I review Beasts, Lynda Barry’s Best American Comics, and a big art book called “Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture” in this week’s Chicago Reader. The first line of the review was supposed to be:

“For the latest Best American Comics anthology, guest editor Lynda Barry has selected works that are richly literary, deeply felt, and fucking boring.”

Something got lost in the editing process, alas. It’s still pretty mean, though, so I guess I can’t complain.

On the other hand, I liked Beasts a lot.

Culture 11, for whom I have been doing a lot of writing over the last five months or so, very suddenly went out of business yesterday.

This really makes me sad for a number of reasons. First and most selfishly, the site had quickly become my favorite place to write for. My editor, Peter Suderman, was a joy to work for, and I got to write about a whole crazy range of things, from C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, to gospel music, to bluegrass, to the Indian Cinderella. I was looking forward to publishing an essay on the Friday the 13th series (which should appear somewhere else, I hope) and an essay on the just-released Bob Wills boxset (which will probably never get written) and one on Barack Obama slash fiction (which really, really will probably never get written.)

Second reason this sucks is that the editors at Culture 11 are all out of jobs. They were a smart, thoughtful bunch of people, and I enjoyed working with them and (occasionally) debating them. I wish them all luck.

Finally, I think Culture 11 was just a great site. It was basically a center-right conservative website, but one which was willing to print and engage in conversation with a socialist-pomo-whacko like myself. I really appreciated that. Conservatism in general seems to have been hijacked in this country by a lot of insular hacks (to an even greater extent than is usual in politics.) Having a place dedicated to using conservative ideas to challenge and interact rather than to hunker down and fulminate was, to me, extremely heartening. I was honored to be a part of it.

I’ve been watching a lot of slasher movies recently. I really like the Friday the 13th series (I have an essay on the box set coming out soon, hopefully.) This one however…eh. It was okay. I know it’s supposed to be one of the more critically acclaimed slasher films…and the effects are certainly good…but the eighties synth music really irritated me, and the relatively complicated script really showed up the mediocre acting. Also, the characters are overall too likable; there isn’t the tension between wanting them dead and worrying about them that I enjoyed in Friday the 13th. In other words, I think the things that tend to make Nightmare more critically accepted — more complex plotting, less open sadism — are the things that made me like it less.

Not that I disliked it. It was fine. It’s just that Freddy is no Jason.

I have a review of Mo Willems children’s books up on Culture 11 in which I compare his use of motion to that of today’s comic strips. Here’s the obligatory sample paragraph:

Though Willems simple character outlines and neutral backgrounds are obviously derived from animation, the grainy quality of his chalky lines and their inherent feeling of dashed-off imperfection gives the drawings a tactile oomph. That sense of contained movement on a static surface, of personality within the line, is one of the great joys of comic-strip cartooning, and Willems’ mastery of it is, I think, part of the reason his books have been so popular with both kids and parents. For instance, in the Elephant & Piggie book, Today I Will Fly!, Piggie is determined to get herself airborne. Willems illustrates her hapless hopping with energetic thick dotted lines, which trace her tergiversations from right to left across the layout, then back from left to right on the next page — and ultimately, through a short hop and uuuuuuup in a flying leap onto poor Gerald’s much-colonized head. Those dashes are, literally, a physical delight: my son likes nothing more than to trace every single one of them with his finger. If I forget and turn the page before he gets a chance to do so, I’ve got something very like a pigeon tantrum on my hands.

So I was in a comics store today for the first time in a while. LIttle hole in the wall place in Chicago’s Logan Square. We went in because…well, it’s a cold day, we’re trying to find something to do with the little one, and he loves super-heroes — and his parents like comics — seems like a good move, right?

Well, not exactly. My wife found some things she liked (Kabuki, the Yoshitaka Amano illustrated Wolverine-Elektra), and we did get a solidly OK comic for Siah — one of the new super-friends titles, where Bat Mite dresses all the heroes in Bat costumes. It’s cute, if not especially cleverly done. But what the hey, he likes it, it’s not dreadful, what more can you ask.

Unfortunately, the boy also saw a copy of some horror vampire-batman atrocity. For one reason and another, he managed to look at it without us cutting him off. He seemed fine at the time, but, as he said later, “sometimes it’s not scary in the daytime, but then it gets to be night and you’re scared.” And so he was. I just finished calming him down enough to get him to sleep, but I strongly suspect I’ll be in there again at some point in the middle of the night. Lucky me.

