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Saturday, January 03, 2004 ( 1/03/2004 03:55:00 PM ) Bill S. "A GENTLE GIANT, PROTECTING US FROM HOSTILE INVASION" – Bloggish gratitude goes out to Dirk Deppey, who noted my comment about blurb-ular billing on the Zippy 2003 Annual in Friday's ¡journalista! You're a giant among comics bloggers, Dirk! And speaking of giants, I've been reading Bill Griffith's latest Fantagraphics collection and noted with interest the appearance of the Gemini Giant in a 03/16/03 Sunday strip. Towering over Zippy and his creator, the revamped muffler man sparks a fearful characterization from Griffy: "He's a dangerous lunatic, sheathed in phallic headgear & brandishing nuclear tipped weaponery!" Zippy, of course, has an entirely different take: "He's standing guard over our proud nation!" Or at least a decent Wilmington, IL., burger joint. . . # | ( 1/03/2004 07:54:00 AM ) Bill S. MORE PULSE-POUNDIN' EXCITEMENT! – It's lightweight and silly, but as long as Marvel continues to put out fare like Gail Simone's Gus Beezer, I'll continue to hold out hopes for mainstream superhero comics. If something as frivolously goofball as this can be published with the Spider-Man logo attached to it, why, then creativity can burst out just about anywhere! Well, mebbe not here. . . # | Friday, January 02, 2004 ( 1/02/2004 04:55:00 PM ) Bill S. "I LIKE 'OR'S – DOUBT IS REASSURING" – New Year's Day I spent much of my time, sitting back to install software updates (put Windows XP on the ancient p-c – which engendered much updating), plus reading a graphic novel it took me months to crack open: Craig Thompson's Blankets (Top Shelf). Thompson's wrist-strainer of a trade paperback has been received both praise and brickbats: it's been out long enough to spark both Best-Graphic-Novel-Since-Will-Eisner-"Invented"-The-Form kudos and a Hey-It's-Not-That-Good backlash. Coming to the book after all the dust has cleared – and web critics like Andrew Arnold have unequivocally enshrined it in the Best of 2003 pantheon – I'm more on the side of the book's boosters. Reading it over the course of a snow-less winter day, I found myself wrapped up in Thompson's semi-autobiographical graphic novel all the way to its finish – it's the closest thing to a Thomas Wolfe novel ever attempted in comics. The book centers on Craig as an adolescent and the star-crossed romance between him and a kindred spirit named Raina. We first meet our hero as a young Wisconsin boy, sharing his bed with a younger brother, and though the main story revolves around the romance between Craig and his teen-aged flame, it keeps returning to the author's boyhood. Blankets is as much about the dynamics of growing up in a family as it is a love story (much as Wuthering Heights, say, is as concerned with questions of child-rearing as it is Heathcliffe and Cathy's doomed love). When Craig stays with Raina at her estranged parents' house, as much attention is paid to the young girl's role as surrogate parent to an adopted brother and sister as it is to her developing romance. (At times, you get the sense that Raina's role as parental teen is part of what makes her so attractive to Craig.) The book's first chapter offers two grimly effective scenes of child mistreatment: in the first, the author's brother Phil is forced to sleep in a vermin-infested crawlspace as parental punishment; in the second, both brothers are sexually abused by an overwhelming babysitter. Both moments loom over the rest of the novel (more than once, for instance, we're reminded of the "cubby hole" by the boys' room) and color its central romance. At the same time, Thompson's graphic novel is also about the limits of adolescent faith: raised in a conservative Christian home, Craig turns to the Bible as a shield against a world he perceives as unremittingly hostile. But relying on religion solely as armor proves to be insufficient, and our hero falls away from the family faith once his incandescent romance burns to its end. Some readers have seen this plotline as Thompson's slam on evangelical religion, and while there are elements of this in his hero's growing disenchantment with organized faith, it's depicted more dispassionately than the bullying doled out by both religious and secular authority. Just as often, the book's honest evangelicals are shown to be struggling to get by just like everybody else. But what brings in readers is the romance between Craig and Raina, which is crafted with well-remembered detail and delicacy. Attracted to Raina even as he wrestles with the nattering strictures of his stern upbringing, Craig slowly lets his guard down. We follow the duo's building relationship with both anticipation and dread. We know that they're meant to be together at least once, but we also suspect that once it happens one or both will retreat from following things further. The art used to depict this ultimately bittersweet story is fluid and often beautifully composed. (One dubious visual decision: a mid-book