This Post Is Dedicated To My Mother*

She likes cows; she likes Wolverine. Connect the dots.



*The alternate title for this post was:
Wow, Bully sure grew up fast!

Things I Like Which No One Else Does

Part Two



Let's speak some truth to the youth of America, shall we? Comic Sans is a font. A font. The fact that the mere existence of such an innocuous device as a font has caused so much incredible gnashing of teeth across the wide world is, frankly, bizarre.

I'm not going to lie to you and say I have some great love for Comic Sans. But you know what? I don't think it's possible to love a font, anymore than it is possible to hate a font. Unless you appeared in this movie, I don't really think you should probably get so attached to fonts, or fetishize your hatred of same. Yes, even you professional or semi-professional web designers and publishers in the audience - I can feel you firing up your keyboards with fierce anti-Comic Sans jeremiads. Would you like to know a secret? How to ensure that you never have to worry about Comic Sans? Delete it from the fonts file in Microsoft Word. Then you won't feel the horrible temptation.

But the thing is, lots of people do use it - just as I'm sure there are even weirdos out there who use Wingdings (probably eight-year-olds, but I digress). If you're one of the many anti-Comic Sans agitators, take heart: some people just aren't as advanced a specimen of the human race as you, with all the brainpower devoted to the history and application of fotns and typefaces as yourself. That's so awesome that you know the names of the guys who invented Helvetica (Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann). Really, the knowledge that Carolingian minuscule grew to prominence in Northern European scriptoriums following the Carolingian Renaissance, and that it serves as the basis for many modern typefaces, is just unbelievably great. You're a better person than me. Really. And obsessing over a typeface isn't just another way of reifying a self-justified sense of superiority over less fortunate, design-challenged peons. It's not just another way for nerds to justify smug feelings of condescension, with an added patina of veiled classism, really, it isn't. I promise.

I use Comic Sans - I used to use it for my comics remixes, back in the day when I did such things. Hell, I use to love the fuck out of Cooper, and you can't tell me that's not an ugly font. Because, you know, I don't really care. Maybe it speaks ill of me, bad breeding or whatever, but I just can't be motivated to care. You know what my favorite font is? Courier New, because the even spacing and legibility looks good on my eyes when I'm staring at the computer screen for hours on end. I hear you about to say: "well, the font you choose says something about you and the information you are trying to present to the world, much like wearing a Big Johnson T-shirt to your interview might jeopardize your chances of getting a job at Sun Microsystems". But hey, have you looked at this website lately? I'm using the same gaudy orange Blogger template I've been using since day one (save for a month where I switched to a black template out of respect for Sleater-Kinney's break-up); half of the links in my sidebar are dead or to sites I don't read anymore; hell, I've still got a link to the "Al Gore in '08" grass-roots organization website, and some ad toolbars that I don't even know what they are.

Really, in 2009, sloppy design and useless clutter is an aesthetic choice as much as anything else. So I celebrate my right to use Comic Sans, if for no other reason that it is the one sure-fire way to piss off all the elitist assholes who have this taped to their cubicle walls.

Doom Is Always Right

And sometimes even moreso than others:



Doom forwards his apologies to the good
folks at the the Comic Empire of Tulsa.

(Speaking of which, I just stumbled across this interview here. By far the best thing about my too-long self-imposed exile in Tulsa was the Comic Empire. I spent quite a bit of time there over the years. This interview was conducted a few years ago, but it was a few years after I left the area and it's weird to see he had changed some of the moth-eaten old retail posters on the walls - although I can't see if he had changed the early 90s Legionnaires poster that hung above the boxes of old Warren / Savage Sword of Conan / Mad magazines - my personal favorite store anachronism. If you pop in on the right day you might catch him listening to DJ Shadow, my particular contribution to the store's furniture, along with a strange doodle of Charlie Brown holding a gun next to the bathroom wall, which was probably taken down years ago.)

Things I Like Which No One Else Does

Part One of what is sure to be another extremely infrequent series



The Thing's Spiky Look

Although nowadays characters change costumes and powers at the drop of the proverbial hat, back in the mid-to-late 80s when Marvel decided (either by design or sheer coincidence) to give almost all of their top-tier properties significant makeovers, it was slightly shocking. Suddenly, Spider-Man was a black creature of the night; Captain America was out of the red-white-and-blue; the Hulk was gray and pissed; Thor was sporting a full-beard and armor; Iron Man had ditched the red and gold for red and silver; Storm got a mohawk. The Fantastic Four changed, too. She-Hulk joined the team for a brief period following the first Secret Wars - but this was nowhere near as jarring an inclusion as it could have been, considering that Byrne's She-Hulk made a copacetic fit with the FF's longstanding family dynamic. Soon after issue #300, however, they upended the series premise entirely, booting Reed and Sue into semi-retirement in Connecticut, and leaving Ben and Johnny to forge ahead with Sharon Ventura - Ms. Marvel - and Crystal. To make matters even weirder, the Thing's appearance was transformed radically - from his traditional craggy form into something spiky and far more intimidating.

