Dragon Con?

Hey, this actually looks do-able. I could drive up and back (about 4 hours each way) on Saturday--no plane fare or hotel expenses. Should I? Is it cool? Are any of you going?

sidebar woes

Gaaah, I hate fucking with my sidebar, but that one loooooooong undifferentiated blogroll was becoming just about useless for keeping up with stuff, so I'm breaking it out into categories again. It's a work in progress. Your patience is appreciated.

BLACKEST NIGHT: Early Stumbles

After a solid week of wall-to-wall coverage here, I thought I'd give Blackest Night a rest for a while, though that meant leaving some loose ends. Since there's nothing new out this week on that front, it's a good chance for me to get fully up to speed.

I've already looked at BN #1 and Green Lantern #44 from the point of view of new-reader friendliness, but my goal in covering them here is to examine how they do or don't live up to writer Geoff Johns's stated goal of delivering a "horror story about superheroes."

SPOILERS FOLLOW

As I mentioned, GL #43, technically the Prologue, does quite a decent job of establishing Black Hand not only as a supervillain, but as a character who can function as a kind of gothic monster in a superhero universe.

As a figure of horror, he frames the events of BN #1, very similarly to how Scar's ominous presence frames the events of his origin story in GL #43. The issue opens (see the panel at the top of this post) with him lurking in a cemetery, like a vampire or necromancer. He's in a Gotham City (the very name allusive of the word gothic, if not outright derived from it) graveyard, in fact, at the grave of Batman, the mainstream superhero of the DC universe most easily associated with horror--from the very concept of his character and its association with vampires (an association made literal in comics from Red Rain to Nosferatu), it's hardly an accident that he's the superhero who appeared in Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's macabre early issues of Swamp Thing.

The issue closes with Black Hand at the scene of the climactic superhero zombie attack that leaves two major characters dead on the floor, the first victims of Blackest Night. He wields Batman's skull as some kind of necromantic artifact:

For the most part, I think this issue hits the right horror beats. A lot of people have complained about the early pages as boring and unnecessary exposition, with added grumblings that blame new readers for it. I address the whole "fuck new readers" sentiment here, but I also think it's incorrect to view this sequence as an infodump. The point, as I see it, is to focus the view of old and new readers alike through a funereal lens, through the veil of a winding sheet. The point of this recital of the dead is to draw a pall of death over the DC universe, and establish a somber mood. And also to impress us with the scale of the impending threat. When Green Lantern shows the Flash who has died, he's also showing us what the heroes will have to face in a hideous, horrific guise--this isn't raw information, it's obviously meant to pack some emotional punch, and I think it does. There's no strict identity, of course, between this two-page spread and the one revealing the dead Green Lanterns resurrected as zombie Black Lanterns, but there is a resonant symmetry.

The Black Lantern rings suggest a biblical plague of locusts or swarm of Beelzebub's flies as they disperse throughout the cosmos to work their evil magic of raising the dead.

Scar's vicious attack on the Guardians is spectacular and shocking. First, it establishes just how far up the food chain this crisis horror story will play out. Then, biting a throat in such an animalistic manner and ripping out a beating heart carry connotations of vampires, werewolves, and appalling heathen rituals.

The one serious stumble in this issue, it seems to me, is the use of the Dibnys as the zombie attackers in the climactic murder scene. In itself, the scene is suitably horrific, but as I've mentioned, these characters are perceived by some readers as having a history of shabby treatment, and those readers seem to have responded to the Dibnys' zombification in the context of that treatment, as more of the same (here's another example). Basically, this response distracts from and undermines the horror. It looks to me like it should have been foreseeable, and avoided.

Where Blackest Night (the crossover, not the issue) goes off the rails is in GL #44. In the closing pages of BN #1, Martian Manhunter shows up as a Black Lantern zombie to tell Hal Jordan and Barry Allen they should both be dead:

This strikes me as a decently effective horror moment, first because he looks pretty scary, and second because he's right--they should be dead.

