…he decided to finish the battle on his own terms. Even when we went to Dignitas,” Lavis recalls, “it was, ‘I’m pulling the pin on the hand grenade. I’m murdering MS. It’s not murdering me.’”
[comics] CR Review: Paying For It … another review of Chester Brown’s latest autobiographical comic this time from Tom Spurgeon … ‘There’s a jittery undercurrent to Brown’s work that shimmies to the surface at odd and unexpected times, a queasy energy unlike anything else in comics. That noted, it’s always enormously fun to read Brown, and Paying For It proves no exception. There’s little I can write that will ever do justice to the enormous visceral pleasure that can come with spending time in Brown’s version of reality.’
[comics] ‘Dark Knight Returns’ Page Up for Auction … ‘The original artwork for the splash page from issue No. 3, which features Batman leaping through the skyline along with his new Robin, Carrie Kelley, the first female to hold that role, is up for bidding at Heritage Auctions. The bid is currently at $100,000.’
[comics] Chester Brown’s Paying For It Reviewed … the first review I’ve seen of what will likely be the most controversial comic of the year … ‘The social cues he seems unable to pick up on, the rituals he is congenitally incapable of performing, the years and decades of accrued guilt and sense of failure he built up from missing out on potential romantic or sexual relationships, the elaborate and to-him draining emotional quid pro quo of sex within the context of the few relationships he was able to enter into and maintain (that’s the context in which he really “paid for it”) … all of that disappeared the moment he told his first whore “Uh, I’d… like to have vaginal intercourse with you.” (“Yes, that’s what I really said,” he assures us helpfully in the “Notes” section.)’
[comics] A Comic Book Lover’s Guide to Going Digital … some interesting pointers for managing digital comics … ‘For the record, I don’t mean by any of this that you should ditch paper comics altogether. I understand that for many fans, nothing beats the feel of paper, the accumulation of a big collection, and the pride of having gotten that issue “way back when it first came out”. I think both paper and digital comics are great, and have their time and place-and while I have pretty much switched to digital entirely, I in no way think everyone else “should”. I do think maintaining a digital collection, whether replacing or on top of your existing collection, is a great idea.’
[tags: Comics][permalink][Comments Off on A Comic Book Lover’s Guide to Going Digital]
7 April 2011
[comics] His Face All Red … I really can’t recommend this scary webcomic enough. Go read it…
Trudeau has always been able to take a situation and develop its possibilities over a long arc. Sometimes this has led to slapstick, as in the antics of Uncle Duke, whose drug seizures make the top of his head flip open to let bats fly out or release Mini-D, who is his Id. Sometimes it has led to gentle mocking of do-gooders, as in some of Lacey Davenport’s polite crusades. But he has never developed a situation more movingly or powerfully than in recent years with his treatment of wounded veterans.
[comics] Ten Great Moments In Cerebus … ‘I’m missing some of my favourites out here, like the whole prayer sequence (“Cerebus is a bad flyspeck!”) because the pacing of the series tends to mean a ‘moment’ can be ten or fifteen pages.’
[comics] Boy From The Boroughs … Alan Moore interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid … ‘I would have been basically going through all the decades of her life, with her getting older in each one, because I liked the idea, at the time, of having a strip in 2000AD with a seventy or eighty year old woman as the title character.’ (Moore on the uncompleted books of Halo Jones)
[tags: Alan Moore, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on Alan Moore Interviewed By Pádraig Ó Méalóid]
At the time it was published Morrison was accused of being a Nazi propagandist by people who hadn’t read the series, which lampoons Hitler constantly and mercilessly. He’s depicted as a buffoon and a lunatic, hallucinating entire conversations over cups of tea and convinced that he’s being remorselessly pursued by a trolleybus full of people with chairs for shoes. He’s as mad as a fish. At the same time he’s portrayed as a limited kind of visionary, finding the seeds of National Socialism in the rich, dark soil of the British Empire while hearing Morrissey and John Lennon singing songs from the future in his wardrobe (Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now and Working Class Hero, respectively). Morrison knew the kind of controversy he was courting, even titling the first chapter ‘What Do You Mean, Ideologically Unsound?’
[tags: Comics][permalink][Comments Off on 100 Comics To Read Before You Die]
[comics] Fantastic Four #74 Splash … a close-up look at the original art for a Jack Kirby splash page … ‘It’s funny to look at original production artwork and see where before computers came into use, the production personnel would cut out the month and date, then tape it to the publication information at the bottom of the page.’
