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2008-10-24T11:30:00.000-07:00

The New Website

Sex & Comics: Comic Book Reviews for Oct. 15, 2008

2008-10-17T11:32:00.000-07:00

@ smashallrobots.com

The Random Playlist: Johnny Cash's Balls

2008-10-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

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Judging Comic Books by the Covers:Comic Book Reviews for October 8, 2008

2008-10-09T19:56:00.000-07:00

Remember when comics had awesome covers? Like Superman shooting rainbows out of his hand. And like fifty lines of text. And they were totally misleading. Let's see if things have changed with modern comics...

B.P.R.D.: The Warning #4

Cover:Two monsters fight. Dr. Krauss sits in the corner saying, "Hi."

Actual Content:Two monsters actually do fight. In fact, there are soldiers fighting monsters. Soldiers fight goblins. Soldiers fighting giant robots. All that needed to be on the cover of this book was the word: FIGHT! Of course, the two monsters were once allies. But Abe Sapien gets the bright idea to blow a whole through one with a rocket launcher and then have Dr. Krauss use his ectoplasmic mojo on the dead corpse to control it and bring it back to life and really tear things up. Sure, it was kind of a poor Dues Ex Machina (well, isn't that device always poor? Sorry, for the redundancy...) but still cool in the Army of the Dead-Lord of the Rings-kind-of-way.

Which is better? I'm going to go with the actual content on this one. I thought the last B.P.R.D. miniseries has that Alien kind of feel. Well, this has that Aliens kind of feel. And that little "s" means a buckets more crazy problems. In fact, the epic scale of this story really sticks out from most Hellboy-universe tales. Most of them are small and contained. However, this story--illustrated by this issue--is wide open and affecting more than some secret government agency. In fact, the opening page is Germany being set aflame by giant supernatural robots. Though, I have to admit...that little Krauss breaking the fourth wall saying, "Hi," to the reader is pretty endearing. But I'll stick with the actual content being better.

Final Crisis: Revelations #3

Cover: Batwoman...with flames rising from her crotch.

Actual Content: Really heavy handed commentary on whether or not God is a good guy or not. Of course, seeing that all the other actual mythology--angels of mercy, angels of vengeance, Cane, etc--hold true in this stories universe, I've got to find the whole argument kind of void. "God created the universe and has all this power but is a stupid prick because I don't like the way he punishes people." Well, stop believing in him then and he'll go away. I do like that those taken over by the anti-life equation can't be affected by the power of God because God can only have power over those with free will. But otherwise, there is a considerable lack of fire rising from Batwoman's crotch in this book.

Which is better? The cover. Because it seems to be a metaphor that Batwoman has some kind of STD (what else could a crotch on fire represent) which means we can expect an appearance of Bat-Valtrax.

I Kill Giants #4

Cover: A girl on a cell phone. I'm pretty sure it is Barbara's, the protagonist, older sister that takes care of her.

Actual Content: This gets pretty dark. Barbara's one friend betrays her; because Barbara is kind of an asocial jerk. Giants invade. Barbara gets the crap beat out of her. And we find out something really messed up happened to her mom. Like being tied to a bed and tortured in front of Barbara or something. Maybe it was just the A Rose For Emily deal, but whatever it was it is messed up.

Which is better? Content. This series gets better with every issue. I mean, how many comics deal with psychologically messed up twelve-year-old girls who deal with some messed up corpse of her mom by pretending she's Thor? This story just continues to catch me off guard with each issue by the depth it is going for.

Invincible Iron Man #6

Cover: There was another one, but I picked the variant. Why? It's retro and that is kind of what this story arc has been all about. Tony Stark is a poser futurist.

Actual Content: Well, Iron Man fights Zeke for a bunch of pages. There are a bunch of robot Iron Men that help out. Then Iron Man wins. How? I don't know. He shoots some ray and everything works out. Oh, and then Tony gets all The Dark Knight and bemoans the fact that villains are so bad he has to be a little evil too...like when he kills four guys when he pushes his magic let's-end-this-arc button.

Which is better? The cover. This arc was all over the place which is probably why it was six issues instead of three. I mean, I kind of liked it. But I'm not going to keep buying it. Afterall, it is an Iron Man comic. And it never did make me care about Iron Man or Tony Stark or the movie sequel this book is supposed to be setting up. You know it's true. At least the cover was cool looking.

Secret Six #2

Cover: Catman and Batman punching each other.

Actual Content: Catman and Batman punch each other while Catman tries to figure out the origins of the scent of Mexican food. It originates from Batman after eating a burrito. (Which begs the question--did the scent originate from his breath or his farts? Sorry kids, but sometimes those are the kind of jokes you're going to get.)

Which is better? I'm going to go with the actual content. I mean, it has the same stuff from the cover but also the possibility that Batman farts a lot while fighting crime by himself. Plus, I'm pretty sure Bane is straight edge (he rambles on and on about how he no longer juices up using Venom). So, I guess that's a plus. I mean, he'd be cooler if he wore chains as a belt and construction gloves; but he does wear a lucha libre mask...which, really, is the next best thing.

Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane #3

Cover: Mary Jane skateboards on a clear summer day, while Spider-Man swings above her.

Actual Content: Mary Jane runs to work in the pouring rain while Spider-Man hangs out on a building getting a cold from being out in the freezing rain.

Which is better? Tie. I like the cover. It is by Terry Moore and real pretty. The content, while it is pretty Degrassi Jr. High...that is what I expect. Neither really succeed at being more than what they are. So a mediocre draw.

Walking Dead #53

Cover: Some people. With guns.

Actual Content: Rick and son find all the people that used to hang out with them until Rick thought it would be a good idea to fight a tank (just in case you're not reading this: bad idea). And then some new people show up saying they're scientist and know what causes the zombies and are fixing the government.

Which is better? The cover. Because, really, people--probably--pretending to be some of some occupation to survive during a post-apocalyptic America...wasn't that from the horrible Kevin Costner movie The Postman? Yeah, adding zombies won't fix that.

Wonder Woman #25

Cover: Little girls getting pumped over a Wonder Woman movie.

Actual Content: I'm not really sure. So there is some evil queen that is the source of fairy tales that has taken over a Hollywood movie studio to make a movie slandering Wonder Woman and the Amazons. And then some fighting. And gorillas want to eat Hollywood execs. Or something like that.

Which is better? Content. I mean, I was really confused but it did contain this line: "Snow White wasn't trained in ambidextrous dual axe technique!" Also centaurs get kicked in the face. Stop being so wishy-washy centaurs! Are you people or are you horses! Pick a side!

Young Liars #8

Cover: Sadie with a clown...all seventies psychedelic-like.

Actual Content: Dude, clown orgy! Seriously. The last issue was the end of sanity with this book that was already on the edge and I'm driving into whatever this book is about head first. The whole spiders from Mars thing just might be true after reading this issue. I don't even know what to expect anymore. I mean, pigeon shooting with live greyhound dogs as the pigeons? You know Garth Ennis is cutting himself with glass for not thinking of that first.

Which is better? Actual content. I mean, anorexic model spy wishing to probe the orifices of her friends. And clown orgy!

Thursday Morning Hangover: Comic Book Reviews for April 9, 2008

2008-04-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

Is Dick Cheney a Green Lantern? Would I like Harry Potter more if it featured beautiful punk rock girls? And what is with all the Nazi gorillas? All this and more, in this week’s reviews…

Thursday Morning Hangover: Comic Book Reviews for April 2, 2008

2008-04-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

Holy crap, 15 books in one week. It is like some huge crossover event started today and all the publishers pushed as much crap out as possible hoping that newcomers will pick up their books too. But did Countdown have the power to sucker people into buying all this stuff? Oh wait…Countdown wasn’t the huge crossover event? Oh well…

Continued here.

Comicpocalypse

2008-03-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

So the new site, Comicpocalypse is up...kind of. The barebones are up, there is a message board where y'all can talk, and there is the blog.

Oh, and the website is for a comic book podcast. There is a built in drinking game with the show...hey, this straight edge punk is looking out for the rest of you drunks.

So yeah, I'll probably be posting there for now...at least the comic book stuff. So check it. I don't want get cancelled. Tell your friends...and start liking comic books so you'll want to listen.

Reflections of a Time-Traveling-Kung-Fu Monk; pt. III

2008-02-25T19:45:00.000-08:00

Such a lifestyle came into conflict with my training in the monastery—which should be needless to say, but as my publisher demands a specific word count, I will say it. Regardless, my life became of constant acts (sometimes as the one who found joy in it, and sometimes as helping the other party) of masturbation, mutual masturbation, sexual intercourse—vaginal and anal, oral sex—both giving and receiving, paying for sex, frequenting strip clubs, week-long pornographic viewing benders, asphyxiophilia, throat fucking, catheterophilia, salad tossing, formicophilia (though this may have been do to just having sex in run down hotel rooms and not the actual desire to have insects treads on our genitals, which goes the same for any acts of mysophilia), the Dirty Sanchez, hierophilia (though admittedly I only enjoyed it with Christian objects), chrematistophilia, holding my phallis against a vibrating copy machines and receiving sexual gratification, agoraphilia, zoophilia, orgies, mixophilias, telephonicophilia, pictohilia, narratophillia, urophilia (though never pissed on myself, for a period of seven month I found some pleasure in urinating in a women’s mouth during oral sex or on her breast after intercourse), hybristophilia, one instance of oral sex from another man and three hand jobs, biastophilia, odaxelagnia (which led to the discovery that most Goths are all talk when it comes to vampirism), amomaxia, gregomulcia, bondage, sadism, masochism, fisting, nasolingus (which I could not imagine was enjoyable for the female as I do not have an excessively large nose), seventy-eight percent of the position listed in the Kama Sutra, one-on-one, two-on-one (both mmf and mfff), finger banging, sperm swapping, ejaculating in a woman’s asshole, mouth, ear, nose, pussy, eyes, on her face, breast, ass, between the toes, and just about every other body part, cutting flesh, violent sex that resulted in bruises, black eyes, missing teeth, and (in one instances, a torn off ear), the general violation of orifices with bottles, prods, toothbrushes, action figures, eating utensils, writing utensils, and flower stems, and other acts of debauchery that I dare not write. I called this my Aristocrat Period. During this time, of much unprotected sex, I did my part to assure no women was impregnated by heating the chi in my penis at the point of ejaculation to render the sperm dead. Though, one or two sperm may have made it through. In case a child of my loins is reading this, I dare say, do not seek me unless you have trained at the martial arts to the extent you can crush me with your kung fu. And monkey claw will not work.

