Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

comic books

Crushing Comics includes definitive comic book guides, essays about characters and titles, collecting strategies, comic reviews, and more!

The Happinomics of Magneto

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Today on the bus an attractive, muscle-bound, black man was sitting across from E and I rocking to an unknown sort of music. He was wearing a muscle-shirt version of this Magneto t-shirt.

I turned to E and said, “That guy’s shirt is awesome.” She nodded in agreement.

Then I motioned to the man to take off his headphones.

“Your shirt is awesome.”

“You know who it is?”

“Magneto!”

“Yeah!”

We chuckled at each others fanaticism. He replaced the headphones in his ear and I went back to talking to E.

He smiled until we got off the bus.

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Happinomics is an Ad Busters article about how small changes to the way we interact with the strangers around us can make us tangibly happier. In their example, the interaction is talking on the bus.

Almost watching the Watchmen

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Despite my lengthy jag as a comics fan I was a latecomer to Watchmen. I was certainly aware of it, and the archetypes that it played out, and I had paged through it a few times in book stores or on friends’ shelves. It took me until seeing the magnificent trailer on The Dark Knight to get truly and viscerally interested in the film.

For a while I insisted I would stay completely spoiler free so as to best enjoy the movie version, but we all know my will is weak when it comes to these things. I bought my own copy of the graphic novel at Newbury Comics during my birthday weekend with Erika, and devoured it promptly (it had been long sold-out within the city limits of Philadelphia, at that point).

I concede the masterwork that is the novel, but remain pretty skeptical that the film will pull a Matrix-level March shocker out of the bag – good action films simply don’t come out in March, unless they’re going to be huge sleepers that play through Memorial Day.

All that said, here’s two ends of the spectrum:

(1) Harry @ Ain’t It Cool goes typically apeshit over a clip of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre breaking into a prison – just about the only present-tense action sequence in the entire book. The problem is the clip sucks – the slow-mo is completely overblown, and the score is awful. Watch:

(2) On the other hand, IGN sneaks a overwhelmingly positive Australian review of the flick past the supposed misdirected US press embargo (usually not a good sign, especially for genre flicks).

While other purported reviews are cobbled together based on inferences from the trailer and knowledge of the book, this one seems to be the real deal – more detail about the performances behind Rorschach and Nite Owl, and even acknowledging that Dr. Manhattan’s penis got enlarged for the screen (an overly astute observation – he’s only truly full-frontal a handful of times in the book).

(I wonder if they’ve also kept in the awkward Ménage à trois from Chapter III; that would definitely be ooky on screen.)

Less specifically, Wil Wheaton heartily endorsed it in a spoiler-free review, stating:

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is as close to a perfect film adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen as we were ever going to see, and when his super-ultimate-here’s-everything cut comes out in the fall, I think it will be perfect. But what I saw yesterday is truly remarkable: a big studio movie adaptation of one of the most — if not the most — important graphic novels of my lifetime that not only didn’t fuck it up, but brought it to life brilliantly.

And, furthermore, so did my fucking television-as-literature idol Jacob Clifton in his FaceBook status of moments ago:

Jacob Clifton liked the movie even more than the comic, yet again. By a lot.

(Stalking? What? Me? I have no idea what you’re talking about.)

So, will it suck, or not? I’m trying to avoid my typical habit of passing judgment before I make it to the theatre next week with Wes and Gina, but I have my doubts that Zach Snyder has the nuance to get past the construction of comic book panel dioramas with no emotions inside. I’ll be quite cheery to be proven wrong.

[Ed. Note: I wound up absolutely loving it in the theatre, though I found the extended Director’s Cut unnecessary.]

how far from your star to mine?

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Okay, three remainders from that post.

First, I bought the set of Le Complexe du Chimpanzé graphic novels for me and bro to read. I made it through the first one with my English/French dictionary gripped firmly in one fist. It’s a future tale of a relic of past space exploration coming back to haunt NASA, and how the ordeal splinters the relationship between America’s top astronaut and her young daughter.