[tags: Comics][permalink][Comments Off on A Close Look At A Jack Kirby Fantastic Four Splash Page]
[anime] Neon Genesis Evangelion: (Hideaki Anno) Reborn Again (and Again) … huge Metafilter post on Neon Genesis Evangelion … ‘What makes Eva so good is that as the series goes on, the deeper frameworks behind it become more and more apparent. It goes from a fairly standard ‘plucky teens in mechas vs giant monsters’; to a drama with explorations of growing up, shyness, cowardice, love, heroism etc; through a conspiracy reveal with betrayal and intrigue; to an all-out, reason-defying, biblically-proportioned eschaton.’
[tags: Comics, Movies, TV][permalink][Comments Off on Metafilter on Neon Genesis Evangelion]
[comics] Bane … noted Batmanologist Chris Sims discusses the orgins and history of one of the Batman villains in the next Chris Nolan film … ‘Bane is essentially the most successful attempt at creating The Evil Version of Batman.’
[comics] Respect Due: former 2000AD editor Steve MacManus … ‘Writers like Wagner, Mills, Grant and Alan Moore blossomed. New scribes such as Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan emerged. Great artists like Gibbons, Gibson, Bolland and McMahon did some of their finest work in this period on 2000AD. Amazing new talents like Simon Bisley, Glenn Fabry and Steve Dillon were nurtured in the comic.’
[tags: 2000 AD, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on David Bishop On Ex-2000AD Editor Steve MacManus]
[comics] Is Palookaville #20 The Last Comic Book? … ‘I bought Palookaville #20, mainly because I wanted to see the pictures of Seth’s cardboard city (which he says he fantasizes about as he drifts off to sleep each night), not because of the comics.’
[tags: Comics, Seth][permalink][Comments Off on Is Palookaville #20 The Last Comic Book?]
[tags: Comics, Funny][permalink][Comments Off on Real Life Quotes From A Comic Shop]
17 January 2011
[comics] Dan Clowes interviewed by Tom Spurgeon … ‘I can’t say that I would never do another comic and call it Eightball. I say there’s actually a very high probability that I would do that some day. Kind of for old time’s sake, or something. Or just to kind of rethink what a comic book means at some point. But right now it sure doesn’t feel like the thing to do. After David Boring I really should have stopped doing comic books. It made no sense to do Ice Haven and The Death-Ray as comic books. I was just so married to that format for so long, that I couldn’t have the first iterations of those work in anything but a comic book. In retrospect that seems crazy. To this day I can’t explain to people who aren’t enmeshed in the world of comics what The Death-Ray is.’
[politics] Steve Bell’s Political Cartoons of the Year … On David Cameron: ‘By way of a bonus, Cameron does not favour the depiction. He came up to me at a Spectator party at the Tory conference in October, and asked me how long I was going to carrry on with it, before advising me: “You can only push a condom so far”.’
[comics] Bill Sienkiewicz speaks about Big Numbers #3 … ‘But with Big Numbers one of the demands – prerequisites – I’d placed upon myself was to work almost exclusively from the model as possible. I was going for as great a degree of illustrative photographic verisimilitude as I could muster. Dammit, I was going to adhere to the accurate reference no matter what. It was, in retrospect, a vain attempt to control everything – everything – completely, as things swirled and collided in midair all around. This was my Stanley Kubrick period. Of course, the more I tried to control everything, the more Real Life kicked my ass. Up and down the Route 95 corridor.’ [thanks @slovobooks]
[comics] Not A Best Of: Comics In 2010 … Beaucoupkevin’s comic picks for 2010 … ‘I wanted to avoid mentioning reprints, particularly expensive large-format volumes that are already out of print, but reading all of Planetary in one dose reminds us that Ellis believes in people despite his curmudgeonly reputation. While Jakita Wagner kicking the shit out of anything that hoves into her view is my primary fetish when it comes to the title, getting an oversized look at John Cassaday’s development as a sequential artist free of the occasionally-year-long delays between issues is a genuine pleasure.’
[tags: Comics][permalink][Comments Off on Beaucoupkevin Comic Picks For 2010]
[comics] “YRUBB ORUTOO DA YREEMB UYON – – KRYPTONIU EWYRR!” … Mike Sterling on Kryptonian: ‘I suppose, once I have a spare decade and a complete collection of Superman comics, I can catalog the different ways Kryptonian has been represented over the years. Then I can finally fulfill my dream of opening a Kryptonian language camp for underprivileged children, and we can compete with the Klingon language camp across the lake… but perhaps I’ve said too much.’