Of course, my own powers learned from the great discipline of self I learned from the monks began to decrease. After the shattering of my hand in the battle with Cowboy Hick, my chi was able to heal the hand in a matter of days. Twenty-seven bones broken in forty-eight different spots. Three days and seven hours my chi was able to fix the whole shebang. (Let it be noted now that when I knocked out Cowboy Hick with a single blow, it was not a chi-induced hit, but rather as I stated before a punch full of anger and testosterone.) However, years later, towards the end of my Aristocrat Period I found myself repeatedly punching a wall. Two fingers broke. And to this day, they have not healed. Most days I forget they are broken, but after a long day of typing (which is numerous these days as my publisher demands thousands of words typed almost daily) or paper shuffling the middle and ring finger of my right hand become stiff and scream with pain at the slightest movement.

I came to breaking these two fingers during my third marriage, which was really my first legal marriage but third relationship that I called marriage. My wife had called me a man of loose morals. My anger did not arise from the fact that she had made such an accusation, for I have admitted such in my own reflections. (Though I have never called the loosening of morals a bad thing, all I have said is that it declined my chi and ability to heal. Now if one believes the loss of chi and ability to heal is a negative, then he makes a judgment of the nature of good and evil and therefore, metaphysics! And I deem metaphysics as utterly useless; therefore, my causal connection between fucking a lot of women in various ways and my loss of chi cannot be an evaluation of good or evil.) My opposition to my wife’s complaint arose in the fact that I had always admitted to my whoredoms and for her to hold all those things against me as if I had kept it secret and hidden under a mattress. Thus, her hypocrisy kindled my anger. I made mention of all my exploits before we were even engaged.

Of course, because of my learning with the monks I still had great discipline over my body. And though I gave into various gratifications of the flesh, there were other acts of addiction I never gave into such as the smoking of tobacco, partaking of illicit drugs, or the ingestion of alcohol. Even before my training I found I had a gift to avoid total loss of the control of my emotions. This ability was only enhanced by my time-traveling-kung-fu training. I simply could not loose control; every act—even under the pretense of rage—was simply calculated. To this day I still debate which is more sinister—to loss of control or the complete disguise of loss of control with calculated acts.

Reflections of a Time-Traveling-Kung-Fu Monk; pt. II

2008-02-19T20:27:00.000-08:00

In my short story from ten years ago—ten years ago this summer or maybe this October—the protagonist, who was nothing like me, stood at the edge of a cliff in America after having returned from New Zealand, where he learned martial arts from monks. There was some kind of nonsense about Jungian theory about myth and the idea of the return to humanity for the hero after having defeated evil and ascended to the gods. At the time I knew nothing of Jung or his ideas (outside an entry level community college course in psychology). In fact I thought the idea of the collective unconsciousness was laughable. However, there I was writing about ideas that existed for thousands of years though I had never heard of them, so I guess Carl Jung had schooled me.

Though later I started coming around to the idea of some kind of socialist, collective thought as I toyed with theories of the mentally ill. This was after I had returned from New Zealand and after I had stopped talking to the girl whose skirt I wanted to get up. I hypothesized that those society called mentally ill where those who had simply evolved and escaped the collective unconsciousness. It seemed perfectly acceptable to not want to have any connection to the rest of the world when you see the madness that is humanity. In the short story, the protagonist recounts a number of encounters with the villagers below the monks’ temple that justifies the conclusion that people are stark raving mad.

There was the man who laughed while his four-year-old son finished off the last sips of beer in the father’s discarded bottles. And then there was the man who heard a street preacher talk of Jesus Christ, and so he decided to be save and dig up and destroy his marijuana fields. The man turned to me and asked my help for destroying the crop. The protagonist agreed and the two dugs of the fields while listening to Bob Marley. Then afterwards the two lit fireworks in celebration of Guy Fawkes Day. Though the protagonist was never quite sure if the celebration was in favor of the anarchist trying to blow up parliament or his discovery and execution. Another man, Maori with a full moko, invited the protagonist into his home. The Maori recounted in the one-hundred-year-old home that had no electricity and though it was noon day it was pitch black inside the home about his youth and how he had fallen into affiliation with a criminal gang. The protagonist, once his eyes had adjusted to the dark, noticed that a good portion the floor boards were missing, exposing the dirt underneath the home. The maori finally found the strength to leave the gangs and repent of his ways after seeing Hulk Hogan wrestle on television in 1984. He thought there was nothing that represented more strength than the Hulkster and his nation of Hulkamaniacs.

So the mentally ill simply lay outside the collective. They seek new stories and new tales to create and be inspired by. Of course, after ingesting a number of prescribed narcotics (not all at once but at their prescribed times and amounts), I understood that such a notion of living outside the collective was pure rubbish. As I further studied the mentally ill, I came to discover that they all suffered the same delusions—not always created with the same symbols, but nonetheless the symbols always pointed to the same desire. And so I ceased to be mentally ill. This was after I lived with the monks and after I wrote the short story ten years ago this October, so the short story was filled with numerous demonstrations that the protagonist suffered from a messiah complex. My bout with the Ultimate Fighter Cowboy Hick also happened after the fight with mental illness, and embracing such delusions as mere chemical imbalance is what gave me the strength to knock him out with one punch. I had realized I had wasted a number of years in self pity which had denied me from exploiting life, or in other words, I was pretty pissed I had denied myself gratification of the flesh because I thought it would interfere with my destiny to rise up and save the world. So I was filled with pure anger and testosterone, I punched out Cowboy Hick (who thought such a bout between Western strength—Cowboy Hick—and Eastern discipline—me—would be a billing that would bring in much money as it capitalized on his fame and my legendary status as a kung-fu-time-traveling monk) with a single punch and then spent the next seven years engaging in the most vile acts of sin with women of the night and women with no shame.

Reflections of a Time-Traveling-Kung-Fu Monk; pt. I

2008-02-16T21:14:00.000-08:00

Ten years ago this summer I wrote a short story. It was mostly autobiographical (though I denied the whole thing having a single similarity to my life) and totally written to get into a girl’s pants—or up her skirt because she always wore skirts. She liked the way I wrote because she knew I was ahead of the curve when it came to writing in high school (which is not much of an indicator of my writing skills as I attended public high school in Los Angeles) and, as far as I could figure, still had that impression of me when we met three years later.

Of course, she also thought I had mellowed out. Or something. She mentioned that if the me at that time had met the me from high school, they’d probably just fight each other. That totally ignores the basic rules of time jumping, but since most people had not studied time traveling physics and martial arts as I had on the highest mountain on the most southern tip of the southern island of New Zealand I tend to give people a break on that basic fact. Well, by people I mean girls whose skirts I want to get up. The point is she thought I had mellowed out a bit.

Seriously? I had just studied with kung fu, time traveling monks for three years. I may have been a bit more zen, but if the more punk rock me tried throwing a punch I’d surely crush him. After all, my pay-per-view cage match with the Cowboy Hick is well documented where I knocked him out with a single blow. Of course, in defense of the Cowboy, that punch shattered every single bone in my hand. And in defense of the girl whose skirt I was trying to get up, that match took place a year or two after I destroyed her reputation and ceased contact with her. Sometimes I forget most are not time-traveling-kung-fu monks, like me.

The Continuation Of Pissing On Dr. Wertham's Grave...

2008-02-08T18:28:00.001-08:00

So I've discussed the complete mediocrity of DC's weekly Countdown a number of times. However, out of this banal practice of superheroism has come a blessing...a blessing of complete insanity that is Jack Kirby comics. I know I should already know about Mr. Kirby, but as with most things in this post modern world were art is just a mishmash of old media cut-ups, I actually know little about his work and have read even less. I guess I'm kind of like Avril Lavigne when asked if her pop music with a punk attitude was inspired by the Ramones and she stating she had never heard of the band. So I've slowly been correcting this mistake by picking of the Countdown Specials that have focused on Jack Kirby's work.

I picked up Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen and The New Gods which were pretty insane...but standard DC silver age insane, which is pretty enjoyable. However neither had prepared me for the latest special, OMAC.

All I knew about OMAC was from a this two-page spread I had seen on the internet from OMAC #2:

Yeah, that's a guy in spandex and a giant mohawk punching like eight guys at once. The last sentence just described about every picture I drew between the ages of six and fourteen (and then I moved onto tracing lingerie models and making them nude because that was how teenagers obtained porn before the internet was invented) . So of course, I'm picking up the OMAC special. Sadly, it only included one Kirby story and that was OMAC #1. I guess I'll just have to wait to acquire that splash page when Kirby's entire OMAC run is released in May in hardcover. Curse my lack of time machines (unless you're reading this after May when I've already bought the book...then my curse is just a moot point).

Of course, OMAC #1 does involve OMAC kicking six guys at once while leaping over a trap door that leads down to boiling magma. But Kirby's first OMAC story has something even cooler...

!!!SUICIDE BOMBER SEX DOLLS!!!

