The Factual Opinion

My Wife: To The Extreme, Glory Like A Vandal

Glory #23
Art by Ross Campbell
Written by Joe Keatinge & Ross Campbell
Published by Image Comics

It's interesting to read a comic about a character and a story line that I've never heard anything about before, even more so when it's an interesting idea. In Glory, I read about Gloriana, a 500 year old warrior Goddess from another "realm", the child whose birth brought peace to a warring and divided planet by virtue of the union of the two that brought her into being. She's been trained for 500 years to do battle, but there is no battle for her where she is...so, she goes to earth to help during WWII. 

Pretty good so far, right? That, alone, is fodder enough for one issue, don't you think? Even a couple of issues. A series of frames showing the former war, hopping around the fighting....maybe an issue dedicated to Glory's training. How about a series of vignettes of what she went through during World War II? As much as an interesting storyline that this is, my desire for an elaboration of it is pure wishful thinking. The above paragraph is a minor part of the overall story arc of this issue, and it's almost completely described in narration. Instead of an action comic book, it's a collection of panels where somebody talks about the awesome stuff they had done in previous panels that, unfortunately, there just isn't room to show right now. It sort of feels like I showed up at a party, on time, and there's only one person there and he just keeps telling me about all the crazy, awesome stuff that these really interesting and sexy people were doing right before I got there, but unfortunately they just left and they took all the food with them. But don't worry, he says! There's plenty of talking to come!

Parallel to the story of Glory, this issue tells the story of a young woman named Riley Barnes. As a little girl, Riley has had "dreams" of Glory. I used the quote marks because Riley's dreams told a continuing story from night to night until looping back to the beginning, repeating the same narrative over and over again. It's an interesting sounding idea, although I'll admit I think I might want to kill myself, or at the very least never go to sleep, if I had the same sequence of dreams over and over again.

Somewhere around this point in the comic is where I started to get confused. I initially thought that Glory lived in her mind as a special dream, and that Glory's time on Earth was only known to Glory and the people who had come into contact with her. But her friend saying "Isn't she dead, Riley?", made me have to rethink the whole thing, adn eventually I figured out that Glory was a well-known superhero on Earth while Riley dreamt about her, and that all of these things were occurring at different times.

Anyhoo, this isn't the crux of the issue yet. Essentially, Riley goes on a little expedition to France because she feels pulled there on her search for Glory. When she gets to the small town, she finds out that the waitress at the bar knows exactly who Riley is, and brings her to see Glory - who is totally laid-up, comatose and bandaged, in bed.

I should own up to something: I've skipped a lot in trying to make a point. And what's that, you ask? This is a story that has a lot of potential...but waaaaaaaaay to much is squeezed into one issue. I get that the writer is just trying to get on with the story that he wants to tell...but there's a whole lot of backstory jammed into one comic book to get to that story, and there's a limit to how much of this sort of exposition I'm willing to tolerate. The math just doesn't work out here: it's pages of telling me about the cool stuff I missed, the reasons that big decisions are made (at one point, Glory says that she's "lived", "loved" and "fought" with humankind and now she's going to "be one of them"--I would have really liked to see some, any, of that stuff), and then it ends with what's supposed to be the big dramatic moment, which is the character near death in a hidden back room and the ominous mention of bad-times-a-coming...

So? It's not as if Glory means anything to me. She's just someone who either talks or is talked about.

The unfortunate thing is that there is so much opportunity to SHOW action, and yet the decision has been made to only show what happened AFTER the action. It's always a character telling us about what happened. That's a good trick for a play, but it makes for boring comic books, I'm sorry to say. And when its the type of action being described in these pages? Trust me, "decades of living as a Goddess" is NOT something that should get tossed off and ignored. That's the sort of thing millions of women would pay to read and look at. We already know what that's like to imagine it, what I'd go crazy for is to see the big budget action movie version!

I understand that this is issue 23, and that issue 22 was published in the 90's--I asked for clarification, and it was given. Perhaps this was a big, big, big recap issue. Still - if a picture is worth a thousand words, stop writing so much prose and start drawing some of that action! These characters are drawn in an interesting style I don't think I've seen before. Glory is seriously built and has a simultaneously cute/fierce face. There is a lot of distinction between the characters, which is kinda cool because very often I fee like the only difference in these kinds of comic book characters is found in distinctions like hair or eye color. The difference between Riley and Glory, though, is quite stark. I'm sure it's intentional! Nevertheless, Riley is so cartoon-y compared to any other character that I sometimes felt like I was reading an entirely different comic book whenever she showed up. But again, maybe that's to set the tone for the upcoming storyline. I don't know....we shall see. I'll probably peruse the next issue just to see if this was, indeed, a super long recap story. I hope not. There's a lot of ideas here, and I feel like they are the kind of ideas that deserve a chance. Time will tell!

-Nina Stone, 2012

Too Many Movies: No, Thank YOU Good Sirs

This week, Joe McCulloch has got your Melancholia take along with your The Secret World of Arrietty breakdown, while Tucker goes deep into spoiler territory on his favorite new movie in a long ass time, The Grey.

Melancholia
It’d be hard to sell a house with a magic cave anyway, 2011
Joe McCulloch

Those of us damned to perpetually emphasize the Tarkovsky over the Dreyer in the Lars von Trier catalog will no doubt confront this end-of-the-world-by-way-of-angst spectacular by thinking first of the Russian master’s similarly-poised final film, The Sacrifice; our devotion will be promptly rewarded with a slow early image of a ruined painting reminiscent of the ecstatic finale to Andrei Rublev, with which the film will also share the presence of horses as symbolic of the human soul. This moreover has the double effect of positioning Melancholia as a goatee-wearing evil twin to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, a film so evocative of Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, and so reminiscent of the Danish provocateur’s present taste for cosmic imagery set to aching music refrains.

Yet von Trier is characteristically blunter. He might publicly fret over his movie’s visual gloss -- “This is cream on cream. A woman’s film!” -- but he cannot deny his affinity for romantic cinema, nor (I expect) the heated melodrama burning behind the likes of Dancer in the Dark. Passions. Where Malick flicks his images into an associative swirl of legs in clingy dresses on watered Texas lawns as indicative of a boy’s burgeoning sexual desires, von Trier celebrates Kirsten Dunst’s breasts as a full-fledged recurring motif. At first they heave, painfully blooming and barely-contained under the dress she’s worn to a wedding she’s trying to convince herself to like, only to later sag, defeated, in obscured profile as a brutal bout of depression hits her. Heroically, a gala unveiling later occurs as Dunst is restored to health in the glow of humankind’s richly-deserved annihilation at the hands of an oncoming rogue planet, her nude repose framed in a painterly long shot that promptly cuts way in for some straight-ticket ‘just lolling around rubbing my boobs’-style porno framing, perhaps in commemoration of the dichotomous nature of so much of the film’s content. This is not a director unfamiliar with erotic film or explicit sex to begin with, of course -- and it turns out you needed to see the movie to get his infamous Cannes joke about wanted to make a sex film with Dunst next -- yet Melancholia still seems like the horniest von Trier’s camera has ever been.

