Mountain of Judgment

I have had no notable opinions about anything since January 14th. This is for the best, considering the crushing oversupply of opinions.

I loved Matt Kindt's SuperSpy, but I haven't thought about it hard enough to articulate why. I'm supporting Obama for all of the same reasons as everyone else I know. I agree with everything I've read about the new R.E.M. album, both positive and negative. In the past few months I have finally caught up with, to my delight, the TV series Arrested Development, Jaime Hernandez's Maggie & Hopey stories, Scott Pilgrim and the Sly & the Family Stone CD reissues.

But mostly, I'm insanely impatient for the glacier currently covering Vermont to recede. I'm pretty sure there are a bunch of frozen blog posts buried in my backyard.

"I suppose the themes are lust, jealousy, betrayal, regret, obsession, super-heroes. The usual."

El Rey out in the U.S. on Manifesto Records, May 20.

as above, so below-etry
it must be hell reading my heavenly poetry

you've been bad so I spank your po-po-etry
give you a time-out for writing oh-no-etry

your rhymes are john doe-etry, I just tagged your toe-etry
dumped in an unmarked grave by my poetry

you ate the yellow snow-etry
Major Tetley in the incident at Ox-Bow-etry

I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello-etry
I'm John, Paul and George, you're just Ringo-etry

check your pants, you've got camel-toe-etry
plus they're stained bright red from your heavy flow-etry

your gun won't shoot, you're out of ammo-etry
your ass got capped by my poetry

you're stuck in reverse; I've got the Big Mo'-etry
your rhymes die on the vine; I eat Miracle-Gro-etry

Got no proof your rhyme balance is sufficient; now you’re in escrow-etry*
your lines are so straight; I pick my afro-etry
I’ve read your work, it don’t suck, it blow-etry
You can't keep up; I think you might be slow-etry
I win; this is my place; you don’t even show-etry
how 'bout a little fire, scarecrow-etry?

I’m smooth like butter; you spread cheap oleo-etry
people love my lines, they say “wherefore art thou, Romeo-etry?”

I’m afraid I drifted off reading your clichéd old status-quo-etry
did my couplets burn you badly? Rub on some fresh aloe-etry

you guzzle Welch’s grape juice while I’m sipping Moet-try
Moe fingers in the eyes of your sub-Shemp Curly Joe-etry

try some Irish Spring, you stink, I think you’ve got severe B.O.-etry
I read you then throw up, just like when I drink cocoa-etry

I climb a tree and take a pee on your so-so-etry
jiggle the handle; you just got flushed by my poetry

you're amateur hour; make way for some pro-etry
I’ll put you in the doghouse with my Hi-Pro Glow-etry

I'm storming the beach at Anzio-etry
while you eat whale blubber in Oslo-etry

you plead "Don't tase me, bro-etry!"
too late--you got shocked--by my poetry!

*thanks to Dave for the clarification

A couple of years ago, a friend teaching a high school class on comics filled with resistant kids asked me to write an apologia for the form. Hence the references to incredibly past-sell-date pop culture toward the end--not to mention a sense that we're well past the time when comics would need to be explained. Anyway, here goes, insufferable tone, stereotyping and all:

Skeptical about comics? You’re part of a very select club…basically 99% of the U.S. population.

For some comic book readers, part of being a fan is having a complex about it. Some of us feel compelled to “prove” that our hobby/habit/whatever isn’t pathetic, isn’t a sign of arrested development or a way to get grade school kids into the back of the van. We blanket our non-comics reading friends with examples of comics we adore. “You have to read Watchmen!” “You’ve just got to check out Love & Rockets!” When they arch their eyebrows, when TV shows treat comics as shorthand for illiteracy, when people we love flip lazily through our favorite comic only to shrug and say “I don’t get it,” we take it personally. We passionately insist that comics can be as valid as art on one hand (poetry, serious novels, painting) and popular entertainment on the other (summer blockbuster movies, hit songs, etc.) Our love for something so unpopular makes us outcasts and we get defensive about it—even as we tell ourselves that comics’ very unpopularity proves our refined tastes. If you love a musician or a writer or a movie that the mainstream ignores, you might know the feeling. You want everybody to know about them, love them, give them the respect they deserve—but you also want to keep them to yourself.

Also, because comics aren’t that easy to find, they tend to attract devoted fans who care to make the effort to seek them out, while repelling casual readers who might pick up a comic now or then but can’t be bothered to drive to a special store populated by geeks, where it smells like a sandwich from Subway—even though nobody there has eaten one. That’s the stereotype, anyway. And it’s one that the big superhero publishers have catered to, producing comics expressly for the obsessed fans, with backstories so complex that it’s nearly impossible for a new reader to pick up a random issue of X-Men and know what’s going on without a decoder ring.