You know, robotic women that want to be your friend and once you start the loving they blow up and kill you in the process. And who was the main target of these suicide bomber sex dolls? Politicians and world leaders. Holy crap, Kirby was totally writing a comic book about how to successfully assassinate future president Bill Clinton. Of course, if the Republicans had tried that, they would have found themselves in an unsuccessful bout of fisticuffs with a man in spandex and a giant mohawk who talks to a giant robot satellite.

So there you go, another wholesome Comic Code approved story from the seventies.

Comic Review for 1/23/08: The Eyes Have It

2008-01-26T21:05:00.000-08:00

So comics, they’re violent and stuff. But this week seemed to push the cosmic envelope as three very different genres align with the same violent as to create some kind of triforce of violent power to mock the bones of Dr. Fredric Wertham.

Let’s start with Speak of the Devil #4. This miniseries just continues more and more bizarre. At first it was like a B-teen movie (I’m pretty sure B-movie and teen movie is somewhat redundant, if not complimentary for a teen movie as they are just usually god awful) that dabbled with subjects of child abuse, incest, sexual perversion, and high school sport competitions. And now it has turned into one of those B-movies I would sneak out to watch on USA Up All Night when my parents were sleeping, you know what I’m talking about—a bit of skin, a bit of violence, a lot of over the top bad acting. So now a girl, her boy friend (not boyfriend) who she occasionally screws, and her stepmom who occasionally screws her stepdaughter’s boy friend decide to go on a killing spree. There wasn’t any explanation for the whole thing...maybe that will come later. But there first victims are the stepdaughter’s boy friend’s parents. And it is bloody and involves knives being stuck through the eye sockets of good ole mom and dad.

Then let’s jump to Countdown to Final Crisis #14. I haven’t had many nice things to say about this series, but over the last few weeks it has settled into an entertaining big summer action movie. Not the highest form of art, but this is a picture book about people with meta-human powers who choose to wear spandex. So Earth-51 is getting a blowed up by alternate versions of DC superheroes from around the Multiverse. Batman-51 isn’t too happy about this. In fact, Batman-51 is the Punisher in a Batman outfit. I know, it sounds stupid. But in context it actually makes sense. Batman-51 reacts to the death of Jason Todd like a rational human. He shoots the Joker between the eyes and then proceeds to murder all the other super villians of his universe. Anyone, Batman-51 teams up with another universe’s Jason Todd and they go to war against all those attacking Gotham-51. One seen includes Jason Todd making sure an alternate Supergirl doesn’t use her heat vision by sticking knives through her eyes and cutting them out.

That leaves us with The Punisher #54. So, yeah, you’ve probably guessed what happens. The Punisher violent? Garth Ennis violent? A Punisher/Barracuda story violent? Well, yeah, there is a scene with Barracuda blinding a man by pressing his fingers through them. The funny thing is that that is probably the least violent thing about this issue which includes: a baby strapped to C4, a nose removed by a pair of pliers, castration with a pocket knife, a beheading, prison rape, not one but two arms removed by an axe, having the clip of a machine gun unloaded in your face at pointblank range, and total emotional isolation.

Screw you Dr. Wertham.

New Comics...they're starting to get good again...

2008-01-10T20:37:00.000-08:00

So I haven’t written about comics lately. That is one part laziness and one point seven parts nothing has completely blown me away lately. Sure, there was Punisher MAX #53 that showed us why someone never wants to go up against Frank Castle twice (and I pity Barracuda—what can I say, I almost like the guy in a Bizarro Punisher kind of way—for wanting to face him a third time). And then there was The Spirit #11 which has been my favorite issue thus far; maybe because the tone of this issue was so dark for this title (Issue 10 was all about pseudo-Rush Limbaugh cross-dressing as pseudo-Rosie O’Donnell and murdering pseudo-real talk show personalities) that it probably shouldn’t have worked but it did. And then there was the conclusion of the Howard the Duck miniseries which was…oh wait…ended up being really boring for a book about a talking duck who beats scientist with the appendage of mannequins and goes up against M.O.D.O.T. (Mental Organism Designed Only for Talking). But it was really bad.

However, this week got me all jazzed again because there was some truly amazing stories put out today like…

Punisher War Journal #15: Frank’s inner monologue in this issue is just about the most perfect thing I’ve read in a really long time. There really is no way to some up than just retype the whole damn comic. Even with a flashback to that horrible Headin’ Out West arc, this issue stood strong as it shows that maybe the Punisher putting the fear of God in villains is maybe more beneficial to the villains’’ victims than just killing them. So great writing and then it is all topped off with the Punisher blinding a super monkey with the snapped-off horn of a Minotaur. That POP! you just heard was your mind being blown.

The Spirit # 12: This issue ends Mr. Cooke’s run with this book. This issue kept up with the darker, more urgent tone of the last issue…which is a great thing. What else made this issue great? How about all the flashbacks of Denny and Sand’s relationship as kids being drawn similar to Eisner’s big city epic, A Contract With God trilogy. And, maybe it was just me, but the final page of the Spirit walking in the rain was a complete homage to Eisner’s rabbi walking home from the funeral in the rain; and , damn, it is beautiful. And can DC please put out prints of Cooke’s Spirits two-page title splash pages because that is freakin’ art.

Pax Romana #1: Yeah, this came out a few weeks ago, but I failed to realize what I was missing and was finally able to hunt a copy down. So what does the Catholic church do when it controls the only time machine in the world? The answer isn’t as evil as you’d suspect. Maybe misguided, but not Garth Ennis-Preacher-style evil. The real villain is bureaucracy in this book.. The style of this book (I’m guessing Hickman’s previous series Nightly News is similar) is a real mash-up of style’s. It almost strikes me how an internet comic would look. It has the art, but isn’t real sequential. Each page is more of a collage with dialogue and little pop-up style boxes giving the reader all the exposition they need. Hell, there is even two pages of straight transcripts of secret meetings the Pope had with his Bishops in debating what to do with the time machine. So the structure is challenging, but it works. And thanks goodness someone is trying to do something new with comics besides retconning Spidey’s whole marriage so Marvel can recycle all his pre-marriage stories again. And the fact that Hickman reveals in his backmatter that he wishes this to be a series like Hellboy, in that it is a series of mini series that he can come back to occasionally and build on, well that got me excited as well.

B.P.R.D. – 1946 #1: Speaking of Hellboy, the new B.P.R.D. series kick off with a look at its early history. Hellboy has been discovered and the B.P.R.D., trying to understand Hellboy’s origin, are investigating a series of reports on old locations where the Nazis practiced the occult. So super secret government agency investigating devil worshipping Nazis. That pretty much sells the book right there. I also like the juxtaposition this series has with the last B.P.R.D. mini. The last one was full of doom and gloom and ambiguity. Team members are growing distant and the agency can’t even stop a routine hell spawn. Now jump back to 1946 and you see the B.P.R.D., only two years old, full of optimism that they can tackle the supernatural. Plus, there is a panel of baby Hellboy chasing chickens in New Mexico which is priceless.

There was also Scalped, which was great as usual. And I also picked up the second volume of Warren Ellis’s Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. that I fully expect to be as out of control hilarious as the first volume.

Cum On Feel The Noize

2008-01-09T23:40:00.000-08:00

“But honey, the band finally figured out our thing, our gimmick,” said the long-haired man in his mid-thirties to his wife as they walked down a crowded walkway at the mall, “You see, we finally came up with a name for the band. No, not a name; we came up with the name for the band. Ram.”

“Ram,” said his wife.

“Yeah, Ram. But not like the animal or the verb. Ram like the acronym. R-A-M. It stands for Really Awesome Metal, R.A.M.”

“So, you’re still a metal band.”

“Um, awesome metal. Really awesome metal. But that isn’t the whole thing. You see, we’re all going to wear helmets that have ram horns…I mean, I think you can buy real ram horns from hunters or something…anyway we’ll have the horns mounted to our helmets. And then while we’re just wailing away with this awesome music we’ll like run up to each other and butt horns. Like rams.”

“But, you’re band name doesn’t stand for ram—the animal, right?”

“No, it means Really Awesome Metal.”

“Yeah, that’s actually pretty cool. I mean, why the hell are you talking about it around all these people? Someone might overhear you and steal the idea.”

“That’s true, honey. Sorry, I was just so excited.”

A Christmas Carol: A Brief History

2007-12-09T00:11:00.000-08:00

It is a little known fact—though well documented—that the first story to involve the shoeing of a horse was in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The act takes place in the middle of the second act of the book as Scrooge ponders if the Ghost of Christmas Present is wearing any knickers under his robe. His mind turns to the ghost hypothetical shriveled tentacles, when his thoughts are interrupted by the shrieking of a horse being shoes in a nearby shed by an amateur black smith.

While the homoerotic undertones of Scrooge’s ponderings may have seem controversial in the Victorian-era, it was quite common place for men to openly discuss the state of their testicles with each other (though never in the presence of a woman or a boy under the age of seven if he had a proper upbringing). In fact, Mark Seether Gustenburg is credited for creating and popularizing the ball ornament, in which he secretly claimed was in celebration of the testis—though, under the scrutiny of the Queen, he publicly claimed the ball ornament was to represent the world which Christ saved.

Returning to Dickens’s tale, the most scandalous part of the described passage was the shoeing of the horse. The ability to own a horse was an upper class privilege, and more so to be able to have the extra income to shoe it. Thus, the portrayal of a tortured horse during the act of shoeing was seen as a direct attack on the upper class by Dickens. Dickens came under scrutiny for his passage of a tortured horse and the book was widely shunned by the literate crowd. It was not uncommon for the upper class to light the pages on fire in order to light the candles on their Christmas tree. A Christma Carol was in danger of falling into total obscurity, until a major corporation stepped in.

