Kim Deitch is sort of a second-tier comics alterna-Deity. He’s not as famous as Art Spiegelman or Dan Clowes, or Chris Ware or R. Crumb — and his work isn’t as straight-up pretentious as any of those artists, either. As such, I’ve tended to try to ignore his stuff; it’s boring and nostalgic and generally leaves me saying, “who cares?” but it could certainly be a lot more irritating than it is.

I’ve gotta say, though, that Deitch’s cover for the latest Comics Journal is pretty fucking godawful. (It’s reproduced below: copyright Deitch himself, or the Comics Journal, or some combination of the two, presumably.)

How does it suck? Let us count the ways….

1. Butt-Ugly Drawing
I’ve never been a huge fan of Deitch’s draftsmanship, but seeing it in glossy four-color really pushes it from “eh” to “ergh.” The character designs are awkward and flat and generally unmemorable. Neither realistically detailed, nor cartoonishly amusing, nor beautifully stylized, they hit that particular sweet spot of aesthetic alterna-nullity. Really, it seems like he drew this in Toys R’Us while gazing at some particularly unappealing humanoid plastic detritus.

2.Massively Lame Layout
Yes it’s cluttered and awkward, but it’s the clichés which kill me. The ironized faux pulp action cover page with the exclamation points and little yellow Splash! Bang! panels — how many more thousands of times do we have to see this crap? I guess it was sort of funny when underground folks like Deitch did it in the 60s…but that was getting on 50 years ago now. Could we come up with another cutesy layout gag to cover for the fact that we have no idea how to organize a page? Please?

3.Boring, Insular Content
We know you’re being interviewed, Kim. But couldn’t you maybe come up with something a little more interesting than just a picture of yourself and your relatives talking on the phone with Gary Groth? I know that would require a modicum of imagination, but it is a goddamn four-color cover — a showcase, you know? And no, putting that lame cat who’s in all your comics on the page doesn’t qualify as whimsy — it’s just another way of saying that you only have, like, the two ideas. (Incidentally, I did peel off the cover sticker; there is Additional Secret Content under there which, I am pleased to report, is just as boring and clichéd as the plainly visible content. Points for consistency, I suppose.)

I don’t know…maybe Deitch was having trouble meeting the deadline or something? As I said, I’m not a fan of his art in general, but this does seem a cut below his usual standard. In any case, it’s kind of embarrassing for a magazine devoted to comics to have such a thoroughly crappy cover. To say nothing of the embarrassment to the alterna-fanboys who worship this stuff (and yes, that includes you, Chris Ware.)

(To be fair, I thought last issue’s Tim Sale cover was beautiful. I guess they can’t all be gems…)

Update: Through the bizarrely instantaneous power of the Internet, there’s already a thread on the TCJ message board about this post. Ben Towle very politely suggests that I have crossed the line into personal attack, which certainly was not my intent. He also posted this image from Deitch’s Alias the Cat:

I quite like that, actually. It’s got a very nice Winsor McCay feel with the clean design and the manipulation of scale. He’s actually using the fact that his figures look like stiff, creepy dolls, too — and I really like details such as the smoke belching out of the castle. The colors are beautiful too, again in a McCay/art deco style. I can certainly see what Chris Ware loves about him here. So obviously Deitch can do imaginative, exciting work…. I don’t know, maybe there really was a deadline problem? Or maybe TCJ just brings out the insular hack in all of us?

Bitch Magazine has digitized one of my short articles; a review of Joanna Russ’ We Who Are About To. (You’ll have to scroll down a bit after you get to the page.)

I just read this really entertaining column by Tucker Stone about the much ridiculed Justice League of Detroit — a continuity blip when all the A-list leaguers wandered off and the title was left with Aquaman and a bunch of newbies.

I can’t remember if I had all those issues,but I certainly remember the sequence where (as Tucker describes) the newbies were killed off. It was extremely brutal and cold and quite sad. Tucker seems ambivalent about it, but I think those were actually excellent stories; as is so often the case, the only time the series really seemed to figure out what it was doing was when it terminated. A lot of that was, I think, because those last stories were written by J.M. DeMatteis. I think he wrapped the Detroit series up as a prelude to his goofy run with Keith Giffen — a run that also, actually, had a lot of suprising emotional depths.

So anyone know? Am I remembering right that DeMatteis penned those last few JL Detroit issue? Or am I just making that up?

Been a bit busy…but if you miss my prose, I do have a Winsor McCay review in the new Comics Journal, which is actually supposed to be in stores….

This review first appeared in the Comics Journal.

“[S]uper-hero comic books…aren’t taken seriously in the critical community,” Timothy Callahan claims in the introduction to his monograph *Grant Morrison: The Early Years.* If that’s true, books like this are the reason. Instead of in depth analysis, Callahan provides his readers with lists of themes, like *chaos* and *sacrifice* (and yes, the themes are printed in italics.) Rather than synthesis, he gives us tedious, page by page plot summaries of every single damn issue. And rather than attempting to arrive at any complex conclusions, Callahan merely gushes out bland fanboy boosterism. As the final sentence states, “…Grant Morrison is, indeed, a master of the medium.” And then there’s this gem: “[*Arkham Asylum* is] a more fully realized combination of words and images than almost any comic-book story every published.” Or, translated, “Manga? Underground? Duuuh…what dose?”

