Waid executes it expertly. That plus Waid's understanding of Batman's obsessiveness and general mistrust of everyone who's not him makes this just an amazing story. You've gotta read it.

2. The Long Halloween
This book reads a lot like an episode of the animated series, so maybe it's cheap to pick it. Whatever. It's a great story. Tim Sale's artwork really nails the noir feel that birthed Batman in the first place, and Jeph Loeb writes an incredible and dark mystery story that will keep you engaged with the book until its very end. As a bonus, this book acts as a tour for Batman's rogue's gallery, the finest in all of comics (side note: I think it would be an interesting post to rank comics' rogues galleries. Thoughts?). It also seems to be the first place that Solomon Grundy becomes more or less a Batman villain. I always wondered why this happened, but whatever. Long Halloween is a fantastic read through and through.

1. The Killing Joke
Okay, first of all: Brian Bolland could draw anything and it would probably be awesome. This book is beautiful to look at, case closed.

But more importantly: Alan Moore is one of the masters of comics--maybe their best-ever writer, as even a glimpse of his resume (Watchmen, Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta) would argue. His superhero stuff isn't always amazing. But this is. The Killing Joke is a crazily well-crafted one-shot that gives us a close-up look at the Batman-Joker relationship. It shows us just how far Joker will go in his heinous crimes, and more importantly, it shows us that his driving philosophy of insanity is wrong, that not everybody is "just one day away" from being crazy. Among the best moments in the book, for me, is when Jim Gordon, who's just been through hell, who's just seen the Joker's pictures of his daughter shot, naked, and otherwise brutalized... when Jim Gordon insists that Joker is brought in "by the book." "We have to show him that our way works!" Right on, Commissioner.

Of course there is the issue of Joker's backstory, to which this book gives a significant contribution. But even though the supposed flashbacks that cut throughout Killing Joke's narrative tell a very sad human story that seems totally believable, I prefer to think of it as just one version of the story Joker tells himself to get some kind of interpretive foothold on his life. As Joker himself says of his past, "sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another...". My feeling is that the way Joker remembers his life at any given moment has to do with what kind of feeling he wants to evoke in himself or others... if he wants to appear sympathetic, as he does in Killing Joke, he may convince himself this story is true; if he wants to feel like a criminal mastermind, perhaps he remembers things the way a recent story-arc of Batman: Confidential has it. Though this is only one fan's guess, I think that, at present, it may be the best way to connect all the various Joker origin stories without invalidating any of them.

But anyway. The Killing Joke is awesome. If you haven't read it, please do so.

Man, I can't wait for Dark Knight.

Batman's been on my mind a lot

2008-07-07T15:09:00.009-05:00

and I'm sure it has something to do with the new movie coming out in, holy crap, 10 days! In the time between now and my viewing of the midnight premiere of Dark Knight (in IMAX!) I intend to re-view Batman Begins and Gotham Knight, in order to more fully immerse myself in what fans are calling the Nolan-verse. However, as a precursor to this journey, I couldn't help but look back at what I (and many of my peers) consider the definitive Batman universe... Batman: The Animated Series.

Simply put, this must be one of the best cartoons ever. The series premiered in 1992 and sixteen years later it is still as dramatic, emotional, and exciting as it ever was... perhaps moreso, because B: TAS seems to be one of those series that kids can enjoy but that adults will really get. I know that I sure didn't understand the driving motivations behind Bruce Wayne when I was in third grade, but I still made it my business to watch every damn episode of that show. To quote my friend Marc Fishman, "Batman: The Animated Series was my religion."

An element of the show that I had never really thought about struck me last night, and I think that it was the key to the show's critical, if not commercial, success (because, let's face it, kids will watch ANYTHING that's called "Batman"... for instance, The Batman)--Batman: The Animated Series was HARDLY EVER ABOUT THE TITLE CHARACTER. This is the genius of it. We all know who Batman is, we know his basic story and motives and gadgets and stuff. So it seems that, for the most part, we can forget about him. Bruce Timm & co. seemed to reason that it was much more interesting to do stories that focused on other people... villains, maybe, or just random denizens of Gotham City with a hard-luck story (the first story that is really about Batman in this series, I think, is the movie Mask of the Phantasm, which puts such an excellent twist on Bruce Wayne's backstory that dammit, it should be canon). In doing this, B: TAS gave us a stunning number of incredibly human characters, even if they only appeared for one episode. For instance, my roommate's favorite episode is called "See No Evil," about a petty crook/lab assistant who steals an experimental cloaking fabric just so he can spend some time with his daughter, something his ex-wife would not otherwise allow. I'm reminded of Will Eisner's middle Spirit comic strips, which also liked to spotlight the townspeople. And to make us care about some no-name guy or girl in 22 minutes... that's pretty amazing.