This is a visceral work, even more so to my mind than the director’s preceding Antichrist. Split into two halves, the film establishes a metaphoric steel cage match between major depressive disorder and garden- variety anxiety symptoms; each chapter is named for one of two sisters -- Dunst’s Justine and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Claire -- lead characters and respective sufferers, with each’s segment tracking their decline and downfall. Critics will gladly note that each half is thereby labeled with the woman von Trier plans to destroy, though it seems more transparent than ever before that Dunst, at least -- a sufferer of inpatient- caliber depressive symptoms much like her director’s, though her role was actually intended for Penélope Cruz, who had contributed to the scenario -- is effectively von Trier’s ‘presence’ in the film. Through her, the director lashes out at societal rituals, advertising, parenting, science, and (worst of all) ‘nice guys,’ who are always just stupid ugly beasts like the rest of us, but also pretentious.

I was not prepared for how much of a rueful comedy the initial Justine half turned out to be, though I could have expected it from von Trier’s allusion to Sade, whose work the great Angela Carter once characterized in The Sadeian Woman as a puckish affront to social mores: “Whatever else he says or does not say, Sade declares himself unequivocally for the right of women to fuck - as if the period in which women fuck aggressively, tyrannously and cruelly will be a necessary stage in the development of a general human consciousness of the nature of fucking; that if it is not egalitarian, it is unjust.” The difference here is that Melancholia cannot foresee any developments improving the human lot at any time in the future, so Dunst’s downward slide merely disrupts the automata of society’s function, from servants whisking dishes and suitcases away with cold precision to grabby bosses retaining underlings to follow valuable employees around and extract work product whenever possible.

To von Trier, this is empowering; maybe the only empowerment. Melancholia begins with a prelude, an overture, depicting scenes from throughout the film to come -- including a few which exist only inside characters’ heads and are only later presented through dialogue -- in agonizing ultra-slow motion, so that they seem like people posed in photographs, with only eerie small gestures affording them any recognizable life. This, right up front, is the perspective of Melancholia-the-planet, the destroyer’s view on things, an all-seeing, all-knowing planetary take on the action, with humans diminished and near-frozen from the encroaching calamity’s cosmic speed. It does not care that they are obliterated, because it cannot process them as more that icons of obscure drama; this is the film’s notion of God, and its summary of humanity.

From this, Dunst emerges as heroine in the Claire half, because while the approaching planet’s atmospheric trickery prompts in Gainsbourg the shortness of breath and panicked grasping of anxiety, Dunst has already been through everything, and can emerge as a confident, validated, sneering asshole anti-savior; as always, von Trier makes no effort to appear particularly likable, whether off-camera or through his movie avatar. It is ‘my disease is harder and stronger than yours, and so I am harder and stronger than you,’ with major depression finally suggested as a ‘magic cave’ that insulates the proprietor from the horrible, inarguable shit of reality. Why Gainsbourg’s idea of putting on classical music and drinking wine at the apocalypse is worthy of instant derision while Dunst’s magic cave is known to be glorious can only be understood as indicative of inner understandings: the knowledge that nothing is beautiful, that strength is a temporary salve, and that we are only poignant because we are finally so utterly fucking worthless.

Of course, the ambiguity remains that Dunst may have just summoned the damn thing itself to re-write her life as a narcissistic heroine’s triumph to the ruin of everyone who loves her. Because that’s what depressives can potentially do. And that’s why everyone hates Mr. Lars von Trier.

The Secret World of Arrietty
Keep in mind, I liked Ponyo way more than Princess Mononoke, 2010
Joe McCulloch

In these circumstances I kind of envy critics like Manohla Dargis, who, mindful of her generalist audience, can pluck certain aspects from a foreign picture and riff comparatively without too much sweat, because for that readership the primacy of female characters throughout the Studio Ghibli catalog is a happy alternative to the wares of big ‘n easy target Pixar, and not another reminder of studio rock star Hayao Miyazaki’s formative (albeit unwilling) influence on the moe impulse in anime, a particularly slippery subcultural symptom in the big body of gender discussion re: ‘geek’ culture, which at this level of specificity is maybe just a discussion of culture knowable mainly to geeks, for all the effect it has on the public at large. I mean, shit - the Walt Disney Company has a lavish slab of $23 million feature anime playing on 1,200 screens in the U.S. right now, and I suspect its their bread & butter audience of parents or grandparents contemplating a brand-approved trip are more likely to nod toward Dargis’ broad cultural implications than the furrowings of childless J-culture sensitives seated way toward the front of children’s cartoons.

Still, I wonder if I’m not hallucinating some under-the-floorboards skittering in this Miyazaki-planned/ co-written adaptation of Mary Norton’s 1952 novel The Borrowers -- the debutante feature from director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a longtime Ghibli animation hand applying a tone of abject melancholy to much of the film’s runtime -- insofar as there’s an interesting predetermination at play in the blend of Japanese and Western visual decorations onscreen. It’s genuinely easy to forget that the film is even set in contemporary Japan, given its country setting, its regal dollhouse furnishings and its lusciously sound-captured rotary phones - My Neighbor Totoro seems an easy comparison, as are parts of studio co-founder Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday, if here by way of mid-century shojo manga’s taste for European exotica, or maybe just Miyazaki’s longstanding taste for foreign influence. Yet there is also a sequence where Shō -- a sad boy with a heart condition who’s been moved out to the sticks to stay with an elderly relative AND WILL TOTALLY KNOW ENCHANTMENT THEREFROM -- is seen conspicuously eating with chopsticks while the adults of the house dine with forks and such, both validating and upending the usual ‘bucolic locale as reservation for spirits and Old Ways’ motif by positioning the country home as inhabited by the uncanny, yes, but also representative of evidently non-Japanese ways.

This makes logical enough sense for a Japanese film adapting an English classic, but Miyazaki and co- writer Keiko Niwa take it a step further by drawing a distinction between the names of the full-sized human characters, all Japanese, and the miniature Borrower people who live under the floorboards of the house and snatch little crumbs of sustenance and pleasure from the big world - their names are taken from Norton’s works, a difference sadly erased by Disney’s U.S. adaptation, which westernizes everyone’s name as a means of presumably not losing the less attentive beans in the crowd. As such, there is less underlining the relationship between Shō/“Shawn” and willful Borrower heroine Arrietty, whose zest for life detoxifies the boy’s exceedingly mono no aware worldview, fixated fatalistically on the pathos of his fragile body and the endangered nature of the lil’ folks. His is a sensitive but do-nothing philosophy, which eventually costs the Borrowers all of the security they’ve built up, though they remain (mostly) determined to stride into a future the lad can only see as lovely in terms of doomy poignancy.

