A few nights ago, while mildly drunk, I made a personal list of what I considered the best films of the decade. A list of top films seemed less daunting, somehow, than talking about the best music or comics of the decade. Films seem more singular to me, easier to consider as individual entities, seeing as how each film is a different combination of forces- screenplay, director, cinematography, actors, art direction, soundtrack. For all that music critics value the album, following bands' creative direction over an extended period of a time is a different thing. Animal Collective were maybe one of the most exciting bands of the decade for me, and their two best albums nonetheless have dud tracks, that after listening to I thought "oh, their next record will be really great, if it goes in a certain direction" only for the following record to be a different thing entirely than what my speculation conjured.

Talking about the best comics of the decade is even stranger. The feeling of "their next work will be amazing" still exists, but added to that is "when this serialized work is finished and collected, it will be amazing." In serialization, unfulfilled potential is even more of a disappointment. This decade was also one rife with reprints of much older material. It seems like the entire landscape of comics shifted over the course of the decade, to look at individual critic's best-of-the-year lists, year after year.

It's that shifting landscape that's interesting to me, in terms of making a "best-of-the-decade" list: What works were the most influential, when all is said and done? But that gets confused by comics' commercial nature: Some, when faced with the bar being raised, retreat completely. A list of the best work should consist of that which stands on its own merits.

All of this is preamble to saying that any list should include Paul Pope's 100%. There seems to be a whole school of comics following in Paul Pope's tradition of work primarily influenced by manga, but also influenced by European comics, Kirby and Ditko, and alternative comics. Most would acknowledge this school of comics by giving regard to Bryan O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim, a more popular work with more evident manga influence. But 100% is better-composed, I think. A one-off, not a franchise; a "graphic movie," in its own parlance, with its focus tight enough to have emotional resonance and payoff fairly quickly, with the small scenes extended over multiple pages all being fairly moving and effective, like the slow-motion bits in Spike Lee's 25th Hour. (A movie that made my list.) 25th Hour is an apt comparison point in another way, as well: Pope is also responding to post-9/11 New York. If a best-of-decade list should somehow tell the story of the years creating it, that's preferable, to me, to Scott Pilgrim's telling the story of 2000s Canadian indie rock becoming a dominant culture for twenty-somethings. (Note: I like Scott Pilgrim a lot and don't mean to dismiss it.) (Tekkon Kinkreet is also a big comic for this group, and that has some of my favorite drawings to look at, but it came out in Japan in the nineties. No. 5 could be up there if the whole thing was translated.)

The other school of comics most interesting to me right now would be typified by Kramers Ergot contributors and Picturebox-published cartoonists. But I can't really think of a clear masterpiece of that school of comics to be published this decade. I still think Gary Panter's Jimbo: Adventures In Paradise is the book to beat, and that was published in the eighties and is now out of print. Jimbo In Purgatory is a fucking crazy comic that I can't really read, only stare at. Brian Chippendale's Ninja gets the edge over Maggots, for its fully-developed sci-fi/fantasy/political world, and for being drawn this decade. Maggots is probably one of the best comics of the nineties, secretly. 1-800-Mice by Matthew Thurber is one of those books I think will destroy everything around it when it's completed. The top widely available Paper Rad product of the decade would be the Trash Talking DVD. There's a case to be made for Paper Rodeo being the best of this type of comic, especially using the criteria of influence. But I'm giving the spot to Ninja. This is, ultimately, an arbitrary decision: These are the comics I am most psyched to read right now. Here's what that comic has as specific strengths: It's huge both physically and in the size of the world it reveals, it's drawn as if possessed, it's filled with ideas- fantastical, political, and graphic; the action sequences are pretty much second to none; it's pretty readable, but only in small chunks because of how overwhelming it is. In the world of comics called "Fort Thunder" that get described as totally crazy, giving the award to the guy who actually lived at Fort Thunder and made the craziest comic is the representative move. Oh yeah, I'm pretty sure this is out of print.

I like Powr Mastrs and CF's work a lot as well. It's not done yet. The horror vacui thing in Chippendale's work is absent, in its space is a lot of clean lines. If Chippendale's frenzy is to depict noise, and activity, and dirt- as opposed to the cleanliness of development, a visual metaphor and comparison made outright in Ninja- CF's thin contours and geometric straight lines, plus occasional watercolors, more represent the beauty of nature. Chippendale is designed to read fast, CF's stuff is to be read slower. It's the difference between a bomb going off and spells being cast. It doesn't make a list because it's not done yet.

The other great, not yet finished comic of the decade is Anders Nilsen's Big Questions. Which I suspect will need to be edited before collection because when I read issues 3 to 6 in one go, it got a little repetitive and the pacing was weird. And some other issues have kind of stupid parts. (The bit about the allegory of the cave.) But oh shit the stillness. Was this the decade comics discovered stillness and nature? Comics have a root in gags, in the instantaneous and ephemeral. There's that R. Crumb comic, "A Brief History Of America," but even that is focused on forward momentum, like time-lapse photography. There's something to be said for manga's pacing, of stretching things across pages. I mentioned it when talking about 100%, and Pope is also a big influence on Dash Shaw, whose Bottomless Belly Button had pacing that allowed for bits of grace.

Kevin Huizenga's comics were filled with nature, and transcendence. They were stuck largely in the realm of thought, and self-consciousness: There's diagrams on one hand, and expressive craziness on the other. In between are short stories finding empathy, humor, myth... At this point I could actually just make a list of Kevin Huizenga's best comics, so numerous are his strengths. But the short stories are inseparable- "The Curse" is a highlight, but it's a part of a suite with two other comics that ground its wild excursions into territory he doesn't normally tred. "Pulverize," as part of Ganges 2, follows this weird opening overture of drawing to tell a simple story, filled with odd-detailed humor. "The Wild Kingdom" is just a crazy tangle of all sorts of stuff, an abstraction about how man and nature interact. What I said about Animal Collective being the most exciting band of the decade for the paths they don't go on to walk down again applies to Huizenga's comics.

My favorite Chris Ware book would be The Acme Novelty Library Report To Shareholders hardcover from 2005. This is one of those things where I can consider Jimmy Corrigan a nineties comic, and consider the Rusty Brown material being serialized currently as incomplete. This comic, again, is huge- comparable to Ninja in size, but not in content, but maybe in terms of scope: It begins with God creating the world, civilization coming into being, and in the end the world falls apart, and God goes on to create it again- But Ware's god is a bleak one, and in the middle is all sorts of satire about life in America and cruelty and lack of people understanding each other, and ruminations on changing seasons. Huge and terrifying, funny and moving. This is my favorite Chris Ware book.

