Watching the Toilet Bowl Slowly Fill With Blood

So, yeah, anyway, just when I was starting to build up a head of steam towards more frequent and substantive posts, the motherboard on my desktop went and shit the bed. Leastwise, the tech expert tells me it's the motherboard, I already tried replacing the power supply and that didn't work.

And, of course, all my main blogging supplies are on the desktop. So I can't even do the week's Mark Trail panel yet.

So, in lieu of content, I will give you an extemporaneous list to discuss and debate to your heart's content.

The Top Five Mainstream Superhero Books of the 90s
5. Weapon X - Barry Windsor-Smith
4. Starman - James Robinson & Various (notwithstanding the bad parts)
3. "Unity", in various Valiant titles - Jim Shooter & Various
2. "The Rock of Ages", in JLA - Grant Morrison & Howard Porter
1. Marvels - Kurt Busiek & Alex Ross

Honorable Mention - Lobo & Lobo's Back by Keith Giffen & Steven Grant & Bisley

Now go, flame someone.

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine

The other day I was browsing in Newbury Comics and I saw one of those strange things that you just know will probably be stuck in your head until the day you die.

There was an old man - if he was a day under 75, I'd be surprised - bald, stooped, using two-canes to walk. Now, an old man being inside Newbury Comics was admittedly odd enough. But what was he buying?

An Armand van Helden 12".

Yeah, I think that's probably the weirdest thing I've seen in many, many months.





Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed?

by Liz Prince

At the risk of appearing a curmudgeon (me? never!), I should probably say that regardless of Liz Prince's skill as a cartoonist, her subject manner leaves a lot to be desired. Sure, it's enough to recognize that there are cutesy people in the world, and that said cutesy people will probably meet, fall in love and have cutesy relationships. Hell, I have been occasionally accused of cutesyness myself. But a surfeit of cute? Well, that's just a recipe for disaster. Anyone who's ever been in an English class knows that when an author stresses anything to the brink of incredulity, it usually means just the opposite. That's called irony. So how else are we to interpret the barrage of cutesy relationship humor in Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed? than as a coded message of domestic tragedy, a modern-day Kramer vs. Kramer played out in the lingo of the cute-addled modern hipsterati?


(Not actually from Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed?, but fairly indicative of her work nonetheless. There's more where this came from here.)

"But you're so cute I want to squeeze the pee out of you!" probably means "I hate you for ruining my life and taking everything of value from my soul, leaving me a twisted and shrunken shell of a man."

"You haven't given me any special kisses in a long time . . . I want specialer ones!" probably means "Now that our love is a cold and shattered husk, there's nothing left for me but the long and futile road to a dusty, forgotten death."

The bit where Liz pretends that the teapot is talking and says "Hi, Kevin, Liz thinks you're cute" is probably a veiled reference to an absolutely unforgivable act of domestic violence, probably involving scalding hot water, a fireplace poker, and a starving ferret, ultimately resulting in a trip to the hospital and an arrest warrant.

It's simply too depressing a scenario to contemplate. Surely, the hatred and loathing on display here rivals even The Lockhorns for sheer soul-numbing passive-aggressive torpor.



The thing is, despite the unremittingly grim subject matter of her strips, Prince's art is still quite attractive. She wears her influences on her sleeve, and considering the fact that this is her first book you can't really hold them against her. Jeffrey Brown contributes a brief forward, and James Kochalka provides an (unflattering) illustration of the author. Much as it used to be de rigueur for up-and-coming, journeyman (and even established) mainstream artists to ape Kirby and Buscema, there's nothing particularly wrong with being up-front about your influences in the indie scene: if it were, Adrian Tomine would long ago have had an appointment with Ol' Sparky. Now, if five or ten years pass and Prince is still aping Brown so heavily, well, that will be a different story: but for the time being I'm willing to chalk it up to the process growing up and into your own style.

And there's no denying that it is definitely a pleasant style. Even given the soul-deadening abject cruelty of her subject matter, her work combines the best aspects of her influences -- Brown's keen eye for gesture and expression, along with Kochalka's sense of pacing and whimsy. Ideally, this kind of choice appropriation could bode well for her career. If she can prove as apt at shuffling and sifting other influences and ideas, she should find copious fertile ground for further work, easing into a more comfortably distinctive style as a matter of course. Or, she could produce another book of cutesy relationship vignettes that make me want to drink drain cleaner. Either one.

The Hurting's Weekly Out-Of-Context Mark Trail Panel

For the Week of 03/22/06



(I am really disappointed that no one got last week's reference.

In any event, is it me or does Mark look particularly raffish in this picture? Almost the splitting image of Jake Gyllenhal in Brokeback Mountain...)


For the Week of 03/15/06 For the Week of 03/08/06
For the Week of 03/01/06 For the Week of 02/22/06 For the Week of 02/15/06
For the Week of 02/08/06 For the Week of 02/01/06 For the Week of 01/25/06
For the Week of 01/18/06 For the Week of 01/11/06 For the Week of 01/04/06
Year One

V For Crap

So I guess as a blogger I have to mention that I went to see V From Vendetta. Not out of any real desire to see the movie itself, mind you, but mostly because I hadn't been to the movies in months and I felt like going, and that was as good a reason as any. And maybe I should have followed my first disinclination because, well, I was just bored. It wasn't really bad, it wasn't really good, it just sort of sat there and flopped around onscreen for the better part of two and a half hours. All the talk about the politics and ideology is essentially a waste, because -- just as with the last two Matrix films -- either they didn't put a lot of thought into it to be begin with or they're simply not that bright, because it was so hopelessly muddled as to be ethically incomprehensibly. Now, I can't say the book was either boring or incomprehensible, so at the very least they got mixed singles somewhere along the line.

Was I sad? No, not really. It was just a very, very mediocre movie that didn't really seem to even hang togther very well. Not even enough of a failure to be disappointed with, just a big old wet fart. Say what you will about the Matrix films, but even during the direst moments of the last two they sure zipped along. There was no sense of cohesion in V, it was just seemed very lifeless and lethargic. The only thing that makes me sad about the movie's success is the suddenly very real threat that they will get around to making a film of Watchmen, which is just about as stupid an idea as there ever has been, short of Eisenstein's (thankfully unrealized) notion to film Das Kapital. Of course, I said that about Lord of the Rings as well, and I heard that ended up making a few bucks. (But it's worth noting that, seemingly alone among the masses, I was extremely disappointed by the Lord of the Rings films.)

So, eh, forget the stupid movie and buy the book if you haven't already got it. Alan Moore will, at least, get a few pennies from that:

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