I didn't attend the Small Press Expo this year, due in part to former travel companion Adam Boysen having left Baltimore for the west coast, but the very passing of the event means that comic book Oscar season is upon us, to use a phrase coined by Mothers News.

The book I am most excited to read is the collection of Matthew Thurber's 1-800-Mice, wrapping up using material previously unpublished. I haven't heard anything about the new material: For the past few years, Jog would write about the show, or someone at Comics Comics, but now that Dan Nadel is the new online editor of The Comics Journal, the fear of "conflict of interest" delays such coverage. The same effect from those former stalwarts applies further, nowadays, to books published by Fantagraphics. That consolidation of power effects a huge chunk of discussion about the comics I would want to read, so all I'm getting our Twitter chirps about how the new Love And Rockets is one of the best comics ever. (Adam Boysen was also the roommate who kept on top of purchasing everything the Hernandez brothers did, so I will have to wait some time to confirm this firsthand.)

I find myself still reading comics of note, one of which is an Eleanor Davis short story in the final issue of Mome. It is a bit of science fiction that feels very contemporary, in a way that seems difficult at this point in time, with communications technology so developed and advanced that telling stories taking place in the modern era functions as science fiction in a certain way. That would be the tactic explored in the last few William Gibson novels, for instance. Other authors attempting to talk about modern communications technology, Youtube videos and G-chat and such, tend to just tell stories dealing with their semi-autobiographical protagonists confrontation with depression and inertia. Miranda July's new film The Future works that territory before moving into magic realism. I was thinking that maybe this strategy emerges because we are living in a science-fictional world, but without any of the narrative thrust of adventure instilled by those pulp narratives. "In a society that has abolished all adventure, the only adventure left is to abolish that society," goes the May 1968 graffiti, but that is not the life being lived by those with iPhones. Davis tells a tale probably familiar to anyone who has traveled back and forth between one of America's metropolitan centers and its more rural areas, but extrapolates it into the future, largely through use of language and semi-psychedelic coloring that looks like it was done using colored pencil. I thought it was great, and am now interested in reading her comics for kids published by major publishing houses that will inevitably share none of this story's concerns but may still succeed on their own merits.

There's ideas in that last paragraph I meant to write in a letter to Matthew Thurber, actually, in response to these Smell Temple posts he's been putting up his blogs, photos of typewritten reviews of science-fiction films, but maybe this post will show up in his Google Alerts. (I would hope he wouldn't have Google alerts but they are a thing that people have.)

Not quite a comic book is Michael Kupperman's Mark Twain's Autobiography: 1910-2010, which develops a tendency towards prose that's been present in recent issues of Tales Designed To Thrizzle, but expanded to book length loses a lot of the dadaist chops that made them what they were. The premise takes it to a lot of territory previously covered by Kupperman, as well as noted admirers like John Hodgman. There's a certain degree of diminished returns for me but certainly I still got a few laughs out of it. He's using the same constellations of humor, but it's not like I do not appreciate a good gaze at the night sky. Have I mentioned before that I don't really like his use of color, and prefer him in black and white or monochome? The book is filled with illustrations and some chapters are comics, all done only with tones of blue, but it's also all drawn in one simplified style, rather than the crazy engraving style look or photorealism that Kupperman sometimes uses for particular effects. Without the appropriation of tropes of 1950s comic books or educational films that marks a good portion of his art, the book could be more accessible to a general audience, one that would be prepared for the humor from Conan O'Brien and Will Ferrell. More of a gag gift than something for a dedicated audience, but the Scott Dikkers gag book You Are Worthless is one of my favorite bits of humor writing, so that's not a completely ignoble goal.

Olivier Schrauwen's The Man Who Grew His Beard is a collection of gorgeously colored comics. Like Brecht Evens, Schrauwen is a Belgian whose sense of color is superior to anyone making comics in North America. It feels handmade, even when computers are utilized, and while Schrauwen is known for utilizing the style of Winsor McKay, all the comics here feel really contemporary. Reading it, I was reminded of the imagery one comes across on 50 Watts, while certain aspects of it reminded me of Steven Millhauser's short stories, to name another fantasist who McKay has influenced. Also like Millhauser, there is a certain familiarity to the structures being utilized- while Millhauser repeats himself, Schrauwen tells the tale of one using his imagination to escape a mundane reality that will be familiar to those who've seen Brazil, or the works of Dennis Potter. But the psychedelia of the drawing goes beyond, and sells the idea thoroughly. It looks phenomenal, and I imagine I will return to it frequently.