(In the same way that I consider Jimmy Corrigan a nineties comic, I should mention that right now I am deeply enamored with Peter Blegvad's The Book Of Leviathan, which is also a collection of material from the 1990s.)

While talking about Chris Ware, I might as well talk about Daniel Clowes, whose "The Death Ray" in Eightball 23 really was a hell of a thing. A great superhero comic, or thing kind of about superhero comics, a rumination on adolescence, and about American foreign policy under the Bush administration as well.

The great mainstream superhero comic of the decade would be Alan Moore and JH Williams' Promethea. Every one knows how good JH Williams is now, and now he's drawing comics that are less ambitious. So this is a highwater mark, of sorts. Meanwhile, the script covers mysticism and enlightenment, and the kabbalah and all sorts of things. I am really fond of Top Ten and League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume 2, but this is Moore's America's Best Comics highpoint. A bonkers work of ambition and beauty. I like how uncontrolled it is, how every good issue wasn't necessarily good for the same reasons. Issue 8 was a thrilling comic of action scene, and issue 12 was super-clever. The whole book was thrilling and clever and well-drawn.

I thought I would list more mainstream superhero comics but at this point I am pretty exhausted and think the things I listed as the best would give someone outside of comics a good overview of the decade. I will list more comics, in the somewhat cursory fashion I did when discussing the Picturebox work earlier on. The Peter Milligan and Mike Allred X-Force comics (before it changed its name) was really entertaining. The Grant Morrison New X-Men comics jostled with it at the time of its publication, while also competing in my mind with The Filth which was running at the same time. By the end it wasn't so entertaining but parts of its first and second acts fired bullets just past my head. At this exact moment the Seaguy comic, one of my favorites at the time it came out, is not striking me as being as good, but certainly it was better than the Morrison output that followed at DC. Matt Fraction's Casanova then became the thing I read Grant Morrison comics for. Brendan McCarthy's issue of Solo was that, but better, and crossed with what I read those Picturebox comics for. I loved that comic.

I should also mention Renee French, Souther Salazar and Michael Kupperman. They're great.

And if a best-of-the-decade list is meant to include works of influence, it really should be noted that the Art Out Of Time book, edited by Dan Nadel, ended up spawning books for almost every cartoonist contained within its pages. When that book was first announced, I had never heard of any of them. The books it led to- that I read, which would be the Rory Hayes book and the first Fletcher Hanks collection- were incredible. Also, there's a part of me that believes that this book led to Matthew Thurber making more straightforward comics, which will lead to the greatness of 1-800-Mice, once it's done.

That is my list for people who didn't read comics but want to know that the decade was like. I await lists for people who did read comics but missed obscure stuff. Or I do a lot of expecting hugely popular things to not look as good in retrospect and look forward to being validated in my ignorance.

For all the talk about how "comics" is a misnomer, there's certain trends in humor that seem to find their first expression through the medium of combining words and images. Jules Feiffer's Village Voice strip, with its neurotic Jewish male dialogues, is an expression of worldview that, when viewed with Feiffer's Little Murders, becomes this connective tissue that leaks down into Larry David. That, combined with Matt Groening's Life In Hell metamorphosis into The Simpsons, starts to define the 1990s. There's also Gary Larson's The Far Side, which was sort of dismissed as a comic but influenced a generation of people's sense of humor, like Ben Jones.

Lisa Hanawalt's I Want You combines this absurdist sense of humor, totally well-drawn, that you can read in Michael Kupperman's comics, and then jettisons the emphasis on cultural detritus, like 1970s cop shows and 1950s comics, in favor of looking at the self and interactions with other people and feeling like a creepy weirdo. This shouldn't make the comic seem derivative: It's a huge leap forward, in using that sense of humor for personal ends, as an expression of what the cartoonist is like in real life and how she feels about things. You feel as if you know her, and confident that she's much more interesting than the people that do autobiographical comics.

It's a great comic, and I hope Buenaventura Press can afford to print more issues, because her minicomics are harder to find. I want her stuff to keep coming out, and being encouraged, because even though it's a fascinating creative voice, it seems possible that she could do weirder and deeper work in the future. Hanawalt cites Renee French as an influence, and that's certainly someone whose work has changed over time into something different from what it was. I also recently got my hands on Shary Boyle's Otherworld Uprising art catalog, and learned that Shary was in her mid-thirties by the time she started doing the more fantastical work she's doing now. This isn't to say I'm waiting for Hanawalt to abandon her sense of humor and make serious work- I love humorous work, and think the sense of humor on display is inherent to Hanawalt's experience of the world- rather I'm trying to orient understanding of the nature of the consciousness on display by bringing up these artists rather than mentioning specific autobio cartoonists.

This interview of Peter Blegvad in the new issue of The Believer is phenomenal. Blegvad's work is fascinating: I'm more partial to the Leviathan comic than I am to the music of Slapp Happy but that both, and more, originate from the same man is mind-blowing. It's sort of astounding how much one can accomplish if one stays alive long enough and continues to work as an artist, especially if one doesn't limit oneself to one medium.

This coincides with my recent discovery that Gregg Turkington, aka Neil Hamburger, was an original member of Caroliner, edited the Sun City Girls' Midnight Cowboys From Ipanema tape, and ran Amarillo records (with its own vast catalog). This sort of thing really helps me connect the dots of various artistic activity. I imagine early issues of Bananafish would also help elucidate a lot.

Since living in Baltimore I've made the acquaintance of all sorts of accomplished types, one of which would be Daniel Higgs, whose own life and musical history maps a wide territory in its movement from punk to mystic. Then I discovered that in 1994, he was a part of the first show at Alleged Gallery in New York.

What's interesting about this stuff is that it really goes beyond any notion of a scene, there's nothing that can be pigeonholed. It's just individuals who end up in a variety of places, largely by virtue of staying productive while alive, and outlasting the immediate surroundings to go somewhere else. It's deeply inspiring for the way it reminds what life is, existing in time.