Naturally, such exposure to a foreign culture does wonders for one Japanese heart, though I wish the American voices employed for the big screens around here were a bit more up to the task. Disney Channel veteran and pop singer Bridgit Mendler acquits herself fairly well as Arrietty (the U.K. dub got Saoirse Ronan - unfair), but David Henrie (as “Shawn”) underplays to the point of blandness, as does Will Arnett, bizarrely miscast as gruff Borrower patriarch Pod, which brings back memories of Liam Neeson’s utterly bored rendition of the colorful magic daddy figure in Ponyo, a gross but typical case of a big studio cramming in as many available names as possible regardless of their applicability to the content itself. On the other hand, much as Tina Fey proved to be an excellent fit for the Ponyo world, it must be said that Carol Burnett absolutely nails the role of antagonist Haru (“Hara”), filling the house’s ill-intentioned caretaker with richly misplaced condescension transitioning into waves of sputtering confusion that sync perfectly with the goony grins drawn onto the character.

And there’s maybe something extra going on there too. Japan might be a culture that values stoically filled obligations, but I find it hard to believe an old-school Class of ‘68 leftist like Miyazaki would be entirely comfortable with the locus of villainy being the film’s primary representative of the servant class contra the wizened tolerance of a bourgeois landowner and her sickly charge. Noticeably, Yonebayashi devotes much onscreen attention to detailing the Borrowers’ navigation of familiar household spaces made weird and looming - caverns of adventure with ‘not starving’ as the prize at the end. Yet this world is ruled by folks born into evidently greater power, and “Hara’s” ‘villainy’ comes from the yawning disparity -- underscored by Yonebayashi’s mise-en-scène -- between the Borrowers’ meager takings and the caretaker’s rage at less the reality than the idea of theft from the property, to which she attributes the embarrassments of her life, and thus inevitably embarrasses herself further.

Of course, to see an unhappy, economically disadvantaged woman humiliated isn’t a lot of fun in retrospect, but then The Secret World of Arrietty isn’t all that sunny a film, so full of sweat and aching chests and spoiled wishes and ruined homes and childhood confrontations with mortality, and the acknowledgement that the born-powerful are generally going to okay while smaller folks just vanish. The takeaway, in this nonetheless Ghibli film, is that survivalist determination can be a font of shared humanity - to extrapolate specific politics from that is maybe just my own lunging toward local applicability. Hopefully I’ll get a Times rate for this!

The Grey
James Badge Dale Is All About Failing To Catch A Break, 2012
Tucker Stone

For those who have yet to catch The Grey's theatrical run, let me roll out an obnoxious hobby horse, of interest only to me: no television set is going to be able to closely approximate the experience of this film's plane crash. It's one of the most antagonistic moments I've sat through in years, and having seen the movie twice, I feel confident in promoting a theory that, for every time The Grey plays in a movie theater, there is one man who says something like "Jesusfuckingchrist" or "holyshitchrist" or just a hoarsely mumbled "goddamn". Sitting right up in front of the movie, resting as the conclusion of the film's first, melodramatic arc, the crash is depicted almost entirely by resting on the blinding white howl that faces Liam Neeson's oddly named Irish character as the plane bearing him and his Alaskan oil field co-workers heads down forever. The audio, slowly ratcheted up during the prior scene's are-we-going-down fake-out scene that quietly serves as the introduction to the film's initial group of protagonists, provides a cacophonous roar of static and turbine noise, eventually exploding into--because what else would surprise better--total silence. What follows is a quick run through of survival film basics: shock followed by bonding, a meditative lesson in death, the set up of hierarchical authority (with Neeson as the immediate, obvious head) and the first night.

The Grey isn't a realistic film, and it isn't a macho one either, and part of the reason so many of the reviews seem to have come down on it so harshly is because that's what they expected it to be. That's to be expected: it was clearly marketed as being a macho version of man versus wild, with one trailer even going so far as to use a deleted sequence of Liam Neeson leaping into the air with those infamous glass claws. If you saw that trailer--and who didn't?--and you expected that film going in, there's good reason for disappointment. As is pointed out in Ignatiy's Vishnevetsky's insightful piece, Liam Neeson's character is horrible at keeping the survivors alive. Unlike the films that The Grey cleverly mimics, the main character in this one isn't lying when he offhandedly mentions the likelihood that they're "all going to die", even better, his open admission that he's terrified (an admission that comes so unadorned with pretension that Neeson delivers the line with his actual accent, the sound of which seems to even confuse him) isn't a smokescreen for badassery, it's just a fact: this isn't going to work, and he's not going to make it.

For all of the film's excellent sequences--I doubt I'll see something with lighting this remarkable anytime soon, and the last thing I can think of that surpassed it was Barry Lyndon--the moment to beat has to be the one near the very end, where Neeson, framed at the bottom of that expansive white, cries out for actual meaning, for some evidence that what he's experienced has some sort of value or purpose. Cast against the opening of the film, where the character is depicted with gun in mouth and hand on trigger only to be stopped by the deus ex machina of a perfectly timed wolf howl, the moment is one buried in such unbelievably constructed horror (all of the film's most likeable characters having suffered tremendously brutal deaths, the last of which serves as Neeson's psychological annihilation), the audience can't help but openly cry out with Neeson that Enough Is ENOUGH, where's the helicopter or winged chariot, just/fucking/anything. This blog's own Nina Stone was heard to say aloud the phrase "Please, I just cannot do this anymore"--"do", not "take" being the word choice I found most interesting, as it implies to me that the audience bears ultimate culpability for the degradation on display. Taken to its extension, the "reason" Neeson demands is obvious to anyone: so that those of us in the stadium seats can tip or toe into death. What greater value can fiction provide?

What follows that moment is where the true believers diverge. To my mind, the implication that the film implies atheism and some sort of bootstrap-pulling self-reliance is incorrect--if Neeson's character truly didn't believe in hope, none of his actions make sense whatsoever--but as was explained to me at great length in the subway systems of New York City by a furious woman, there was ample evidence to believe that an empty, man-centered worldview at the heart of The Grey is a distinct possibility. I still can't say that I buy it, and while I doubt I ever will, there's nothing quite as stirring to find out that there's still movies out there--not "films", but rip-snorting, blood and annihilation soaked actioners with Dermot Mulroney and Dallas Roberts in tow--struggling to force that question to the dead center.

Or, to steal the colorful analysis I heard on the way out of the theater when a young woman theoretically proposed an alternate ending to the one just witnessed?

"Bitch, this ain't Underworld. There's no coming back."

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: At Least Whitney Missed Peter Panzerfaust

Thief of Thieves #1
Art by Shawn Martinbrough & Felix Serrano
Written by Robert Kirkman, Nick Spencer & Shawn Martinbrough
Published by Image Comics

From the back page essay, written by one of this comic's writers: "[Thief of Thieves] brings to the comics medium the same kind of story you'd get in a movie, novel or a TV show, but we're utilizing the strengths of what our medium has to offer in order to tell the story."

