Monthly Archives: May 2010

Senses Abound: Comics and Art, Theory and Bullshit

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In which our fair blogger talks a bit about her critical theory and new critical approaches.

It’s been a nicely theory laden past couple of weeks here at HU, and I’ve enjoyed seeing Noah and Caro argue Lacan and Freud and Foucault.  Suat has his own lenses with which to approach comics: he’s always got some wonderful, surprising old comic art to reference and post in relation to whatever we’re peering at.  Richard has a rich and interesting knowledge of capes and artists and writers and storylines.  And our collaborators and columnists will no doubt have their own ways of thinking or talking about art.

And then there’s me, wandering around being snobby about manga art and sticking my tongue out at Clowes and rolling my eyes at Alan Moore and generally being, I suspect, a bit odd.

In watching the different critics talk about their work as critics, I’ve been thinking about my own stance and my own influences.  I’m familiar with some of the modern critical thinkers like Lacan and Freud, but I don’t particularly find them interesting.  I don’t find the old critical thinkers like Aristotle all that interesting either.  To me, they’re one voice, and to be honest, these single voices are too….  I’m not sure what.

Dull?  Un-interactive?  Non-collaborative?

Maybe if I was able to argue with Caro and Noah about Lacan, he’d become more interesting, but since Lacan makes my eyes glaze and I end up saying things like “‘m awake, really, just resting my eyes there for a second, um what?”  it wouldn’t be a very interesting conversation.

But what has occurred to me, over time, is that while I don’t have that conversation, I am still busy having critical conversations.  And these other critical conversations seem both omnipresent and invisible (isn’t everyone having these conversations right now?  No?  What do you mean no?)

And these conversations inform everything I write and very much inform how I approach the art in question.  So I’m going to talk a bit about the critics I’m wandering around soaked in and what that means for me as a comics blogger and then I’m going to talk about a new project.  Ahem.

So these conversations that I’m having, that I participate and read and revel in, come in a variety of forms but are in general created over at the great morass of feminine critical art thought that is LiveJournal.  Fandom, yes, I’m talking about fandom.  There’s a whole weird, complicated set of social rules, mores, and activities in fandom but at the moment, we’re having several interesting conversations, as one does at a big party, and it helps to think of the critical thought as something of a salon and a collaborative effort.

Instead of an icon like Lacan, I think of broad topics with a twisting path of conversational threads, often centered around either wank or a communal discussion of a notable issue.  So it’s, say, the Gabaldon Wank this past week, and in that wank, we’ve been talking about fanfic versus profic, how art is created (ie, not in a vacuum), authorial rights, porn, BDSM in published works, why gay characters always have to be evil/sadistic/die/fuck the opposite sex, and whether Marion Zimmer Bradley got screwed over by fanfic (answer: no).

Now, I understand that every community has conversations like this, and it seems as though of some of these topics are discussed via forums or blogs in comics, but one of the most notable aspects of the fandom I run in is two things: One, there’s a lot of private conversations (locked, so, like private parties) where people refine their ideas amongst friends and can talk more freely and two, there’s a lot of effort put into truly collaborative linked, meta works so that the conversation can be read as a whole.

There are individual people who gather links and then post them to create a new conversation (with or without their own take), there are communities whose sole purpose is to find interesting critical posts and wrangle the links together (like MetaFandom), there are communities where the links are wrangled and then new conversations take place (like Unfunny Business or FandomWank), there are wikis, and on and on.  It’s all based on the idea that many people are having a group discussion and that the group discussion itself is worthy of note, and that anyone may join in at any time and be of interest.

This is not to portray fandom as a nice place, because it isn’t.  It’s kind of like getting a lot of sharks together and tossing in a penguin to play with.  Manga critics: not nice people!

But this is a very much a difference from, well, the folks who run things round these here parts.  I remember reading the “welcome” post from the head honcho here, Gary Groth,  (who I’d never heard of) and being shocked at the rudeness and also the lack of buy-in, to use an annoying business term.  He doesn’t think the web provides useful or interesting criticism.  And he said so in his welcoming post to his new online critics!

Odd.

In my neck of the woods, you never know who will be the next awesome commentator or the coolest writer or the worst troll.  Could be anyone (there was an infamous incident of a TV producer getting banned once, fer instance).  Conversations of note aren’t just a few of the same people talking, but tend to get metafandomed and then spread like wild fire until posts reach many hundreds of comments and the poster has to take a valium and go offline for a few days (not a joke, and I have seen this happen several times).    Sharks, like I said.  Also manga critics: still not nice.