Decades later Walt Disney was looking for a new franchise. Mickey, Goofy, and Donald had fallen in popularity due to the fall of the common practice of eating mice and other rodents during WWII (the more popular beef, chicken, and alligator meat was rationed for soldiers). The 50’s had come to a close and erupted into the revolution of the 60’s. Disney, with a team of lawyers and researchers, combed through literary sources to find material for new movies and characters. During this time the Disney empire discovered the almost-lost work of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and the history that had tried to bury the tale.

It was not only the fact that the copyright had lapsed on the book that appealed to Disney. He thought the book, because of how it upset the upper class, was the perfect symbol for the socio-political upheaval of the 60’s. However, after battling with shareholders the status quo was somewhat maintained. What rose from the find was Scrooge McDuck. He was based on the Donald Duck mythology, however, much of the penance that Scrooge went through in the Dickens tale was abandoned.

But before Scrooge McDuck became sub-par fare, Walt Disney produced one comic book that lived up to the history of the McDuck’s origins. In Disney’s Tales of Great Adventure #129 a horse with gold horseshoes is seen rampaging through a small peasant town, destroying property and eating crops. The police, headed my Donald Duck, are unable to subdue the horse. However, Donald finds the “one duck with a large enough feathered sack to put that rotten horse in its place.” Scrooge arrives on the scene and proceeds to defeat the horse by painfully cutting off its feet, selling the corpse to a glue factory, and melting the gold shoes down and molding them into coins to help the towns people rebuild their village (though they do use a Scrooge McDuck subsidiary to do the reconstruction, thus he collects all the gold in the end).

Disney also marketed A Christmas Carol as the forbidden Dickens book, instantly creating hype for it. The book became an instant best seller, while Disney absorbed the copyright and made more money by selling the movie rights. Thus, through the mechanisms of kapitalism an obscure tale of anti-materialism was freed from the grips of the upper class.

Reviewing the Pull List, pt. 3

2007-12-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

Join me as a try to cut the fat on a pull list that started at a slim 5 titles has bloated to 40+. Do I need to be reading all this stuff? Let's find out.

Tonight: N - Z.

Newuniversal: Warren Ellis’s take on some 80’s Marvel alternate universe were a few humans get super powers and the government wants to hunt them down and kill them. It comes off as Heroes, except Newuniversal is good and I actually enjoy it. I just wish I didn’t have to wait ten months or whatever between arcs.

Northlanders: Brian Wood, who is known to do really great urban, underground comics is doing a Viking series. The only reason this is on my list is because the store I got to is marketing it as 100% returnable. I don’t have high hopes.

Order, the: This books strength is that, while it is set in the Marvel universe, it features zero old Marvel characters. Instead, it is all new characters and therefore has a better chance of me liking it. Despite the fact that it failed to give me an instance of straight edge revenge, I actually like most of the characters, despite the fact that they’re all celebrities of some kind. Plus, it has featured a Soviet bear wearing a jetpack and an actual Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (though I may be mistaken on the teenage and ninja part). I’ll probably stay with this until Fraction is done, but Marvel would have to announce a hell of a writer to get me to stay with it.

Programme, the: When Russia and the US conquered and invaded Germany, both their militaries found genetically engineered German fetuses. Both sides grabbed the technology and worked on creating super powered humans during the cold war, though none were ever used. Jump to present day Afghanistan and a super powered Russian starts offing American soldiers. The US military responds by trying to activate one of their own super powered beings who has spent his life as a hippie and running a bar. The artwork by C.P. Smith teeters on insanity. I really don’t know how else to put it. The colors are bold and have little to do with reality, like the whole thing is a giant LSD trip. But I really like the art. And even if the story almost sounds like it is being done so it can eventually be pitched as a television series or a movie, well, the Russian super human is named The Spirit of Lenin and that is enough to get me to read a comic.

Punisher MAX: This is the book Garth Ennis was meant to write. Well, most of the books he has done were meant for him because who else would write books like Preacher, The Boys, or Chronicles of Wormwood? But really, if you're going to have a story about a guy who just goes around shooting the mafia and various gang members, get the guy who can write ultra violence best.

Punisher War Journal: So who would have thought I would like a silver-age version of the Punisher running around killing villains in the Marvel U? And it is written by Matt Fraction? Oh, well I guess I would like that. And even though Frank has been assisted in battle with Iron Man midgets and guns that shoot swords, this series has been shaky at times. First, I never dug Ariel Olivetti’s art. And then there was that long boring Hate Monger arc. But all that seems to be past us now and hopefully the rest of Fraction’s run is as enjoyable as the first arc was.

Runaways: If there was a comic book written for emotional fifteen-year old geeky girls, it would be this book. Teenage love, teenage jealousy, hating and distrusting parents, psychic connections with a dinosaur…awesome stuff and I love this book. It was gone downhill a little bit since Vaughn left, even with the inclusion of a 19th century version of the Punisher. I’ll stick around though because I want to see Gert return from the dead.

Scalped: I was working with this guy that spent most of his time drawing zombies. Somehow I figured he was probably into comics and he was. So he’s talking about how Tony Stark was right to make super heroes register and how Brad Meltzer’s run on JLA was really good…basically stuff I don’t agree with at all. Then he says to check out Scalped because it was a really good series about organized crime on an Native American reservation. So seeing that I had not agreed with nothing at all with this gentlemen in regards to comics and zombie theory, I decided to go out and pick up the first arc. And it was (and still is) excellent.

Speak of the Devil: So this series is about a female peeping tom that wears a mask that reminds of Dorkin’s Devil Puppet (and that is part of the reason I checked this series out). So the high school-aged, female peeping tom peeps on her dad and step-mom having sex. They get turned on by the fact that someone is peeping on them and keep the window open, and when the father goes out of town, the step-mom dresses up in lingerie and plays with herself in hopes that the peeper will watch her. The peeper, the step-daughter does. And then peeper has sex with a boy in a cemetery. And then, while the step-daughter is out a gym meet for school, the boy she was banging goes and bangs her step-mom while dressed in the devil mask. And issue three ends up with the step-daughter finding out about the affair and pulling a knife on them. This is why the Bible tells us not to dingle around with our private parts.

Spirit, the: I’ve never even looked into Will Eisner’s version of the Spirit, so I can’t really critique Darwyn Cooke’s version in comparison. But Cooke did write and pencil DC: The New Frontier and for that I’m willing to give his projects a try. This is how the Spirit works. He gets involved in cases that he can in no way handle and then is rescued by someone else who also defeats the villain. The Spirits main purpose is to buy time for those who can actually defeat the villains. Sometimes those heroes are gay hairdressers who are driven to kill zombies. However, Cooke only has one issue left on his run, and though Sergio Aragonés is taking over the writing and I loved his little cartoons in MAD magazine when I was nine, well, I have to wait and see if I’ll keep this on the pull list.

Star Wars: Dark Times: Remember in the first Star Wars (from 1977) when Kenobi is talking all grim about Darth Vader hunting down and killing the Jedi while the Empire rises to power and you’re sitting there thinking, “Darth Vader is the baddest mother ever.” So guess where this series got its title? Here is the problem: in six issues it has featured Darth Vader killing exactly zero Jedi. ZERO. Lame.

Suburban Glamour: Jamie McKelvie draws very pretty punk rock girls. And that is my main reason for buying this. Also, the last book he drew was about indie rock having occult powers, which is pretty awesome.

Thunderbolts: I’m buying this because Warren Ellis is on writing duties. I’ll stop reading it when his run is done (unless some other amazing writer is announced). His writing with this series is like a Michael Bay movie done right. Which pretty much means there are actual reasons for things to explode.

Usagi Yojimbo: To really appreciate this, you probably have to like samurai movies…I think. The thing with samurai movies is that they…being like most Japanese cinema…move really slow. The action last about thirty seconds…because when you get sliced with a katana then you don’t really move around much after that. And that is how this comic goes. I moves along very deliberately, setting up back stories for about seven hundred characters, so when in the three panels that people get sliced in half…well, it means something. Plus, whenever some one dies it is expressed by a word balloon shaped like a skull with no words inside of it.

Walking Dead: This series started out interesting. It began were zombie movies end. The group has escaped and now they’re just looking to lead as much of a regular life as possible. And then the other town shows up in tanks and wants to blow the main characters up because they were able to raid a Wal*Mart before first. Well, now things are just getting silly.

Wolverine Origins: You’d figure it would be pretty hard make a story about WWII-era Wolverine trying to assassinate Captain America, while Bucky is trying to assassinate Wolverine would be pretty hard to make boring? But this title has managed to do it. Can we all agree to stop using decompression as a way to drag two- or three-story arcs into five-story arcs (because then it makes the perfect trade paperback)? Because that makes for boring comics.

Y the Last Man: One issue left with about ten issues worth of exposition to tell, so I have no idea how this is going to end. I don’t know if this book would have featured as much black-on-asian-on-white-on-russian-on-prison-women lesbian sex if was written by a female, but the fact that Brittney Spears runs Japan’s Yakuza and women pimp out male robots to other lonely women…well, that was pretty awesome. Plus, it features a monkey.

Zombies vs Robots vs Amazons: Look at that title. It pretty much says it all. The only way it could say more is if was called This Is Going To Be Really, Really Awesome. The first series, Zombies vs Robots, featured a zombie virus being translated into a computer virus, thus pitting hordes of human zombies against robot zombies until the Frank Castle of robots shows up and kills everyone with atom bombs (which I figure is how the real Frank Castle would have dealt with the situation). And then Amazons show up with the promise of this series. This cannot fail.

Round 3 - Final Count:

Keepers - 14
Should probably drop - 4

Reviewing the Pull List, pt. 2

2007-12-04T20:19:00.000-08:00

Join me as a try to cut the fat on a pull list that started at a slim 5 titles has bloated to 40+. Do I need to be reading all this stuff? Let's find out.

