This week saw Matt, Joe and Chris talking comics, Sean and I talking Fast and the Furious, an old column about a DC Comics panel I attended, and a book round-up. Before that, there was a Taiyo Matsumoto podcast where Joe explained the collapse of American comics--both the 90's one and the one that's coming--but my favorite part was when he said "The S stands for success". Joe's columns have been particularly wonderful as of late, but I'd also point you to his article for the Hooded Utilitarian on After Earth.
Speaking of things, here is a recording of me talking to a cabdriver who was taking me to the airport. He's explaining how semen works. The best part is when he says that it "fights with the egg".
Over in comic book criticism land, two guy took up Ng Suat Tong's challenge and delivered a couple of the smartest critiques I've seen in a while. The first was Alex Deuben, who went after Relish. Then there's these two pieces on the Before Watchmen comics. I've never read any of these comics, so I found those two articles pretty revelatory.
I'm not sure why I've been operating under the opinion that the Monkey See blog at NPR wasn't publishing stuff that interested me, but it turns out I was pretty much wrong. I ended up there courtesy of David Hudson, in search of Linda Holmes and her excellent piece on the dire state of women in (or on) film. As with most articles that deal with subjects like this one, you can not read the comments and save yourself some irritation, or you can read the comments for a while and see the actual cause of the problem described in the article played out for you in living, mouth-breathing, color.
The New Yorker has been a bastion of some of the lousiest cartoons for more than a few years now, but I keep reading them anyway, and I'm glad that I do. Edward Steed is a permanent bright spot on that front--sort of like a Kate Beaton mixed with that guy at Playboy who always did the best men-in-grey-suit jokes--and he's been even better than usual in the last few months. The best way to experience his work is while you're reading the magazine's 900th blisters-and-all takedown of a private school where all the professors are getting busted as the deviant creeps the rest of the world implicitly knows all of academia to be riddled with, but if you have to count your free time on one hand, the next best way is to head over to the Conde Nast website, where they bizarrely (and hilariously) explain every single cartoon with a level of detail only a blind person could possibly appreciate.
I usually read super-hero event comics for the same reason that I read children's comics and annoying 20-something comics: because it makes the workday way more interesting and fun to know what people are buying, reading and having opinions about. I'm less and less capable of separating my retail feelings about super-hero comics from anything approximating emotions, which is why I tend to get hyperbolic when I'm digging on Batman Incorporated or an issue of Daredevil, and that's why I'm so glad that Tim O'Neil wrote what he did about Age of Ultron. I skipped this one out of simple exhaustion, and while Tim makes it clear that I would have hated it, I won't pretend that his article didn't make me yearn for the days when a certain cabal of bloggers would all dogpile on a super-hero comic over the course of a few days. The last--I'd say ten years or so--it's become widely accepted to behave as if writing a corporate super-hero comics is some kind of art form on par with legitimate cartooning and such, and it's completely ludicrous. Alan Moore may have accomplished something with the form at one point, Grant Morrison and a few others aside, but even at their best, in-continuity Big Two super-hero comic book writers have about as much claim to the word "creator" as the guy freeze drying ramen does to the word "chef". Take a page from Ennis: treat it like a job, and shut the fuck up.
-Tucker Stone, 2013
Hahaha. That cabbie is the man. Give him his own show.
Posted by: bebreezy | 2013.06.21 at 10:15