It leads to some fascinating theory.  You can read posts like How to Suppress Discussion of Racism which was brought about by fandom discussions of various artistic works.  That’s easily recognizable as theory and criticism.

But there are other aspects to the weird world of fandom.  One aspect that I love is that nothing is sacred.  Fandom writers write about, work with, and criticize everything.  TV fans talk about comics, comic fans talk about audio books, book fans talk about commercials, real person fans talk about music, it’s all mashed up and spun around and shaken not stirred.  And it makes for some, well, pretty weird art.

Because, like its approach to critical theory, fandom thinks pretty much anyone can play in the sandbox and use whatsoever tools they’ve got lying around to create art.  Want to read one of  the best takes on a gay relationship between two characters on a TV show?  Read about them as GirlScout cookies in a multi-media piece here.  Not work safe.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Not safe for work gay cookie porn.  It’s got over nine-hundred comments and it’s really, really good.  Trust me!

But that’s the thing about fandom.  You can love TV today and comics tomorrow.  Or love comics and then love TV.  You can use your powers as a lawyer or as a sculptor or, god save us, a knitter.  Podcasts.  Videos.  Audiobooks.  Comics.  Novels.  Poems.  Theories.  Archives.  Charity auctions. Social networking code.  Anything and everything rolled into one big, gooey pile of confusion and collaboration.

I suspect that most of the critical comics world doesn’t know about fandom’s take on comics (manga or American) because fandom is so damn messy, and wading through a thousand and one posts on Adam Lambert’s hair or Rape Culture 101 doesn’t appeal to them, or feels irrelevant or uninteresting.  Fandom blogs are a lot less single-focus than comics blogs seem to be.  My own blog, while sometimes discussing modern class theory as shown in fantasy and SF, is currently discussing nail polish.

Just as a for instance.

But the mismash of media makes for a lot of interesting art.  It means that feelings, themes, plots, and characters are re-interpreted and re-invented time and again by many people in many ways.  Art that started out as a TV show becomes a written and drawn comic.  Comics become stories.  Novels spur audiobooks.  And comics, including modern American mainstream comics, become perfume.

Oh yes.  Perfume.  Officially licensed , commercially sold perfume.

This is not like that wretched Spiderman lip gloss crap.  (GROSS, people.  GROSS.  Do. not. want.)  That was an attempt by The Powers That Be to commercialize a product that would appeal to girls just in order to make some random bucks.  Hint: speaking as a girl, if you can’t match MAC’s lipglass, I ain’t touching it, and I’m sure as heck not putting anything associated with Spidey’s goo near my lips. Ew.

No, what I’m talking about is a re-imagining of the comic, the characters, through a different sense entirely.  What is Hellboy as a scent, rather than a visual image or written story?

Which is the question I shall be addressing in my upcoming posts.  What is the Hellboy character as a scent?  What is the comic?  How are they related, and when the scent is realized, what emotions does it evoke?  How successful are such imaginings?

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab‘s perfumes are well known in fandom circles and are usually referred to as BPAL.  They’re a small perfumer, working in tiny batches, handmixed, and without a major in-person retail outfit.  The scents themselves have quite a fandom following on their own, but one of the most fascinating aspects of BPAL is the way that they explore imagery, ideas, and characters through scents.  For a long time, they have had a series of perfumes that evoke places, Shakespearean characters, Lovecraftian horrors, Alice in Wonderland, and deities.  They have also explored art pieces as scents, as in the Salon series.  (There was also a limited edition floating world series, but it’s gone now.)

When I mentioned the idea of this series to Noah, he seemed startled, but encouraged me to proceed.  “Truly bizarre”, in his words.  I think it’s a bit difficult to startle Noah and I’m quite pleased to have managed it.  In my world, switching from medium to medium is quite common, and can result in some truly spectacular art.  Or some truly eye searing horrors, such as the infamous Care Bear BDSM story (which I would like to forget thankyousoverymuch).

What this means is that I will be exploring comics and scent.  Comics re-imagined in a new sense, literally, from the visual and verbal to the sensory input of the nose.  Hellboy.  Witchblade.  Neil Gaiman’s works.  Boom Studios.  Sachs and Violens.

I don’t know all of these comics, so I’ll be reading them and smelling them at the same time.  I’m curious, as some of the folks around here have no doubt actually read all of the comics in question, if anyone has favorite characters whose scents they’d like to see reviewed or explored.  Are there characters you think I’d find particularly intriguing?  Is anyone already familiar with these scents and have a favorite?  Is BPAL completely new to you?  Have you experienced comics in a different medium yourself that you’d recommend I check out (such as, I don’t know, the comic fandom version of cookie porn?) as I go through this exploration of re-imagining?