Any time a serious conversation about B: TAS comes up (and it happens a lot, in my line of work), I'm invariably asked to name my favorite episodes. This is really hard, because there are over 100 of them, and almost none of them are bad (I recall not liking the ninja ones as a young'un, but beyond that I can't offer up much criticism). But I think that, if I had to choose, these five would be my "can't miss." They are, in broadcast order:

Beware the Gray Ghost

Even though I just said that B: TAS episodes were seldom about Batman, this episode is partially an exception, as it delves into the youth of Bruce Wayne and shows us his favorite childhood hero, the Gray Ghost. When a series of crimes across Gotham are found out to be straight from the plot of an old Gray Ghost episode, Bruce has to track down his old hero for help, but the man behind the mask isn't exactly who Bruce expected. This is a really touching episode that has some cool moments of male bonding, some good insight on what it means to be a hero and an inspiration, and also some genius voice casting (the Gray Ghost is none other than Adam West, and the villain in this episode is voiced by Mr. Bruce Timm). A classic.

Almost Got 'Im

This one almost goes without saying, and it's on everybody's list, so I'll leave it be, except to say that this was mine and probably a lot of other kids' first serious introduction to telling a fairly mundane story in a really unique way, and for that this episode deserves every ounce of praise it gets.

Old Wounds

Unlike some, I liked when the series moved to the WB, because it opened the show up to a little bit more adult themes, characters, and situations. I kind of doubt this episode, which explains why Dick Grayson quit being Robin, could have been made on Fox, because my favorite scene in it probably wouldn't have flown with the censors: Batman and Robin break into an apartment to get information out of one of the Joker's hired goons, but his wife and son happen to be home too. Batman threatens to beat the snot out of the guy in front of his kid, and, seeing the horrified child, Robin tells Batman to drop it. Batman refuses to back down, and Robin walks out. This scene only lasts maybe a minute, but is one of my favorite moments in all of the Timm-verse. Oh, and the rest of the episode is really sweet too (the other greatest moment: in the heat of the moment, Robin tells off Batman and then PUNCHES HIM. Damn).

Legends of the Dark Knight

This episode, which gives us animated versions of the Dick Sprang and Frank Miller versions of Batman, also probably goes without saying, but it's just so inventive and cool that I have to put it on here. Besides, any episode that takes a potshot at Joel Schumacher has gotta be at least top 10, right?

Epilogue

Picking this episode might be cheating, because technically this is a Justice League Unlimited episode which primarily stars characters from Batman Beyond... but you know what, I don't care. To me, this episode, a love-letter and last goodbye to fans of Beyond, is what Batman is all about. What happens is this: Terry McGinnis, future Batman, learns that he doesn't just wear Bruce Wayne's old costume... he has his DNA. Terry is outraged, assuming that Bruce has set his whole life up from the start just so the world wouldn't be without a Batman, so he goes on a fact-finding mission to get to the bottom of things. This episode masterfully ties together nearly all of Bruce Timm's DC projects (including, at long last,a nod to Mask of the Phantasm!) and hits with a rough emotional punch at the end, as Amanda Waller (pictured above) tells Terry how to step out of the shadow of Bruce: "You want to have a better life than the old man? Take better care of the people who love you. Or don't." To me, this line gets at the heart of the character of Batman... this is his greatest tragedy. And much like I love DC One Million in part because it shows us that in the end Superman gets his happy ending, I love "Epilogue" because it shows us that in the end, Batman doesn't... at least, not Bruce Wayne. He never totally learns to bring others in to his life. But the episode also gives us hope that, even if Bruce can't, maybe his legacy can, all while keeping alive his constant vigil for justice. If this is not an essential Batman story, I don't know what is.

WizardWorld Chicago

2008-07-01T20:42:00.007-05:00

was great. Well, I had a great time, anyway. The convention was okay.

I think, in all honesty, the Chicago show has been ruined for me a little bit. Experiencing the New York Comic Con a few months ago has taken a lot of the luster out of the old Donald E. Stephens Center. But I have to think that Wizard could be doing a bit more to salvage things on the homefront. And I'm not even necessarily talking about stuff like the caliber of guests (which were definitely better than at last year's Chicago show, but not nearly as good as NYC's) or the amount of exclusives available (presumably, there was a scheduling conflict that forced this year's show to fall before the San Diego convention, thus cutting the number of exclusives down to precisely one), although those are certainly frustrations. I'm talking about simple stuff, like organization and communication, both of which were in short supply this year.

Basically, the problem with WizardWorld Chicago is this: if you want to do anything that a lot of other people want to do, you are going to have a harder time doing it than you should. This was true in trying to get tickets for the screening of Batman: Gotham Knight (or the Alex Ross signing, or the Image founders signing, or some fourth thing I don't remember), and this was ESPECIALLY true once one got to the screening. There were lines that went every which way. The screening was overbooked by, I kid you not, probably around a HUNDRED people (or more!). It was standing room only, for an event you had to stand in a maze of lines to get tickets for anyway. That shouldn't happen. And I think the thing that galls me the most is that all Wizard would have had to do is take ONE EXTRA PERSON from their staff to seat people at Gotham Knight to fill in the gaps in seats that invariably caused at least a few people to stand... but somehow, they didn't think this was a good use of their resources. Better to let the know-nothing hired help of the Donald E. Stephens Center's own goon squad stand around and tell people where they're not supposed to be.