GL #44 picks up from that point, and botches it by commencing with an ordinary superhero brawl. However the Dibnys' history may have complicated the reception of their zombie attack, at least they establish in no uncertain terms what Black Lanterns do--they use their superpowers to kill, rip hearts out, and raise their victims as Black Lantern zombies. Martian Manhunter doesn't seem to be trying to do any of that here, and his attack utterly lacks the murderous ferocity the Dibnys displayed.

What's more, character reactions are extremely important in eliciting feelings of horror in an audience. Characters need to respond to horror with horror for the audience to feel it. Green Lantern and Flash simply don't respond to Martian Manhunter with anywhere near the fear or loathing a monster should provoke. I don't care how recognizable he is as a former teammate. He's also plainly recognizable as a zombie. Sure we know Green Lantern and Flash are the major heroes in this crossover, but if they display real fear, we can empathize with them and feel some measure of it, too.

This isn't a disastrous misstep. Blackest Night can still develop into an awesome horror story. But this does make me wonder how well Johns understands horror and how to evoke fear in an audience. We shall see . . . !

Skulls-on-the-patio-fireplace Porn

I'm jealous.

Comics and Movies--What's the Problem?

(from EZ Street)

While a lot of the marketing for MAYHEM is overly ambitious, or disorganized, there is one thing I think it’s fair to say about Carey and Gibson’s efforts: they are honestly trying to sell more comics, not just some “media property.” There are quite a few “comics to movie” companies that I could name – or any regular reader of this blog could name – that are very, very obviously not interested in being successful publishing companies — and succeeding handsomely in that goal.

--Heidi MacDonald

With apologies to Heidi (I guess I don't follow The Beat regularly enough), I don't understand this complaint. I've noticed it on occasion as I gradually learn my way around the comics blogosphere--a reviewer who dismisses a miniseries or OGN as "nothing but" a movie pitch, or the broader claim Heidi makes above, disapprovingly, that there are "quite a few 'comics to movie' companies" that are less interested in comics than "just some 'media property.'"

So here are a few questions, not meant with any snark at all; I honestly don't understand, and am curious to know. What makes a comic seem more like a movie pitch or "media property" than a "proper" comic? And why is that a problem? I don't understand how the goal of making a comic that's a good movie pitch or media property is inconsistent with or divergent from the goal of making a good comic, period.

Commenter nrh made similar criticisms in the thread to my post about Stuff of Legend:

I haven't read the interviews, but the emphasis on "Character moments!" and "Action!" rather than the slightest sense of atmosphere beyond the most hackneyed, on-the-nose sepia design cliches, let alone any real ideas (no Hoffmann or Angela Carter here) make this seem like a post Toy Story, high concept proposal for a mid line direct to video movie adaptation. . . . it looks more like storyboard than comics to my eye, like the rhythm would make more sense as a back and forth between actors than something happening on the space of a page.

I have to confess here, as I did there, when I look at the comic, I don't see what he's (?) talking about. Even so, I can sort of understand what kind of point is being made--that there are certain formal features/dynamics more appropriate to movies than comics that are contaminating comics. I suppose that answers both questions, how you can tell that a comic is a movie pitch (by these formal features/dynamics), and why that's a problem (there are other formal features/dynamics that work better in comics).

Please chime in and help me understand. When you read a comic, what makes you think, "Harumph!--just a movie pitch." And what's wrong with that? And who are the worst offenders? I'd really like to learn something here.

UPDATE: Heidi posts my question at The Beat, and a few people offer interesting answers in the comments.

WAIT UNTIL TWILIGHT by Sang Pak (Harper 2009)

(Okay, first, just ignore that T-word in the title. No relation whatsoever.)

This isn't the kind of book I would have chosen off-the-shelf at Barnes & Noble. When author Sang Pak offered me a review copy and described it as,

a coming-of-age/southern gothic novel about a motherless teenage boy who discovers a terrifying secret in his small Georgia town, and finds that sometimes the most gruesome monsters are those inside ourselves.

. . . I really wasn't sure it would fit well with my tastes. I went through my "southern gothic" phase back in college, and got it pretty well out of my system then. The "coming-of-age" label concerned me even more, as I find such stories tend to be "literary" in all the ways I find most annoying, with levels of narcissism ranging from subtle undercurrent to raging torrent. That the teenage first-person protagonist's name is "Sam Polk" really alarmed me on this score. And then as I started reading, well . . . I have to agree with Ian Chipman's Booklist review quoted at Amazon, that it "opens hesitantly."