Or, you know, do you now need a valium and a lie down after finding out about the Care Bear thing?

Dyspeptic Ouroborus: What am I doing? What are you doing?

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I was wondering about what people do when they practice criticism. Everyone here writes out their thoughts about comics, movies, music, etc. What are you doing when you do that?

What I do is to feel my way. Whatever I’m writing about, I want to write about it as if I had never seen the thing before. What is this thing you call “comic”? How could it ever have come to be? Why do people keep it in existence? And how did this particular example of “comic,” the one I’m holding, fluke into being? What can we tell about ourselves from its existence?

I guess at answers by keeping my eyes open and noticing everything (trying to, I mean), and I refine my guesses by comparing them with what I know of the world, including the people and industry that produced the item in question (the comic, movie, or whatever).

So I start out pretending to know nothing, then I pull in what I know or think I know. It’s quite a change of gears, and in either case it’s like I have to take myself by surprise, ambush my perceptions from a direction I don’t expect.

Always getting blindsided and feeling like a dope can get your adrenaline up, even if you’re just typing your thoughts about Civil War. But it can also leave you ragged. The “ah ha” moment come by often enough to keep you playing, but most often it’s like you’re trying to find your cold medicine in an ocean liner and the lights have gone out and the damn floor keeps moving.

Possibly somebody else might follow the same approach that I do, the same “dream it up/check it out” two-step, and that person might not feel at all stupid. Instead of “Everything I know is useless,” the person might think “I see the universe in a plum!” Instead of “I can’t possibly be right,” he’d think, “My flashes of perception are transformed and broadened by my sure knowledge of the world.” Which makes that hypothetical second person sound like a fatuous ass, but whatever. You don’t have to suffer to do good work.

And it’s very likely that other people follow quite a different method. The thing is, I don’t know anything at all about how other people write criticism. I’ve never studied the subject and never thought about it, beyond noticing that critics I like don’t necessarily supply opinions I agree with. (For instance, Pauline Kael and Citizen Kane’s alleged “dime-store Freud.”)

Anyway, how other people write criticism. It involves theory, right? As indicated above, I proceed by sensibility and fact-checking. My ideology (which I won’t try to define) is always there, but it sneaks in. I never feel oriented, never proceed from an overview, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to.

Review: Dan Clowes’ Wilson

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Synopsis with significant spoilers. “Wilson is a big-hearted slob, a lonesome bachelor, a devoted father and husband, an idiot, a sociopath, a delusional blowhard, a delicate flower.” His misanthropic existence is filled with misdirected rage and a search for meaning and connection. His closest companion is his pet dog, Pepper, but his father’s death prompts him to leave her in a quest to find his ex-wife, Pippi, and his daughter, Claire. He finds them both with the aid of a private investigator but this fleeting happiness ends when he is imprisoned for kidnapping his daughter. When he is finally released after a period of 6 years, he discovers that his dog has died. His ex-wife is already dead by her own hand. His one time dog-sitter, Shelley, becomes his only consistent companion. Wilson is briefly reunited with his daughter and discovers that he has a grandson. The connection is short-lived and she will only communicate with him through the distance afforded by an internet connection. The closing page shows him at an uncertain rest while contemplating the fall of raindrops on his window.

Continue reading →

Anything but Capes: More Crime

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Bronx Kill
Writer: Peter Milligan
Artist: James Romberger

I learned two things from reading Bronx Kill.

1) In my previous post on crime comics, my definition of the genre was too narrow. Most crime comics tend to be about hard-boiled detectives, vigilantes, or dangerous heists. In other words, they’re typical male adventure stories. But there is another type of crime story: the missing loved one.  Like hard-boiled detective stories, the plot is based around a mystery – what happened to my missing wife/lover/child/etc. – but the mystery is much more personal for the protagonist, and the emotional impact of the crime is far greater. Missing loved one stories can sometimes function as vengeance fantasies, which could be seen as empowering. But more often than not they’re much bleaker stories where death and loss are inescapable, pain is all-consuming, and discovering the truth is actually far worse than not knowing. The most famous example of this sub-genre is The Vanishing, in which a man obsessively searches for his missing wife for three years, only to discover her terrible fate by sharing it.