While I'm saying all this I can also point out how semi-strange it is that there's a They Might Be Giants song about one of the guys who co-created Wonder Showzen, and that I am really looking forward to Drag City's release of Vernon Chatman's Final Flesh in a couple weeks. They Might Be Giants were my first favorite band when I was in middle school, and while I've stopped caring, and find the fact that they're making children's records for Disney really strange, they did a CD to accompany the sixth issue of McSweeney's, which, while this happened after I'd stopped caring about them so intently, was still one of the first things I'd heard about that periodical. I would also like to salute McSweeney's for the fact, learned from their website, that their upcoming newspaper's comics section will contain a Savage Dragon page from Erik Larsen in addition to Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman: Right on. (Alternately, when They Might Be Giants showed up as voices on Home Movies it really solidified the way that show captured much of my childhood-through-college interests in miniature.)

And all these things I'm writing paragraphs about have never intersected in anything more than super-tangential six degrees of separation style.

The Funkadelic album Cosmic Slop is pretty underrated. This is true partly because it's a Funkadelic album, and they're marginalized for all sorts of reasons, largely reducible to "too weird for their time." Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow is one of the all-time great album titles, and Maggot Brain gets some recognition. Cosmic Slop comes after those, as well as the fairly inconsistent America Eats Its Young. Funkadelic is also a band that kind of fell off as they went on, with their final record, The Electric Spanking Of War Babies, coming out in the eighties and being unable to avoid being marred by cheesy keyboards. So, Cosmic Slop might not look so good, coming after a double-album that's not so good, even though it's only not-so-good because it's a double album.

But Cosmic Slop is the first record with Pedro Bell album art! Awesome! And the album title is great, easily reconfigurable in my mind to form the phrase "cosmic slobs," which sums up a whole continuum of great activity and behavior, sort of like the "adventure hippies" designation that I think started off as an Andrew Earles diss and is currently being claimed by Lazy Magnet.

Maggot Brain is totally awesome, of course. But it's got a weird sequence: Spoken-word intro to a guitar solo, another freakout at the end, bookending some pop songs. All the parts are great, although I'm sort of at a loss for how they cohere as a whole, besides being of high quality.

Cosmic Slop is tighter in terms of being almost all songs: It opens with a groove, adds a chant, whatever: Mostly it is a record coming in and out of focus. Start with grooves, gets to songs, slides off. Vocals show up slowed down in deeper pitch. Vocal harmonies show up as these beams of light deep in album sides, maybe degenerated to noise in old vinyl or second-generation tape copies. Then there's more goofy spoken word. "This Broken Heart" is a version of an older song, and it's as straight-up and clear as the record gets, still weirder than the original version, and pretty much completely awesome, with it's simple stripped-down drum beat and vocals. The record might be up and down in quality on a song-to-song level, but that just keeps the groove stronger.

I saw a little news story: Less pharmaceuticals are coming out on the market, because during the testing process, it turns out the drugs can't beat the control group placebo. Placebos, essentially, have gotten more effective, as marketing has become so prevalent that people have more faith in the idea of drugs.

Last night, I attended a lecture about radionics: Essentially a discredited form of science, which could also be considered a repressed method of alternative medicine. The lecture was interesting, touching on all manner of odd phenomena. I would point you to a wikipedia page, but that largely emphasizes the "this is not real" elements. It's worth noting that some people doing these practices have cited positive results. I'll also point to that story about the placebos, both to say "Hey, the human mind can trick itself into doing things" to explain away such positive results of radionics, and also to say "Modern medicine isn't as legit as it would like to be."

I think there's something tragic about these practices being so repressed- A great many Wilhelm Reich books have been completely destroyed. These ideas now just belong to this library of esoteric thought, uninvestigated, deplored. The idea that they were destroyed as harmful because they don't work is not satisfying. I believe last week was banned books week, and that usually applies to fiction found offensive, but those are things that have not actually been wiped from the face of the Earth.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, the music website Pitchfork is doing a top 200 albums of the decade list, building its own canon for an era over which it was sort of the dominant tastemaker. The list is as insane as their original list of the top 100 albums of the 1990s, with multiple albums by artists not really that notable. It's the multiple albums by the same artist thing that really strikes me as evidence of building an incredibly narrow hall of fame. Maybe it's absurd to think of canon-building as being akin to these other things I'm discussing, but it frequently amounts to the same thing: A discrediting of approaches in the creation of this heroic narrative written by the winners.

That Simpsons Treehouse of Horror comic (issue 15) edited by Sammy Harkham and featuring a great many Kramers Ergot contributors ended up living up to all expectations. It is sort of similar to Brendan McCarthy's issue of Solo, which is to say it's kind of as good as pamphlet-format comics can get, now that the bottom has fallen out of that format, and the only way they can come out is through fairly mainstream publishing concerns. There's something about these comics, and the way they use and reconfigure this corporate-owned imagery for its own purpose, that's incredibly exciting. It's also rewarding, to those who've willfully chosen to be bombarded with it, and be in a place where it means something. Tim Hensley's one-page strip that opens the comic ends up being completely insane, while also really similar to dreams I've had in the past. I've also had dreams of watching episodes of The Simpsons that were really funny, and the Ben Jones strip lives up to that expectation as well. This comic blew my mind, repeatedly and cumulatively.

I'm in the middle of reading David Foster Wallace's Oblivion, the last book of fiction he completed before he killed himself, theoretically the work which came closest to his goals of creating sincere and moving literature. It was these stated goals that got me interested in reading his work, after his death, and my perception of them that has led me to be disappointed in what I'd read thus far. The detail and description is astounding, yes, but it gives way to this repetitious self-consciousness which is tedious even in his best pieces.

For the sake of argument, let's consider "good Old Neon" as one of the best pieces. I don't know how many people do, but "The Depressed Person" (from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men) is highly acclaimed, and this seems like a more layered version of that story. Although maybe one of those layers is one too many, another bit of labored self-consciousness on top of a story that's already been repetitive. But that's what I wish to discuss, because I think those with a morbid fascination with DFW's self-imposed demise will find it particularly interesting.

It's about a man who's spent his entire life as a fraud trying to impress people, and then goes on to kill himself, and the story is narrated at the moment of death, finally outside time forever, the voice talking to itself as someone else, explaining everything in this epiphanic moment. In the end it moves on to bring the writer into it as a character, looking at a yearbook from 1981, as apparently the story was inspired by high-school classmate who killed himself ten years later. The self-consciousness plagues it, to the bitter end. And that's unpleasant, even if the point is that self-consciousness is unpleasant. It doesn't really make it any more beautiful.