But I'm glad I stuck with it, because once it hit me with the first major shock, it hooked me in a big, bad way. The "hesitant" opening is the journey of Sam and one of his friends to a spooky old house in a poor neighborhood. Sam has a video project to complete for a class, and David has a distant and indirect friend-of-the-family connection with the woman who lives in the house. What makes her interesting and a potential subject for the video project are her unusual baby triplets, who she claims were immaculately conceived (it's a southern gothic, so I hope it's not too much of a spoiler when I say, you know what that means). How unusual are they? The "little miracles" are so gruesomely deformed that the instant Sam lays eyes on them, he runs outside and vomits.

After I finished the first chapter, I had to set the book aside to run some errands, and I realized it had gotten under my skin when I kept thinking about those babies. Since I couldn't stop thinking about them, it rang totally true, once I resumed reading, that Sam became preoccupied with intrusive thoughts and feelings about them. At first, he makes himself watch the snippet of video footage David managed to capture of them before the insulted woman told them to go away. He works up the nerve to go back and apologize to the woman and ask to see the babies again.

A sinister man begins to haunt the margins of Sam's life. This guy turns out to be the woman's adult son. Wow, he is one vicious, violent motherfucker, and a couple of scenes featuring him are truly nasty and upsetting.

Two things particularly impressed me about this novel.

First, it's relatively short and quite a quick read, and yet a great deal of richness about Sam gets packed in very economically. Besides the main plot thread about the babies, we see Sam deal with school, friends, work, his creative aspirations, the loss of his mother a year ago, the distance between himself and his father and his older brother, and his emerging adolescent sexuality (here it gets a little Marty Stu-ish, as every girl responds to him very positively, in ways he sometimes seems oblivious to). What's most impressive about all this is the way it comes across not as so many different plot strands but as a single life. Pak doesn't just skillfully weave it together, but infuses it with a deep integrity I haven't often seen even from more experienced, established writers.

Then, being "southern gothic," this novel has a lot of unusual details, characters, and scenes that are unsettling in one way or another. I've complained before that this sort of thing too often comes across as an ad hoc piling on of weird and creepy details, but Pak really gets it right and brings an impressive coherence to it all. What holds it all together, ultimately, is the way Sam processes these experiences. Specifically, he draws lessons and resources from them that help him deal with the extreme situations arising on the main plot thread. A lot of writers telegraph this sort of thing in a way that feels artificial--it's easy to see that such-and-such experience is a key, and it's not too hard to recognize it when they come to the door that key unlocks. Here, Sam is forced to scrounge inside himself for whatever he can find to meet extreme demands, these weird experiences are what he has to work with, so he mines them for meaning, and in his desperation finds insights that aren't immediately apparent but that nevertheless ring true. Now, there are some "here's a key" moments, such as when one of his brother's more streetwise friends tells him,

"Samuel, just remember, if you ever get in a fight, just keep getting back up and fighting, even if they're dragging you all around the parking lot bleeding and screaming. You keep fighting; they'll give up. That means you win."

But the other cases I describe make even these seem a lot more organic and natural, and not so plot-pointish. It works.

As I said, this book is quite a ways off my beaten paths, but having read it, I'm really glad I went there. Heck, I'll probably read it again to study how Pak pulls some of this stuff off. Highly recommended!

Shane Oakley sketch

Just got a nice little package from Shane Oakley. In the enclosed letter, this cool Nosferatu sketch accompanies his signature.

Sala Fix

Well, I should have Delphine #4 in hand any day now, but in the meantime, Rob Clough has a nice review of it.

Then, over at Sala's own blog, he's posted a nifty and sinister little piece, "The Arizona Desert" (Part 1, Part 2).