Bronx Kill faithfully sticks to the missing loved one formula. The plot follows a novelist named Martin Keane, who wakes up one morning to discover that his wife is gone. Her disappearance has a strange connection to the murder of Martin’s grandfather and a rundown section of the Bronx riverfront named, obviously, the Bronx Kill. As the weeks go by, Martin’s sanity begins to slip, and he becomes increasingly irrational and violent until he finally stumbles upon the awful truth. And as these stories tend to go, the truth is far worse than the mystery.

Judged solely on its merits as a missing person mystery, the Bronx Kill is a decent comic. Milligan never strays far from genre conventions, but he knows how to pace a story and arrange the pieces of a plot so that the outcome isn’t obvious from page 1. Romberger’s art is functional and unassuming; it doesn’t add much to the comic but at least it doesn’t distract from the story either.

The one tedious aspect of the mystery is Milligan’s attempt to connect the main plot to a crime novel that Martin Keane is writing. The comic will occasionally be interrupted by a few pages of text about a murder in 19th century Ireland. Unfortunately, the novel is boring, and Milligan’s prose is often a chore to read. Rather than function as a thematic reflection of the main plot, the prose sections simply screw up the pacing.

2)  The other thing I learned from reading Bronx Kill is that writers are not manly. I’ll repeat for emphasis: WRITERS ARE NOT MANLY. Apparently, this is the great tragedy of being a writer. You can create entire worlds and populate them with fascinating characters who enrich people’s lives, but at the end of day you’re still an impotent wimp. Worse, you’re a wimp who has to be saved by your girlfriend after being threatened by a bum.

And then there are the daddy issues. God help the writer who has a father with a manly profession, like law enforcement. 50% of Bronx Kill is just Martin dealing with the fact that he can never live up to the expectations of his old man, a respected New York police detective. And while I’m trying to avoid being spoilerish, I can’t resist noting that Martin is cuckolded in an exceptionally emasculating manner.

To be fair, Milligan seems to know just how ridiculous it is for writers to constantly fret over their masculinity. Martin Keane may not be as tough as his father, but he eventually realizes that his dad is full of shit. And Martin is at least competent enough to solve the mystery of his missing wife (albeit only after a big clue falls conveniently into his lap).

But acknowledging the shortcomings of the masculine ideal isn’t the same thing as coming up with an alternative. And Milligan is still working within the confines of a male genre, so the climax of Bronx Kill is the same as the climax of most crime stories: fists, guns, and screaming. Nor are the wife’s motives of any real importance. This is yet another story that’s all about men dealing with their crappy fathers.

Bronx Kill is an uneven, occasionally engaging entry into an often overlooked sub-genre of crime, though a reader’s enjoyment of the comic is dependent on their tolerance for writers with daddy issues.

Not the Best

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Suat pointed me to the Comics Reporter, where Tom Spurgeon interviews Ben Schwartz about his new book Best American Comics Criticism.

I’m hoping to do a review of the book itself at some point in the medium term, so I don’t want to shoot my mouth off too much. But I did want to highlight this interesting exchange:

SPURGEON: You touch on Europe’s concurrent literary comics movement through a few piece, but the pieces that engage manga are limited to I think a single interview with Yoshihiro Tatsumi and I didn’t see anything that dealt with an on-line comic. Do you think that’s a weakness of the book? Was that about the kind of work or about the writing you encountered? How would you describe their omission to someone who really values those kinds of work and thinks they’re as much a part of the modern comics movement as anything? Is there something qualitatively different about the writing done on those works?

SCHWARTZ: It’s not an omission. It’s just not the book they want to read. Tatsumi is not there to represent manga, but gekiga, the Japanese version of lit comics. His choice to break with manga is as big as Eisner’s in splitting with the superheroes, so that’s why he’s in it. I’m going by his definition there. As for on-line comics, I never came across a piece or interview about them that stood out like that. Do you feel, between 2000-2008, that a great piece of writing was done on on-line lit comics that I missed? Lit comics and it’s post 2000 arrival in the mainstream lit world is what the book covers. I just didn’t find anything on them that relates to the book — or 2000-2008 Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, etc. So, it’s not a weakness of the book. It’s the point of the book. I’m a huge BPRD fan, but that’s not in here. Except for Pete Bagge on Ditko’s Spider-Man and John Hodgman on Kirby or Gerard Jones on Siegel and Shuster and the first wave of fans — not much.

