* G.I. Joe movie producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura opens his mouth and a veritable ocean of stupid pours out. Jiminy Christmas, they take my favorite toy line from when I was a kid, cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander, and the movie is still going to royally eat it. (Via Topless Robot, who, for their sins, compile some of the choicest idiocy.)

* Either Doug Wolk is pulling another Jess Lemon or extravagantly eyebrowed Art Brut frontman Eddie Argos actually is reviewing comics for a St. Louis-based entertainment website. He's read Booster Gold and Tales from the Farm...twice! (Via Pitchfork.)

* Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk apparently talked to DC Comics about doing a limited series. He's also friends with David "Kabuki" Mack. That's all I got.

* Eve Tushnet writes on abortion in horror, and discovers a surprisingly underutilized approach thereto. Worth a read even if (as is likely) you disagree with where Eve's coming from on the issue, since her approach is descriptive rather than prescriptive (which is something I could stand to see more of in horror writing, as a matter of fact).

* Rich Juzwiak and Gabe Delahaye chat about Pier Paolo Pasolini's anti-facist proto-torture-porn, er, classic?, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom.

* This week's installment of Awesome Movie Poster Friday over at Stacie Ponder's Final Girl is all about VHS box art, and needless to say, it's de-gorgeous.

Wet Moon Book 2: Unseen Feet
Ross Campbell, writer/artist
Oni Press, June 2006
180 pages
$14.99
Buy it from Oni
Buy it from Amazon.com

College is the time in everyone's life when maximum personal freedom meets minimum personal responsibility. Classes and grades notwithstanding, there's really nothing to stop you from doing pretty much whatever you want, whenever you want, in a parentless, highly sexed world where you are generally rewarded for following your bliss. I mean, at least this was how it was when you were a film studies major. It also seems to be how it is for the art students who populate Wet Moon, Ross Campbell's languid goth soap opera. As is the case with those heady times before you've picked a major, or perhaps toward the end of your four years when you've basically completed all your requirements and have maybe four hours of classes every seven days, the kids in Wet Moon seem to neither know nor care where they're going, simply soaking in the atmosphere of aimlessness. I can't remember the last time I read a comic this visually (and aurally--the dialogue is spot-on) ambitious while having so little an idea of where that ambition was eventually going to take me. I don't know how you'd feel about it, but I'm loving the experience. For one thing, it allows Campbell's art to shine almost as an end in itself. It's not just that his line is lovely or that his character designs are each unique and memorable or that his characters are basically all super-sexy in this delightfully slatternly way, though all these things are true; he also makes very smart choices in terms of choreography, body language, and pacing that really stick. When lead character Chloe accidentally mispronounces a pair of words in the middle of an argument, the look of self-irritation on her face is pricelessly accurate. There's a great sex scene where the interplay of insecurity and self-confidence among young people is conveyed deftly and appealingly, but Campbell can also deflate his characters' romantic presentations, as when he transforms Chloe's memory of getting dumped by her beautiful ex-boyfriend Vincent into an over-the-top parody of goth sentimentality. And then there are random-ass scenes like some sort of reverie/dream sequence/I don't know what involving a character drinking orange juice out of the carton, wandering into the street, and rolling one eye up into her head. What a weird, addictive series this is.

* Related: John Harrison, director of the upcoming Barker adaptation Book of Blood, refers to the film as more character-driven than splatteriffic. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* Matthew Perpetua links to an old Hard Copy story on that time the FBI mistook part of the video for Nine Inch Nails' "Down in It" for a snuff film. That never happened to Stabbing Westward.

* Douglas Wolk annotates Grant Morrison and Dough Mahnke's event comic/Supermen team-up/Watchmen fanfic Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #1.

* My experience with RPGs is limited to one lovely, beery summer between freshman and sophomore year in college, but I still found Bruce Baugh's look at early D&D guidebooks fascinating as an examination of how imagination and play can be given structure and stricture of varying efficacy.