Tonight: D - M.

DMZ: So civil war (a non-crappy-like-Marvel’s-Civil-War civil war) breaks out in the U.S. And New York is cut off from the rest of the country. And this comic is really, really good. Especially with the one-shots. I’ve liked most of the arcs, but Brian Wood's one-shots that focus on a single character or the underground art scene are what really make this series

Doktor Sleepless: Transmetropolitan is probably my favorite comic book series (I mean, it has an issue were the main character does nothing but watch television and it is brilliant). It is basically a political thriller in the future with a ton of sci-fi craziness. However, the sci-fi is always secondary to the story. Warren Ellis claims this is the follow up to Transmetropolitan, and three issues in the biggest difference (besides not having anything to do with Transmetropolitan) is that sci-fi is the main story here. Like the women who connect their minds together via wi-fi so if one experiences an orgasm, then all of them do. Oh, and amongst all the crazy science fiction, Ellis just decided to through in a nice heaping of eastern mysticism to make sure no one knows what is going on.

Ex Machina: Is it odd to find a political comic preachy at times? I mean, isn’t the point of politics to be preachy. Anyways, that is my only complaint about this series…despite the fact that it wants to paint some political issues gray, it still pretty easy to see what the characters favor. That said, I can’t wait to see where this story is going. From the man who controls animals with his voice to the time traveler to a shotgun that lies, I’m hooked. And Tony Harris’s artwork is beautiful.

Fell: Hey, it’s Warren Ellis again. I hate CSI and its twenty-seven spin-offs. In fact, I’ve never liked any crime show. They seem a little too clean. There is always some little clue that is miraculously found that leads the cops to breaking the case. Now Fell is a detective story, but it involves a town that most considered cursed. And Nixon in a nun habit shows up every issue. And Detective Fell is sometimes too smart and when he finds those miraculous little clues it ends up criminals being able to get away with crimes due to technicalities in the law. Also, Ben Templesmith’s artwork is perfect for the series. And given that this is a $1.99 comic (the inspiration for Fraction’s Casanova) that feels like it has more in it than most three-dollar comics, doesn’t hurt either.

Godland: This is the book that got me back into monthlies, which is ironic because it seems it only comes out once every three or four months. This is a kick-back to silver age comics, but not the same way Morrison does it. I’m not sure what the difference is between the two takes on that era, but I think Morrison is more serious in his take on the silver age. He wants to really explore the insanity that gave rise to that era. Whereas, Godland features a villain that surrounds him self with bipedal mice—half dressed as Clark Kent, half dressed as Superman—for no other reason than awesomeness.

Grendel: Behold the Devil: I know nothing about this character except that it has a popular cult following and a lot of critical acclaim. I’ve picked up one issue, and all I have to say so far is that a lot of blood gets drained from people. A lot.

Howard the Duck: I’ve read most of the original Howard the Duck material from the seventies. The whole thing is a practice in satire and is somewhat hit or miss. This mini series carries on that tradition by lampooning talk show host, media conspiracies, and youtube. Again, it is hit or miss and I think this thing could have been edited down from four issues to three.

Immortal Iron Fist: Holy freaking crap…I’ve mentioned like seventeen times that this book has a martial arts expert named Fat Cobra who wields Sith lightning around like a lasso. Plus, it is written by Brubaker and Fraction. And it also features a Pirate Queen. And—I’m pretty Fraction was writing this part of the script—but it features the greatest take on the Heroes For Hire, who I never cared about before until Luke Cage started making lesbian jokes while fighting hundreds of Hydra henchmen.

Incredible Hulk: I started picking this up during the World War Hulk series and let the record show…Amadeus Cho the Seventh Smartest Person in the World needs his own book. Really, I’ll read this thing as long as Amadeus Cho the Seventh Smartest Person in the World (you have to say the whole title) is a main feature in this book. If you don’t understand how awesome he is, then let me explain. He rides around on a Vespa with a baby coyote tucked in his jacket and when his brain is really ticking, it is symbolized by floating math symbols all around him. Way cool than the squiggly lines that represent spider senses.

Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus: Lobster Johnson fights Nazis and Nazi gorillas. He shoots a lobster claw shaped beam from his hand, in which he burns his symbol on the heads of his enemies. It is written by Mike Mignola. Do the math. All of it adds up to awesome.

Madman Atomic Comics: I got into this series by liking it in theory. I’ve read a few issues of The Atomics and on the back of the Milk and Cheese board game that came with an issue of Wizard like a million years ago, was a Madman board game. And any comic that can hang with Milk and Cheese, is worth giving a try in my book. Of course, giving Madman a try included buying the new series, picking up a hardcover of over eight-hundred pages of Madman, and picking up the complete trade of the Atomics. Good thing I’m liking it so far.

Metal Men: If you haven’t read the DC Archives of the Metal Men yet, then you are not fit to read comics. The Metal Men once battled a fried-space-egg and Chemo—wait for it—a human-shaped vat of disposed chemicals that I scientist kept to remind him of his human failures that finally, because of the various mixed chemicals, comes alive and terrorizes humanity. This series is based on ideas of Grant Morrison, whatever that means, and is pretty insane to justify that claim. It also involves an alchemist’s mineral men, made from various rocks, and best of all involves Dr. T.O. Morrow’s Death Metal Men. DEATH METAL MEN.

Midnighter: I’d wish the most recent arc would end, because I’m done with this series. Ennis’s first arc was great. Vaughan’s one-shot was nice. And the best issue was a one-shot about Midnighter tracking down stray cats. But now…I don’t…yeah, Midnighter can predicate the future and enjoys killing people and that is great for a miniseries…I just don’t know how many issues I can take of him fighting people with American flag masks portrayed through really bad art.

Mouse Guard: Winter 1152: I never scene the Secret of NIMH or any other silly fantasy movie that involves talking animals (well, except for the Muppets…but they’re Muppets so I get a by). However, this series has really good art and somehow gets a pass from me for being about animals doing people stuff from Lord of the Rings.

Round 2 - Final Count:

Keepers - 12
Should probably drop - 2

Reviewing the Pull List, pt.1

2007-12-02T15:25:00.000-08:00

Join me as a try to cut the fat on a pull list that started at a slim 5 titles has bloated to 40+. Do I need to be reading all this stuff? Let's find out.

Tonight: A - C.

ALL STAR SUPERMAN: A certain colleague continually mocked me for recommending this comic. “Why should I want to read a book about Superman playing baseball?” Of course, the real question is why should anyone want to read a Superman comic? With this title we receive our answer: Grant Morrison. Remember that time that Jimmy Olsen flew to work with a jetpack and then turned into Doomsday in order to subdue Superman from tearing all of Metropolis apart? Or what about the meeting between Superman, Bizarro Superman, and Bizarro Bizarro? No, because you had to wait until Grant Morrison came around to do a Superman title I could actually care about because it sticks Superman in the environment the suits him best: the Silver Age.

Batman: Pretty much made All Star Superman great, is what is making Batman great: Grant Morrison. Even in an issue that tied into some seventeen-part crossover about the resurrection of another dead villain, Morrison’s contribution was enjoyable without having to read Nightwing or Robin. First, Batman is wearing chainmail for some reason (I can only guess that the reason is because it is awesome). Second, despite having a wooden stick jabbed through his chest, he manages to completely kill the bad guy. Third…well…this has to do with an earlier issue, but you are aware in issue 666 that the future Batman fights the Devil? Wicked rad.

Biff Bam Pow: So, this wasn’t very good. I mean, it is Evan Dorkin but it is Dorkin for kids. Literally. Most of this stuff was published in Nickelodeon magazine or something. It does feature a female, Jewish, space-boxer—which I have a hard time figuring out how Dorkin didn’t make it work—but on the other hand, it featured stuff published in Nickelodeon magazine. I would remove this from my pull list, but seeing that Dorkin is writing it, I figure I have at least three years before the next issue comes out.

Black Summer: Warren Ellis writing about a superhero that kills George W. Bush. And Dick Cheney. And Rumsfeld, I can only assume. And why is the president assassinated? So people can vote by writing a name on a piece of paper with a pencil…so you know, it actually counts for something instead of a confusing scantron sheet or a computer.

BPRD: Killing Ground: I’ll pretty much buy anything written by Mike Mignola. Otherwise, you can just read my previous thoughts in regards to what I think about this title.

Captain America: So, I jumped on this when Cap got a cap busted in him and “died.” I jumped on not knowing about the death, but hoping to read about Frank Castle taking over as the character, as hinted in Civil War. Well, I got to read about Castle doing that in a pretty lousy (which was surprising because it was written by Matt Fraction) arc in Punisher War Journal. But having Ed Brubaker tell a story about Bucky trying to kill Tony Stark for his involvement in Cap’s death has been pretty entertaining. But now there is the whole storyline about the Red Skull trying to reprogram Bucky and…blah blah blah. I don’t see myself caring for much longer.

Casanova: The last issued featured lots of lesbian sex that resulted in murder and a casino blowing up. The issue before that featured straight sex that also resulted in murder. Oh, and a recipe for turkey. Seriously…you could cut out the card and put it in your recipe box. Needless to say, this comic is just about perfect. Oh…and it only cost $1.99.

Countdown to Final Crisis: So this is a weekly that isn’t very good and nothing happened in it for the first 26 issues. I was already to drop this out 40-something and then Morrison was announced as the writer for Final Crisis. And that was that. This title better have something to do with Morrison’s Crisis or I’ll really think I’ve wasted my time and money. Of course, I’m already expecting to feel that way.

Criminal: Ed Brubaker writing gritty crime noir stories. Like the one about the nun robbing a bank on Christmas Eve. Do I need to say anthing else?