Take, as a point of contrast The Shaggs' "Philosophy Of The World." Some people find it abrasive and hard to process in its amateurism. But here it is in the world, despite those things, a piece of music. For those who appreciate it, on its own terms, despite/because of its flaws, it's deeply moving. It has brought me to the edge of tears. In it, we find a lack of self-consciousness that some find unpleasant, but it's completely astounding, and knocks one to the floor. It makes the point about self-consciousness DFW struggles with all by itself, completely by accident.

Part of this discrepancy comes down to prose versus music, or unmediated voice as opposed to trying, in writing, to convey consciousness as it occurs. Maybe it's an unfair comparison. But maybe it would also be unfair to compare David Foster Wallace to Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, or Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories, and say that the latter two come out looking better for their joy in the place of anxiety.

The other notable reading material of the day would be an interview with Ray Kurzweil, on the Vice website, talking about the coming singularity with his typical fervor. He looks forward to a time when humanity has enough nanotechnology in their blood to make them as smart as they want to be, and as free from death as they've always wished to be. In Kurzweil's view, religion and its views of life-after-death are a stopgap measure, until the point where we can choose not to die.

But in Wallace- projecting his anxieties onto fictional characters for the sake of readers with the same feelings that they wish to see reflected back and explained- intelligence is at least partly a trap. Living inside one's head as a consciousness means being alienated from those around you, while this individuality itself is a lie, with the truth being that all of us are connected, and this idea which we know intellectually can't fully be comprehended is until upon the condition of death. (Or so goes the conceit of one short story.) And this point is important, even as it may be obvious, even as the story used to make it has its own set of flaws, etc. It's somewhat comforting, in the face of depression, or suicide, or a scientist's messianic belief in technology.

It might not be the Shaggs, but hey: The point of their album's title track is that everyone wants what they do not have, and this applies to those with technical acument and those with unmediated sincerity. You can never be, something something something, in this world.

After being disappointed in the TV miniseries The Corner, I held off on my plans to get into Homicide: Life On The Streets. Now, that The Wire is complete, and I live in Baltimore, and the public library seems to have some discs inconsistently in stock, I gave it a go. It has a distinct set of charms- so far unreliant on concepts of "grit," instead moving quickly from scene to scene, with dialogue that feels invested in poetry, and a romantic attitude that's missing in not just The Wire, but Law & Order as well, with these being the two shows I'm most reminded of.

(On Homicide the police spend a great deal of time eating crabs, in a way that seems almost labored now, but is that because 16 years ago, there were more crabs in the bay, and there status as working-class food actually made sense?)

Maybe the attitude comes from Homicide's emphasis on characters, giving actors room to shine with dialogue- The Wire is interested in organization as organism, and while the characters ended up incredibly fleshed-out over time, here in the first episodes the characters are being given plenty of room to breathe, being introduced almost self-consciously, introducing their quirks and being viewed, by those around them, as these distinct individuals, beloved for their strangeness, whereas The Wire's world of bureaucracy would crush such quirks, enraged. Law & Order is given over to procedure and scandal, and while there Richard Belzer plays the same character, he isn't given as much to do.

But I'm only three episodes in, and I'm not really planning on going the distance. (Seven seasons! They make that many for the money syndication allows, why isn't this on all the time? I feel the same way about Newsradio, and now, King Of The Hill.)

On a completely separate note, there are two new single-issue comics worthy of note. The first is the new issue of Matt Thurber's 1-800-Mice, which I've gone on about in the past. Picturebox pulled the plug on serialization after the first two issues, and Matthew self-published (I believe) a thousand copies by himself, to get him to finish the story for the eventual book publication. The new issue is four bucks, and is oversized, bigger than the Picturebox-published issues, bigger than standard-comic size. It looks great. I picked it up at the new gallery, Open Space, run by some of the Closed Caption Comics kids, who are really excited to have Thurber as one of the artists in their first show. (Which looks great.)

The other comic is issue one of Brandon Graham's King City- Which, funnily enough, is in a deeply comparable boat. Tokyopop put out a graphic novel of the first half of the story, then decided not to publish the second half, already mostly drawn. So, Image is republishing the Tokyopop book as single issues, at larger than comic size, bigger than the original publication size. Again, it looks great. When the serialized publication is done, the new material will begin with issue 7.

What's funny is that most comic shops probably won't have both comics on sale within them, and there's the possibility you wouldn't even find these books at the same convention, since their cartoonists move in such different circles. But they're pretty similar comics in a lot of ways: Well-drawn, underground-influenced weird fantasy comics out of step with general trends. King City is the one closer to the mainstream, 1-800-Mice is a little better. But King City is nowhere near bad. When I say one is better, I mean that it is better enough to make up for the price difference: King City 1 is $3 for 32 pages, 1-800-Mice 3 is $4 for 24. King City uses its fantasy elements to tell stories about young people's relationships without getting boring, 1-800-Mice uses its to talk about ecology and society without becoming preachy. It's that distinction in their interests that makes the one book the more mainstream (people care about relationships) while the other is more interesting to me (there's a larger world outside that). But both, like Homicide, or The Wire, are totally invested in their fictional worlds and exploring them with as much detail as they can. Also, both books have these amazing VOICES to them. Graham deals in puns and wordplay while Thurber's prose puts words against each other in this interesting way. The voice, also made manifest in the drawing style, puts together these elements in this way that then drives the narrative to the places it goes. It's weird, and it's funny, and there's really nothing in pure prose that does what the dialogue in these comics do, unencumbered by explanation. Both of them are pretty much as right on as comics get- both for the way they tell stories that are visually interesting and meaningful to their cartoonists, and for the format they tell them in (bigger-than-average single issue comics), both of which are decisions which put them out of step with the larger comics culture which somehow doesn't value what these dudes do. Not like they would complain- The back cover of King City discourages whiners, and Matt's attitude isn't suited towards that sort of thing. If you get the chance to support them, do it.