Schwartz is clear about this in his introduction too — his book is focused specifically on the rise of literary comics between 2000-2008. That’s his topic. He has a strong narrative, focusing on the emergence of literary comics, and he chose pieces based on how well they fit into that narrative. The best piece of criticism ever may have been about manga, or on-line comics, or mainstream comics, or may have been written, for that matter, in 1968 — but none of those pieces are eligible to go in this book, because this book focuses on criticism about literary comics between 2000-2008.

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not a fan of the literary end of comics, as regular readers will know, but I have no objection to someone who is a fan putting together a book to cover the phenomena. It’s obviously a big deal over the last decade. I don’t think it’s unworthy of attention.

My one objection, though, is…well the title of the book. Here’s the cover.

If you’ll look closely, you’ll see it’s not called, “Literary Comics, Literary Criticism, 2000-2008.” Hell, it’s not even called, “Best American Comics Criticism, 2000-2008.” It’s called, and I quote, “Best American Comics Criticism.” Period. No dates. No caveats. Just “Best American Comics Criticism.”

Now, if you title a book “Best American Comics Criticism,” I think your readers are entitled to assume that it is a book comprising the best comics criticism written in america. Not the best comics criticism written about the comics you happen to think are important. Not the best comics criticism written between 2000-2008. Just the best american comics criticism. Because that’s what it says on the title, you know?

Of course, I understand how these things happen. Schwartz and/or Fanta wanted to create a book focusing on the lit comics revolution they care about, without having to think about manga or on-line comics or random comics criticism written 50 years ago by god knows who and lord knows who holds the rights. But they figured that a book called “Literary Comics, Literary Criticism, 2000-2008” would sound like it was created by a bunch of boring, insular stuffed shirts who rarely peer over the towering castle walls of the luxurious Fanta compound. So they figured, “you know, if we call this Best American Comics,” it’ll sound like all those other “Best American” books, and people will buy it because they like Best American things — and, what the hell, literary comics are the best anyway, and only the best people write about them, so it isn’t like we’re lying really.”

I mean, I don’t begrudge Schwartz and Fantagraphics trying to sell books. Capitalism is capitalism, and you do what you have to. But given Gary’s longstanding insistence that commercial crap is evil because it is commercial, and his further longstanding belief that literary comics are the antidote to said commercial crap, the fact that this valedictory love letter to all things Grothian is making its way into the world festooned with the most cynical brand of marketing doubletalk is pretty amusing. If one were as uncharitable as Gary can be about such things, you might even call it contemptible.

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Update: Speaking of marketing, Fanta apparently has a big 30-50% off sale on TCJ back issues. So check it out and maybe support the company that supports us (even if they occasionally regret it.)

DWYCK: Flipping the Script — Cartoons and Classical Art

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A perhaps unlikely, but nevertheless useful starting point for discussing cartooning is classical art—not seen as its polar opposite, but rather as its elevated obverse, similarly aspiring toward truth.

Polykleitos’ famous Doryphoros, or spear-bearer (c. 450-440 BC), as it survives in a Roman copy, is a good example. Acutely aware of the particulars of human anatomy, the sculptor distilled from empirical study a now-lost canon of perfect proportion, which applied mathematical principles to the creation of beautiful form. Neither the body, nor the face of the statue appear to us as an unadorned depiction of a man, but nevertheless convinces us of its truthfulness to nature through the sculptor’s evident, careful attention to the human form. It works as a rational prototype unto which we can easily map ourselves.


We learn from Pliny that the Greek painter Zeuxis (late 5th century BC) had similar concerns. Famously having to paint Helen of Troy, he took from five individual models their most beautiful traits and combined them to render that historic beauty. His painting, then, was an abstraction from nature used to project a recognizable prototype. An approach that has as much to do with Aristotelian cognition as it does with Platonic idea.


In his groundbreaking Essai du physiognomonie of 1845, the cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer describes cartooning as a way of portraying the soul of the individual through the condensation of traits into archetype. He further noted that it does not require systematic study of nature, but rather works through a system of almost sign-like notation, immediately identifiable to us.

Sound familiar? To be sure, there are important differences between classic and cartoon form, and the latter has indeed been regarded as an irrational mockery of the former through the modern age, but their fundamental endeavor seems to me strikingly similar. One deals with rational prototype, while the other focuses on profane archetype; one necessitates a detailed understanding of nature’s principles, while the other requires a good eye for human physiognomy and behavior.

Essentially, however, they are both idealist endeavors, distilling experience into visual forms, and thus appealing to what is described by neuroscience as our understanding of phenomena through prototypes synthesized in our brain, into which new experiences are integrated and thereby processed.