That is the problem with WizardWorld Chicago, and with Wizard. They don't seem to think about simple things. You'd think that a company in the business of conventions would be able to handle something as simple as a line or a crowd, but they can't. And going to New York does make a difference for me here, because it sure seems that the New York Con had their shit together a lot more... it was always clear where I was supposed to be, and I was always happy when I got there.

So that's my rant. WizardWorld Chicago is not organized well. This much seems evident to most of the attendees and dealers, who don't really have many kind words to say about it. And I do not want to disparage all of the Wizard staff, because some of them were very helpful, but somewhere along the line, I think someone needs to do their job a little better.

That said, here is the part where I'm happy... this was an AWESOME weekend. If I had gone to the Chicago show purely as a fan, I might be disappointed, but I also went for business reasons. And business was good. And the couple fan things I did, although maybe frustrating, were totally worth it... Gotham Knight is an amazing movie, totally worth standing for (and also purchasing), and meeting Brian Michael Bendis (one of my top five comic writers) was definitely satisfying.

I will say, too, I think the quality of dealers at the Chicago show is better than New York (and no, I'm not saying this because Stand-Up Comics doesn't deal there). That may be due primarily to geographical factors... Chicago is more centrally located than New York and thus easier for a larger portion of the country to get to (plus it's probably cheaper to get a table in Chicago)... but at any rate, I found more variety amongst the sales floor of Chicago than in NYC. For instance, we were placed next to a really cool jewelry booth (that has a website here), and just down the aisle was a store that specialized in Japanese Transformers (see here!). Rest assured, those guys got all of my money for the weekend (and then some). I am relatively sure neither type of store was represented in New York, and if they were, I don't know... I just think Chicago has a better mix. And it may be weird to complain about booths selling nothing but comics at a comic convention, but hey, you know what they say about variety and spices.

And, oh, the company was fantastic. It obviously is not an objective measure of the quality of the Chicago convention to say this, but I had a fantastic time with the people who helped out at the booth, and this made for an all-around wonderful weekend. So, thanks to all you beautiful people!

So, in closing, I'm not trying to say Chicago is a bad show or anything. I mean, it's fun to shop at, it's fun to hang out at, and it's fun to make money at. I'm just saying it could be better. And, you know, I kind of have a vested interest in the Chicago show rivaling New York and San Diego, being a Chicago local and all. Maybe that's just a pipe dream, but it couldn't hurt to try.

I'm off to WizardWorld Chicago

2008-06-26T00:51:00.004-05:00

as of tomorrow. Which means I probably will not be updating for a few days. And I know I'm super-lame for not really writing anything recently anyway... I suppose I haven't been properly inspired (plus, I have been improperly busy).

But hopefully, when I get back I will have a report of the con and pictures to share, much like I did with the New York Comic Con (plug-PS: you can read about my New York misadventures here!). I trust this year's show will be both profitable and interesting... but, hopefully, not as interesting as last year's, if you catch my meaning.

So if you're going to the con, stop by and say hi (we're booth #2135), or if you're not, just wait patiently by the computer for an update on what you missed. Yes, that's it. Don't move. Don't even blink. Just sit there, staring, staring, forever staring... into.... oblivion...

Rock and Fashion

2008-06-16T17:41:00.003-05:00

or image, if you will. How do they relate? SHOULD they? Can they NOT?

I have been thinking a lot about fashion lately... well, compared to any point previously in my life, anyway. This is mostly due to my friend Emily's fashion blog, which I have already linked to but why not do it again. Her last post over there (as you can see on my sidebar!) was about how the Fratellis dressed themselves at a New York show. Now, I'm hardly qualified to talk about the Fratellis, but someone over there made a comment that was exactly along the lines of what I was thinking... "there's something to be said for the Springsteens of the world."

(Yes, it's another post about the Boss. I'm thinking of making this Bruce Springsteen Week).

Because, see, during this whole post I was thinking "alright, is it really fair to tear up a band for not putting a lot of thought into their dress?" And I was trying to think of all the fashion-less bands and artists out there, and about how good music doesn't require good fashion sense.

And it's very telling that the first artist who popped into my mind was Springsteen.

This is telling because one's knee-jerk reaction (like mine) is to say "obviously Bruce is fashionless. He wears jeans and t-shirts or overalls. He dresses like the good ole boys in Youngstown, PA or Asbury Park, NJ." I daresay that this is the most famous image of Bruce's, well, image, the one everyone conjures up when they think of his fashion:

Jeans, a t-shirt, and a red baseball cap. Is he going to rock Yankee Stadium or is he going to watch his kids play baseball? Hey, he's the Boss. He can do both!