[comics] The Twitter Hulks … Kottke surveys the Hulks on Twitter …‘HULK WEIGH OVER 1 TONNE. HULK KISS ANYONE HULK WANTS TO. HULK WORRIES ABOUT EDITORIAL OVERSIGHT AT MARIE CLAIRE.’ (Cross-dressing Hulk)
Cesar Romero as the Joker gets perhaps the least to do, though he certainly seems to be having the time of his life responding to the Penguin’s nautical submarine commands with an unhinged “Yo-ho!” or fluttering in terror while being stared down by Catwoman’s thoroughly inoffensive-looking house-cat. Frank Gorshin as the Riddler is, as always, incandescently insane – after he accidentally hits the Batcopter with one of his skyrwriting riddle missiles, his wonderment is so intense that it blurs the line between ecstasy and disappointment. Burgess Meredith as the waddling Penguin delivers some of the film’s best lines, declaiming with squawking relish as he contemplates the possible death of his henchmen, “Every one of them has a mother!” or urging his submarine crew to dive with the immortal exhortation, “Run silent, run deep!”
[batman] Is Batman a State Actor? … how would things work with Batman and Gotham’s Police Force in real life? … ‘Batman’s rough and tumble style would lead to a rash of Section 1983 claims for damages and probably also for an injunction against Batman’s future cooperation in police investigations. As discussed earlier, most evidence that Batman collects would be inadmissible, and police use of that evidence might bar the use of additional evidence collected during a subsequent police investigation.’ [via jwz]
[tags: Batman, Comics][permalink][Comments Off on Batman In The Real World: Claims For Damages and Injunctions]
28 November 2010
[comics] Seasonal Gift From A Famous Resident … ‘Alan Moore, who is well known for his work in graphic novels, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, is donating 300 Christmas hampers to residents in sheltered housing in Spring Boroughs, which is the area he grew up in, and to the homeless drop-in centre at the Salvation Army.’ [via @joekeatinge]
[comics] Scientists Confirm Existence of ‘Kirby Krackle’ … ‘Scientists have made an incredible breakthrough in the study of antimatter that yielded the first ever creation and capture of antihydrogen, which looks almost exactly like the ubiquitous “Kirby Krackle” visual effect innovated by the legendary comics artist many decades ago.’
[comics] Superhero or supervillain: Which lurks inside you? … ‘Plato suggested that no one could escape the corrupting influence of having the power to do anything without being caught – a sort of earlier version of “Lord of the Rings,” Galinsky said. “Power makes people feel psychologically invisible,” Galinsky told LiveScience. “It’s ironic, because in many ways they become more visible to other people.” Galinsky and other researchers have shown how people who feel entitled to their power became moral hypocrites by holding other people to higher moral standards for speeding or breaking tax laws – even as they judged themselves less harshly for the same actions.’
[tags: Comics, Life][permalink][Comments Off on Are You A Superhero Or Supervillain?]
[tags: Comics, Funny][permalink][Comments Off on Modern Men Don’t Know Enough About Comics, Complain Women]
28 October 2010
[comics] Garry Trudeau: ‘Doonesbury quickly became a cause of trouble’ … ‘As [Trudeau] wrote on the 25th anniversary of Doonesbury: Satire is unfair. It’s rude and uncivil. It lacks balance and proportion, and it obeys none of the normal rules of engagement. Satire picks a one-sided fight, and the more its intended target reacts, the more its practitioner gains the advantage. And as if that weren’t enough, this savage, unregulated sport is protected by the United States constitution. Cool, huh?’
[comics] Comics Time: Batman and Robin #14 … a review of Grant Morrison’s latest Batman comic. On Frazer Irving’s art: ‘To rely this much on subtle shifts of figurework and coloring to convey both vital plot information and to enhance our understanding and appreciation of the physical combat that is superhero comics’ bread and butter, to have the chops to pull it off and the confidence to even try…well, it’s pretty much unheard of outside of some really titanic stuff, Dave Gibbons on Watchmen/Frank Quitely on All Star Superman-type stuff. And while Irving shares with Quitely a genuine, contemporary sense of style and art that allows for neon-bright colors to really pop, his work (perhaps because he does all the color and texture himself) feels fuller.’
3.4 billion years of evolution to create this perfectly self-aware phone/flesh fusion. Are you there, Mother?Thu Oct 14 03:58:46 via webgrantmorrison grantmorrison
[comics] Super-Hero Hoarders: The 7 Biggest Pack-Rats In Comics … ‘Some hoarders are marked not just by the objects they have stuffed away into their own personal Fortress of Hoarditudes, but also by the extreme lengths they’ll go to to acquire them, and nobody — nobody — goes quite as far as Superman himself. Dumpster diving is one thing, but actual diving to the bottom of the ocean so that you can retrieve the wreckage of the Titanic and rebuild it in your living room? Sure there’s nothing else you could be doing with your time there, Clark?’