Because of this tendency, the problem comics fans face is that many comics really are junk—not worth wasting your time on even if your precise goal is to waste your time. There are many reasons why comics are no longer mass culture, no longer sold by the millions at every corner store and newsstand like they were in the 1940s and 1950s—some reasons include limited distribution, competition from TV and video games, CGI action movies that outdo any special effect a comic artist might draw. But one of the biggest reasons is that so many comics suck. It’s hard to see through the clutter. And the clutter exists at both ends of the spectrum: stupid yet obscure comics about steroid junkies in capes pounding each other into paste, as well as pretentious “art’ comics written by skinny white guys who never got over their anger about being shoved into lockers while the cute girls laughed.

Statistics show that if you don’t start smoking as a kid or teenager, you probably won’t as an adult. It’s not much different with comics, aside from the lung cancer. If you haven’t enjoyed comics or even read them by the time you’re through puberty, it’s a hard sell to convince you that you should try them afterward. Even after decades of serious comics for adults about sex, drug use, the Holocaust, growing old, getting sick, everything under the sun--most people still associate comics and cartooning with stupid little kids. That’s just how it is.

But I’m supposed to tell you why you ought to read comics. Because despite everything I just said, you absolutely should read comics—for the same reason you should check out MF Doom albums or see The Life Aquatic, watch Gilmore Girls or listen to Little Steven’s Underground Garage on the radio. Because you should always make an effort to seek out the best, smartest stuff in any medium. Because there are comics out there that will make you think, make you nervous, make you laugh, get you all excited, make you cry. And I mean YOU. You specifically. There are comics being published right now that address your particular interests. Comics can be about anything. All the manga from Japan proves that—giant robots, cowboys, high school romances, demons, pop music, ninjas, gay ninjas inside giant robots in a battle of the bands against cowboy demons at the high school dance. Comics can be silly or subversive, tragic or optimistic. Sometimes all at once. And as Scott McCloud explains, there are things comics can do that no other kind of artistic expression can duplicate.

For instance: the cartoonist Chris Ware has a comic strip called “Big Tex,” about a dimwitted cowboy whose father openly hates him. Takes him for rides and leaves him alone in the woods. Calls him stupid and worthless. One particular “Big Tex” comic strip is broken into a dozen panels, each showing a part of Tex’s house and yard. You don’t see any people, just the house, a tree, and the word balloons of Tex meekly absorbing verbal abuse from his father. Taken all together, the individual pictures add up to a bigger picture of the whole house. But each separate panel takes place at a different point in time—so as you read the strip from left to right, top to bottom, the panels also add up to a life, as you get the story of Tex’s entire miserable existence from childhood to adulthood. All within one unmoving picture of a house, broken into fragments, just as Tex’s life has been broken into fragments. My description can’t do it justice, can’t really explain the impact. In this case, you really do have to see it. But that’s the power of comics, what makes them special. They’re a separate language, visual and verbal elements intertwined into something different than either. Because comics creators can shape panels any way they want, and because you can read at your own pace, comics are free to speed up and slow down time in ways that movies can’t duplicate. They can show details that books are forced to explain.

I love comics because…well, I’ve never known how not to. They’ve been part of my life since I was three years old. I loved them then for their absurd invention—flying dogs from outer space, magic rings, heroes throwing monsters into the sun. I love comics now for some of the same escapist reasons, but also because many of the independent comics I follow these days offer the most personal expression you’ll find in the popular arts. There are far fewer layers of producers, directors, editors, management people telling a comic book artist what to say or how to say it in order to make more money. It’s straight from the artist’s head to the page to the reader—or at least closer to that ideal than anything else I can think of.

Skeptical about comics? Good. It pays to be skeptical about everything. But don’t let that stop you from trying a few. You might even like them.

Now that I've had a few years to think about it, I've realized that DC actually only raped itself.

And that nobody loves superhero comics more than Brad Meltzer.

Well, that's not entirely true. I am out the four dollars.

From DC's The Atom #26, August-September 1966. I was struck by both the tone and nature of the request. Entirely civil, (although the editor had complete control of the message, of course.) And she's not arguing over the way women are portrayed on Atom covers, but that they aren't represented at all--not as villains, not as heroes, allies or bystanders, even as damsels in distress. The Atom's world is very small, and from the covers at least, seemingly vagina-free. Well, except for this:


Anyway, three years, 19 issues and a title change later, Irene's wish was finally granted in a big way, as Jean Loring squeaked under the wire for the final issue of the series. Maybe she was mad about being shut out of the covers since 1962, even while providing the plot for half of the Atom's stories, because she's clearly ready to put a big boot up our heroes' asses:


If you ask me, they look like they deserve it.

(By the way, Scipio gets under the covers with Jean here, here, here, and here.)