Which brings me to super-hero decadence. The back and forth around super-hero decadence in the blogosphere recently seems to be over whether super-heroes should act heroically (Bill Willingham said yes, Steven Grant said maybe not so much, etc.) The argument really seems mostly beside the point to me. The real question is, who is the audience here? Are these characters for kids? Or are they for adults? Is it about funny adventures, goofy plots, and colorful characters? Or is it about sex and horror?

The reason decadent super-heroes can seem so, so wrong isn’t because sex and horror are wrong; it’s because super-heroes are really meant for kids. There aren’t stories where Thomas the Tank Engine turns into a vampire. There aren’t stories where the Snoopy is gang-raped. There aren’t stories where the Cat in the Hat starts ripping people’s arms off. Because, you know, that stuff is for kids, and, aesthetic atrocity aside, you don’t want to fuck up the brand.

Of course, Batman *was* kind of scary initially, before the comics code and the TV show made him more for younger audiences. And different super-hero stories have been initially aimed at different age levels (Marvel obviously a little older). But the point about super-hero decadence — the reason that it is decadent — isn’t the moral ambiguity or that there’s sex or violence — all of which occur in genres that aren’t especially dilapidated. The new James Bond films, for example; sex, violence, moral ambiguity — but that’s fine, because sex, violence, and moral ambiguity fit perfectly well in those stories.

No, what makes super-hero decadence decadent is essentially marketing; their branding is completely incoherent. Super-hero comic are either for kids, or they’re built around a snickering defacement of something that is for kids. It’s thirteen-year olds drawing dicks on Dagwood. It’s not boring and icky because it’s morally complex or evil; it’s boring and icky because it’s dumb and obvious. Of course, when the 13 year olds do it, it’s also kind of funny — but it really loses something when you up the production values and pretend to take it seriously.

Anyway, the result of all of this is that, though I don’t blame the comic-store owner (my job to watch out for my kid) and while I certainly don’t think any permanent damage was done, I’m going to be even more leery now of taking him into a comics store. Which means I’ll be even less likely to spend money in a comics store. Which can’t really be what comics companies want, you wouldn’t think.

Update: Valerie D’orazio linked to me and then connected super-hero decadence to some nut who dressed up as the Joker and stabbed a bunch of kids.

I just want to say…I don’t think that art affects people quite that straightforwardly. I mean, if you’ve got a guy nutty enough to stab kids, you’ve got a guy nutty enough to stab kids; I don’t think it’s Heath Ledger’s fault that he went out and stabbed kids.

I didn’t even like Dark Knight that much, and I thought it’s moral stance was overall dumb. But…well, Charles Manson went off on a song about playground equipment….

Ta-Nehisi Coates and his commenters are whining that nobody likes the inaugural poem enough and he argues that if you don’t read a lot of poetry you should just shut up and sit down. I left a comment which seemed sufficiently mean-spirited to repost here:

To my ongoing sorrow, I have read a lot of contemporary poetry over the years. Elizabth Alexander isn’t horrible by those standards…which means, yeah, she’s pretty bad. I mean:

“I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.”

First line, big cliche; second line lax waffling vague imagery bordering on cliche; third line — what, did she bash her nose in the dark? This is lazy, uninteresting crap; vague inspirational jeremiad. Blech.

I think it’s an extremely good sign that people are willing to come out and say that this stuff is dreck. One of contemporary poetry’s most serious problems is the fact that people feel so alienated from it that they don’t even bother to dislike it. A little (or a lot) more healthy disdain would go a long way towards making poetry more viable, both aesthetically and (dare I say it) commercially.

So we at the Hooded Utilitarian are, at least in theory, going to start making use of high-tech label functionality. We’ll label each themed roundtable, so you can click on the label and read all the posts. We’ll also label with our names, so you can read posts by individual authors. Unless, you know, we forget to do it, which could happen.

I’ll also post the blog roundtable links on the side over there so you can click on them and read them for all posterity. (I have retro-labelled, and added our earlier roundtables on the side so you can read the blog forums of the past…today!)

And, hey, I even remembered to label this post. So far so good….