But there's an obvious flaw in thinking Bruce is fashionless: he wants you to see him this way. This is his image, just as much as Ozzy's is looking like a vampire, and Britney's is looking like (?) a tramp (yes, I took that from a comment I made on Emily's blog before I decided to write up this post. Sue me).

For most people, this can probably go unsaid; of course Bruce has constructed this image, it's good marketing. But the funny thing is that for me and at least one other person interested in the relationship between rock and fashion, we still jump to this image without thinking and label Bruce as a "fashionless" rock-star.

Now, this is not to knock the Boss (whom, obviously, I love). But some people, like my aforementioned friend Jim, are really put off by this. Jim's words: "I don't buy that whole working-man shit." In other words: Bruce pretends to be someone he's not by embodying the blue-collar man in word and dress, and this is a lifestyle he couldn't possibly know about. Well, okay. I'm not sure how well that criticism holds up. Does Metallica know anything about fighting ancient monsters or bringing death to villages? Doubt it. Is David Bowie really an alien? Hell, he's not even an astronaut! Bruce's blue-collar songwriting perspective is just an adopted character like any other. The most one can say is that it's slightly more tricky than most adopted characters, because it's less of a stretch than Alice Cooper as a demon from hell or Dave Mustaine as a sociologist. But only a little less.

See, almost every good songwriter adopts a persona (or several!). The only genre I can think of that shies away from this completely is emo, and you know what? Emo is fucking boring. I could care less about the bad day you had, dude. They Might Be Giants can write better, sadder songs in their sleep, and they're using their imagination to do it. Being able to write songs from a perspective not your own is simply more interesting, more inspired, and more complimentary to an artist's creativity. There's nothing "dishonest" about it. It is a basic tenet of writing that this is the case--one would not expect Stephen King novels, for instance, to be about what Mr. King does for a daily routine.

So it's silly to expect that rock stars would not adopt some kind of persona. And, following that, it only makes sense that rock stars would adopt a fashion to fit this persona. Some genres along those lines are obvious: goth, new wave, hair (really anything from the 80s!), punk. Some take the Springsteen route to make you think they don't care, like the grunge movement of the 90s. But, you know, they care a lot. See, any band who consciously shuns fashion is thus adopting it, because they have to try to dress in such a way that shows that dress doesn't matter. Medieval Italian courts called this sprezzatura. Modern rockers might call it "the Kurt Cobain."

I'm sure that there are bands out there that are more or less, to use a term in Emily's arsenal, "fashion-invisible," that don't make any kind of fashion statement for or against. This would probably be most indie bands; I couldn't tell you how The New Pornographers dress in relation to any persona, just that they're awesome (and that, whatever Neko Case wears, it should be less). So maybe that is an example of music speaking for itself. But even in that case, those artists have to choose to just dress like they want, go out on stage, and rock, and thus the fashion is a personal choice, not a group one. But there is still a larger group dynamic in play, an umbrella under which all band members choose their wardrobe; either spoken or not, The New Pornographers have agreed to all dress like 30-something hipsters that let music speak for itself; if Kurt Dahle decided to wear a robot suit, Carl Newman would probably shoot this down (this is probably why Statements Lost was upset when I wore faux-leather pants when playing with them. But damn it, it was funny).

The point is that it seems like when it comes to rock-n-roll, there's no such thing as "fashionless." And while those of us who live without fashion (like me) may at first balk at this, that's really the only way things could be. Would Bruce Springsteen be as compelling in a suit and tie? Definitely not. Would you want to see Jenny Lewis in jeans and a t-shirt? Not when the other option is a cocktail dress. Fashion... image... is just another way to get at the themes behind an artist's work. It's an interesting point because, I think, so many of us consciously choose not to care about how musicians look when we embrace their music... but maybe this choice is in error.

There is at least one definite and immediate upside to this rock-fashion consciousness. One need only look at Fall-Out Boy to know they suck.

I'd Drive All Night

2008-06-14T15:49:00.005-05:00

just to listen to some Bruce Springsteen.

I was out in the far western Chicago suburbs yesterday (Sandwich, Oswego and Yorkville to be precise) to do a couple cool things, not the least of which was see Blackened, a Metallica cover band that my buddy Jim is in. They are pretty awesome, and Jim is a crazily-talented lead guitarist... I recommend checking them out. I didn't leave their show until midnight (which was the halfway point!... I had to get up for work early today). And while nighttime driving is not always the most fun from a safety standpoint, it affords me an enjoyable opportunity that some may chalk up to mild neuroses but what do they know?!... I love picking music to drive to at night. Further, after many many moonlight trips, I have found that one artist excels at providing a soundtrack for the road under the stars, and, as you may have guessed, that is none other than the Boss.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love Bruce Springsteen in any context. I think he is one of the great voices in American rock-and-roll, if not the greatest. But something about him just... resonates...in the nighttime. I don't know what it is, but I can't really listen to something like Magic or Devils and Dust when the sun is out.