Round 1 - Final Count:

Keepers - 6
Should probably drop - 3

New Comics for 11/14/07

2007-11-14T18:26:00.001-08:00

All Star Superman #9

This wasn’t the greatest issue. In fact, it was kind of mediocre. And yet mediocre for Grant Morrison includes the following:

1. The secret origin of super heroes wearing underwear over their tights is actually the height of Kryptonian fashion.
2. Daily Planet employee Steve makes another appearance. Steve basically thinks people are outing him as Superman whenever he is in proximity of Clark Kent who actually has someone trying to out him as Superman. You see, this is funny because Steve looks like Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
3. After throwing Superman through the moon and causing it to crack, two Kryptonian astronauts stitch up the damage by creating giant surgical staples with various suspension bridges from Earth. For some reason this tickled me.

B.P.R.D. – Killing Ground #4

Here is what I like about Hellboy: juxtaposition. There is all this goofy goth stuff going on and Hellboy—who happens to be a devil pulled from Hell by Rasputin with the help of the Nazis during WWII—does not want anything to do with any kind of that goth tomfoolery.

In fact, this is how things usually turn out in Hellboy:

Some kind of demon that wants to control everything: “By the seventh god of the sixty-three Zords, I shall bring about the kingdom of Zargot who shall rule for fifty-seven cycles with unyielding pain to bring about paradise.”

Hellboy: Yeah, why don’t you shut the hell up? (Hellboy then beats demon to death with a wooden chair.)

Now, some may really like all the gothy, demon stuff. I don’t. I do like seeing gothy stuff pummeled though. However, in the B.P.R.D. series (at least from the the two arcs I’ve read) the paranormal is taken a bit more seriously. Of course, this means I don’t fight it quite as enjoyable. And added to that, this story arc has pretty much read like a paranormal version of Alien, where a demon is haunting the hauls of the B.P.R.D. headquarters and picking off people on at a time. Now Alien was a great movie; however, taking a similar story and stretching it over five months…well, it just looses something.

But I’ve got to hand it to Mignola, as great as Alien was it never included a scene where one of the main characters dies, only to have the ghost of Lobster Johnson rise for his corpse and shoot ghost bullets into another character in a coma in order to kill a spirit trying to take possession of her body. And that is awesome.

Countdown to Final Crisis #24

This is one of those instances where the compulsive side of my collecting habits just got a bit out of control. I was all hyped for this series after the mostly excellent 52. Besides the Trickster/Pied Piper story line, I haven’t really dug this thing. I mean, after 27 issues (the issue number is actually counting down so don’t get all confused) the writers figured they would start progressing the story line after 25 issues. Now I’ve never written for a major comic book publisher, but I think this is a pretty bad idea. Anyways, this issue involves a lot of an evil Superman (you can tell he’s bad—and probably from the 90’s—because he’s all dressed in black) killing super heroes from an alternate earth. If that tickles your fancy then jump in.

DMZ #25

First off, I didn’t like the art in this one. It was muddled and dark and hard to tell what was going on. As with the last few issues, this is another one-shot character study of someone caught in the DMZ. I love one-shots in comics mainly because I’m really, really sick for two or three issue story arcs dragged out to six or seven in order to pad out the TPB version. However, this story is about a low-level Chinese gangster try to reach to the top levels of the Triad. And that’s pretty cliché.

However, this story ultimately succeeds when thinking about it outside of the series and relating it to…I don’t know…maybe some real world conflict that certain countries might be caught up in today. This story effectively shows how no matter how super power-ed (super power in a political, non-comic way) your country may be, it is impossible to predict the outcome due to internal forces seeking power. And is the U.S. really ready to go and kill every Triad member to control Iraq…metaphorically speaking?

Punisher #52

It is hard to upstage Frank Castle. He runs around with giant guns and grenades and kills really bad people. Not ambiguous bad guys that might be right…just really, really bad people like drug dealers and Russians who murder entire Afghanistan villages. But Barracuda does it. He’s the opposite of the Punisher…not that he isn’t a cold blooded killer…rather, that he’s a cold blooded killer without a sense of justice or revenge. He just kills because it is easier to do than actually dealing with people. Instead of asking that jerk to be quiet during a movie, shoot him. Barracuda is so over-the-top bad, he makes a good read. And as much as I like reading about his exploits, I really want to see him dead. Dead at the hand of the Punisher because he seems to really know how to hurt bad people. And seeing that the Punisher off’ed the wife of a mob member who tried to murder him by recruiting her sister, who then proceeds to beat bad-lady to death with a baseball bat while naked while he watches while handcuffed to a bed…I’m really excited to see how he’s going to deal with the man that has just apparently shot his child in the face.

Punisher War Journal #13

One panel is all you really need to see to understand the ultimate greatness of Matt Fraction’s Punisher:

Even in a book about a cold blooded murdered devoted to a life-long mission of seeking revenge for the murder off his family, there is room for a Kool-Aid reference.

World War Hulk #5

Dear Marvel,

Look. I really have enjoyed this series. After all, it was just a series of big beautiful fights between the Hulk and various Marvel super heroes. I just have one little problem. So this whole ordeal takes place a month or two after Civil War, which I hope you can admit now that it pretty much sucked. I mean, the climax was Captain American giving up to fascism because a building got knocked down while he was fighting other super powered people that wanted to give the government control over their lives. That’s pretty weak. But who knows, maybe New York is like this great symbol of America and therefore we should give up certain rights to preserve those symbols. I guess that’s cool and all that you’ve let George W. Bush take reign of the editorial board so he can have a job in 2009.

But can I just recap the events of World War Hulk #5? So, this was the big show down between the Hulk and the Sentry. Now the Hulk is a huge, muscular, green monster that is known for using the phrase, “Hulk smash!” And the Sentry is a meta human with the power of a million suns (or some ridiculously high number). I mean, I’m willing to overlook the big cinematic who-done-it twist at the end even if it did weaken the complete awesomeness of the Hulk kicking Reed Richards’ and Tony Stark’s butts all over the place. But look, just about every page of issue 5 was composed three or four panels of the Hulk and the Sentry punching each other which resulted in huge explosions and onomatopoeia phrases with ridiculous amounts of consonants and no vowels. Now, I’m not complaining about the fighting. That is the only reason I picked up this series. I’m not even upset about the three or four spin-offs coming from this series (a red Hulk? Seriously?) because that is pretty standard fare for the comic industry.

However, I’m pretty sure that amount of explosions pretty much leveled New York. So the arrest and death of Captain America pretty much amounted to nothing. He gave up to save New York and you successfully leveled the entire city. So you give control of super powered humans to the U.S. government and then you crap all over everything that Captain America gave his life for.

I know I was joking about W. running the editorial board over there, but seriously, is he the new editor?

Karate Chopping Down Ivory Towers

2007-11-12T21:49:00.000-08:00

Book: Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson

Chapter 5: Reading and the Division of Labor

The main jist of this chapter is to analyze the Nouveau Roman or the New Novel. According to the internets, because while this entire chapter was devoted to analyze Nouveau Roman it never actually explained what the entire movement was, it consisted of a movement that created books that is only entertaining to people interested in clever mind play. Now look, I'm all for twisting convention, breaking the rules, and complete ambiguity when it comes to conventional story telling. This was well documented in my first novel Five Acts in Four Parts, which was then reworked into the slightly more accessible One Hundred People. While on an academic level these books are admittedly brilliant (and not just according to me, but a number of critics) in their self-awareness to the entire history and canon of western literature, they completely lack heart or appeal to the normal citizen. Hence, this kind of academic masturbation is the antithesis of any mass movement. It is then odd that Jameson, who wishes to show how postmodern theory is somehow related to Marxist thought, would embrace a literary movement that requires years of college education (which equates to tens of thousands of dollars).

Let me briefly describe two writers that accomplish a more successful version of Nouveau Roman. I consider them more successful because they meet the criteria of both being considered postmodern in their takes on writing while at the same time retaining heart and an appeal to the average proletariat.

These writers are Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction, and I will use their most recent collaboration to illustrate above points; The Immortal Iron Fist #10. Brubraker and Fraction break convention by not including the title character at all in this issue. In fact, this is the second time the title character has made no appearance in the last four issues. This is nothing new to either writer as the both have other successful series that have not involved title characters. Brubaker was had a successful run of Captain America that has featured zero Cap because Cap is dead (untill 2009 when Marvel releases a Captain America movie). Fraction has also written an issue of Punisher War Journal that featured approximately three panels of the Punisher and was the greatest Punisher comic ever. In Fractions’s current arc of Casanova, the title character has also failed to make an appearance for the last two issues. And yet, none of this has hindered any of the titles. In fact one hardly notices the title character missing in the last issue of Casanova where his sister has sex during a movie of her having sex with a manipulating psychotherapist that she defeats by using magic words…during said sex. Also in the same issue, two other characters discover something is wrong with time when they start forgetting what positions they had just tried during a sex marathon…in the head of a giant robot. Holy crap, that is the kind of art that should be supporting a people's revolution—not some novel that has a hundred-page sentence written by some professor who is trying to one up James Joyce.

Anyway, I was trying to make a point with The Immortal Iron Fist #10. I think it was this: It features the fight between Dog Brother #1 and Bride of Nine Spiders. And while it doesn’t feature Fat Cobra using Sith lightning in the form of a lasso, it does feature the martial arts move Black Milk of Hell—which I’m pretty sure will ruin your day. So this is my point; this is a comic book—a mainstream comic book—pretty much the epitome of kapitalism. And yet it doesn’t feature the title character, which is unheard of in any mainstream kapatilst project. That would be like producing a Punisher movie where the Punisher never wears a black shirt with a skull on it and have it succeed. And yet, The Immortal Iron Fist is flat out awesome. It bends conventional story telling by not even featuring the protagonist and it completely understands how awesome it is to have a character named Dog Brother #1, which is so much cooler than Dog Brother Number One or Dog Brother no. 1. There is just something that is completely awesome about the use of the # sign in this instance. If someone could write a doctorate as to why that is, that would be great.