The Wednesday Comics newspaper-comic DC is putting out is not really a value in terms of quality, but it's valuable as a sort of equivalent to buying mainstream comics, in miniature. If you read mainstream comics like you read any other, as an aesthetic experience, for four bucks a week, you have a diverse sampling of approaches, sort of like if you were combing through a fifty-cent box and getting a bunch of different things that came out eight months ago. Maybe three of the strips are actually good, about that many are aggressively terrible, and the rest are sort of dumb, but charming if you're in a charitable mood. If you like superhero comics as an idea, that allows for a certain amount of leeway, if you're fascinated by crap.

Criticism is made easy by how much you see, right next to each other. It's interesting formally, as a collection of giant one-page serialized strips: It's like an early twentieth-century comics section, but filled with superhero comics. There's a different sort of rhythm at work than there is in 22-page comics, but it turns out that the people that know how to work one form know how to work the other. Others fail spectacularly.

Paul Pope's "Strange Adventures" strip pretty much rules. While Pope's done comics to feature extended action sequences when he's had groups of pages to work with, here he does what the other people successfully using the format do: Strips where each page is the length of a single scene, avoiding summary at the outset, and letting whole pages revolve around visual motifs.

I don't want to be so formal as to assign "rules" to follow, since the exciting thing about those early comics was that there were no rules established for what a comic was supposed to be, freeing them up to be both Krazy Kat and Little Nemo In Slumberland. But here, there's certain things that work and certain things that don't: A Kamandi strip uses the Prince Valiant technique of barely being a comic so much as a series of illustrations of lackluster prose. You would think that would be discredited by this point.

For some reason, no one in Wednesday Comics does the thing Jaime Hernandez did in Kramers Ergot 7, or Brian Chippendale does in Ninja and Paper Rodeo: Picking a panel large enough to allow for clear and solid compositions and then using that as the basis of a grid to fill up the page. This seems the best way to cover a lot of territory, in terms of plot forward motion, but maybe because of the nature of serializing a thing in twelve installments, no one wants to go that far. No one's really thinking in terms of "one-pagers."

The worst comics here are those that go from page to page, with each strip containing a single plot beat, functioning as a cliffhanger at the end of one strip and needing to be summarized at the beginning of the next. These strips tend to have other weaknesses: I stared dumbfounded at a Metal Men strip where it's revealed a bomb detonator was replaced by a shape-shifting superhero, because in the immediately preceding panel, the detonator is still clearly drawn, being pressed down: it's a terrible panel to panel transition, because there's no sense of time elapsing where the action could've taken place, no single panel where the detonator is not shown that would allow for unseen events to occur. I'm not mad at the plot mechanics, this is the sort of dumb thing that goes down in comics all the time, but formally it's completely fucked.

That's the odd thing about Wednesday Comics, is that the format doesn't really allow for fuck-ups to go unnoticed, and whenever some poor creative decision is made, a reader just wonders why. "Shouldn't they know better?" When cranking out serialized comics, it's easy to imagine people making bad decisions in the rush to do something else instead. But here, when a comic happens where the narration is peppered with deeply half-assed spanish (chicas, dinero, estupido), that narration is the point of the comic, it's completely in focus, it's all that's there, and it's egregiously terrible. Because it's weekly, the editorial focus just becomes getting it out, with no eye for oversight.

But Paul Pope's comic is good. The strips that are good, that work, seem like they should just be shown to the perpetrators of the failures: "Here is how you do something right." But that's assuming the people who aren't doing well have never seen Kramers Ergot 7, or Paper Rodeo, or a Little Nemo collection, or a newspaper comics section. Which seems like it would be impossible, or hyperbole. But the strips that fail the hardest are those made by people deeply entrenched in corporate comics culture, editors who've worked with the monthly format and aren't necessarily that engaged in history. I keep on harping on the Paul Pope comic as being good, but there are other winners that seem equally engaged in how comics work. The Batman strip by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso is pretty good, by which I mean it's executed well. It tells a story visually, panel to panel, clearly, and the plot keeps moving week to week, scene to scene. A lot of the characters based on already existing designs look kind of shitty, but it doesn't really matter when you look at the three panels of a dude falling over a table and realize that no one else in the comic is handling action that well. No one else is thinking about visuals in terms of comics, that sort of animation-style-emphasis on movement, so much as a display of style. The Flash comic, split into Daniel Clowes-strips and then telling a science-fiction story, also has humans drawn with these radically unappealing faces, but it's the strip with the best formal conceit, that allows for plot movement while also feeling like it's digressing enough to be a full experience.

The Mike Allred and Kyle Baker strips occupy the middle-ground in terms of quality: They're not very good because they're not trying to be, they're just dispensing their styles sort of perfunctorily, but that's still not aggressively terrible because the drawing does have its charm. They're professional enough and engaged in comics enough to not make the glaring mistakes some are making.

But on the whole, the comic has it's heart in the right place, in that it's letting the creators do whatever. It's letting superhero comics be comics, and work on their own as examples of the medium, rather than be put into a position where they're furthering this corporate-universe grand-narrative which is deeply depressing. The four bucks per week that go to the superhero reading experience in miniature is closer to a model of how comics probably should work, a better way of getting readers to buy things they don't care about than some event comic sold to them via hype. The fraction of comics I find appealing in this miniature model is larger than the fraction glimpsed in solicitation hype. Still, I've only bought issues three, five, and six of the series thus far, because buying crappy comics isn't really worth the investment, not when there's so much more to be found in actual bargain bins.

As I was listening to the Need New Body record Where's Black Ben? just now, the thought occurred to me that it was what Baltimore music has collectively been going for without being aware of it. The trashy collage of the album art, the goofy sense of humor. All the things that the press talks about when talking about Baltimore music through the lens of Dan Deacon is here, in an unaffected way, but there's a vision wide enough to encompass all sorts of weirder music that doesn't get discussed. Where's Black Ben has this tremendous diversity to it, with its dissonant free jazz and its banjo-led songs, that, while neglected at the time as an album, feels close enough to a vision of an entire small city's diverse music scene.

It's got this energy, that starts with goofs, moves on to songs with a variety of strengths, and then into more abstract territory. There are a million bands each trying to do a fraction of what's on display here, and many more people whose overall personality would be better represented by making music like this than what they're currently trying to accomplish. It all coheres thanks to arrangement, of the record as a whole and as songs with complexity and dynamic movement.

The album is far from perfect, with all its annoyances, but it's great, lovable in how much personality is display, and what that personality conveys as being "about." I feel like it should be on a list of the best records of the decade, just somewhere at the bottom.