The Rick Rubin profile in the New York Times Magazine is truly eye-opening. Rubin is a very smart guy. But that only underscores what dire straits the recording industry is in. After five pages talking about Columbia's daring in hiring Rubin to save the label, we learn just how the legendary producer would do it:

Rubin has a bigger idea. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. "You would subscribe to music," Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You'll say, 'Today I want to listen to ... Simon and Garfunkel,' and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now."

From Napster to the iPod, the music business has been wrong about how much it can dictate to its audience. "Steve Jobs understood Napster better than the record business did," David Geffen told me. "IPods made it easy for people to share music, and Apple took a big percentage of the business that once belonged to the record companies. The subscription model is the only way to save the music business. If music is easily available at a price of five or six dollars a month, then nobody will steal it."

Dear God. If that's the genius idea, start building the coffin. It's hard to know for sure from the description here, but it certainly sounds to me like the industry wants to move away from the straightforward model where you buy music and own it, to one where you merely rent access to a feed (the more you pay, the more access you get), which I assume you lose all as soon as you fail to pay your monthly subscription fee. Guys, people love their iPods, and the cable TV model sucks ass. Your eagerness to destroy the former and emulate the latter shows you as devils, morons or both. Right now people either buy the tracks they like for a buck or less a pop, or they grab what they want for free. Any system that curtails the listener's possession of music, and the flexibility that provides, will be roundly rejected. Subscription only sounds like a good deal for the labels and their executives on velvet couches--and it only reveals their desperation.

Speaking of which, Rubin's co-label president Steve Barnett wants to make up lost revenue by extorting 50% of concert, online and merchandising proceeds from artists. What an awesome incentive for a band to sign.

I like Danzig II: Lucifuge as much as anybody, but I walk away from this article thinking Rubin is trying to save a system that clearly deserves to die. These people could have priced CDs at $8-$10 (given the format's lower manufacturing costs than cassettes) but instead they went for the short money and ripped everyone off for upwards of $20 a disc at the major retailers. They could have supported iTunes and its competitors. (Hey, Universal, good luck selling your own shit for $3 a track or whatever you end up charging. The NYT article refers to Apple's across-the-board 99 cent song pricing as a problem, but it's one of the precious few things associated with the music industry that shows any respect for music fans--so of course the industry wants to kill it.)

There is no easy answer to file sharing, but it's hard to see the industry go down ugly, trying to force a new model that effectively takes the music you buy away from you in order to secure their increasingly irrelevant place in the profit chain.

No, not swapping my first-born son with Darkseid. I've made a deal with my wife: for every day that I go running, she'll read a comic. So far, I've gotten her to read the first five issues of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Sleeper. (She said she didn't like it much at first--too violent--but I noticed yesterday that she was reading ahead. She is a sucker for finding out what happens next.)

After she finishes the first trade, I think I'll have her read Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk's Agents of Atlas, as I work on getting from a 36 back into my wedding pants. Any other suggestions for what I should have her read? The last serial comic she followed with any kind of enthusiasm was The Invisibles.

The trip from Vermont to San Diego wasn't all comics and nerdgasms. We also got in a surfing lesson for Theo, courtesy of Dave:



And a trip to the San Diego Zoo:

I attended Comic-Con this year (my third in six years), only this time I took my 8-year-old, Theo along for the geekery. He was a fantastic traveling companion, and it was fascinating to experience the show from his perspective. He was patient beyond reason as the old man flipped through endless boxes of comics--almost as patient as I was following his hunt for Pokemon cards. Unsurprisingly, Theo was good for about 20 minutes of Roy Thomas reminiscences about late 60s Marvel, a good sign of his general mental health. He impressed a number of aging back issue dealers with his appreciation for his favorite artist, Jack Kirby. (To date, the kid has read every Marvel superhero book in order from FF #1 through July of 1965. Along with his enthusiasm for classic Little Lulu, Krazy Kat, Segar's Popeye, the works of Jeff Smith and above all Jack Cole's Plastic Man, he has better taste than most adult comics fans. In other words, he has my taste, which is one of the benefits of having kids.)

Following Theo around, we went to sections of the con I've never been to, namely the toy booths in the most crowded center section of the floor, with frequent trips to the Lego and Pokemon booths. In other news Dave and I picked up the last two copies of I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets! at the Fantagraphics booth during Paul Karasik's signing session, I bought a big stack of old DC 80-Page Giants and 100-page Super Spectaculars, our friend Dana found a number of the Super Pets comics she was looking for, and Dave achieved his goal for the show of hobnobbing with A-listers.

Sometimes, even Prince has to talk to complete fucking idiots in the course of doing his job. Just like the rest of us!

Sway: Let's talk about the album, Musicology. All right, that term, I play dominoes, and when you study dominology, that means you're a master at dominoes, so Musicology, is that what that means? That you're a master at music?

At which point the interview ended as Prince choked the MTV News correspondent to death with his microphone cord.