I imagine he’ll get through them a bit more quickly than I will, being the better French-speaker of the two of us due to fact that he’s still taking French. (Luckily, most of my pre-Honeymoon French exposure is from watching subtitled sci-fi movies, so I had more of the vocabulary than I thought I would.)

Second, this article is ancient, but it’s still excellent: Image Story, by Michael Dean.

If you were a Marvel comics reader in the early nineties names like Lee or McFarlane meant you were definitely buying a book (but, not Liefeld, who has always been a hack). Suddenly, all of those names formed a super-group, left “the plantation” of Marvel, and set up their own shop – Image Comics. The article offers a detailed account of how Image came to be, what their business model looked like from the inside, and how they unwitting destroyed the comic industry.

(Incidentally, Jim Lee remains one of my favorite comic artists, but the artist who supplanted him on X-Men – Andy Kubert – ranks higher on my list.)

(Incidentally^2, Andy is currently pencilling a Batman arc with recent Newbury-Award-winning author, film-inspirer, and prolific blogger Neil Gaiman that is apparently selling out as quickly as it hits the shelves. They previously collaborated on 1602, which means I should probably own it. Despite my general Batman-comics distaste I will certainly buy the brief two-issue collection published in July (ISBN 1401223036))

Lastly, a webcomic I’ve never read before: Subormality. As recommended by Desh, who I trust implicitly on such matters (but not on music – there we differ substantially). Note the Rob Liefeld joke buried in the first panel.

See, I actually can’t resist fictional universes.

Le Louvre embrace les bandes dessinees et leur auteurs

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The two exhibitions we’ve enjoyed the most both just opened this week – what luck on our part! Both played to our specific interests, which made them even more fascinating.

Today’s at Jeu de Paume was a phenomenal Robert Frank photography exhibit that perhaps I can get Elise to write up for you, as she would do it better justice than I could.

Yesterday’s deserves its own post not only for the conversation it inspired between the two of us, but also because it’s newsworthy – it just had just opened that morning!

Louvre initiated a groundbreaking partnership with a collection of famed French creators of bandes dessinees – comic books, though in this instance it refers to graphic novels – for the new exhibition Le Louvre invite la bande dessinée.

Just the idea of the exhibit is groundbreaking. Louvre is a classical institution, and it has heretofore neglected to recognize bandes dessinees as fine art worthy of mention. Yet, it isn’t just its inclusion that broke ground, but it’s execution. The exhibition is not just a static display of the work of famous comic artists. Instead, Louvre engaged a panel of artists to write and illustrate a series graphic novels set in Louvre, each centering on one of its specific works.

The result was a set of imaginative, fantastical, diverse graphic novels by authors Nicolas de Crécy, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Éric Liberge and Bernard Yslaire – each with their own style and identity.

The exhibit features bios of each artist in French, English, and Japanese alongside of original plates of their work. Additionally, a series of video screens display the steps of digital illustration that went in to some of the books (said Elise: “Oh my god, Lindsay would love this.”).

One of our favorite genres of art in Louvre was paintings of the halls of the Louvre, because their artists had to painstakingly reproduce other artists’ works as seen at oblique angles and lighting conditions. The graphic novels do just that … arbitrarily, and on each page, all while imagining a narrative playing against that classical backdrop.

While many of the novels predictably featured the Mona Lisa, we were drawn in specific to Eric Liberge’s Odd Hours – partially because it is about Nike of Samothrace deciding to fly away from her moorings, but mostly because his illustrations are stunning. The plate of Liberge’s work literally stopped us in our tracks, which only a few other pieces in the entire museum managed to do.

This was a temporary exhibition, so we were prohibited from taking photos – and the comics are so new that I can’t even find any images online! I’ll try to shoot a page of Liberge’s stunning book to show you, as there’s no way I will be smooshing it onto my scanner at home.

Still a comic book nerd at heart.

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How bad do I want this?

Really, really bad.

Not quite as bad as I want to fly to Madison, Wisconsin to see Peter Mulvey open for Ani next weekend, and I’m hoping the flight will come down to the same price as this useless statue of my favorite comic book character of all time in one of her best costumes.