Oh, that's interesting: The 33rd issue of McSweeney's is set to be a newspaper- with journalism, fiction, and a comics section. Called "The San Francisco Panorama." Putting up a fight for the format. It's interesting in part because comics have fought the same battle in recent years, but now print is in decline so much that the rest will catch up. I wonder if they can price it cheaply enough for it to be effective. Before that, issue 32 is set to have a story set in the future by Salvador Plascencia, last published in issue 22, with the first chapter of his novel appearing in 12.

While I'm linking to things: This is hysterical/infuriating. (Not the piece I am linking to so much as what it discusses.)

Big Blood, a band I've talked up multiple times in the past, have made their entire catalog available online for free. The "Already Gone" albums are their latest as of this writing, and I think they're great. The "Sew Your Wild Days" volumes are also a good place to start.

This has been a year, like the last few, where I've felt disappointed in most music released. Soon there will come the retrospectives of the past decade, which will reaffirm that the music most instilled in my head as "good" - 1990s indie rock- is out of fashion, and what is viewed as the heir to that tradition is largely boring. (This includes the work done by many of the highlights of that movement, a few years past their prime.) The things that I find interesting, particularly in the last few years of this decade, are usually coming from a background of electronic music, folk, or noise. Much of it will not be mentioned in these write-ups, and much of it was underrated at the time of its initial release. I've had my share of top ten list entries matching up with other people, but a few months later I've made late additions. Big Blood put out a ton of CD-Rs in 2007, which I think was the same year the Lazy Magnet album "Is Music Even Good" came out to the attention of no one. Get ready by hearing such records, so when the lists attempting canons come out with no mention of such people you can hold them in disdain.

Whenever I read the novels of Steve Erickson, I'm struck by a feeling of "guilty pleasure," thought to be outmoded by those with my general tastes. The books are acclaimed, blurbed by various writers held in high esteem, but there's still something embarrassing and corny about it. Luckily, the books are books, read intimately, by one person at a time, because if I were to read them with someone looking over my shoulder, or in something like a movie theater, I could not enjoy them for the constant cringing.

First, there are the sex scenes, or the way sex is discussed in general, in this half-pretentious manner. Words like "sensuality" and "eroticism" are used- It's not offensive or crass, but reads like a backrub from someone using scented oils, which to my mind is worse. He frequently writes these scenes from the perspective of female characters, and I feel a sort of displaced embarrassment for him, writing these things, which don't read as glaringly false in terms of ringing untrue so much as it feels, necessarily, like a pretense. When he writes the scenes from a male perspective, there's just this sort of goofiness at work. Maybe any writer lingering on such scenes is running these risks, and taking these chances, but he does it a lot (one book features a pornographer as a main character, another a dominatrix), and by making sex such a presence cheesiness lingers. In an interview where Erickson listed favorite authors, Henry Miller was mentioned, and maybe it's that influence of something I find really stupid shining through.

There's also this comfort-food aspect to the talk of film and music, as in Jonathan Lethem's writing: Yes, the writer is talking about these common signifiers that I, and many others, recognize and know about. His last book, Zeroville, is about movies and is filled with descriptions of scenes and figures not always named. I read these sections with a certain pleasure. Erickson is also a film critic, and I enjoy reading criticism, and when I find it in a novel I feel like I am being indulged, pandered to.

It's all very pleasant and comforting to think about- so are the sex scenes- but it's not really the central pleasure of why I read the books: There are magazines that place stories of people fucking pages away from record reviews and I don't read them because it's not going to culminate in something moving and transcendent. It's a collection of elements pleasurable in small doses, placed on top of each other and turned into something you don't really want. Nerds are great, but imagine the sort of person that dresses up in costume hitting on you while in costume. Even if they are attractive, my response would be "I'm sorry, I'm not that corny, I don't enjoy this. This is awful, actually, why is this happening? My brain is short-circuiting."

But there is the possibility that this is Erickson's desired effect, the brain short-circuiting. The plots are these apocalyptic dream-imagery things, moved forward by free-association and dream logic. Sort of like a David Lynch film, but it needs a different sort of immediacy, being a book. And so it's written in this revealing tone, to move you into their space, like you're naked with the author's finger touching your asshole, and he's staring into your eye. Moving into weird territory, rewarding at the end of it, and until then it's just heightened sensation.

The books are kind of great, actually, and there's no way to excise the flaws and have them work as well. I recommend them to all who are corny and retarded and embarrassing. That's most people, at least occasionally: either making bad jokes or laughing too loud or wearing unflattering facial hair or hats. What I view as "flaws" in Erickson's writing are really just mannerisms, a part of a personality that shouldn't obscure his intellect and skill.

I have been house-sitting at my mom's house in Pennsauken, New Jersey. I take the bus into Philadelphia, and on these trips I find suburban sprawl hard to navigate. Most of South Jersey is undergoing this trend of development based around "upscale" shopping centers- The shopping center and its attendant large parking lots are a large part of my personal history and what I take as the quintessential New Jersey/suburban America experience, but these centers (elevated from the street, all major chains, with no room at all for small businesses) is something else. They seem to be multiplying exponentially.

But: Somehow, in riding the bus, I discovered a building labeled "JAIN TEMPLE" mere yards from my mom's house. In walking distance. (In suburbia, almost nothing is within walking distance.) I'm going to investigate tomorrow- Sunday, which doesn't necessarily mean "church services," especially for Jains (a faith where some believers do not even enter temples) but it seems like my best bet after I squandered today. This chunk of the post is for my friends, in case the sign that says "Jain Temple" is but a ploy to lure spiritual seekers to their doom. (A possibility that strikes me as more likely than their actually being a Jainist temple in Pennsauken, NJ.)