Töpffer was writing at a time when the cartoon was more pervasive in society than it had ever been, but as a way of drawing it is as old as representational mark-making. In the renaissance, the kind of notational, linear, and exaggerated drawing today associated with it, appears in marginalia, on the backs of canvases, and in other places one would expect to find doodles.

A compelling example is the suite of heads on the back of Titian’s so-called Gozzi Altarpiece in Ancona (c. 1520). Surely drawn by the master, and probably his assistants, when the huge panel was still in the workshop, they run the gamut from naturalistic to grotesque, and in places approximate minimalist abstraction. And several of them, most notably the female profile on the right, recall classical form.

Leonardo, Profiles of an old and a young man, red chalk, Florence, Uffizi


The most famous doodler of the age was, of course, Leonardo, who throughout his life would populate the margins of his manuscripts with a variety of grotesque heads. An outgrowth of investigations into human morphology and the spectrum of human emotions not unlike Töpffer’s, they embody his notion that an artist would invariably express his self, resorting to its subconscious typology if his attention veered from manifest nature.

It is surely no coincidence that Leonardo’s two most repeated heads, the grotesque so-called ‘old warrior’ and the beautiful young ephebe, invoke classical models—the former is adapted from portraits of the Roman Emperor Galba, while the latter clearly reflects the Hellenistic ideal of beauty. As with Titian, it seems a natural impulse on the part of the artist, reminding us of the strategies of simplification integral to classical art, and of the fact that all art, from the exalted to the grotesque, seeks a synthesis of idea and form in its search for truth.

Utilitarian Review 5/8/10

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On HU

This week on HU, Erica Friedman wrote her first column, in which she discussed whether or not feminine and lesbian perspectives in comics exist.

I highlighted some comments from the Fiore/Berlatsky grudge match.

Suat explained why the Unwritten doesn’t deserve an Eisner.

I discussed time and change in volume 3 of Ooku.

I reprinted a review of Lilli Carre’s The Lagoon.

Vom Marlowe looked at Bran Doll

Caro talked about how Anke Feuchtenberger writes the body.

And Suat provided an appendix of Feuchtenberger drawings.

Tomorrow we’ll have the first of Matthias Wivel’s columns — so be sure to click back!

Utilitarians Everywhere

Speaking of Matthias, he’s got a discussion of the Fumetto festival online at tcj.com.

Anyway, good art tends to thrive on the fringes, and Fumetto is as great as any showcase of the best contemporary comics have to offer. Amongst the highlights was an inventively curated exhibition of the work of Nadia Raviscioni, with focus on her new, autobiographically inflected fantasy, Vent frais, vent du matin, ten years on the making. Beautiful, funny and inventive work synthesizing big-nose cartooning and textural illustration in pages that alternate naturally between gag mode and oneiric suggestion, this promises to be a major book.

Also on tcj.com, I reviewed a really bad coffee table book about Wonder Woman.

Instead, we get a hodgepodge, mishmash Wonder Woman; a Wonder Woman thrashing about helplessly, but alas, not fetchingly, in the piss-golden strands of indifferent storytelling, sub-par artwork, nonchalant exploitation, and endless, grinding, remorseless continuity. Author Robert Greenberger [Update: with art Director Chris McDonnell] is a wonder himself, choosing illustrations by blindfolding himself and stumbling around DC’s offices after closing hours, while all the while cheerily and randomly retailing the intimate minutiae of idiotic, best-forgotten subplots.

At Splice Today I compare Shelby Lynne to of all things, death metal.

I’ve been obsessed with death metal recently. Decapitated, Disincarnate, Dismember, Deicide, Demilich and, of course Death; the best fucking band names in the world of music, and these are just the ones that start with “D.” I love that listening to death metal on an iPod is like collecting every word in the dictionary that could possibly be considered morbid and gross and putting them together almost at random. And yes, I’m sure there’s a band named “Morbid Gross” out there somewhere, and their singer sounds like he’s gargling knives and the music is like being bashed upside the head with a decaying goat tied to a spinning helicopter motor because that’s what death metal is, damn it. Just ask Carcass or Cancer or Cannibal Corpse or Kreator.

And at Madeloud I review the latest by nu-doom metallers Apostle of Solitude.

Other Links

Bert Stabler muses on faith, capitalism, and my recent fracas with R. Fiore.

Also in re said fracas, Charles Reece pointed me to this great essay about cultural and psychological darwinism.

And coffeeandink has a quietly but bracingly negative review of Natsume Ono’s Not Simple.