But, as awesome as those albums are (especially Magic), there is one Bruce album that, to me, is king of the night-time driving routine, and it is this:

Yes, The River has been my traveling companion countless times in the past year, and I haven't gotten tired of in. In fact, I seem to discover something new I like about it every time I listen... kind of like having a good conversation with an old friend. For instance, just last night I finally got into track 18, "The Price You Pay," and really began to see it as the beautiful piece of songwriting it really is.

I'm not sure what makes The River so ideal for a night-driving situation. There are certain empirical factors, to be sure. The fact that it was originally a double-album (back in the days of vinyl, can you believe it?!), for instance, makes it sufficiently long--a little over 80 minutes--to knock out long stretches of road. But I think in the end the only satisfactory answer is that this album feels right to drive to. It exhibits incredible pacing that weaves together some of Bruce's most intense rock songs and his most sensitive ballads expertly. I mean, just listen to disc one, side one--"The Ties That Bind" has got to be one of Springsteen's most kick-ass songs, and it gives you a great shot of adrenaline to get that drive going. That fast pace continues on through "Sherry Darling," "Jackson Cage," and "Two Hearts" before any sign of slowing down with "Independence Day." But then, over on side two (side note: what's nice about MP3 players is you don't have to flip records over. Look into that, guys!) we get another huge burst of energy with "Hungry Heart," "Out on the Streets" (this album's second-best tune behind "The Ties That Bind," in my humble opinion), "Crush On You," and "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)." This side, too, closes with poignancy, but this time with two ballads ("I Wanna Marry You" and the titular track), which pave the way for the slower, more reflective second disc, which actually almost inverts the number of rockers to ballads (first disc: 8 to 3, second disc: 3 to 6).

And, the second disc is really pretty. Like, usually I hate when rock-stars oversaturate albums with ballads to try to be, I don't know, more mature (see: Bon Jovi). But these ballads are great. They are legitimately moving, powerful songs. I won't go through disc two cut-by-cut, but I do want to mention that for me this album climaxes with the second-to-last track, "Drive All Night," which was featured in the movie Reign O'er Me (which, actually, is responsible for turning me on to this album). Maybe because I associate it with a sad scene in a sad movie, I find this song to be one of the most emotional tunes ever to be constructed in the rock milieu. I think that, if you were feeling especially sentimental, it might actually be tough to get through this whole song dry-eyed.

Maybe it seems silly that my best "night time driving record" would be one which front-loads its power and eventually turns reflective, almost sad. Does that really carry me through the night? Well, yes. See, I think The River hooks you with its rock, and then draws you in with its ballads, making a wholly immersing, wonderful listening experience. More albums need to be constructed with this cohesion. By the time you're on to the second disc, you don't need high-octane rock songs to get you through the drive. You're part of the Boss's world for a rich 80 minutes... a world where all of America is laid out in front of you, waiting to be explored, yet perhaps the richest story is the one right inside your car...

Oh, yeah. Having a song called "Drive All Night" also kind of solidifies the River/nighttime driving connection too. Just sayin'.

I've Been on an X-Men Kick Lately

2008-06-12T12:32:00.007-05:00

which I think was inspired by the Grant Morrison kick I'd been on before, after meeting him in New York. I recently got the urge to read through the entirety of his New X-Men series... especially since I hadn't read a few of those arcs since they first came out... and then I realized that, since Whedon's Astonishing X-Men (essentially New X-Men's sequel) had just ended, now would be a good time to re-evaluate that, too. And then I thought, well shucks, I really like Mike Carey's X-Men too, and I've always grouped him in with the avant-garde writers of the last few X-years (based primarily on the strength of his Lucifer series which, yes, I really do like more than its parent Sandman). So it was that the past two weeks has seen me tackle three distinct, high-profile artistic runs of X-Men comics, and I thought I'd pass my impressions on to you. So...

Grant Morrison's New X-Men

July 2001. Looking to shake up their most popular team creatively and sales-wise, Marvel hires on superstar Scotsman Grant Morrison to begin an era of avant-garde X-books that appeal to more than just the usual fan of spandex-laden brawls.

Grant Morrison is my favorite writer. This much is probably clear if you read about my experiences in New York, scoped out the graphic that adorns the top of my blog, or just know me. So it is that I have an automatic positive bias when it comes to this guy's work. Some may say I tend to overvalue it.

And it's true, I do really like Morrison's take on the X-Men. Morrison is known for his crazy, mind-blowing concepts, and those are not in short supply here. This guy stretches the X-Men in ways that most would not imagine they could or should be stretched--going public, losing the costumes, becoming a real school, etc. And, to me, the Marvel Universe was better for it.

That said... I do not love Morrison's X-Men. At least not all of it. I don't think it is his strongest work, nor do I think it's the strongest take on the X-Men we've ever seen. Certainly a couple of the story arcs in here can lock horns for title of best X-stories ever... my personal vote would be for Riot at Xavier's, which takes the concept of the X-Mansion as a school to the highest level it's ever attained. And Morrison does a lot of stuff that's fantastic and, in retrospect, seems like it needed to be done, such as putting Emma Frost on the team, further devolving/evolving Beast (thus deepening an already fantastic character), and creating Cassandra Nova, who is surely one of the most badass X-villains of all.