The rest of the post is pretty much just for Frank Santoro: I am around a bunch of 90s superhero comics and want to highlight Noelle C. Giddings as a colorist of note. She colored for Milestone, which for a while publicized in advertising that all their books had painted color, but her stuff looks the best, to me. Maybe it's the msot restrained. She colored Static and Xombi. Xombi's drawings are pretty stiff, but her work- which resembles watercolor, but might just be airbrush- lets some life in. Xombi was the Milestone comic that was "arty" in a Vertigo-ish way, and even though most Vertigo comics have crappy art, I still think part of Xombi's success is due to the way the colors are so loose. I don't have a lot of issues of these comics, and what I do have is frequently nonconsecutive. The later issues of Static look okay, they have a certain grace to them, but the first issue (the only one of the early issues, drawn by John Paul Leon I have) looks rad. The art is more cartoony than anything Leon would draw in the future: It's real loose, in a lot of small panels, and gives the color a lot of room to carry weight, and delineate form. But because the line-art is so loose and cartoony, the coloring is too. Even though it's painted, it's printed on newsprint, so it's not slick at all. It's sort of smeared: if a nose is drawn by just two marks for nostrils, then the coloring is then just a mark of the rest of the nose. Hair is drawn with chunky lines of black alternating with chunky lines of wavering color. It looks unruly. Another Static art tip is that some middle-period issues were drawn by Wilfred Santiago, later to draw porn, and then a graphic novel, for Fantagraphics. I only have memories of those issues, which I remember looking weird and super-minimal. Further along on the abstraction tip, but by that point I think it was on slick paper and I don't remember how the colors compensated. There's no scans on the internet that do what I'm talking about any justice, as what I can find isn't big enough to convey how idiosyncratic it looks. But on my last few trips here I've just stared at it.

I was talking to my brother yesterday, and he mentioned an article he'd read. I haven't seen said article, and so can't link to it, but here's the heads-up: Corporations are changing their logos, due to the recession, to all-lowercase, in order to appear "friendlier" to customers. He mentioned Wal-Mart, right now the only thing that occurs to me is Pepsi, which I'd previously singled out for a new, stripped-down and bland design, which I was thinking of as a weird corrective to the perceived gaucheness of "cool" nineties branding: A willful lack of style to not chance anything. The mention of it brought to mind Daniel Clowes mocking non-capitalization in people's names in an old Eightball strip, but I guess Wal-Mart doesn't take it's marching orders from "I Hate You Deeply."

Meanwhile, in my mind I am trying to devise what I want the new canon to be for upcoming nineties nostalgia. The most recent discovery I've made from that time that I had not heard before was the Dog-Faced Hermans, who recently had their first record reissued by Mississippi Records. It would seem to make sense for Sun City Girls, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Helium, etc. albums to come back in print following being cited as influences, but the record industry is collapsing, so maybe that won't happen. (Although, it seems like in conservative times the back catalog gets milked hard and placed into deluxe packaging: Look at how many hardcovers the comics industry is pumping out in 2009.) Those bands have nothing in common with each other besides existing during the same time and being out of print. I'm really interested in seeing what are the things that come back into consciousness as nostalgia hits, since it seems like people never stopped talking about My Bloody Valentine.

WFMU's blog pointed out that today is the thirtieth anniversary of Jimmy Carter's "Crisis Of Confidence" speech. I link to it so people can read it, but I don't have much comment on it. I'm halfway through watching Robert Altman's Tanner '88, and thinking about the way politics have changed: Eight years of the worst president the country ever had makes a lot of things seem somewhere between being quaint and being foreign. Even now, immediately on the other side, talking about the Bush presidency seems like both of those things. (A friend also bought a copy of the issue of The Believer with John Kerry taking up the whole of the cover, as messiah: So strange!)

And I woke up this morning thinking about the economy, and the way that, in some way, the existence of the internet is to blame for its collapse: The free content has done damage to the print industry, and the music industry, places for artists, our best and brightest. But there's also the way e-mail has replaced the post office, and probably led to the cutback of a great many federal employees.

Moreover, the whole concept of the internet as a place for content, for free, is a parallel to the actual downfall of the economy: A world where credit is more plentiful than actual capital ends up devaluing money, with nothing to back that credit up. Meanwhile, internet businesses subsist on advertising, in an infinite loop that probably does not lead to actual purchasing: But that's fine, the people writing for the internet aren't really getting paid, except for the exposure, designed to get them paying jobs in print, which the bottom is falling out of. "Credit" in terms of money ends up equal to "credit" in terms of recognition, and both end up being hollow when there's no actual monetary compensation.

I apologize for the fact that I didn't do any research to write this post, and am going to speak in a language of simplified abstractions because of that.

The internet devalues other things besides money: Like ideas. And sex. Personal interaction. Spirituality, probably: It seems like that would follow a general coarseness brought about by the rest.

But of course, the genie can't be put back in the bottle, pandora's box can't be closed, and Obama can't say: "Here is my new economic stimulus plan: The internet will no longer work, forcing everyone back into situations where things have material form and value, and the exchange and trade of content will create an economy no longer built around abstractions." (If I were seriously advocating this, I would also have to acknowledge the problem in the plan of the cost of material and distribution taking a toll on the environment.) But in such a situation, it seems the main place jobs would be lost would be the place that jobs seem to be growing right now: Those technicians building the infrastructure of the internet, working out ways for more effective image searches and whatnot, which strikes me as a field with a narrower worker base than that of content producers. But more importantly is that there's been no large-scale WPA to work on the infrastructure of the material world, where there should be an even broader pool of people to select workers from.

In this abstract computer landscape, there's an ever-shrinking elite left with a desirable skill-set: Soon only mathematicians, dealing in abstraction, will be able to get at the real money.

I sort of freaked out over The Lexie Mountain Boys when I lived in Olympia: Playing songs over the radio, showing the MySpace page to travelling bands coming through town, recommending friends to listen to them.

This was all based on the band as pure sound, despite them being, on a pretty large level, a performance-art project. Costumes play a part of it, but the main thing is presence. Since moving to Baltimore, I've seen them multiple times, and they're sort of inconsistent, which makes sense, considering it's all improvised. But on record they're always compelling. As pure sound, the harmonies interlocking: it seems really feminine, in a great way. It's redolent of pagan ceremonies and campfire jamborees, but when it's pure sound it becomes this thing very infinite: Every singer is going for it, going the distance, out into space, and existing in harmony with the other members, while still being free, and not held back at all. They go into space, and then become it. Some kind of cosmic vagina at the center of all things, free from any bullshit of modern cultural expectations, totally fascinating to behold.

I also know these people, now that I live here, and I really feel like they have the right spirit. (This also holds true for the dudes in Lexie's other project, Crazy Dreams Band) There's a friendliness (as in the harmonies) as well as a lack of uptightness (spacefaring) that, while it makes the music compelling (or mysterious, and occasionally frightening to the uninitiated), makes them great people to have around at a barbecue or house party or whatnot. Someone, elsewhere on the internet, described them as the people skinny-dipping at 3 in the morning, and that was just based on the music they make, but those are the sort of people that I want to have around me, whose friendship I value deeply.