Obviously it was a temporary change. Looking back, it lasted a scant year-and-a-half, although he didn't immediately revert to hie previous form, but spent the next couple years as just plain Ben Grimm. The funny thing is, for whatever reason, while most of the 80s revamps were generally well-received and are similarly well-remembered, the Thing's brief change is almost never mentioned. Obviously, no one believed at the time that Spider-Man would stay in his black costume forever, but it is an extremely striking design and remains popular whenever it shows up. (It was a big mistake to change Venom's design to whatever purple Scorpion-esque monstrosity it was in Thunderbolts - seriously, the black costume is one of the best costumes in comics, regardless of who's wearing it. Similarly, the third Spider-Man film completely failed in this regard, not actually using the black costume but merely a dirty version of the standard togs. But then, Sam Raimi had no real interest in using the costume to begin with, so it's not surprising he failed to grasp the appeal.) Cap's black costume lives on in a slightly modified form with USAgent; the Hulk reverts to gray for the odd storyline every few years; you could even make an argument that Thor's current look owes a lot to Simonson's armor design, although that would depend entirely on whether or not Oliver Coipel has ever read Simonson's run (which is hardly a given). But no one ever talks about the Thing.

Which strikes me as odd, because the spiky Thing kicked ass. It wasn't merely a cosmetic change: the new look brought with it a significant power-boost, so that for the first time the Thing was actually on par with Thor and Hulk in terms of strength. It might seem like a small issue, but think about how many great Thing moments depend on his underdog status: he's incredibly strong, but never the strongest. He has to work that much harder. It might seem on first glance that upping his power level would be a mistake, then, in terms of the character's established appeal. And certainly, if the change had been permanent, it would have been a mistake. But as far as the story went, it was really interesting to see the Thing in a more confident, assured, and even cocky role. Playing against type, so to speak.

There's a great - one of the best - Hulk / Thing battles, in the middle of the storyline, with the spiky Thing tackling the canny gray Hulk. In the first part of the battle (in the pages of Fantastic Four, 'natch), the Hulk and Thing wail on each other like usual, with the difference being that for the first time ever the Thing actually manages to beat the Hulk in a contest of pure strength. It's a great moment for longtime Thing fans, even if it is the weakened gray Hulk - the Hulk still knows he's been beaten by someone he had always dismissed as a lightweight. Then, in the second part of the crossover (in the pages of Incredible Hulk), Peter David presents another clever inversion of the traditional dynamic. Continuing their battle, the Hulk realizes he just can't win in a straight fight with the new Thing, so he uses his wits to out-think and exhaust his overconfident opponent - in much the same way that the Thing had used his wiles to stay competitive with the Hulk for all those years when he was the weaker party. it's a great two-part story because it uses the opportunities presented by the shifting status quo to give both characters a great moment.

On a purely mechanical level, I can't help but wonder whether or not the look's lack of staying power has anything to do with the fact that it's probably a bitch to draw. Regardless, I wouldn't mind seeing the look return, as it added an interesting wrinkle to a property that had become fairly predictable.

Not Dead Yet

So . . . yeah. In my defense, I've got a good excuse: in the time since my last post I had to make an emergency trip to California by way of the Indianapolis Marriot, my last surviving grandparent is in the hospital dying / not dying yet, and I just ran headlong into the last few weeks of classes without a lot of prep time. So . . . yeah.

Anyway.

Stuff I Read

Amazing Spider-Man #592

Well, that's something I didn't think I ever needed to see. Wheatcakes. WHEATCAKES.

Hellblazer #254

I used to love Hellblazer - there was a stretch when it was my favorite title, through Garth Ennis and Paul Jenkins' runs. (I'm serious - as bad as Jenkins is now - and regardless of whatever hijinks he got up to with Big Numbers that I know some of you might still hold against him - his run on Hellblazer really is remarkable, subtle and melancholy and downright hilarious in places.) But then Warren Ellis' run was just repulsive; Ennis' periodic returns were grotesquely bad; Brian Azzarello actually got me to drop a book I had been reading for almost ten years; and whenever I checked in on successive writers - Mike Carey, Denise Mina, Andy Diggle - the results were so monotonously, stupefyingly banal that I basically stopped paying attention. If there is a Vertigo "house style" - defined by putrid browns, "understated" but actually quite tawdry sensationalism, "gritty" sub-Paul Pope urban atmospherics - well, this last decade or so of Hellblazer certainly appears to have exemplified such a style.