That statement is referring to a comic book constructed almost completely out of widescreen panels, most of which utilize the same basic film tricks that even the most low-grade television show has. Consistently featured are tricks like repeating an image of a blank expression so that the character being depicted can be seen pausing before delivering a punchline, or using stark, capitalized sentences atop the image to illustrate that the story has jumped to a different time or place. The story is--no kidding around here--about a weathered and wearied criminal who wants out of the crime racket while he still has his teeth intact. His possible thwarting may occur at the hands of his spunky hip chick protege, who has tattoos to go with her piercings, or it may occur at the hands of a balding, overweight crimelord/father figure who wants him out there pulling another big job. How much do you want to bet there's a black guy with glasses who is really good with computers coming around the corner? You should be able to spot him easily, as he'll be accompanied by a fat guy from the Middle East who handles weaponry and/or lives in a strip club.

Then again, maybe this comic really is "utilizing the strengths of what our medium has to offer". It just turns out that Robert Kirkman believes one of the medium's biggest "strengths" is that most comics readers are unsure of how to turn on a fucking television set. That's always possible.

Batman #6
Art by Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion & FCO
Written by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo
Published by DC Comics

This is the conclusion of the first story arc for the series, and it turned out to be the hipster douchebag version of that old Batman mini-series by Jim Starlin, The Cult. The Cult was DC's first post-Miller attempt to do a Serious, For Mature Adults story featuring Batman. In the end, that just meant watching Batman get himself physically and emotionally debased for multiple issues before rising up and returning the favor in full--which is exactly what this new story was as well. Here, the main violence done to Batman is at the hands of a character named Talon, a character who looks so much like Marvel's Nighthawk that it'll get your dog pregnant. Mostly, it's just a violent fight comic, which is the sort of thing that DC publishes a lot of. The difference this time around is that the Batman fight comic doesn't look like shit, and that somebody--a somebody with some actual sense, which is kind of a surprise--got the word count down to a manageable, less leave-me-the-fuck-alone number.

B.P.R.D. Hell On Earth: The Long Death #1
Art by James Harren & Dave Stewart
Written by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & James Harren
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Featuring the best last seven pages of any comic you're likely to find, The Long Death would probably get called "A Return To Form" if the previous story, Russia, hadn't turned out to be as good as it was. On the strength of this one issue, The Long Death does seem like it's going to be even better than Russia was, as this looks to be the first BPRD story since that John Severin War On Frogs issue to be going for the Holy Fucking SHIT audience so hard that it sort of makes my teeth hurt, which is totally a good thing. If this were a poker game, I'd go all in: this one is just that fucking good.

Lobster Johnson: The Burning Hand #2
Art by Tonci Zonjic & Dave Stewart
Written by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Tonci Zonjic
Published by Dark Horse Comics

The big comment this time around on Lobster Johnson is going to be the one about Tonci Zonjic, and it's totally obvious why: the guy is extremely talented. The way he sets up and delivers the final panel in this issue--where the old Chekhov adage is followed, and a first act fedora is finally removed--quite nearly bends the comic in upon itself, forcing one's attention to rest on a single image so well known to BPRD readers that its mere appearance behaves like a kidney punch to the memory. There's more going on than one panel, but basically, this is everything one could want, assuming that what one wants is good shit.

Peter Panzerfaust #1
Art by some guy with a David Tennant fetish
Written by some other guy with a David Tennant fetish
Published by Image Comics

This is--jesus fucking christ, get ready--a Peter Pan story set in World War 2 era France, or at least, set in a gray color field littered with brown and green squares that people keep calling World War 2 era France. The main character (his name is Pete Panzerfaust) rescues some orphans...some lost boys...and then he helps them jump really far...almost like they're flying....all while generally behaving with the same cloying, inhuman perkiness that you always find in comic books trying to seperate themselves from the nasty antihero books that everybody else puts out. Or maybe the guy just won't grow up. Like the song from the movie. But hey, maybe you're into this sort of nonsense. Some people are! Those people should probably be put on a watch list. A suicide watch list. Because liking this will make you want to kill yourself. Clap if you believe in fairies!

Winter Soldier #2
Art by Butch Guice & Bettie Breitweiser
Written by Ed Brubaker & Jackson Guice
Published by Marvel Comics

There's so many wonderfully tiny images in this comic--a smudged bit of darkness to stand in for a shadow, a sihoulette of a gun being covered in snow, a scribble that stands in for a hand, degrading fragments when an image gets blown up too many times...it's all very much in a Steranko vein, but it's so much less enamoured by the world in which its contained. It would be over the top to claim it for something other than Marvel, and it's only a matter of time before their insane release schedule cripples this title the same way that upcoming Punisher crossover is going to kneecap Daredevil, but that's just the way these kinds of comics are going to be from now on, apparently. All minutes, no hours.

Daredevil #9
Art by Paulo Rivera, Joe Rivera & Javier Rodriguez
Written by Mark Waid & Paulo Rivera
Published by Marvel Comics

Nice issue and all, but really, this fucking foodie thing...like, there's a reason most of the people who buy Daredevil and read Marvel Comics don't pay attention to conventions, twitter feeds, this blog or the thousands of others like it, and that reason is all wrapped up and personified in this letters column, which features a picture of the writer of the comic being carted off by the corporate cargo shorts guy to said guy's current most-preferred trough. Like, do we really need to do this? Why not just shit on a child's face at his mother's funeral for a couple of hours, post a video of that? Either method is as repugnant. Seriously, clap if you believe in fairies.

Red Hood and the Outlaws #6
Art by Kenneth Rocafort & Blond
Written by Scott Lobdell, Josh Williamson & Kenneth Rocafort
Published by DC Comics

This is a flashback issue that fills in the gap where "how these two people know each other" was, with the two people being Jason Todd (the Red Hood) and Starfire (the hardbody orange girl who wears the metal bikini). The backstory is, no fooling, a naked shipwreck that results in the two best things that a young man can experience, which is A) playing with superguns and B) getting crazy laid, thus proving once again that Red Hood and the Outlaws is the number one DC book if the contest were Not Being Completely Full of Shit About What the DC Audience Likes To Read.

Secret Avengers #22
Art by Gabriel Hardman & Bettie Breitweiser
Written by Rick Remender & Gabriel Hardman
Published by Marvel Comics

One of the many weird things that goes with reading super-hero comics is the acceptance that, while all super-heroes can be categorically organized as being essentially indistinguishable beyond their differences in costumes, there will always be a few specific ones that you just fucking despise to such a disproportionate degree that it will make you feel a little bit insane every time you remember said hatred. Example? Captain Britain and his second rate Captain America outfit. Is there any super-hero character as pathetic as this guy? Even that joke version of Captain America from the JLI, General Glory, was more inspiring than Captain Britain, and General Glory spent half of his existence as an old man with his speckled ass hanging out of a hospital gown. It's not that this particular hatred comes from the realization that Captain Britain represents some dunderheaded criticism of the UK as a place so devoid of ingenuity and innovation that the best hero they could hope for and create is a half-ass imitation of Captain America--in fact, that explanation is one that only exists after the fact. The guy is just eye cancer, which is the opposite of eye candy.