Whartscape has begun in Baltimore, and I am not attending, because most of the acts play out all the time, and not all of them are as standout phenomenons as these projects, either musically or as people.

Kazimir Strzepek's The Mourning Star 2 really works for me. It functions sort of like a 1980s black and white fantasy comic, but with the revelations of twenty years worth of craft development behind it. Rather than be published in serialized pamphlets, it comes out as a book, which gives the fight scenes room to breathe- a trick some people learned from manga, but here, the way that action plays out feels more influenced by Mat Brinkman comics. Partly I could be picking that up from the book's square size: post-nineties, comics don't need to be taller than they are wide, and I think the squat size keeps the action moving, while also feeling really intimate, and just fun to hold in the hand.

The book also starts off with the story's presumed villains, which makes them approach sympathetic-character status, in a way similar to how CF's Powr Mastrs comics move between characters working at cross purposes. Sure, at the opening they might not be seeming likable, but when a never-before-seen character shows up, doesn't speak, and brutally murders people seen sleeping next to their wives, the fact that they're parts of the ruling empire depicted as antagonists to the rest of the main characters doesn't seem to matter as much.

(Oh, speaking of CF- the Mark Lord tape on the Rare Youth label is pretty great. The Mark Lord stuff has this techno/industrial beat moving the noise into a more pop direction, where Kites - on Peace Trials and the occasional tape- had folk music and clear vocals as reference points grounding the chaos.)

In another strain of influence, there's something of Jeff Smith's Bone in the character's dominant cuteness, as something anthropomorphic but unrecognizable. But that comic didn't work for me the way this does, seeming to exist in a harsher world. Partly the post-apocalyptic setting, and the focus on survival, serve to move it away from the tropes of fantasy that I find tedious, but it also moves the book closer to its real formal strength: The contrast between the cute and the brutal powers the book. The way the cute, uniformly well-designed characters look when suddenly cut in half. The way the square shape sits nicely in the hand and keeps you moving through the action sequences quickly. The way Bone and Fort Thunder are reconciled.

The new issue of Jordan Crane's comic book, Uptight 3, is not very good. One story, the first part of a serial called "Vicissitude," works out a new art style that stands as a development from stories in the last Uptight. In it, Crane's printer's training gets worked into black and white, with greytones. It looks really well-designed, and there's a break from the standard grid pacing I've seen in all of his comics. But: It's called "Vicissitude." Story-wise, it's in really well-travelled territory, about people in their twenties, committing infidelities. It's the sort of thing that would be embraced by a "graphic novel" audience, theoretically, upon completion, if it went anywhere. There's no guarantees it's going to go anywhere. And I really don't understand why this is the sort of comic you would serialize. There's no real intrigue to get a reader to read a future installment. Really, none, besides seeing Crane work in this style more. Granted, the style looks great- I will single out the panels featuring sex scenes and raccoons, but this is pretty dull stuff. I guess it's sort of standard for alternative comics of this type to serialize stories like this one, but maybe that's why the format is dead.

The comic also reads really fast, partly because of the punctuation-less dialogue. It works in Ben Jones comics, (including Cold Heat) and Achewood, because it's kind of inherently funny, but I think it speeds up the pacing: Like the panel is only the length of someone saying something, caught between breaths, and doesn't include the pause that follows a period. The only thing to slow you down is looking at the design work, but that's going to get you looking at it in the store, or looking back to it after an initial read. Maybe it'll be good when completed, but holy shit do I ever not want a comic called Vicissitude on my shelf.

The second story is for kids! And it's pretty much unreadable. Drawn in this light and feathery style, displaying pretty active detailed backgrounds. It's a sequel to The Clouds Above, but that comic was done in color- And looked gorgeous, with color to determine composition and delineate space. It was also printed at a panel a page, which made the pages not be overworked, as well as slowing down the speed with which it was read. Why is this sequel in a black and white comic? I understand Jordan wanting to do this kind of comic book format, but Eightball had stuff printed in color when it needed to be.

There's no economy for that, so do a comic that works in black and white. Vicissitude, art-wise, works in black and white. Ideally, the whole comic would work like that. But then, if the comic was just Vicissitude, it would be an issue of Optic Nerve, and people hate that comic these days.

I haven't seen much talk about this news of Sammy Harkham editing a Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror special- if Ben Parrish hadn't e-mailed it to me I wouldn't have really known about it- but I am really excited about it. A collaboration between Kevin Huizenga and Matthew Thurber would never seem like a good idea except in this specific context, where it shines brilliantly. I really love the fact whenever mainstream companies give this venue to more idiosyncratic artists- in this case it'll end up being one of the cheapest places to find work by these people. This is the comic I am most looking forward to, until that Brendan McCarthy Dr. Strange thing gets solicited.

The news of Will Sweeney being in the comic is exciting, also, as he just made one of the best animated music videos I've seen in some time. And his actual comics won't be readily available cheaply until Picturebox does that Tales From Greenfuzz collection. Will Sweeney, I believe, is also a member of the band Zongamin.

Or wait, this new Jacob Ciocci video I just saw is pretty good. I really think that Jacob is underrated as a cartoonist, by the way- His videos are widely-acclaimed, but I think his approach to comics is pretty cool, and... his part of the Paper Rad Kramers Ergot 6 piece was edited out of the Ware anthology, despite being the climax. It seems like people maybe view it as hippie stuff, dismissively, in contrast to the gags of Ben Jones which are more relatable to humor comics traditions. But his style looks great, even in black and white, like in the last issue of Paper Rodeo: the way there's no borders, how it just streams and approaches collage seems pretty difficult, but it reads great. It looks related to the collages he does, but it's narrative enough that when you read it it feels really free, and melty, and sort of pushes forth this idea of "letting go" which the characters espouse. I like how there's sort of a narrative, or sense of forward motion, in this video too, and it's likewise abstracted.

While I'm linking to videos, here is a USAISAMONSTER video made by Imaginary Company, featuring some limited animation of Kevin Hooyman drawings. Jacob has also done Flash animation for Imaginary Company. And Matthew made a totem pole for the final USAISAMONSTER show in New York City a few months ago. That brings this post full circle.