Anders Nilsen's Big Questions has been collected, and I bought the deluxe hardcover from Amazon, which I would advise against. The Amazon discount puts it at the cost of buying the paperback from a local store, and the added appendix I was so excited ends up being fairly slight. Support your local retailer! Especially if they are the sort of the place that carried Big Questions as it was being serialized. I followed the serialization until the point where it seemed like an ending was no longer in sight, and the cost of individual issues continued to rise. As someone who read the individual issues, I have a slight quibble with the reformatting: I wish the white-on-black spirograph image found on page 234 was not there, and that the scene that plays out over a page turn on 235-236 was maintained as a spread as it was in the serialization, where it worked beautifully as a continuation to the preceding scene. But the book is good, displaying a completely separate set of strengths on display in Nilsen's monologue comics, the ability to draw the shit out of a scene. Setting, layout, action sequences... The storytelling is top-shelf, totally on a par with any Providence dudes you would name if you agreed with me that those guys are great visual storytellers. I also am reminded of Geof Darrow, if Darrow was less into gore and more into open fields. Total visual poetry. Don't read it too fast. Also I am pretty certain that Nilsen draws these super-detailed backgrounds over and over again, even when he could easily do things animation cel style. People are saying nice things about this book all over the place, including the New York Times, which isn't going to talk about the stupid minutiae that I am half-ashamed of noticing. When this book was coming out I was convinced it would be the next Black Hole and everyone would read it when it was collected and that still seems pretty possible, but it might be too quiet and epic for that sort of ubiquitousness in folks' consciousness, which is to its credit.

Oh yes, there's also a new Optic Nerve out. The last issue came out when I was in college, and I read it although my consciousness was already moving in an "Adrian Tomine is kind of lame" direction. It is interesting how the shift in general comic folks' consciousness has moved in a way to effect him, as a cartoonist. The whole idea of black-and-white comics as indicator of "alternative," arising out of budgetary constraints has sort of changed- That was how Love And Rockets were printed, that was how Eightball was printed, and Tomine's general style of "realistic" drawing fell into the same type of idiom. Now, with so many older comics back in print, half of the comic is drawn in this Popeye-influenced style that is also reminiscent of Sammy Harkham, Jordan Crane, Chuck Forsman, etc. It's a lot looser. And then the other half is in full-color because its a reworking of a strip from Kramers Ergot 7. (The first half is in 1/4 full color, in emulation of Sunday strips in the cycle of newspaper comics.) It is cool, an interesting progression, even if these days I am sort of neutral on the content. I am fairly certain that "Hortisculpture" is a better comic that Shortcomings was, and not just because it is more self-consciously a comic than something that could just as easily be an indie movie. Shortcomings was serialized over the course of my going to college, and when I first read Sleepwalk and Other Stories I was in high school and had not yet read Raymond Carver. Sometimes I think people are not served by being prolific, by having their voice out there too often, a readership can become over-familiar; in other cases a lack of output just reminds the audience of how much time has passed. The comics I am the most excited about are those I have not yet read.

Halfway through another year where online music magazines are talking about the best of the year thus far and posting lists of neglected records which are not that neglected in that they received some coverage from online music magazines, my little corner of the world is as small as the corner record store where local yokels peddle their wares. The store I am talking about is The True Vine in Hampden, Baltimore, where the records coming out from Baltimore acts that receive coverage are unlikely to be ordered by proprietor Jason Willett, unless those bands place copies on consignment when they are not on tour. This laissez-faire attitude still wins the respect of local musicians, most of whom would probably still consider The True Vine their favorite local record store, despite/because of this indifference. Here are the records my smallish segment has produced thus far.

The Angels In America Narrow Road To The Interior LP alternates between being stripped down and hollowed out. There's plenty of space, which sometimes translates to too much reverb, but mostly just means a particular mood being conveyed: You have to give it more space and solitude than you do your more common in-the-red mastering jobs. Loose structures of song-husks, as lyrics discuss topics like burning your money, walking in the woods, and the appeal of being beaten up by women, and soundscapes try to convey the same elusive truth. If you have heard and liked the ballads on the proper, song-based Magik Markers LPs you will understand what's happening here, if you can intuit the correlative difference between live drums and drum machine and electric guitar vs pure electronics. Not everyone can but come on. Available on LP, CD, and as pay-what-thou-wilt mp3 download. Weyes Blood and Angels In America also have a limited-to-100 split cassette release on Northern Spy you can download the mp3s of for $4 but I haven't made the plunge yet because I keep thinking one of those 100 tapes will be made available to me at some point in the coming months.