Plastic Man Archives Volume 5
By Jack Cole
Published by DC Comics

The fourth volume of these Plastic Man reprints flagged a bit, with the moment where the character takes on the form of an amorous whale (submarine sized, mind you) the only Gold Medal of Weirdness on display. But whatever it was that had killed Cole's enthusiasm seems to have been removed from his diet by 1946, as the stories from this period are right back up there with the cartoonist's previous high points. This time around, Plas goes after the likes of a man who can send anyone (except Woozy) into a deep coma merely by mentioning that a nap might be a good idea, a gun-wielding psychotic who likes to masquerade as a bespectacled infant and a couple of goons who go pretty far into Jack Bauer territory on a small child, all so they can get a magic lamp working. Although it's a waste of time to pretend that the audience for this volume aren't going to read Volume 4 no matter what let's go ahead and do so: this one makes that one look like the proverbial piece, and if there's only minutes left to choose? You know what to do.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Thread of Tears
Art by Goseki Kojima
Written by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima
Published by First Comics

This is another installment of Lone Wolf and Cub where the Wolf deals with the fallout from an earlier battle--specifically, he has to face off against the widow of a samurai he'd killed a ways back. She's been laying in wait for him since that day, weaving and crying (hence the title of the story), and as there's never even an implication that she'll serve as a dangerous opponent, Koike and Kojima utilize the battle as a chance to drive one of the saga's pet moments home once more. That moment comes up when little Daigoro falls through the ice into a nearby pond (at this point in the story, a bitterly cold winter has set in), only for the Wolf to ignore his drowning son's cries completely. Stoic even in the face of possible tragedy, he explains the true way of vengeance to the woman as he has numerous times in the story so far. His explanation is then echoed in Daigoro's own actions, as the little boy refuses the offer of rescue the widow almost immediately provides. As she has shown herself to be his father's villain, any help she offers is to be rejected, even if one's own death is the result. It isn't the first time in the series that Daigoro's burgeoning metal has been put on display, but that doesn't make it any less potent. Another excellent installment.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

My Wife: Wants Belit's Oufit, Would Like Conan To Get It For Her

You may have guessed that I have not been choosing the comics myself lately. You're right! By my request, we've gone back to the old way, with a comic book landing in my hands that the "boss" has picked for me. How does he decide? What are his reasons? You'll have to ask him. I have time to read the things, and that's about it.

And so, here we are with Conan, The Barbarian, starring in "The Queen of the Black Coast, Part 1."

It starts in the midst of action. I like that. I like that a lot, actually. No heavy handed inner-dialogue while some character sits around "thinking" and thereby catching us up on the story (you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about). Just a little bit of scene setting and then BAM! Conan, on his black horse, riding through a city, down some stairs and leaping onto a ship. That's some fun stuff! The first two-page spread in this comic is pretty gorgeous. The pages of this book even seem thicker than most comics, too. I liked it, it made the book feel heavier, manlier. I never really got used to it, and kept thinking I had accidentally skipped a page due to the feeling of the page between my fingers, but I liked the experience it gave me. Going slowly through a comic that's a story like this--it made it better, somehow.

After the horse-jumping and yelling, there was this great little scene, with that "thing" that you men-folk are often portrayed as doing. You know, you sort of fight with each other first, either with words or fists. Then, through that interchange, something grows your respect or disdain for your "brother". In this case, the bad-assness of Conan earns him some the respect and friendship of his shipmates, it becomes mutual on Conan's side, and a true loyalty is born between him and Tito, Master of the Argus. I liked that part. It was quick, but it felt like it really happened.

After all the fun stuff, we're soon introduced to a woman named "Belit". She's something in the Bitch-Goddess magical creature variety of person, this one a "scourge, a plague among the seas." That's part of her description, and she's drawn with ivory skin, jet black hair, curvier than the Pacific Coast highway, and there's fire coming out of her eyes and blood dripping from her mouth. Yeah....that's where it started to get a little weird. I got a bit distracted, wondering if she was a vampire. And why is her tounge sort of poised at the opening of her mouth like that? And wait, what is going on with those fire eyes? How's she stay so fit? What's going on?

That happens to me with these kinds of stories sometimes, I don't mean to do it on purpose. There will be a thread, and I pull on it a little too hard, and something starts to unravel. I feel like I'm being mean, but I really don't mean to do it, it isn't purposeful. Here, everything was fine, it all made sense and I believed it, and then I saw that blood on Belit's lips and all of a sudden it was like a bunch of cars stopping short in my head, and all those cars are the parts of the story you just have to accept if you're going to participate in the story.

Anyway, the thing with the blood shouldn't have been that big of a deal, but it sort of stands out as where I started to get lost. After Conan hears about Belit, lo' and behold a series of events lead the characters (Conan, Tito and his Argus-ian crew) to sail further out than they expected to and voila, they encounter a ship from a distance that seems to have encountered Belit. 

What does that mean? Well, it's a ship, initially depicted in a silhouette that seems to convey tattered sails and a deserted ship. Conan, in what I assume is some kind of act of loyalty, decides he's going to go take stock of this situation and jumps into the ocean to swim to the ship. 

And this is where this comic takes a sharp turn and the last seven full pages made no sense to me whatsoever.

First we see Conan get on the ghost ship, only to find dead people and blood everywhere. He calls out Belit's name, and we see that simultaneously, on the other ship, Tito is sitting with his head in hand and head shaking (I think?) and then we cut back to the ship, where Conan has just yelled "BELIT!"

And then we cut to Conan, who is in the water alone.

Then Belit is with him. Next frame, they kiss. Next frame, she sort of lies down on him in the water. I think. The next frame looks like a whirlpool is sort of happening and the two of them are lying on top of the water? Unless the perspective is just drawn weird and we're really supposed to be seeing them as underwater - and she's choking him? I don't know. 

On the next page--and I'm sorry, this must be boring to read but I'm still trying to figure it all out--the scene shifts from pinks, purples and flesh tones to icy blues and greys. Conan is returning to the ship, or waking up, or coming to after being attacked, or just sitting up...or anything, I'm not sure. But it's happening on a ship and he's all alone and it's foggy or something. It almost looks like winter. Eleven different frames of him sort of coming to and looking around. Seeing another ship across the way. Is it Tito's ship? Did he never actually leave Tito's ship and this was all a dream? Did he never actually make it onto Tito's ship in the first place, but back in the beginning jumped on some boat and hit his head and knocked himself out?! I sincerely doubt that last one, but I don't have to, do I? There's no real evidence to the contrary. By that logic (or absence of logic), I could, of course, make any claim I want. I don't want to do that. I just wanted to understand the process as I experienced it.

