Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

consume

Grudge Match

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My friend Rob Baniewicz (of killer improv comedy duo Meg & Rob) shared an article from the Onion A/V Club Q&A titled “Lifetime Grudges.”

The article caught my interest because it’s about lifelong, subjective, sometimes irrational grudges that people develop against artists. Many of the Onion’s regular contributors shared their personal grudge matches, from Sofia Coppola to U2.

Surely you’ve done it. A movie star whose weird mouth-shape you just can’t get past? A musician whose utterly terrible new album forces you to lose faith? The reason doesn’t matter so much. just that they’ve jumped your personal shark permanently, never to return to your good graces.

A few spring to my mind immediately. Alanis Morissette – by her fourth US record she had entirely quit writing catchy, interesting music, so I gave up. Chuck Palahniuk – wrote too many overly-convenient, repetitive books for me to care that he might eventually get better. Jason Mraz – I found his songwriting schtick underhwhelming from the first second I heard him.

The grudge article is an interesting counterpoint to something else that has been on my mind lately: permanent “must-buy” policies. Lifetime subscriptions, let’s call them.

Surely you have these too – an unflinching desire to consume everything by a specific artist. I’ll buy any song by Garbage, watch any movie by David Fincher, and love any print by Mucha, no questions asked. It’s a form of brand-loyalty – these artists appeal to some aspect of your personal aesthetic, and you’ll support them forever for it.

Who is your #1 Grudge, and why? What about your most major undying, devoted subscription? Could the grudge ever (re)earn your trust? Could the subscription ever fall from the pedestal?

Classic Modern Classics

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There is a wonderful meme sweeping the illustrators of blogland wherein they render an antiqued paperback cover for a modern classic.

I first caught this meme earlier in the month from the blog of author Martha Wells, who pointed to these clever Harry Potter covers, in the style of classic Penguin books. The same artist – M. S. Corley – also took a shot at Lemony Snicket and Spiderwick. I recommend spending a few minutes with Corley’s blog during which you scroll down to some of his prior work, much of which is fascinating.

However, that one blog didn’t push my to my posting tipping point – I needed a reminder. Earlier today I caught a link from Neil Gaiman for illustrator Mike Baker‘s entry for a classic Coraline.

Apparently Baker caught the bug from Spacesick, who rendered covers for cult cinema classics like Back to the Future and Highlander. Some of them are particularly excellent – I might print a set and wallpaper my cube.

Finally, Storyteller’s Workshop offers a primer on how to achieve the effect on your own.

If you have seen this meme elsewhere on the web please point me towards the art so I can update this post or pen a sequel.

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.]

abnormally attracted to sin and debunking bestsellers

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Breaking news: Tori Amos’s new disc will be titled Abnormally Attracted to Sin.

Like, duh, Tori.

However, in the “un-duh” department, each song on the disc – will be paired with a “visualette” shot in HD and Super-8. Amanda Palmer did a YouTube version of same on her last disc, which I dug. And, Tori never does anything half way.

Abnormally Attracted to Sin is the first disc in Tori’s deal with Universal Republic Records, which is primarily for distribution – she won’t be signing away masters or publishing rights ever again.

First disc of a newly freed Tori, who ended her last tour with a full band in fierce form and is coming back with her first integrated multimedia product launch. Preliminary verdict? Probably awesome.

Good luck getting into the SXSW showcase featuring the debut of new tunes – as of this morning it just became the hottest ticket of the entire festival.

Personal Tori-worship aside, I’d probably hit PJ Harvey’s instead.

In other news, yesterday my old-skool blogging pal Martha enthused about BSG and Malcolm Gladwell, two things I can very much get behind.

Except, the NYT dinged Gladwell’s newest, Outliers, right out of the gate – causing me to back off my haste to snap it up. (Later another NYT writer liked it more, and Gladwell responded.)

Martha claims the book is enrapturing, causing her to miss her bus stop twice. Coming from Martha, this is a sufficient endorsement. However, one of her commenters felt the need to respond with a general debunking of his Tipping Point.

The debunking employs my favorite example from Tipping Point (“Broken Windows“) versus Freakonomics (crime v. abortion) – a book I panned as being superfluous.

I’m not sure the debunking convinced me in one direction or the other. Yes, Gladwell skirts direct links to causation in Tipping Point, but that’s anecdotally the point of the whole anecdotal book – causation isn’t a single, lonely factor.

That said, the debunking did convince me that A Smart Bear is a rare sensible and practical marketing blog. Sample their intelligence for yourself: ignore the wisdom of crowds or act like your price just doubled.

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.