The Weyes Blood LP on Not Not Fun, (probably still available but if you google it the first result is a mediafire link) The Outside Room, is pretty killer, which I was not expecting at all- In the time concurrent with the record being recorded, live performances were based around loops which did not always align and tended to abstract away from the idea of the song, with occasionally a tune or two coming in clear enough for me to stand behind it. Her live shows now are totally great, actually, but all of that is incidental to the fact that this record is a pretty perfect bit of atmosphere. Nico is probably the easiest point of comparison, and "sad" is the easiest emotional descriptor. But "sad" is obviously a lax term, especially when we are talking about music, so keep "Nico" in quotations as well. This is the kind of record that you put on at the record store on a Sunday afternoon and sell three copies. I like records more than live shows anyway, and records like these are a good communicator of that concept.

The Daniel Higgs cassette Ultraterrestrial Harvest Hymns contains lots of organ improvisations, run through with occasional tape distortion. Or at least it did when I heard it- My playing of it caused a tape player to break. I have others but have been wary. His collaboration with The Skull Defekts is great, both on the record Peer Amid and even moreso live, where they played material that I think will be on a followup LP. Live the feeling is that of watching The Fall as psych-rock band, with Mark E Smith's drunken nonsense being replaced with Higgs' clarity of sense in the presence of multiple realities overlapping. The record with the Skull Defekts is on Thrill Jockey, just like last year's Clairaudience Fellowship collaboration with Twig Harper.

Twig Harper's self-titled solo CD on Hanson Records is maybe my favorite recorded material I've heard of his. Starting off with the initial shock of the first sound you hear being that of an acoustic guitar, things start to make more sense as that instrument never gets around to playing a melody, but instead gets melted in with a melange of other electronics. A piano later makes a similar appearance, maybe out of tune, maybe all these instruments are out of tune, but they remain recognizable ingredients, keeping the whole thing processable as "horror movie soundtrack." The film in question would be that of aliens flying about in a space ship with human being on the operating table, but all of this is occurring within the bounds of the mind, and any violence that might be enacted is a liberating act being misunderstood by the body. Psychedelic agenda in effect: If you hear this music and your head thinks "haunted house," your mind is the haunted house, being exorcised of all sorts of ghosts of former tenants.

The new Sejayno record, Interstate 95, is currently only available for download, although the concept I heard awhile back was that the album was going to be turned into a playable Myst-style adventure game you click your way around, with the songs maybe being pressed to vinyl or not. Ideally that conceptual framework gives you hint of what's going on, in this concept album- which is about I-95, the highway that runs the length of America's east coast, being the "devil's corridor," told in terms of an art handler/drug courier making the voyage from Providence to Miami and back and having adventures along the way. This rules, obviously, these goofball parameters should give you an idea of what to expect, obviously this whole thing is an assault on expectations with a lot of laughs if you are tuned in enough to be accepting of a thing too stoned to be called surreal and too esoteric to be characterized using such common drug parlance as "stoned."

Records to come out this year that I had to pick up at Fells Point's The Sound Garden because the people that made them do not live in Baltimore include Micachu And The Shapes' Chopped And Screwed, Terror Bird's Human Culture, and Alvarius B's Baroque Primitiva. The record most widely enjoyed by people I talk to in conversation would probably be that Bill Callahan Apocalypse record. I'm leaving the house now, to go see Jason Willett perform with his fairly amazing improv band Leprechaun Catering.

I received a review copy of Jaakko Pallasvuo "PYYTÄJÄT," sent from Finland, and am please to announce that it is pretty damn good, worthy of your attentions if you are one who has thought about ordering comics from Finland. (I have!) The hand-lettering is in Finnish, but the dialogue is translated at the bottom of the page, in a closed-captioning effect which might not always be effective, but is in this case: The story beng told has an oblique tone of uncertainty to it, at first, and that removed distance contributes to the book's sense of mystery. Turning the page from the first to the second page, one wonders how the narrative connects, reading on, one questions the motives of characters as they being to say things that seem like lies. By the end, threads have converged, with things that initially might have seemed like jokes being developed into character depth by the end.