On the next page, there is more of the same, and then Conan spots Belit in her little porn-y belly-dancing outfit on the other ship. She looks at him, with her tongue out (of course she does, I love her, she's such an obvious tramp) and he yells "Alarm!" and is suddenly surrounded by men on a ship that I thought was deserted. 

And that's it.

I have no idea where he is, where she is or what's going on. It's supposed to be a cliffhanger ending, but I'm so confused that I just want to put the book down.

Did anyone else have this experience? It's weird that it went from such a fun and succinct little comic with all this warrior-male-bonding stuff before turning into this trippy, mythological thing that either completely lost it's way, or just completely lost me. I'm no artist, but this just struck me as a clear case of the story not being told well by the pictures. There's virtually no dialogue at the end AT ALL. It's all pictures, and eventually just becomes impossible to follow.

So. I guess that's my take on it? You know, at this point I don't want to know what was really intended to be told in those last seven pages. I would love to hear various hilarious versions. You know, like those contests they have to write a caption for a comic or photo. I'd love to see what the most hilarious storyline could be thought up to go with these frames. I doubt that was the intention.

I want to add something here--I really liked the beginning of this comic. I expected to dislike it, because it was about Conan the Barbarian, a character I only know from that silly movie...which, to be fair, I have never actually watched. Instead, I found myself in love with this story almost immediately. Conan was just so likeably bad, that perfect mix. I liked the way he was drawn, the way he did his hair up the way a woman does whenever we take off our make up (just barely pulled back into the scrunchie), and I liked the way everything else looked to. It was a pleasure to read this comic, until it wasn't, and I admit--I might be a little harsh because of that. But I don't see any reason to pretend I wasn't. I can't remember feeling this way before, and it seems ridiculous to say it, but oh well: if the people who cared about the front of this comic had taken the same kind of care with the back, they could have made something really special.

Instead they just made this.

-Nina Stone, 2012

My Wife: Will Always Have Brubaker's Back

Winter Soldier #1
Art by Butch Guice & Bettie Breitweiser
Written by Ed Brubaker
Published by Marvel Comics

I'm actually going to talk about the art in this one first. That's weird for me, right? Maybe, but I don't think I have much of a choice: it's quite striking. There's something about this art that has me thinking I'm reading an "old school" comic book that's also totally new at the same time, in the same panels. The people, are drawn "normally", by which I mean realistic. Body parts are generally in proportion, facial features have naturalistic details. But there's an overall manner to the characters, a vibe that has me flashing back to 1960's & 70's era James Bond movies, with a bit of a Rockford Files vibe here and there as well. I love that the general palette is a washed out red, white and blue--it's very subtle, but very clever. You don't necessarily notice it while reading, but upon flipping back through the comic, it's evident throughout.  

It's funny to me that I like the art, because the old 60's & 70's comic book style could probably be blamed in large part for turning me away from comic books. It's not that the style is bad, I hope that's clear. It's just the sort of thing that I saw in comic books when I was younger, and I think I associate that art style and comics with something that I didn't read or like that much. It's a sort of learned rejection, not always tied into actual evidence. But in this case, I was drawn in. Some of the things that drew me were the way the frames were played with - on the first page, our main characters are are in these great catalog poses, with The Black Widow depicted too large for the frame in which she's drawn (love that!), and there's a lot of fun being had with frame size, shape, insert and overlap, teasing out things that draw the eye in. It just made me want to find the flow of the page and see what else was going on. And, of course, I loved the romantic scenes between Bucky and Natasha. They're really intimate and sensual, and yet there's nothing X-rated (not even R-rated) about those drawings. I think that takes real artistic talent to be able to draw intimacy with such restraint.

So, anyhow, that's the art! And now, onto the story. Although it's clearly a storyline that's grown out of another story that must have been going on for a while, it's not at all difficult to catch up with. Everyone thinks Bucky is dead, but he is actually trying to save the world. He's teamed up with Natasha, the Black Widow, and they are trying to find and "catch" (I'm pretty sure they're just going to kill whoever they find) some sleeper agents (who are actually sleeping - Cold War agents of destruction who've been put to sleep in sleeper tube-things and kinda forgotten about after the Cold War ended and it looked like they weren't going to be needed) before the other side finds them and actually uses them in some kind of destructive way. There seems to be a couple of problems when they find the tubes, because they are empty. The big surprise of the issue is who shows up at the end. He's a gorilla warrior.  No, I didn't spell it wrong. He's not a guerrilla warrior, he's an actual gorilla. And he's a gorilla that screams in Russian at that! Neato!

The only funny little problems I had with these parts of the comic were when some of the fight scenes occurred. I couldn't always follow the action. That might be on me, but half the time I saw all the bullets and legs flailing about, I kinda gave up trying to follow it. Instead, I skipped to the end of the scene to figure out what happened by looking at the end results. Then I went back and tried to map out what I was supposed to be seeing. I suppose if it were a little clearer, I'd look at it more. I can't figure out what I really need changed though, because the problems I had with the fight scenes seem to stem from the same experimentation that I liked so much in the more intimate, talky scenes.

The other thing that seemed kinda, um, unrealistic sandwiched within the realistic art is that neither Natasha or Bucky ever seem to get hit. I finally asked my husband if they had some kind of unspoken magical powers or something, because...seriously. Is there something I don't know? Because Natasha seems to just back flip over every bullet that ever comes her way, and Bucky never seems to get hit either. They seem to be completely invincible. Is that the case?

Apparently, its not true. I'm told that she doesn't age normally, and maybe that's what keeps her so agile, and I've read (and extensively analyzed) about Bucky's robotic arm before. But they are not magic.  

All that aside? I found Winter Soldier to be an entertaining and somewhat thrilling read. It's got one heck of a cliffhanger, too! A maniacal machine gun toting Russian Gorilla screaming "DEATH TO AMERICA!!!" It definitely makes one wonder, "What happens next?"

-Nina Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: Pardon Our Brevity, We're Still Recovering From That Thing With Madonna Singing All Our Childhood Favorites

Blazing Combat #3
Art by Joe Orlando, Reed Crandall, Eugene Colan, Alex Toth, Wallace Wood, Gray Morrow, John Severin
Written by Archie Goodwin, Alex Toth, Wallace Wood
Published by Warren

This is excellent, of course. These issues (as well as others) were collected by Fantagraphics a few years ago, but there's something to be said for cracking open the yellowing pages behind Frank Frazetta's somber illustration of an American soldier standing knee deep in a pile of dead Vietnamese soldiers, the faint sky blue smoke rising from his rifle. Anti-war war comics are tough work--you're basically saying that you're planning to be entertaining, but this is the kind of entertainment that should leave you stroking your chin and looking off into the middle distance--and it would be impossible for all of those attempts to stick the landing. But if you take a second look at the line-up of talent this one bears, it's no surprise that so much of it does work. Severin's story is a nasty piece of EC style "surprise, asshole!", delightfully stocked with the same kinds of expression heavy faces you'd find in a Maguire Justice League. Toth's is pure post-apocalyptic lechery, with a climax that will appear doubly insane to modern readers. For my money though, the best thing in this package is Reed Crandall's "Foragers". A classic slice of that war comics staple--fragging the lunatic in charge--blessed with the sort of caricature style art that nowadays only shows up in movie parodies, if it shows up at all, and its reliance on brevity only ups the savagery with which it delivers that most classic of messages: Don't Be a Fucking Asshole.