Reading Sabbatical: Moses in the Matrix

2007-10-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

Book: Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson

Chapter 2: Theories of the Postmodern

Much of this chapter is devoted to mentioning theories by other theorists while never actually describing their theories. It goes something like this: Of course Bentley would say that Jackson was trapped in a late-consumerist paradox, but we all know how Jackson would refute that claim. It gets really annoying.

Jameson does touch on the fact that postmodernism is political, though it often shun politics, because it arises from a culture, due to excess provided by kapitalism, that depends on the idle leisure time of late consumerist society. May I just say, this point was illustrated more entertainingly by the Chuck Atkins is Dead project. During said project, Chuck Atkins dissected cultures defined by rebellion to show that they rely on a certain privilege. Afro-feminist has also arrived at similar conclusions as they claim that very idea of feminist thought arose from upper-middle class white women who had the time to worry about their place in the world as gender, as opposed to trying not to get beat by their masters. Hence, postmodernism can only arise in those cultures that are privileged enough to idle their time away in the university, as opposed to working soul-grinding jobs. This is why none of my non-college educated friends understand any of my very funny postmodern jokes. The poor are truly worthless.

Jameson draws up four theories: 1) antimodern/propostmodern, 2) promodern/antipostmodern, 3) antimodern/antipostmodern, and 4) promodern/propostmodern. 1 and 2 are fairly easy to understand. 3, the anti-/anti- understands the modernism is over but rejects that postmodernism is the next evolution. 4, the pro-/pro-, is best described as a post-Marxist. That is promodern in the belief that science/human knowledge can create a utopia and propostmodernism in that postmodernism exposes the absurdity of kapitalism.

As for myself, I would subscribe closest to the anti-/anti- model. I understand that science has more or less made the idea of god passé. However, I also don’t believe that science will give up our Jetson’s like utopia. The idea of the postmodern destroys faith in any ideology including postmodernism. Not only is god dead, but so are all ideologies. I outlined these ideas in my doctorate dissertation God is Dead, and so is Marx. At the end of history, all contradiction is to be at an end, i.e. struggle has ceased. However, once any objective truth is destroyed (and I don’t limit this merely to the concept of god, but even Nietzsche’s überman) by the understanding of postmodernism. This is much like shooting the wizard of Oz because he lied in regards to his omnipresence. But by killing the lie, also the ability to return to a desired state dies. While Kansas may be far from utopia, it sure beats the hell out of having to fuck midgets who wear funny looking shoes for the rest of your life.

Essentially, being an anti-/anti- is equivalent to Moses wondering in the wilderness…a bitter old man that will never arrive to his goal because he claimed to derive water from a rock (i.e. alchemy, a proto-science). But why did he claim to pull water from stone? He was trying to calm the masses and bring them out of slavery. It was a political action. Thus politics tears humans from god. In fact, as I have concluded in my other works, politics is the ultimate human realm. There is no religious answer to the question of politics. In other words, utopia (i.e. the Garden of Eden, God) is in conflict with politics (i.e. the supremacy of the human). How odd it is then that postmodernism which is the ultimate triumph over god, seeks utopia through pure means of modernism (conquering climate change through science and decreed law comes to mind). In postmodernism only keeps men in the old religious chains because it tells them both that god is dead and hence they must listen to themselves (or at least the most powerful or rich or most famous of the masses) in order to guide themselves through life. Whereas the ancient religious tribes either rewarded the free thinker by murdering him and proving the greatness of his freedom through martyrdom or simply cast him out of their tribe and let him wonder and find his own way because the religious tribe was focused on communing with god and not setting up a political dominion (through punishment of the apostate or religious war) because it interfered with the religious realm. In many ways postmodernism has brought back the fanaticism of the witch trials. The contradictions cannot be swept under the rug no matter how large a rug the postmodernist can weave.

Chapter 3: Surrealism Without the Unconscious

This chapter is devoted to the art of video. I am completely inept with video theory and can only assume the author chose to focus on video rather than film because video is (or was in 1991) more populist. Or maybe he had just watched a lot Devo music videos.

Here Jameson starts to paint an image of a machine that invades every part of our life. With the older art of drama there was the intermission and the end of a play. The actors stopped. We could get away from the story and come back later and see how it finishes. However, television demands our attention. It never stops; it is always in motion. Characters will not stay in place and wait for us. We must be there at the same bat-time on the same bat-channel if we wish to participate in this art form.

Moreover, perhaps we have already entered into a Matrix-like future. No, we are not in comatose states being used as batteries for machines. But we are close. It can be said that meaningful life begins with purpose. Without purpose, a being simply reacts. One cannot act until they know they are simply reacting (notice the contradiction, the action of acting is a great reaction to always reacting). Machines—computers, iPods, game stations—all have purpose: to be turned on; to be used. A television in a box or turned off is not alive. Hence, machines gain purpose by attracting one to use them—a human to use them. Of course, we have had machines for a really long time. No one would say the toaster has enslaved them. However, in recent years the technology has become more and more enslaving. It is now almost impossible to appreciate art (film, drama by the media of television) with owning a very large, very expensive television, sound system, disc playing system (DVD, HD-DVD, Blu Ray). The machines (spurned by their kapitalist masters) try to draw more of our time away with the internet and myspace and such. Every time I visit a grocery store, a common sight is to see the young child follow his parent, ten or twelve steps behind, as she taps away on the keys of her Nintendo DS.

The machines and kapitalism are the perfect enslaving system. Machines enslave the humans to use them—help them fulfill the machines’ purpose, bring them to life. So in a way we are the batteries of machines. Even in the Matrix lore there is a definite connection between machine and kapitalism. It is through the machine world becoming the lead economic power that it is eventually able to rule. The machines build the best cars, the best electronics, have the strongest currency and thus they eventually rule the world.

So what does all this have to do with video theory? I don’t know. It was just stuff I thought off while reading.

Chapter 4: Spatial Equivalents in the World System

A complete chapter on architecture. I admit I skimmed through most of it. It did repeat a lot of information in regards to the Westin Bonaventure. Of course Jameson should have realized this chapter would bore me as he points out that architecture is only recently become of interest with North Americans. He also makes the same claim with food. I don’t know much about Canadian cuisine, but they do have this thing that is basically French fries and mayonnaise and gravy. Oh wait, maybe he was talking about the other North Americans.

Here is my basic thought on architecture. Modern architecture is all about form being functional. Hence, the great grey boxes of the sixties that housed thousands of cubicles. Easy to build, easy to stuff tons of people in them to tap away at keyboards. And then postmodern architecture comes along and says that buildings should be their own world or invisible or whatever to distort special ideas. The office building is not an office building. In fact, the office function is as invisible as possible. It is simply this new world (idea) that you can visit until you move onto another spatial world (idea).

The problem is that this is still form being functional. Whereas the grey boxes of the sixties sought to be functional in a kapitalist system (a model that Wal*Mart still strictly follows—they have six basic designs for their stores, thus they don’t waste money on architects and are more efficiency in their expansion saving more money), this postmodern perspective is still providing a form that functions to soothe psychological dysfunction. The grey box we go to work in takes on a symbol of a prison. We grow anxious as we pull into the parking lot and wish the day or our life to be over. However, the new architecture hides the kapitalist machine. There are trees inside or the building is built to remind us of a college campus (with memories of beer bongs that brings a smile to the face). So while the form may not adhere to the function of producing kapital, it does satisfy our psychological needs of not being reminded of being in a prison as we type the day away on our keyboards.

Hence, postmodern architecture provides happy slaves that are blind to their poor condition. That doesn’t make the gray modern boxes a better solution; though they do remind us of our actual condition. The answer lies somewhere else than the prison box and the invisible prison.

So...um...reading

2007-10-04T20:44:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I'm still reading. Just haven't had time to write about it. With all the work, recording stuff for a podcast, reading, reading comics, redoing the kenarchist.PRESS. website...

Oh yeah, kenarchist.PRESS. is back up. All semi-new and improved. Enjoy or whatever.

Reading Sabbatical...not really...

2007-09-26T23:03:00.000-07:00

I know I’m trying to do less comic-book reading, but it is Wednesday and I’m still devoting that day to reading comic books. Plus, I forgot my book at work again. This was originally a four-thousand word essay on my view on comics and how they relate to what I purchased this week. Screw it, that was boring. Here is just what I thought of everything.

!!!SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW!!!

Batman 669

The final arc of a great story involving the silver age League of Batmen—which includes a Native American in a Batman cowl wearing a stereotypical Native American headdress. This may sound insensitive, but that is awesome. The book also features a bad guy in a Mexican-style wrestling mask name El Sombrero, who creates a booby trap with piranhas, wasps, and a Bowflex. That is a triple-A RAAAD! And like the other arcs of Morrison’s run so far, it comes to an end but also alludes to something larger building. Did I mention this involves wasps and a Bowflex and a Native American Batman?

Countdown 31

If this wasn’t countdown to Grant Morrison (hopefully) finally ending all the ret-con nonsense I wouldn’t stick around. Twenty-issues in and it still feels like it is beginning. Plus, nothing about the Pied Piper and the Trickster running around, which is the only thing I’m really enjoying.

Criminal 9

I don’t have a lot to say about Criminal except that it is great and I can’t wait to see how everything ends. Plus, nun-themed sex. Amongst gangsters.