The comic I was most reminded of, (aside from general "this is like a European art film" sentiments) was the Ed Brubaker and Jason Lutes collaboration, The Fall, that ran in Dark Horse Presents and was later collected in a similar format by Drawn And Quarterly. Pallasvuo's drawing style, with its rough pencil line and figurework and absence of panel borders, pretty far from Lutes' polished inks- But each make their pages dense with panels, and The Fall initially withheld knowledge of the characters' pasts in favor of showing human behavior in a cryptic context. The Fall was a crime story, and had more noticeable plot forward movement, but the amount of density here stops the book from feeling slight, and makes the book read at a deliberately slow rate that allows me to be reminded of stories that were much longer. Meanwhile, the drawing is able to capture its setting, woods and a river, and natural phenomena, like light and the blur of speed ably, while still seeming of a piece with its depiction of humans and their structures as flat and childlike, reduced to iconography and texture.

The format is great: A one-shot comic, with dimensions comparable to a coloring book or a small newspaper, with endpapers depicting trees and the endpapers listing other works the publisher has handled, including translations of Americans such as Gary Panter and Jeffrey Brown, and Europeans like Ruppert and Mulot and Joann Sfar, as well as other Finnish cartoonists whose work has been translated by American publishers. The publishers' multi-cultural attitude is much appreciated, as in reading the comic in question I learned Finnish swears, which I'm pretty happy with.

A few weeks ago DC Comics sent out a press release announcing that all of their comics would be relaunched with new first issues and that this would allow for something fresh and accessible to the masses of contemporary culture. A week or two after that, the writers and artists that would be behind the coming avalanche of product were announced, along with images displaying what the art would look like, and those paying attention learned that the idea of "contemporary" that a 2011 comics company is willing to put out there looks exactly like things that were popular in the 1990s. Popular comics-wise, at least, at a moment when comics were at a low ebb in terms of their cultural currency: The drawing style I'm talking about would be made most manifest outside of comics in Todd McFarlane doing album art for the band KoRn and directing one of their music videos. If the visual gleam of this crosshatched surface had a sonic equivalent, it would be nu-metal, essentially, and that is the house style, mandated from the higher-ups, for DC comics come mid-2011: Drawings that look like they come from a Disturbed CD.

The original announcement of restarted numbering came part and parcel with the idea that these comics will be available digitally the same day that the physical copies are on sale, a concession to ideas of the digital world. What's strange, then, is the disinterest these comics have towards the way that the online world is oriented towards visual culture: Look at tumblr, flickr- all these tools that people use to keep track of what floats their boat, visually. A big part of this stream is photography, and that isn't necessarily germane to a comics discussion, but shit: There are plenty of people who draw, or design, and these people's sense of aesthetics is miles away from the product that DC hopes to charge money for an audience to look at.

The reason for this, probably, is because that anyone who learns how to draw comics via reading comics is also going to learn a lot of history, and for this generation of cartoonists, that means knowing that working in the labor mines of the mainstream is not a worthwhile way to spend away the vitality of your youth. Anyone looking at Jack Kirby drawings (as drawings, as comics, and not just a vehicle for certain characters beloved by fan culture) is going to learn that Jack Kirby's career arc is not one to emulate: It involves working pretty much until you die, with diminishing commercial success. Any prospective penciller that might not know these things, and be closer to the "fan" mentality that would be interested in drawing characters from their youth, probably grew up on manga, and would have a drawing style completely repugnant to the companies signing the checks. So the people the companies find to make things look "new" are those that have already been employed by the industry, for the past 15 years or more: The artist chosen to draw the flagship comic that kicks off the whole initiative, Jim Lee, is in his mid-forties.

So, that's the upside. The past is dying, and the mistakes prior generations made have been learned from by the children of the future. However, just because the best and brightest of those making art have learned where the action isn't, doesn't mean that the average consumer has, and mainstream superhero comics remain a major revenue stream for comic book stores, places I would assign cultural value to. I would like it if the people willing to pay for high-production-value color printing offered that service to people willing to use it in an interesting way, but that is not the case, and the fact that things look different printed on paper than they do on a computer screen will probably be lost to the generation after this one. Plenty of comics with meager virtues to their art, worth learning from, can currently be found at comic book shops across this great land, sold for dirt cheap because most people aren't interested. Connoisseurs of bottom-feeder culture have the quarter bins of comic book stores the same way they have the one-and-two-dollar bins of record stores, but that only lasts as long as either remain open, powered by a stream of things with actual profit margins.

The downside to a major publisher dying is the death of print, and comic book stores, and the continuance of landfills in the face of everything else.