Animal Man #6
Art by John Paul Leon, Travel Foreman, Jeff Huet, Lovern Kindzierski
Written by Jeff Lemire
Published by DC Comics

This issue of Animal Man is taken up with a comic length presentation of a super-serious film version of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass by way of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, (in the comic it is credited to "Ryan Daranovsky" which is just adorgahhh), which, in the DC Universe, features the Buddy Baker character in the starring role. As this is a standard super-hero comic in 2012, there's only enough room to show what would probably be the first 8 minutes of a movie, and the best thing one can say about it is that it's an incredibly accurate depiction of how fucking mealy mouthed and boring a super-serious film version of Kick-Ass would be; that is also, unsurprisingly, the worst thing one could say about it. The comic drones on for a while in this fashion, and whether you think it's being pretentious by choice (as a way to comment on the disgusting immaturity of a man who chooses ego validation over doing things like "pay child support") or not will be determined by whether or not you actually read the comic in question. Theoretically, there's probably an argument to be made here, but when you put the whole thing under the lens of working human eyes, it becomes rapidly apparent that "being a super-hero" is something that non-pieces of shit stop doing the second some girl barfs their kid out of her vagina.

The Punisher #8
Art by Marco Checchetto & Matt Hollingsworth
Written by Greg Rucka
Published by Marvel Comics

Although this leans so heavily on film tricks that half the reading experience consists of pages of Checchetto drawing zoom effects on dead bodies and plugging up the page with "establishing" shots, it's actually a pretty engaging comic, almost like it's being so in spite of the way everyone involved would apparently be happier storyboarding David Fincher movies. Rucka's take on the Punisher is still an unwelcome return to the stories that get told whenever the character is being written by people who can't shut the fuck up about their own personal disagreements with Frank's horrible (and yet still fictional) worldview--and in this case, it's the old "make the surrounding situational ethics unassailably in Frank's favor, and then spend as much of the comic's page count as possible amongst other characters"--but the comic is still so deeply immersed in that professionals-only landscape that Rucka tends to do best in, and it all sort of works. As long as they keep the Spider-Man types and wistful grandmothers at arm's length, this book has actually gotten pretty decent.

Justice League International #6
Art by Marco Castiello, Dan Jurgens, Vincenzo Acunzo, Hi-Fi
Written by Dan Jurgens
Published by DC Comics

This is probably the purest mediocrity that DC has, a comic so boring that its ideal audience would be found in a locked room containing a Rubbermaid tub of semen with a Tupperware container of ova floating in it, as that way you'd be at an absolute Ground Zero, surrounded on all sides by something that has never had the opportunity to know any better. Even trying to find something in the story to point to as evidence deserving of cruelty is a pain in the ass, this comic, such a slippery eel of banality. Near the end, there's an exciting tease of a moment when a woman in the UN's "Security Group" is depicted wearing a dress seemingly cut from the exact same design that one sees on the United Nations flag, but then there's a close-up drawing and you see that it's just a bunch of little white palm trees (?) on a blue background--still without class, but not as hilarious as one could have hoped for. That sequence also features the funniest part of the comic's script, although it isn't legendary or anything--just a bunch of mid-grade super-heroes making excuses and playing victim for multiple pages. It brings up one of those intermittent questions that arise following the reading of too many super-hero comics: don't regular civilians despise these fucking clowns? Wouldn't they despise them further, to see them whining and passing the buck? Comics or real world, it's the same old song, the reason that girls don't like "nice guys": because desperation and pleading are the ugliest things on the planet, and we've been bred, correctly, to treat weakness with the virulent contempt it very much deserves. Failure is nothing more than that, its failure, and you better hurry up and get married if you want anybody to care that you have a cold and cry sometimes, Booster Gold. Because if there's one thing we've got plenty of, it's another clown with a self-esteem problem and a bunch of fucking gadgets.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Woodshed: 2.3.12

Over at the Comics Journal, you'll find a rambling take on the recently concluded B.P.R.D. Hell On Earth: Russia. Look for more of these in the future, or just wait to be told that they've arrived: only you know what your future schedule allows.

Over at Flavorwire, you'll find a list of upcoming comic releases that seemed worthy of spotlight. Most of what's on here won't be a surprise to anyone who ends up on this blog in the first place, so let me just stress two items: Joost Swarte's Is That All There Is and Derf Backderf's My Friend Dahmer are two of the best comics that are going to come out this (or any) year. Don't let them pass you by.

Here at TFO, we've had the regular bubbles of activity--Comics of the Weak continues its sojourn in the deserts of the weird, Nina read the only issue of The Walking Dead she ever will, and then there's some clearing of the throat regarding some books n' such.

In the extended family edition, you can find Joe McCulloch with an excellent essay on Soderbergh's Haywire over at MUBI: don't pass it up, even if (like me), you've yet to see the film. He's that good, that Jog! Meanwhile, fellow trench warfare combatant Matt Seneca took up the Herriman challenge and succeeded brilliantly.

In my other, day job identity, I've been happily piloting this little tumblr for Bergen Street Comics. It's still in the figuring-out-what-we're-doing-with-it stage, but for now, we're pretty happy with it.

In other Bergen Street news, Benjamin Marra has unleashed the details for his upcoming art show, including the poster, which (of course) is totally awesome.

You neglect the badge at your peril, brother.

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My father's uncle lived across the hall from Ben Gazzara for many years, and my dad has a few solid stories about the guy. I wish I could remember a single one of them.

I uploaded some footage of me being a racist and getting slapped by Halle Berry in a television mini-series. It's a torturously shit thing to watch, but hey, I was able to afford a Chevrolet Blazer with the money I got paid, and I remember that being pretty fucking cool.

This flick, on the other hand, looks great. The way its shot brings up memories of White Ribbon, but I imagine using such a hardcore strain of religion will result in a far different film.

 

Like everybody else, I've been a Longreads addict for a while now, to the point where I've started buying magazines off the newsstand for the first time in years, just to keep up with all the great writers they've introduced me too. "The Story of a Suicide" is only the most recent example of the sort of well researched, well written articles that they're plugging. It's really telling how tempted I am to try to and summarize the article's key points into some catchy couple of sentences, as the problems inherent in that sort of of summary (and the internet's love of trafficking in that sort of writing) are one of the many great takeaways to be found. The subject matter (the suicide of a young gay man, and his roommates ensuing legal battles) isn't the most palatable, but that will only be a barrier to the very few.