Clive Barker's The Thief of Always
Kris Oprisko, writer
Gabriel Hernandez, artist
adapted from the novel The Thief of Always by Clive Barker
IDW, 2005
144 pages
$19.99
Buy it from Amazon.com

Given the standard weakness of comics adaptations of non-City of Glass prose material and the standard cheesiness of American horror-comic art, any project that entails adapting a prose horror novel would normally already have two strikes against it. But Clive Barker has gotten lucky on that score a few times during his career, from the impressively atmospheric Books of Blood-based anthology series Tapping the Vein back in the day to this little number based on Barker's first all-ages book. While you can see the rough edges in the edits quite frequently--most notably during the beginning and ending, which are rushed enough to feel like they happen how they do because they must, not because that's what springs from the events that befall the characters and emotions they experience as those events take place--it's a surprisingly evocative, beautifully illustrated little graphic novel about a childhood lost.

The story concerns a schoolkid named Harvey Swick who, bored to tears by a dreary February, is approached by a magical being with a beyond-ear-to-ear grin, named Rictus. (Already a good sign, right?) Rictus offers Harvey a vacation to a place called the Holiday House, whose mysterious proprietor Mister Hood offers "special" children an eternity of carefree carousing, with each day in the place comprising all four seasons of the year. (Every morning is springtime, while it's Halloween every evening and Christmas every night.) Needless to say things aren't what they seem, and before long Harvey and the friends he makes at Holiday House try to escape this lotus-eating interval to return to the outside world, which turns out to be tougher than it looks.

While the book tends now to be compared to Harry Potter, it has a lot more in common with other stories of childhood voyage and return to a dangerous land of fantasy: Oz, Wonderland, Never-Never Land, and Barker's own Abarat. The idea of the haunted house--since that's obviously what we're dealing with--also hits notes resonant with everything from Hansel & Gretel to The Shining, not to mention Candyman director Bernard Rose's Paperhouse, a more-or-less contemporary product of the British dark fantasy scene, iirc. Aside from the obviously truncated start and finish to the story, Oprisko does a solid job of preserving as much of Barker's weird whimsy as possible, making sure to include moments that stand out from the fairy-tale norm--Harvey's phone calls home to his parents to make sure they're okay with his vacation, for example.

The real star of the adaptation, though, is Gabriel Hernandez and his absolutely lovely art. It appears to have been done in pencil, then given a soft bath in muted color washes by Sulaco Studios. The contrast between Hernandez's off-kilter, frequently angular character designs and Sulaco's gauzy palette is pretty much perfect for Barker's kids' fantasy work, which itself introduces elements of the horrific into a storytelling mode we're frequently quite cozy with. Hernandez is as attentive to detail as he is to design--for example, quietly filling the Holiday House with everything a boy could wish for, from suits of armor to Egyptian sarcophagi to preserved pterodactyls, despite this never being referred to in the dialogue. It's the art that will keep me coming back to this one, and makes it worth at least a first look.

* Tom Spurgeon has done another of his always-worth-reading slush-pile review marathons. This one includes his takes on the rewardingly bizarre Water Baby by Ross Campbell, some Johnny Ryan minicomics, the latest MOME, and, in a review that contains compliments so awesomely backhanded they'll make your face ache, Comic Foundry.

* Chuck Palahniuk says his first more or less openly horror novel Lullaby is headed to the big screen. Chuck Palahniuk is not the most reliable source of information regarding movie versions of his books, but hey. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* Aaron "Chief Galen Tyrol" Douglas says Battlestar Galactica's final episodes won't start airing till April, rather than the originally announced January start date. (Via AICN.) SciFi Channel says au contraire--the January start date is on as planned.

* The very good comics and art publisher PictureBox is having a deep-discount sale on everything in its store this week. Unsurprisingly, I bought a T-shirt.

* Curt Purcell of The Groovy Age of Horror continues his series of essays critiquing--even "debunking," in Curt's words--Freud's seminal essay "The Uncanny," one of the core texts for scholars of horror. This time out he argues that the supernatural isn't scary because of how it indicates the return of the repressed, but that the return of the repressed is scary because it indicates the presence of the supernatural. Total protonic reversal!