But on a lark I flipped through this issue, and what did I find? Something I never thought I'd see again: an issue of Hellblazer that actually felt like something from the book's first decade, and not just a portfolio piece for Random Splatterpunk Urban Horror Setpiece Monthly. Here was Jamie Delano's John Constantine, back in the saddle again, walking through the same kind of pre-Vertigo British mainstream house style defined by John Ridgeway, David Lloyd, Steve Pugh, etc. You can tell the classic Hellblazer stories by the fact that they all look like BBC dramas, shot on lousy film but making a virtue of the watery color and dodgy lighting - hell, right down to exterior and interior shots being filmed on different stock. You could criticize the issue for being such a conscious throwback but then you'd have to argue that the last decade of the book wasn't absolute garbage, and in my opinion you'd have a tough road to hoe on that score.

Reading a good story with an old favorite who's been so mishandled in recent years you'd practically forgotten about him really is an awesome sensation. Rats off to you, Peter Milligan and Goran Sudzuka.

Detective Comics #853

The first part of Neil Gaiman's "Death of Batman" riff really wasn't very good at all, and from what I heard the second part was no improvement. But, as they say, the proof is in the pudding is in the eating - this actually was really good. It's funny - I used to think Gaiman had a problem with endings. Look back at Sandman and you see a whole bunch of great stories with some not-so-great endings - until, by the end of the series, the paucity of endings became an integral theme. (For all of Gaiman's shortcomings in comics, his sure-footed ability to account for his own weaknesses as a writer is pretty enviable.) But his last significant comics work, that Eternals series, had a pretty meandering beginning and middle which was effectively saved by an extremely strong final chapter. When I finally got around to actually finishing the damn thing, I thought 1602 actually ended fairly well - a good capper to a mostly mediocre exercise in wheel-spinning.

Again, here, we had a first chapter that didn't seem like much, and a final chapter that somehow pulls it all together. Yeah, it's not a patch on Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? - but was anyone expecting it to be? It's different. Back in 1986 Alan Moore saw that the default mode for Superman stories was still early 60's Camelot-era optimism, so his story tapped that vein mercilessly. The problem with Batman in 2009 is that there is no default style - if any one trait defines Batman the character and Batman the corporate property it is his ruthlessly chameleonic endurance. There is no one Batman - there are not even any dozen Batmen. There is a multiplicity of Batmen, all equally valid and all shedding light on different facets of the idea. So Gaiman gives us a story about just that: there are an infinite number of Batmen, and even though all the stories end the same way the best part is that they always begin again. You're either going to think that the ending is the cheesiest bit of cheap sentimentality you've ever seen or sheer brilliance - I tend to err on the side of risk-takers, so the rather ballsy conceit worked for me. (I wouldn't dream of spoiling it for you.) In what should really be a tired exercise in corporate nostalgia, Gaiman actually manages a poignant gesture: no matter how different all the Batmen are - from Frank Miller's urban Oedipus to Neal Adams' swashbuckling romantic to Dick Sprang's pre-atomic Caped Crusader - they're all, every single one of them, a kid trying to get back something he's lost, striving against impossible odds - the most cynical of all super-heroes, nevertheless driven by blind, childish hope. Nice one.

However, the art leaves something to be desired. And I don't know if I can lay the blame at Andy Kubert's feet. Sure, he's nowhere near the stylistic magpie he really needed to be to pull of these effects - were JH Williams and Gene Ha not answering their phones? - but looking at some of the actually-pretty-nice pencil art in the back of the book, it really seems as if Scott Williams is responsible for sapping a lot of the life out of these pages. Bad show, that.

Marvel Zombies 4 #1

I will modify my initial negative reaction to the announcement that this series would focus on the Midnight Sons, since the series really isn't about the Midnight Sons. I had a massive 90s flashback, and was dreading all the old shit - Zarathos and the Nightstalkers and Vengeance and Blaze with his hellfire shotgun - but thankfully this is just Werewolf By Night, Son of Satan, Jennifer Kale, Simon Garth and >ugh< Morbius. But Morbius is balanced by the inclusion of Zombie Deadpool - or rather, the decapitated head of Zombie Deadpool. Good fun for the whole family.

I mean, it's OK, right? Everyone is pretty much out of the closet on the whole loving Deadpool thing, right?