"I haven’t been on the Internet since the ’90s. Whatever people think is their business, and they can blog, they can be trolls, they can do whatever. That’s their business. That’s their privilege, as they sit alone at 4 o’clock in the morning. That’s their privilege to do whatever they want. I choose not to engage in it. I find it very unhealthy, that environment."- Lucy Lawless, interestingly enough.

I'm sure I'll come up with some boring, shitty jokes about Watchmen soon enough, but right now I just think the whole thing is obnoxious and sad all around. The only non-Twitter reactions I've honestly read about this whole thing are the ones from Abhay Khosla and this one by David Brothers, and while I'm positive that Chris Mautner and many other people will deliver intelligent and/or funny responses on the subject, I think I'll tap out this time around. I'll be hearing what people think about the subject plenty at the shop, and that'll be where I do my penance.

Comics are clearly heading in a direction away from where I would like them to be headed, and that will have to be okay. If this is what people want--and I have come to believe that the industry as it currently stands is exactly what the people want, and I believe websites like The Beat, Newsarama and Comic Book Resources provide plenty of evidence of that fact--then they should have it. I am happy to leave it to them.

No Pictures: Where My Trash At, Sucker

The Third Reich
By Roberto Bolano, 2011

It's essentially a warm-up book, in that the best bits (like the weird rhythms of male friendships that can ultimately make the "bad times" indistinguishable from the "good times") all eventually made it into Bolano's later, better books. It's totally understandable that the Bolano translation squad want this older, less polished material out there, but good God, it really is unnecessary stuff if you aren't a grad student. Featuring an obnoxious, role-playing-game obsessive as he goes through a coming-of-age experience way too late in life, Third Reich's only local claim to fame is that it provided this reader as a graphic, painful reminder of how incredibly irritating it is when self-righteous prigs yammer incessantly about their geeky hobbies. Udo Berger--the jackass at the heart of this novel--never stops telling people about the dice and paper war game he's so awesome at, and he never stops believing that the only thing preventing people from caring is an all-encompassing "they just don't get it" If you ever wanted to experience the serious literature version of cringe comedy (without any comedy to lessen the sting), then this one's for you. Otherwise, just knuckle down and start 2666 all over again.

Zone One
By Colson Whitehead, 2011

I came to this one with the expectation level set a bit too high, and that's not fair to Whitehead. However, I still found this book was ultimately a failure, as it's attempts to toss some "ideas" at zombie fiction ended up being no different from the type of commercialism critique that George Romero pulled off in Dawn of the Dead, and Whitehead's seemingly bottomless disdain for action sequences became impossible to stomach. It's totally fine, and maybe even laudable to throw a forearm up in the face of genre's continued advance, but doing so within the confines of a zombie novel? It's absurd, and yet that's exactly what Whitehead does, over and over again, with nearly every scene featuring a battle strip mined of anything approaching excitement or human feeling, with the absolute worst portion being the sequence near the end where its happening to one of the only two characters that Whitehead has built up enough for us to care about. As with almost any genre story, one is so starved for endings that it's hard not to finish reading the thing, but that's more the luck of the field than it is any skill on Whitehead's part. At this point, an Intuitionist sequel no longer seems too much to ask. Please?

Cain
By Jose Saramago, 2011

On paper, Cain sounds like it would be a stunt book, an insubstantial trick--the Old Testament, retold from the point of view of what 2012 calls "snark merchant" and what Adam called Son. But with Saramago at the helm, the experiment takes on heft, and all that serial under-casing stands without a whiff of pretension. More than anything else, it's just funny--not on every page, but consistently enough so that the narrative never flags. Short, but excellent.

Do The Work
By Steven Pressfield, 2011

Complete nonsense, but pleasant nonsense. This is not really a book, it's a hardcover collection of a guy poking you to finish projects and follow your bliss, but in a masochistic, manly way that will appeal to people skeeved out by A Course In Miracles and The Artist's Way. The most interesting thing about is pure speculation of the Faked Moon Landing variety, and that's this: the book is published by something called the Domino Project, which is some sort of Amazon funded enterprise, and if there's one place that would love for more people to churn out nonsense that other hopeful nonsense-churners will buy cheap eBook editions of, it's Amazon. I couldn't prove it (and won't be trying, because that would ruin the fun) but I would be that the primary consumer of shitty first-draft e-published novels by wanna-bes is, hands down, other shitty first-draft novel producing wanna-bes. At least, that better be true. My future children's health insurance is depending on it.

Nobody's Perfect
By Anthony Lane, 2002

Second time all the way through this brick, which consists mostly of Anthony Lane's movie reviews. Tom Spurgeon has tried to convince me that Lane isn't all that great due to the man's feelings toward the Speed films: my apologies, but it'll never work. Nobody writes as sublimely as Lane, with the only exception to that "nobody" being the wonderful Joe McCulloch, who could probably teach me to love I Am Curious Yellow, which would be no mean feat. Alongside Ignatiy Vishnevtsky, Lane is the writer who I most fervently wish I could someday become, if only because theirs are the tastes I find myself most closely sharing, to say nothing of how much more passionately I find their writing.

This time around, I was able to look past the stylistic twists and specificity of the various value judgments a bit and see that one of Lane's most laudable habits is his total unwillingness to permit the personal failings of the artist or author to derail his feelings toward the work itself. It's a challenge that seems to have become far, far too prevalent in discussion today, with critics and artists scanning twitter and facebook constantly to confirm that neither side is getting too out there with their political or social commenting. Lane dispenses with it constantly in this collection, essay after essay, displaying patent refusal to allow the likes of Evelyn Waugh's shitty personal behavior to ruin the sentences he created, and Lane''s able to do it (and this is the hard part, I think) without letting each instance turn into a treatise on why you have to do that. (To be specific, he never even tries: he just tells you he doesn't care, and then he continues forward.) It's a tough act to pull off, to tell us you aren't going to care without forcing us to decide whether we care too, and then lead us back to the work that matters in the first place. The best example is his essay on Harold Bloom; coincidentally, there's no better example of a man whose longtime critical work has been stuck on the rocks of responding to his critics (while criticizing other critics at the same time, like a caged animal laying waste to those who are only trying to help free him) instead of focusing on the work that got him there in the first place.

It's a difficult path to follow, what Lane's doing. He's here to talk about the books, and yet he's got to address the problem that the author faces--in Bloom's case, it's how impossible he finds it to ignore the cries of sexism, amongst others, that land upon his back--without the entire essay becoming a study in those conversations. It's a tough trick, as sexism is like super-hero comics or "least favorite tv shows", in that its a subject that tends to dominate the conversation the second it enters the room, with everyone striving to have the last word. Lane manages it with grace, but I'd be goddamned if I could tell you how he does it. The only thing I can confirm is that it's a trick he's mastered, as he pulls it off everytime he needs to.

Honestly, I thought I might grow out of this guy. Ten years later, I'm delighted to find out that will probably never be the case.

-Tucker Stone, 2012