* CRwM of And Now the Screaming Starts has been taken a lengthy, YouTube-enhanced look at each of Coney Island's three haunted-house rides. View at your own risk!

Fires
Lorenzo Mattotti, writer/artist
Penguin, 1991
64 pages
Buy it used from Amazon.com

I've had this book for a long long time, acquiring it through Sequential Swap because hey, Lorenzo Mattotti, right? One of the great comics artists in the world! But I've put off reading it for just as long because the great comics art inside it is, if I'm being honest, not for me. I don't see people in Mattotti's blocky, quasi-cubist painted figures, I see blocks. With its tactile layers of color covering every inch, I have a hard time finding an "in" to any given panel. My eye just bounces right off the surface.

The funny thing is that the story almost overcomes this. It stars one Lieutenant Absinthe, an officer in the navy of a South American archipelagic country whose battleship is sent on a mission to investigate the mysterious island of Saint Agatha, where ships seem to go missing with alarming regularity. In an arc that should be familiar to fans of everything from The Lord of the Flies to Lost to The Shining, Absinthe--heh, here I was going to say "slowly" out of sheer force of habit, but it happens almost overnight--goes native, and ends up helping the supernatural (?) forces present on the island destroy his comrades. On the back cover, a blurb from Mattotti indicates that his inspiration was the films of Tarkovsky and Herzog and the hypnotic power of their environments; in essence, Mattotti's project was to craft a story that does what his art fails to do with me, which is suck one in. He works so hard at it that he almost pulls it off--the story's climax in particular is vividly done--and the countless similar stories you've read or seen do some of the work for him, but ultimately I keep running into that wall of visual information over and over again and finding no way to join Lieutenant Absinthe as he's pulled in.

* First half: Kramers Ergot 4.

Brilliantly Ham-fisted
Tom Neely, writer/artist
I Will Destroy You, July 2008
20 pages
$5
Visit Neely's website

They can't all be winners, but this collection of "19 comic strip poems" originally published on Tom Neely's blog boasts some very strong work, including among them some of my favorite comics of the year. Constructed by juxtaposing a simple sentence against a four-panel strip's worth of largely abstract imagery, these comics are a veritable catalogue of Neely's visual preoccupations: Tall houses with crooked chimneys, Gottfredson-style white gloves, deep-black, viscous blots of ink, lone trees, holes, the severing of heads or hands. At times they're used to strike a harrowing tone of confusion and despair--"Seething Rage" is a memorable portrait of a literally beaten man, while "House of Cards" plays off one of my personal favorite tropes for utter senselessness, roadkill. Given my own predilections it's probably no surprise that the book's more hopeful moments--"New," touting the power of hope in the form of a newborn; "R.R.I.P.", a declaration of ars gratia artis inspired by painter Robert Rauschenberg--leave me cold, leaning a little further toward the mushiness that is an occupational hazard of "comic poetry." Still, "O.K.," a full-color strip that overwhelms with the beauty of its palm-trees-at-sunset vista while the text celebrates the acceptance of a proposal, proves that Neely has the illustrative chops to give even his most (understandably!) sentimental inclinations real punch.

Rick Altergott, Gabrielle Bell, Jonathan Bennett, Blanquet, Blex Bolex, Conrad Botes, Shary Boyle, Mat Brinkman, John Brodowski, Ivan Brunetti, C.F., Chris Cilla, Jacob Ciocci, Dan Clowes, Martin Cendreda, Joe Daly, Kim Deitch, Matt Furie, Tom Gauld, Leif Goldberg, Matt Groening, John Hankiewicz, Sammy Harkham, Eric Haven, David Heatley, Tim Hensley, Jaime Hernandez, Walt Holcombe, Kevin Huizenga, J. Bradley Johnson, Ben Jones, Ben Katchor, Ted May, Geoff McFetridge, Jesse McManus, James McShane, Jerry Moriarty, Anders Nilsen, John Pham, Pshaw, Aapo Rapi, Ron Rege Jr., Xavier Robel, Helge Reumann, Ruppert & Mulot, Johnny Ryan, Richard Sala, Souther Salazar, Frank Santoro, Seth, Shoboshobo, Josh Simmons, Anna Sommer, Will Sweeney, Matthew Thurber, Adrian Tomine, C. Tyler, Chris Ware, and Dan Zettwoch.