Green Arrow: Year One 5

So remember how awesome Batman: Year One was? How it both showed the evolution of Batman his first year and was a simple story of Batman trying to gain the trust of one cop? Well, what if Batman: Year One started with Bruce at age ten or whatever witnessing his parents being shot and then spending the rest of the week deciding he should fight crime? Yeah, I know that is like an origin story, not a year one. Well, Green Arrow: Year One is pretty much an origin story, with no development. Ollie is stuck on an island with drug pushers and since it sucks being in that situation then he decides to shoot a bow and arrow (no flower-arrows yet) which apparently is the only thing he is good at. Also, five issues in to a six-part story, about seven days have passed. So what about the other 358?

Immortal Iron Fist 9

I’m pretty sure this sentence will describe how awesome this book is: Fat Cobra is a sumo wrestler that knows how to wield Sith-lightning in the form of a lasso.

Immortal Iron Fist Annual 1

Similar to the regular Iron Fist, but with more crappy art. But it does feature a gang of Chinese prostitutes who run around with machine guns and call themselves the Harem Harlots of Harlem.

The Order 3

Three books this week written by Matt Fraction. It is like I won the lottery were I paid nine-bucks for 100 or so awesome comic pages of complete silver-age style insanity. So there are no Soviet-bears with jetpacks in this issue, but there are robot zombie hobos. Seriously. Also, a Japanese baseball player, who lost he legs to a drunk driver, is seeking revenge on the man who cost him his baseball career. I don’t think that story line should excite me as much as it does, but I home he kicks the drunk’s ass with his titanium prosthetic legs. sXe revenge!

Speak of the Devil 2

I’m not sure where this story is going. It was billed as a female gymnast who peeps on people while wearing a devil mask. I think half the reason I picked this up is because the devil mask is similar to Evan Dorkin’s Devil Puppet. Behold, the power of Dorkin. So far the female gymnast spends a lot of time peeping in on her step mom who thinks the peeping tom is a guy and likes being watched. She strips down and masturbates, and the step daughter digs it. Hell, she even peeps in on her step mom doing her dad. So, uh, yeah. Recommended.

The Spirit 10

I’m not sure what it is, but this book has lost some magic. I think the issue with the blue-skinned punk bands was the high point. This issue does claim that Rosie O’Donnelle is nothing more than Rush Limbaugh in drag, playing out the liberal side of his split personalities, but even that falls flat. I know, hard to believe? I will admit though, the Spirit always opens up with an amazing splash page.

Usagi Yojimbo 106

If you’ve watched samurai movies, you’ll know how slowly they move. This comic is no different. And that is why I like it. I foresee the current story arc as being thirteen issues with about three pages of actual bloody sword fights resolving the whole thing. Also, when as people are dying their word balloons are shaped like skulls. That gives me warm fuzzies.

Reading Sabbatical: Day 3

2007-09-25T20:57:00.000-07:00

Stupid work. I forgot my book about postmodernism being explained in exactly three times as many words as it needs to be in my office. So I’ll get back to that when I remember to actually bring it home or find enough time to waste writing this stuff at work. So I pulled another book off the shelf—

Book: Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Charles Bukowski

I received this book as an Easter gift from my wife in 2006. Seriously. Bukowski. Easter. Jesus. Drunken gamblers looking for whores. It makes sense in my world. This was also the first time I’ve read any portion of the book outside of church. I typically bring something to read while sitting around during the sermons, and I figure the more blasphemous the better. After all, if you can’t be forgiven for blasphemy at a church, where can you receive forgiveness for it?

This book is basically comprised of rambling stories—some mostly true, some less-mostly true. Like the title implies, this is a bunch of notes and the lack of proper punctuation and respect for the rules of capitalization it pretty comes off notes written by a dirty man.

Random thoughts:

Starting on pg 45 – A piece written about the death of JFK, written soon after the assassination. This is pretty political from what I’ve read of Bukowski. He seems pretty pissed off at Gov. Reagan. I don’t know if Bukowski is an anarchist, but he doesn’t like them rules. Reagan says it is people like Oswald that show that people are just choosing what laws they want to obey. Bukowski’s reply is that you can’t claim that lawlessness (autonomy?) doesn’t work because one guy kills the president. But then he goes on to show that all the political figures getting assassinated (and assassination attempts) are Left Wing figures. And he wonders why that is. Of course, if he would have waited a few decades he would have to deal with the assassination attempt of President Reagan. I guess that destroys his whole hypothesis of a Right Wing conspiracy.

Pg. 52-53 – A man talks about looking for the clean spot of a cum rag to wipe himself off with after an encounter with a prostitute. That’s followed up with an Emmanuel Kant joke!!! And then it’s all wrapped with the wisdom that a man must be a misogynist if he wants to convince a woman to sleep with him. (And golden showers don’t hurt either.) Gloria Steinem must be spinning in her grave.

Pg. 61 – What are people mostly made of? “Mostly blood and bones and pain.” I’m pretty sure that is a lyric from a Life of Chaos song. And if it wasn’t, then it should have been.

Reading Sabbatical: Day 1

2007-09-23T21:11:00.000-07:00

Book: Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson

Introduction & Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

I received this book a couple of years ago for my birthday or Christmas. Or perhaps Easter. But definitely not Halloween or my wedding anniversary. I don’t recall how I found out about the book but some how it caught my eye and I decided to acquire the book (I do remember I was spending a lot of time in the Literary Criticism section of book stores, which is an incredibly small section.

My first impression of the book is that there are a lot of five and six syllable words. This isn’t bad, but I get the impression that most of the ideas could be expressed with words comprised of two syllables—three tops. Take Bukowski for instance. The man’s work is concise, to the point, original, and groundbreaking. Yet how often does he use words over two syllables? Rarely. In fact, the only time he uses a three syllable words is when he uses the word alcohol (admittedly, he uses this word a lot). My point is, I’m only understanding like 60% of what is being said. I’ve read postmodern philosophy translated poorly from French that made more sense. But I think that is part of the point. This is a book spouting Marxist ideals (i.e. freeing the working class masses from their kapitalist masters) that is completely inaccessible to the masses. I guess that is postmodernism.

Random thoughts:

Pg 4 - Discussion on how modern culture has come to the point that art is almost completely pointless because it has lost the ability to shock. Due to higher education, the likes of Picasso and Joyce are no longer ugly; rather we “get it.” Can art or the artist even exist without the use of shock or ugliness when the new aesthetic seeks to commercialize everything. Even anti-kapital pursuits are used to feed the machine of the kapitalist system; thus Che Guevara shirts being sold at the mall.

So is there art that can exist that can shock or be ugly? In my own pursuits of this, I have found it difficult to find a scientific answer, which is one that is repeatable. Many are aware of my Bratz exhibit, which featured pictures of the best-selling dolls adorned with porn-facials. While such exhibit exposed the schizophrenia of modern culture as pointed by Jameson—with criticism of the exhibit being considered child porn while most watchdog groups also admitting that Bratz dolls were exploitive of children themselves—it was impossible to recreate the same shock with a similar exhibit.

Thus, the aesthetic of smashism. After one taboo has been traversed, its value of taboo-ness will geometrically decline. Thus, art exhibits composed of feces is now cliché. For the smashist, the only solution to the declining value of art is to push society through every taboo until it is forced to reach the logical end of art, politics, philosophy, etc. and begin again. It is as if we are required to read a murder mystery that we have already figured out and are merely reading because we have to take a test at the end which asks questions like, “What color hat is the clown wearing on page 197?” Thus art no longer teaches us anthing, rather it only signifies what we should already know.
For example, Garth Ennis’s version of Frank Castle, a.ka. the Punisher. The Punisher came into being at the proto-stages of the Bronze Age of comics. The anti-hero was the new hero of the day in movies such as Taxi Driver. He came into full realization as the Bronze Age embraced a grittiness of its characters. The Punisher shot up in popularity because he was able to do what traditional heroes would not—kill. This became his novelty; what set him apart from other comic book heroes. The dialectic has been pushed from admired hero to admired anti-hero.

Ennis’s Punisher of the Punisher MAX. Frank Castle was released from the PG world of comic books to the NC-17 realm. This was the next step in the dialectic, but what was he to do? The first story arc ends with the Punisher murdering his former sidekick. What was his sidekick’s crime? Trying to recruit Castle into waging war against Osama bin Laden. This was as if Batman murdered Robin because Robin felt that their talents would be better used to defeat real life threats as opposed to the cartoony Joker. It at once produced a comic book “hero” that was amoral, borderline insane, violent, and completely impotent in defeating real life threats. It was both parody and reflection of years of comic book history. By creating a character that the reader cannot associate with (a senseless murder who kills his former allies), the reader enjoys the product of the “hero” without liking the “hero.” In other words, it is modern America. We enjoy the commodities of China while also hating those communist reds. Ennis’s Punisher via Punisher MAX reflects Jameson’s points of art reflecting the death of the subject (pg 16) (the Punisher ceases to exists as a character as the reader now only enjoys his product, violence, and not the Punisher himself) and the schizophrenia of modern culture (pg 26) (the Punisher, a violent military expert is impotent to defeat real life threats).

Ennis’s Punisher creates a product that is at first ugly, but each following story arch features a similar story. Someone befriends the Punisher, and that partner meets is met with death. What was first met with shock as the Punisher murders his former sidekick becomes normal. The ugliness and shock goes away. It goes from a postmodern critique of the comic book hero to an accepted commodity. Frank Castle still remains an unlikable sociopath, but he is now tolerated for entertainment purposes.

Jameson then devotes a large part of chapter one to critiquing the architecture of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles (pg 39—44). He speaks of how inaccessible it is and how it was created so that the visitor would get lost in it. As I attended a party there during Celebration IV (commemorating the 30th anniversary of Star Wars), and let me tell you, there were a bunch of obese, lonely men in Stormtrooper armor walking all over that hotel looking for the party. Of course, they may have been lost because they were delirious with excitement because it was the first party they were ever invited too. I dunno.