Supernatural Thrillers Featuring THE LIVING MUMMY

I love the approach Marvel took to its Bronze Age horror comics, putting the monsters front and center as stars of their own titles. Of course, the big three dominated--Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, and Frankenstein Monster. But there were plenty of second-tier titles. Mostly, these seem to have begun as anthology series, featuring different monsters every issue, until some monster struck a chord and came to dominate the title. So Adventures into Fear essentially became Man-Thing, and later Morbius, and Creatures on the Loose concluded on a Man-Wolf run. The Living Mummy made his first appearance as a one-off in Supernatural Thrillers #5, sandwiched between one-offs about Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde in issue 4 and the Headless Horseman in issue 6. Writer Steve Gerber and artist Rich Buckler deliver a fun, however by-the-numbers mummy yarn, complete with flashbacks to ancient Egypt and a rampage through modern Cairo.

Swathed in all those rotting bandages, mummies sure look awesome. I'm pretty sure that's the core of their appeal--their striking visual presence. Considering the lackluster lineup of monsters from previous issues, it's hardly surprising that the Living Mummy got slotted into the star position "by popular demand!"

Cool as they look, though, do mummies really lend themselves to ongoing series? Gerber seems out of ideas already with this launch of the character's official starring run. He rehashes the events of the prior issue at great length, including the whole ancient backstory, and sends the mummy on yet another rampage, this time in New York. On a more positive note, Val Mayerik picks up the art chores. Where Buckler's mummy was basically a big guy in bandages, Mayerik's is more monstrous, showing signs of dessication and decay, and doing a lot more shambling.

This story, and Gerber's stint, concludes with the mummy disappearing into an alley, leaving things wide-open for whatever might come next.

Tony Isabella picks up the writing for the next installment. I think the opening pages actually look quite promising, with their suggestion of a distinctly groovy psychedelic direction:

Alas, Isabella drops this turd in our laps:

These supposedly scary elemental gods never come off as anything but an incredibly lame supervillain gang. They're some of the weakest, most uninspired shit I've ever seen a storyteller pull out of his ass. And with that, the series is fucked, because these bozos are the main villains the rest of the way out.

In this next issue, it gets even worse. Apparently, there's another Egypt-themed character in the Marvel Universe--one of the X-Men's lowest-tier and most forgettable villains, a mutant calling himself the Living Pharaoh. He's as broad a stereotype as you can imagine, with a small army of flunkies costumed like the palace slaves who fan the princess with palm-fronds in any B-movie you've ever seen with an ancient Egyptian setting. If Living Mummy jumped the shark in the previous issue, it crash-lands in this one, and never gets back up.

Was this a tragically missed opportunity? Could another writer have crafted a much better horror series around the mummy--one that actually aimed at horror, instead of whatever they were aiming for here (I honestly have no idea what they were thinking with the direction they took)? Or is a mummy just too limited to serve as the starring monster character in an ongoing series?

Whatever the case, at least the covers were pretty decent, for the most part. Here are the rest of them:

LOLCRwM

(blame it on this guy--or this one)

Horror Fan Dumb?

CRwM, August 1, 2009:

When it comes to obsessively policing the "correctness" of works within their chosen genre, nobody beats horror fans.

Sure, sci-fi readers may have us matched when it comes self-defensive knee-jerk reactions to what we perceive as anti-genre bias in the mainstream. But nobody can get as hot when proposing what should and should not be considered as a valid addition to our pet genre. You couldn't find a mystery fan who, even if their tastes ran towards the hardest of hardboiled crime fic, would not recognize the elegant classics of Elizabeth Daly, the juvenile Nancy Drew series, and the aw-shucks slapstick of Kinky Friedman as all belonging legitimately to the genre. Sci-fi guys regularly lay down definitions RE the scientific rigor of the romances they read, but they know it's bullshit: Not a one of them wouldn't count Philip K. Dick among their number and his works are about as scientifically rigorous as The Great Space Coaster. I can't imagine you hear many romance novel readers say, "I don't consider romances between nurses and doctors to be real romance. It's either lusty pirates with good hearts and the clever, but sheltered - don't forget sheltered, sheltered is the whole thing! - daughters of wealth shipping magnates or nothing!"