But there are some problems here, too. Chief among them, I think, is that after the high-point that is Riot at Xavier's, momentum begins to falter. Murder at the Mansion is an okay story, but I really don't like Assault on Weapon Plus, and I feel that a diversion into a Logan-centric story really hurts the overall thrust of Morrison's work on the title. Planet X has some cool stuff in it but I find it a little garbled, and Here Comes Tomorrow... I don't know. I really don't like what Morrison was going for there, creating the "ultimate Bad" for the X-Men to face in Sublime. I guess it just didn't resonate with me. This may sound like a weird (or weirdly obvious) thing to say about Morrison, but it seemed like too much of a reach.

To sum up, I think pretty much every story up to and including Riot at Xavier's is perfect, and every story after that is a little on the weak side. Instead of building to an amazing end, I feel like Morrison's run climaxed early. And while it was still a great read, I don't think, as a whole, it is the definitive run in X-Men history.

Rating (out of five stars): * * * *

Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men

May 2004. Morrison ends his high-selling yet controversial run on one of Marvel's flagship books. Marvel needs to find a follow-up writer who will continue to bring the non-superhero appeal of Morrison, but at the same time salvage their super-hero team from some of those crazy ideas introduced in the past few years. Enter, of Buffy fame, Joss Whedon.

Before I dove into my X-project, my initial expectation was that I'd like Morrison's run a little more than I did, and Whedon's a fair deal less. I remember not being incredibly into Whedon's stuff past the first story arc, and as the series went on I definitely lost interest, probably due mostly to chronic lateness (it was not uncommon to go four months without a new issue, and the stories were very decompressed as it was). But reading them all in a couple sittings, I found myself really getting into most of Whedon's work. Basically... I think Astonishing X-Men starts and ends with two of the best stories in X-history. And then there's two stories in the middle.

Whedon's first arc, Gifted, is amazing. It focuses on the notion of a cure for mutancy, and it's easily the best iteration of a cure storyline that's ever been done. Similarly, Whedon's final arc, Unstoppable, just feels so excellent... for a crazy outer space story, it's incredibly human, and the climax is, I will say, very moving.

Whedon's other two stories, Dangerous and Torn, I am less impressed with. The villain of Dangerous (literally the Danger Room come to life) is a little silly, for one. Torn, on the other hand, has a great plot through-and-through (picking up on some major Morrison threads, in fact), but both of these stories share the major flaw of being paced very poorly. In each case there is far too much build-up and not nearly enough time for the action to resolve; this was especially infuriating at the end of Torn, when after six issues of waiting for something HUGE to happen we get about two and a half pages of semi-resolution before BAM! and the X-Men are whisked off into space.

But, as I said above, it is emotion where Whedon excels. His characters are so human that after reading an issue or two you feel like they're friends of yours. It is this emotion that carries on through the fairly lackluster second and third arcs and sets us up for the big, gut-wrenching finale of Unstoppable.

And Whedon's got another asset... the art of John Cassaday, whose incredibly realistic style compliments Whedon's emotional command fantastically (look at the way he draws those faces!). The art of Morrison's run was quite varied. Sometimes it was good (Igor Kordey did a fine job, and it's where I was first introduced to Ethan Van Sciver, one of my favorite artists in the medium) and sometimes it was so-so (I like Frank Quietly, but not on X-Men), but it was never consistent. Cassaday's pencils are just as much a part of Astonishing as Whedon's art, and the end result is that much better for it.

In the end Whedon's run, like Morrison's, falls short of perfection. I already mentioned the pacing problems in the middle stories. I also think that Gifted could have been the defining X-Men story were it not for one nagging problem--this arc is saturated in testosterone, which results in Wolverine brawling both Cyclops and Beast on school grounds with very little provocation. I was really hoping something would pop up in this story or the one following to explain this (maybe something to do with psychic backlash from a distraught Emma messing with the X-Men's minds?) but this was not the case. And, maybe it's a silly complaint, but those two scenes really did bother me... they seemed very out-of-character and out of place in an otherwise perfect story.

But despite it's problems, Whedon's work on X-Men certainly is magnificent, and simply because Whedon is more reader-friendly than Morrison, I think his run is a little closer to being the definite X-Men legacy.

Rating: * * * *

Mike Carey's X-Men (pre-Messiah Complex)

I'm not gonna give this run a fancy-pants introduction, because I am probably one of the only people in the world who would consider Mike Carey an avant-garde X-writer. Like I said, that's based solely on the fact that he wrote one of the coolest comic sagas I've ever read in Lucifer. But putting him on X-Men was not, to Marvel, like signing up Grant Morrison or Joss Whedon. And it certainly wasn't to fill Whedon's shoes, because all of these books came out concurrently with Whedon's (albeit on a monthly schedule). No, it shall be Warren Ellis who Marvel deems worthy of being the next "artsy" X-Men writer, and because I absolutely loathe Warren Ellis, I shall not stick around to find out how he compares to his priors.