* Speaking of absurdly stuffed packages of comicsy delights, Grant Morrison has a lengthy interview up with IGN's Dan Phillips, and it's as good as you've come to expect from the guy. It's more or less equally split between Morrison's trademark close reading of superhero tropes and metacommentary on the making of a modern superhero story, but I thought there were a couple of points particularly worth pointing out. First, here's a bone that many hardcore DC fans will be glad to have been thrown:

IGN Comics: I don't want to spend too much time on this topic, because you've addressed it elsewhere, but there have obviously been some discrepancies between parts of FinalCcrisis - mainly, the death of Orion - and Countdown and Death of the New Gods. At what point did you realize this would become an issue, and do you think it will affect any other aspects of your story?

Morrison: There were a couple of discrepancies which affected the early issues of Final Crisis and which came about because of the way the two books were being written out of order and to different deadlines.

Ultimately, it comes down to me as the last guy in the chain to fix it all, which is what I'm going to do. I'm actually going to make all the discrepancies work and tie in, and I've got a plan to fix it. To me, it was just like, "Oh guys, don't worry about it." Sometimes human error just creeps into the system. But I also realize that a lot of readers have a genuine emotional investment in the strict coherence of these patchwork fictional universes, so it seemed only fair that I should use the Crisis to clean up any lingering problems.

IGN Comics: That's interesting, because Crises have always sort of been used to clean up continuity problems.

Morrison: Yeah, they always did that sort of thing with Crises, didn't they? And I didn't want to make this any kind of continuity reboot, which it's not. But I did realize, well, why not set time and space right ? I can easily provide a reason for why things played out differently in different books.

Remember also that, despite my inexplicable reputation among certain fans as a 'difficult' writer, I'm actually one of the most successful people in the comics business and have been for a long time. I wrote what's still the highest-selling original graphic novel ever, I wrote DC's biggest selling book for years with JLA, I wrote Marvel's most popular X-title.

* WANT: CineFile Video's auteur/metal mash-up T-shirts! (Via Keith Uhlich.) Drooooool...

* Matthew Perpetua salutes Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for their...work ethic?

* On the "three great tastes that taste great together" front, Paul Pope draws a nude woman reading Watchmen.

* I've often thought that furries are an underserved demographic in the soft-drink market, haven't you? (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Finally, Tom Spurgeon gives you a present in the form of this incredible gallery of art as we all wish a very happy 91st birthday to the late Jack Kirby, the King of Comics. Here is my favorite thing he ever drew.

The first hip-hop song I ever loved, "Fight the Power" is arguably the greatest hip-hop song ever, but part of me thinks Spike Lee's video for it is even better. Every time I see it I find myself astonished that such a thing ever even happened, let alone was filmed. The most powerful aspect of its rally format is exactly what people are rallying around. With the exception of the song's title there is literally no sloganeering to be found on any of the signs and placards--each is simply emblazoned with a proper noun or a person's photograph, as though merely asserting the presence of "BROOKLYN," "FLAVOR FLAV," or Malcolm X is enough of a statement in and of itself, which at the time it was. It's what I've called an "image of triumph-through-simply-existing" and it wows me every time.