Sean T. Collins, August 1, 2009, after quoting the above:

OH MY JESUS YES

Sean T. Collins, May 15, 2006:

As I've said before, there is virtually no overlap between the sort of horror that interests Curt and myself. In fact, I'd likely refuse to categorize a lot of what he calls horror as horror at all, if I were forced at gunpoint to be the genre's arbiter.

The truth is, every fandom has its little pet obsessions that get endlessly discussed. Most of those probably center around how awesome the object of their fandom is, but the narcissism of small differences pretty much guarantees heated debate over various esoteric internal divisions and arcana. For horror fans, one of those is the question of just what does and doesn't count as horror. There's actually a pretty good reason for that. Horror is defined by two criteria. On the one hand, it's a genre, with all the conventions, tropes, and trappings that implies. But on the other hand, as Sean puts it, when explaining why he doesn't (or at least didn't) think much GAoH material counts as horror,

Why? Because, to me, fear is precisely the point of the genre. I'm pretty much a horror elitist on that score. In fact, in my senior essay on horror I argued for what Lovecraft deemed the highest form of fear, "cosmic fear," as being the ideal reaction inspired by horror works. To the argument that such an ideal would establish too narrow a "standard for inclusion into the genre," as per The Philosophy of Horror author Noel Carroll, my reply was a terse "so what?" Long story short, I believe horror scary rises or falls with its scariness, and while that scariness can attract, fascinate, thrill, and please (per Curt), it should in the end, and primarily, and fundamentally, scare. If you can't approach a genre based on how well it executes its defining characteristic, I don't know how you can approach a genre at all.

Every horror fan strikes her own internal balance between these criteria, and so when marginal cases set these criteria in tension, horror fans differ in their judgments on whether a particular case satisfies the criteria or not. Those ads for Hurt Locker make it look pretty scary. But is anyone suggesting that it's horror? Of course not. Because it has none of the conventions, tropes, or trappings that characterize the genre. Going the other way, ads for monster cereals depict a vampire (Count Chocula), a ghost (Boo-Berry), and a Frankenstein Monster (Franken-Berry), but nobody calls them horror either. Why not? Because these are zany cartoon characters selling children's cereal, about as far from scary as they possibly could be.

I hew pretty far to the "genre tropes" end of the spectrum, so I tend to say stuff like this:

What bothers me about the assumptions I criticize--the overvaluation of fear in horror, the assumption that it must be aversive, and the assumption that it should aim to produce real fear behaviors and succeeds best when it does--is that they often lead to a sneering dismissal of, well, most horror in any medium as not being "really scary." Whether you're talking about the Universals or Hammers or Marvel Bronze Age horror comics or the novels I review here, the plain fact of the matter is, they aren't scary in that particular, limited sense. To demand that horror in general be scary in that sense, and to measure it by that yardstick, is to demand both too much and too little of the genre. Too much because it's an unrealistic expectation and too little because delivery on that expectation reduces horror to a grim endurance test, with an emphasis on "taking it" rather than enjoying it. In order to get a sense of how unrealistic it is, check out this post (via ADDTF) that explains why "horror is the toughest genre to do right." Well, yeah, it's the toughest genre to do right when you place absurd demands on it--demands that, as I've argued, grow out of some pretty fundamental misunderstandings of the nature and role of fear in horror.

and this:

As an aside, I think there's something very dubious and unhelpful about lumping movies like [Se7en and Saw] (and Silence of the Lambs, etc.) in with horror--not because I want to deny them the grand honor of that designation, and certainly not because I believe they "transcend the genre" or anything like that, but just for the sake of clarity; "thriller" seems like a much more apt category for them, and I see no good purpose in critically blurring that distinction where the films themselves don't cross genres in any notable ways.

But fear is important to me, too, and as the tone of these quotes suggests, I get a lot more worked up defending the inclusion of something I want to call horror than excluding stuff other people want included. On that note, I have to say, CRwM gets this last point exactly right:

While few in the sci-fi ghetto would rail on about Artemis Fowl or The Hunger Game, the fact that tween girls enjoy the Twilight series is apparently a source of unending and obsessive focus for horror fans who, at their age, should really be minimally obsessed with monitoring and evaluating the behavoirs of tween girls. Seriously, boys and girls, it's a wee bit creepy.

Vampirella