And it may be that my placement of Carey among Morrison and Whedon is flawed. In fact, I'm pretty sure it is. This is despite the fact that obviously Carey is a big fan of the two, Morrison in particular--he does a lot with Morrisonian concepts and his style seems to me to kind of mimic that whole "crazy-in-media-res" thing Morrison has going on. Reading these issues the first time around, I was totally sure that Carey belonged in the Morrison/Whedon pantheon. But reading them again, in succession...

Well, there's a couple problems.

And now I'm going to backpedal like I'm running for office. I don't think the problems are, necessarily, Carey's fault.

Problem one, to me, is this: unlike Whedon and Morrison, he's been saddled with B, C, and D-list characters (this may be kind of circular reasoning, because I think Morrison and Whedon helped define the A-list, but still). I saw Carey give a talk at a bookstore once and he said that, like Morrison and Whedon, he got to pick his team. The problem is that he didn't get first pick--in fact I rather think he was last on the picking order, after Whedon himself and then Ed Brubaker, who for some reason is a superstar writer. So it is that Carey's X-Men are: Rogue, Iceman, Cannonball, Cable, Sabretooth, Mystique, Lady Mastermind, and Omega Sentinel. Morrison picking Emma for his team was inspired... Carey picking three point five bad guys not so much. Sure, he had a good reason for it (he explained as much at this talk), but still. Dude, you have precisely two major X-characters on your team, Iceman and Rogue, and their status is kind of questionable. The rest... blah. It's really hard to care about Cannonball when Beast, Emma, Kitty, Wolverine, Cyclops, and Colossus are in the next book over.

Problem two: Carey has been saddled with B, C, and D-quality artists. Sorry guys, but I do like Humberto Ramos or Chris Bachalo, whom Marvel has assigned to nearly all of Carey's issues. I find their art formless and overcrowded. The only issues of Carey's run I enjoyed looking at were the two not illustrated by these guys. In fact, the one pencilled by Mike Choi was beautiful. Coincidentally (or maybe not) it was also my favorite issue in Carey's run. Go figure.

So I think that Carey kind of got the shit end of the stick here. Weak characters and weak artists don't really help his book to compete with Joss Whedon and John Cassaday. Yet even for all that, there is some quality stuff here. Carey takes those two key characters he got and does amazing things with them--Iceman has never been so powerful, and there's no good explanation for that except that no one thought about his powers as much as Carey. Ditto Rogue, except the result of taking her powers to their logical conclusion is a little less happy for her. Carey created an excellent villain in Pan, a "Typhoid Mary in reverse" who infects himself with people's "diseases" (and/or powers) when he comes into contact with them. And, even though I ragged on Cannonball above, him and Iceman do make a really cool team, which Carey exploits to the fullest. In fact he gives his all into these characters and does some really great things with most of them. I just feel like, at the end of the day, doing great things with Lady Mastermind and Omega Sentinel as drawn by Ramos/Bachalo is not so compelling as I would have hoped.

Now, compared to any average X-book (like one by Chuck Austen, Peter Milligan, or Chris Claremont in the last 20 years) Carey's stuff is fantastic, yeah. But I am forced to conclude that, for reasons probably beyond his power, he is not the "spiritual successor" to Whedon/Morrison I hoped he'd be. Maybe his current work on X-Men Legacy will change that. Until then, I will happily re-read my Lucifer trades and be thrilled that such an awesome writer has made it to the mainstream, because even if his stuff isn't fantastic... dude, he's Mike Carey. He's the man.

Rating: * *

Pimping

2008-06-10T15:52:00.005-05:00

is supposed to be illegal. That's what "The Law" says. But that may only be when there's sex involved. And God knows there's no sex here. I mean, come on.

So my buddy Marc designed the logo to my blog that I just now put up. It's really cool. He did it for a really great price which included me mentioning who did it. But I was gonna anyway. Marc is part of the trio of guys known as Unshaven Comics, who you can find here. They're a company of aspiring-but-further-along-than-most-of-us-will-ever-get graphic novelists from the south suburbs of Chicago. On Free Comic Book Day, they did a signing at our store, and it went really well. If you're so inclined, you can support them by checking out their book, called The March: Crossing Bridges in America at good old Amazon.com... or Stand-Up Comics. Or you can e-mail Marc and tell him how cool his work is/commission some of your own, at marc@unshavencomicsonline.com.

(I'm also going to be cross-posting all my comic-related stuff at the Unshaven website, where I already have a few blogs up. If you're interested, you can scope 'em out in the "Words" section).

And while I'm at this pimping game ... I'd like to mention a few of the people who inspired me to start doing this. It would be really cool if you looked at their blogs, too (oh, and all these blogs are linked to on the right-hand side of the page, if'n you don't remember to bookmark them now):

- Attention men: from summer to winter fashion advice, this is where you should turn! (and we could all use it)

- Find yourself missing the mark with your poker play? Maybe you'll find some tips to dominate the table.