Your Disease Spread Quick
Tom Neely, writer/artist
characters and dialogue inspired by the album (A) Senile Animal by the Melvins
Robotic Boot, Summer 2008
22 pages
$6
Visit Neely's website

You don't need to listen to the Melvins to appreciate Your Disease Spread Work as further evidence, as if any were needed after The Blot, that Tom Neely is working the most fruitful vein of horror-slash-artcomics since Al Columbia. Like Columbia, Neely's work borrows stylistic elements from masterful old black-and-white kids' cartoonists like Otto Mesmer and Floyd Gottfredson, then harnesses it to a unique vocabulary of monstrousness and murder. While Columbia tends toward intimate horror in the work of his I've seen, Neely's best stuff is characterized by a tendency to scale upward and outward at breakneck speed, with threats suddenly emerging as colossal if not outright apocalyptic.

YDSQ addresses that tendency head-on, beginning and ending with words of woe from a doomsday prophesier with the head of a horse. In between we encounter decapitations, an infernal saloon populated with infamous tyrants, Neely's trademark black-ink blots, a sequence reminiscent of that old 7-Up mascot Spot crossed with H.P. Lovecraft, the Big Bad Wolf, a ghoul, a thunderbird, a Fritz Lang-style robot bride, a mummified Baby Herman type, scenes of everyday depravity, and more. At no point does any of this arrive from a predictable direction or feel anything less than profoundly discomfiting. It adds up to a portrait of great unease with the direction of society, coupled with a gallows humor about it all (there's a Hostess ad parody on the back cover to cleanse the palate). What it has to do with the Melvins I may never know, but it works as both an ad for the band and a statement completely independent of them.

* Speaking of execs in need of defenestration: Clive Barker tears Lionsgate head Joe Drake a new one over his mishandling--deliberate, Barker once again alleges--of Midnight Meat Train, which Barker says was buried a long with several other films in order to keep the spotlight on the Drake-shepherded genre effort The Strangers. (Via Dread Central.)

* Quote of the day:

Vertigo's typically indifferent colors don't help, of course: strap in for the color brown, everybody! Do they get a discount on brown? Is that how they keep the costs down? Seriously, dead seriously: What is with these people, and the color brown? Does anyone even know? This is an open invitation to any Vertigo colorist willing to do an interview about the color brown. Please explain.

* Joe McCulloch reviews the inaugural entry in Rick Geary's Treasury of XXth Century Murder, The Lindbergh Child. How kickass would a Treasury of Victorian Murder Omnibus be?

* I've had two dreams about the lost fourth season of Deadwood in the past week. They've been violent and awesome.

* I enjoy many current superhero comics by several different superhero comics creators, some of which are good, some of which are very good, some of which are even great, but it occurred to me the other day that really the only guy working at a level comparable to the best or even the very very good alternative comics creators right now is Grant Morrison, and when I read writing that fails to keep this sort of thing in perspective by treating random aspects of current superhero culture like it's the most important and innovative and forward-looking comics material on Earth, I get very irritated.

* Finally, congratulations to Rick Marshall on his new gig as co-editor of MTV's Splash Page comics/movie blog!

Incanto
Frank Santoro, writer/artist
PictureBox Inc., 2006
44 pages
$5
Buy it from PictureBox

I have no idea if this is an active reference point for him at all, but I can't read Frank Santoro comics without thinking of the swirly, sensual, romantic rapture of a good shoegaze song. Both are (generally) more concerned with mood than with any kind of narrative--knowing, perhaps, that emotions can be stories in and of themselves. This particular comic reads a little like a dress rehearsal for the more rhapsodic moments of Santoro and Ben Jones's teenage-riot series-cum-OGN Cold Heat. Joining his usual minimal line to an equally minimal layout (one or two panels per page), complemented by unbroken fields of blue, orange, and white color, Santoro "tells" the "story" of an emotionally epic romance in the language of metaphor--wild horses, mysterious combat, vampiric antagonists, deserts and mountains, blazing suns, parents that just don't understand, desperate embraces, taking off a shirt, hands on bodies. Each of these sort of dissolves into the next in a fashion that enables you to make it all the way through the comic in under a minute, or flip back and forth and re-re-re-read like putting "Vapor Trail" on repeat. It's slight, and not for everyone, but lovely for me. I want to connect with the emotions he's conveying even though feeling them has become a distant memory for me.