The book is amateurish in every bad sense of the word. There’s no index. The proofreading gaffes are sometimes so overwhelming as to make the text difficult to read. And there are multiple errors of fact. Callahan claims, for example, that “the reader isn’t told” why Cliff Steele’s robot body explodes after a brain transplant in Doom Patrol #34 — but, in fact, Morrison takes a panel to tell the reader exactly that (the body wired itself to detonate in case of brain transplant.) In another instance, Callahan states that Morrison’s filching of older copyrighted characters has made it difficult to collect and distribute the Zenith comics in trade paperbacks. But in an interview at the end of the book, Morrison says that the problem is actually a rights dispute between him and the publisher over ownership of the Zenith comic itself.

This interview at least, is worthwhile. Callahan’s questions are sturdily innocuous, but Morrison is game, talking about his interest in magic, his time on the dole, his relationship with his artists. He also politely punctures several of Callahan’s pet theories, which (given the level of animosity I had worked up after trudging through all 200-odd pages) is quite satisfying. But overall, this book just made me embarrassed of my 12-year old self, who probably would have had enough sense not to enjoy reading it, but might well have written something like it if he’d had the chance.

*Grant Morrison: The Early Years* is supposed to be the first in a series from Sequart “devoted to the study and promotion of comic books as a legitimate art.” From now on, I plan to avoid them all: including the next one, entitled “Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy From Comics to Screen.” ‘Nuff said.

Update: Callahan and others have at me on a thread here. Callahan argues that I have a prejudice against super-hero books. As regular readers of this blog know, that is simply false. I hate everything indiscriminately.

Updeate 2: In comments, Julian Darius, the publisher of the book, notes that many of the errors I point out have been corrected for the recently released second edition. He also provides a lengthy rebuttal, and (politely) upbraids the Comics Journal for its lousy proofreading — a palpable hit.

Blogs are all about self-promotion, so what the hey….

I’m currently looking around for freelance writing opportunities. If any blog readers have leads or ideas, let me know. My email is noahberlatsky at hotmail.

Thanks all.

Finally found another decent John Carpenter movie; Escape from New York isn’t exactly great, but it’s entertaining and intermittently thought-provoking.

It’s especially interesting in light of all the women-in-prison movies I was watching recently. The plot (Manhattan Island turned into a huge isolated prison in a miliaristic/crime-ridden near future) seems more-or-less lifted from Stephanie Rothman’s Terminal Island, about a similar quasi-fascist solution to crime.

Terminal Island does use a smaller, less well-known island to house its prisoners, of course. But the real difference is in the gender politics. Terminal Island is Rothman’s vision of feminist revolution and utopia. The island is under the fascist/feudal control of a white guy and his black vassal; women are owned and exploited for labor and sex, while most of themen are just exploited for labor. A group of outcasts captures the women, and together the multi-ethnic, multi-gendered revolutionary force overthrows the patriarchy, instituting a low-tech paradise of communitarian equality and peace. The end.

Escape from New York is also obsessed with patriarchy and pecking order, but there isn’t any feminist utopian vision. Indeed, there are hardly any females in the movie, period. For a quasi-mainstream, quasi-exploitation director, ohn Carpenter is really, really uninterested in women as sexual objects. There are only two women in the movie; one literally falls down a hole and disappears as soon as she tries to kiss Snake (Kurt Russell); the other lasts a little longer, but doesn’t actually do a whole lot more. Instead, we get to see the leather-clad Snake wrestle big sweaty men or exchange meaningful glances with Lee Van Cleef.

The whole movie, in fact, is one long male-dominance ritual. In part, this is played straight — Snake is a man’s manly man; super-violent, super-tough, speaks in a whisper, and constantly sneers, doesn’t give a shit about anybody, except that he is decent at the core…etc, etc. Anyway, Snake’s the hero and he beats everybody up and screws over Lee Van Cleef; so yeah, he’s super-cool dominant male archetype, hooray!

At the same time, there’s a lot in the film that can be read as a satire of the male pissing-match. The plot revolves around the President of the U.S., whose plane crashes in New York. Snake has to get him out — but before that happens, the Pres is abducted by the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes, doing a big bad blaxploitation thang.) The President, alpha-dog in his own bailiwick, is tortured and brutalized — given an object lesson in macho maleness. Not unexpectedly, he crumples, constantly shaking, whimpering, shouting on command “You’re the Duke of New York! You’re A number 1!” Even while being rescued, the President remains thoroughly cowed; he never helps or offers any assistance; Snake has to drag him around like some useless…well, some useless woman, right?

The only point in the movie where the President takes any kind of initiative is towards the end. He’s on the top of the wall, about to escape to freedom. But instead of going quietly, he grabs a machine gun, and starts laughing maniacally as he shoots the Duke, who’s stuck down below. “You’re the Duke of New York! You’re A number 1!” he squeals in a high-pitched mocking voice. It’s like Lord of the Flies, or something; except the inclination isn’t that the President’s inner-caveman has been let loose, but that this is who he really is anyway, all the time. That’s macho posturing, and it’s what it means to be President — shooting people who don’t have a chance, mocking them, and then turning around and having the rest of the world pretend like nothing happened.

Of course, you could also argue that the President’s problem isn’t that he’s a man, but that he’s not enough of a man — if he’d been cool when he shot the Duke, that’d be fine. Still, it’s a pretty great take on the Presidency (better than that crappy Tom Clancy movie — what was that called? Air Force One?) I bet this is a favorite Frank Miller movie — it really reminds me of his best stuff, where the extreme machismo teeters on the line between sincere appreciation and parody.