- Sure this political blog hasn't updated in a few months, but maybe some heckle-ing would convince the owner otherwise. He's strong enough to take it.

- My comic knowledge is but a trickle compared to this foss-it of insight.

And yes, all those italicized words are puns. Deal with it.

So this new Weezer album...

2008-06-09T09:14:00.006-05:00

sucks on ice. It's terrible. Easily the worst thing the band has ever recorded.

When Make Believe came out in 2005, no one wanted to listen to me arguing that "Beverly Hills" was a tongue-in-cheek send up of glamor culture, that Rivers didn't really want to be in Beverly Hills, he was just making fun of people who did. But what's weird is, now it's three years later, and Weezer's put out what's basically an entire record of "Beverly Hills," and people are going nuts for it!

It's not just fans. Critics love or at least like the Red Album. Rolling Stone's given it three stars. Spin magazine talks about how it's a "return to Weezer's roots." AllMusic.com rates the album at four and a half stars. But the most audacious thing about AllMusic's review is this line, courtesy of head critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, who usually I agree with 100%: "[Rivers] never avoids his age."

WHAT?!

This whole album is an exercise in Rivers avoiding his age! With only one or two exceptions, every song on this album is about, in some capacity, being a rock star. Except, critics insist, it is an ironic take on this--Rivers makes fun of over-produced pop in "Pork & Beans," he mocks the faux bad-boy side of rock in "Troublemaker," he sends up the tendency of rockers to overvalue themselves and their work in "Greatest Man Who Ever Lived." Well, okay. That's one way to look at it. But it's not a good way.

This reading of the Red album would work if Rivers Cuomo was, well, a ROCK STAR. But he's not. It's been three years since his band's last album, and they didn't even headline their last tour. Each successive Weezer album (of course, except for this one, inexplicably) has been met by worse and worse reviews. Weezer is not a band full of rock stars... they are a band that, since 2001, has been trying to be rock stars again.

Given this, doesn't it seem a little odd that Rivers positions himself to critique pop music from the inside? If this album had come out in 1996, yeah, sure, that's good timing--you're rejecting the process of corporate pop/rock by making fun of it while you're on top of your game critically and commercially. You get to look down at others and scoff. But it's come over a decade later, when your only means of salvation as a band seems to be embracing that world. Hmm...

See, I have a much more insidious reading of this album. I'm pretty sure that the goal of writing all these awful songs criticizing rock stars is to make Rivers & co. be part of that same scene again. It's a weird kind of tactic in play here: "Yes, I am ridiculously cool. I'm so cool that even though I'm not famous anymore, I'm going to make an album tearing apart famous people from a perspective that only other famous people are privy to. By doing so, I will seem even cooler, and will become famous again." It's attaining proximity by distancing, and it's a great tactic in theory... at least for a rhetorician. Not so much for a musician, at least not one in a band whose early work was so praised because of its honesty. But it seems to have worked, because if the press is any indication, the Red album is some sort of comeback for Weezer. But to me, it's ridiculously transparent. You are not cool, Rivers Cuomo. And making fun of cool people does not make you cool.

If Rivers really had acted his age on the Red album, it could have been excellent. See, I have to say... I'm actually a fan of Maladroit and Make Believe. No, they're not classic Weezer, but they have some good songs on them. And that's what's really important... not cultivating some kind of pop-rock image like Red tries to do. And to me, it's really a shame... if Weezer had made Make Believe 2 I would have stuck with them, gone to see them live, and waited another three years for another okay album with terrible reception. But now all they're going to have is critical and commercial popularity. Yep... it's quite a shame.

Hey

2008-06-09T08:35:00.000-05:00

I've decided that the timing is right. I'm about to become like seven million other assholes (and a handful of actually cool people) who have an honest-to-goodness blog.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that a bunch of my friends have taken this up as a hobby lately, and I enjoy reading what they write... it gives me something to do. Also, I don't know why, but I've been feeling inspired lately... not just when it comes to writing, but when it comes to all my pursuits. This is a good feeling, and I'm gonna go with it. So it is that I feel like having an outlet to express myself critically, since shoe-horning these things into everyday conversation just doesn't always work (sometimes it does, though... and it's always fun to try!!).

So what I'm going to be writing about here is kind of whatever crosses my mind as an important topic of discussion at the moment, but I'm willing to bet that most of the posts will be about one of three things. In descending order, those are: comic books, music, and philosophy--the three things I know most about (or at least pretend to), and, more importantly, care most about. And maybe it's just me, but I feel like I do have something to contribute to the discussion at large when it comes to comics and music. Philosophy, not so much, but it's an interest of mine, so bear with me.

I don't know how often I'll update, but I imagine it will be pretty frequently. Like I said, I've been feeling inspired, and I've already got three-four posts lined up, one of which will probably go up later today. So, thanks for visiting, guys, and enjoy!