sequence where our hero's nose looks like it was made of plywood and pasted on his face.) Thompson's depictions of the snow-blanketed Midwestern setting make maximum use of the black-and-white format, while his page and panel composition utilizes Eisner-esque storytelling techniques in a way that feels totally natural. Too often, when comic artists take from as florid an artist as "Spirit" era Will Eisner, all you get is showy technique divorced from story emotion. Here, I found myself accepting Thompson's visual decisions without stopping to consider where they might've come from. When the artist abandons his snow-bound Midwestern setting to show his artist hero's visual imagination working full force (one memorable image: the sight of Craig and a naked Raina embracing as angels pull the pair out of reach from a horde of hellish demons), it illuminates the book's knowing awareness of adolescent romanticism. Giving teen emotions their due without succumbing to sentimentality is a tricky balancing act: the beauty of Blankets lies in the way we accept our hero's heartbreak even as we hope he'll learn enough to eventually grow out of it. . . # | Thursday, January 01, 2004 ( 1/01/2004 12:36:00 PM ) Bill S. BLURB-ISM – Standing in the comics shop yesterday without enough cash to purchase the book, I see I got to be a blurb on the back of this year's Zippy Annual. Though the line quoted from my review of last year's Fantagraphics Zippy collection is only cited as "Blogcritics.Org," I still remain quietly proud – and plan on buying the book tomorrow. # | Wednesday, December 31, 2003 ( 12/31/2003 12:23:00 PM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK BULLET POINTING – In the middle of more than one book, have several Xmas-delivered DVDs waitin' to be watched (the still-unopened Firefly boxed set among 'em), haven't bought a new CD in weeks or gone to the moviehouse to see Return of the King yet. . . So let's just dance:
# | Tuesday, December 30, 2003 ( 12/30/2003 06:30:00 AM ) Bill S. A NEW YEAR APPROACHETH – Still doing housekeeping on the ol' blog: tallying up reviews from 2003, so I'll have a representative list of the year by New Year's, adding names to the blogroll (Mike Sterling, come on down!) and deciding if I wanna do anything different next year. Looking at my review list, I see I've been most slack on theatrical movies – haven't been going out as much as I used to – and while I'd love to see that change in the next year, it probably won't due to family obligations. One regular item that hasn’t shown up on the review list at the right is my "Fifteen-Minute Comic" series of capsule reviews. I've been debating whether to continue this feature over the next year – I'm considering replacing it with more extended pieces on individual genre comics' storylines. Generally speaking, the capsule reviews have gotten little to no response (too many fannish writers out there doin' the same thing, I suspect), so perhaps it's time for this feature to be put on an Extended Hiatus. On the road for the rest of the day, so I'll hopefully see ya back here tomorrow. . . # | Sunday, December 28, 2003 ( 12/28/2003 09:00:00 AM ) Bill S. NOT A DREAM; NOT A MONTHLY STORY! – Some days – watching Dave Mack kill the momentum in the monthly Daredevil, for instance – I think the short-run British television model (admirably taken up by HBO on its thirteen-week series) is really the only sensible way to go. To hell with monthlies altogether. Let's do the Big Boys as overlapping mini-series. What's it matter, after all, if Superman reaches its 200th issue, if that issue itself is an incomprehensible load? Limited runs don't automatically guarantee quality, of course (look at HBO's Arliss – or Batman: Tenses!) But when they're done right, they can make a satisfyingly solid package. Easier to collect as individual issues or in a trade, unimpeded by the editorial need to connect storylines to preceding or impending arc, story instead of "story arc," a strong mini-series can revive even the most moribund character – or create its own self-contained genre universe. They're also easier for readers (like me) with faltering engrams to recollect. Looking back at the last year of mainstream genre comics, the titles that most consistently jumped out were all mini-series. These, then, are some of the mainstream minis that really worked for me in the last year. They all concluded in 2003, which leaves out still unfinished works like Alan Moore's Smax or even (I still hold hopes for a big rabbit) 1602. We ain't talking art comics here, even though you could argue that some of 'em (James Sturm, anyone?) ratchet art comics underpinnings onto genre. We're not even talking the All-Time Year’s Best Comics because there are plenty of lists out there doing that already. Nope, it's just a batch of plain ol' well-done entertaining genre mini-series – even if one of the genres represented is the Morrison Sci-Fi Mindfuck. So without further ado:
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