The first time I saw the preview clip for Ben Jones' Cartoon Network show, The Problem Solverz, show up on Youtube, I felt crazy, like something in reality I had taken for granted had been undermined. The show felt "off," in a way which was sort of like an Invasion Of The Body Snatchers scenario: Uploaded to the Paperrad Youtube channel, looking really great, but moving according to this formula that seemed dumbed-down. Eventually the revelation came: Oh, it's for kids now. The Adult Swim pilot, produced by PFFR, distinctive as it might have been, had jokes in it that weren't prefigured on the assumption of an adult audience the way that Adult Swim shows increasingly have been, with offensiveness a part of its underlying premise and as such impossible to remove. That was fine by me, but I felt what I was seeing was something else: Someone looking at the surface of Ben's aesthetic and running with it, thinking that was all that was there. A sort of aggressive ecstatic randomness, based around videogames, food, neon, butts, etc. This felt especially jarring after years of seeing this aesthetic copied elsewhere and feeling like I had to explain the difference between the real thing and the copycats.

This interview then explained to me the thing I was really detecting, in a way that made sense to me: Ben isn't writing this show. He cares about it, is invested in it, but is directing his energies towards the visuals, delegating the writing to Hollywood-comedy-writers-looking-for-work. (I looked up the person writing the episodes up online and found a LinkedIn profile showing a resume that I wouldn't begrudge anyone, but definitely is that of a journeyman looking for work writing comedy after an Ivy League education.) It reminded me: Oh, yeah, right: "Artist" has a tendency to mean "visual artist," which was sort of the underlying principle behind all the drawing and gallery installation and whatnot. The comedic voice, while it might not have been secondary, existed to supplement visual ideas. Now, with a mainstream venue, the visual ideas are the driving idea, as that ended up being the thing that had gained the most traction in the larger culture anyway.

(This is sort of a bummer to me as someone who was basically into writing first, narrative, humor, and then got really inspired by some bits of visual language that felt more immediate than the sort of drawing I was seeing in comics I bought for the writing. But that little personal narrative is just an aside to the story that I am trying to tell currently.)

I disagree with Dan Nadel's assertion in his interview that Ben is the first underground cartoonist to make the leap to having a mainstream animation venue since Matt Groening. It forgets about Jhonen Vasquez making Invader Zim. Maybe Nadel wouldn't count him as an underground cartoonist, but I think it's pretty important to note, especially since the currently existing dominant internet 4chan culture evidenced in the bulk of webcomics and Cartoon Network obsessives talking shit on the look of Problem Solverz comes from that place in goth culture. It might seem too prevalent to consider underground, what with the presence of Hot Topic in every mall in America, but hippie was huge as well, and so was hardcore after that. I also think that being aware of and fascinated by trends/fashion/youth culture is a pretty big part of Paper Rad's work, especially the stuff the Cioccis did/continue to do in their solo work.

Anyway, with the lens of "visual art" on, the fact that Problem Solverz is sort of Ben Jones gone through the looking glass then allows for the fact that, thanks to Youtube, you can see Problem Solverz through the looking glass, reflected through the eyes of internet-savvy kids, who upload videos of them just videotaping the show, or doing dubs where they talk all over the dialogue. It is kind of annoying when I am just trying to watch the newest episodes, but I imagine that Ben must be psyched as hell to see these weird 21st century distortions popping up, marveling at how weird kids are, and what they are receptive to.

This all is sort of the follow-up to the Riff Raff "Ice Thunder" video I posted a while ago, where a white dude bedecked in cornrows and ostentatious jewelry rapped at the viewer in a boardroom using Garfield references while a Jerky Boys decal hung behind him and there'd be cuts to cartoon Ninja Turtles merchandise. Dude is currently cluttering up my twitter feed with use of the word "obtuse," used much the same way Lil B would use the word "based," but rather than Lil B's reclamation of negative drug-talk to constitute a sort of absolute freedom, including from that of language, Riff Raff's use of obtuse just makes me think of the bit in the BJ And The Dogs book where Alfe is sitting in a car and says "does this rod have to be at such an obtuse angle?" and then puts the car in neutral/reverse causing it to roll backwards. Look at this fucking goofball, and be amazed at how culture works in 2011 America. It is maybe important to also note that Odd Future, when they are not rapping about rape and not having dads, are being absurdist and shouting out Cartoon Network shows. Does any of this make any sense to any of you? Youth is a thing that doesn't have any memory, which is why the people at the last few Extreme Animals shows have been the same handful of people that have been going for years- It might even be a smaller crowd than it was in 2006, to hear the tale be told. Through the looking glass, caught up in reflected light's glare.

Maybe I bemoan the loss of the Paper Rad crew telling stories in their narrative voice because the emphasis on spirituality and humor really helped to ground it in a world I could understand, (that of human beings with individual consciousnesses) rather than just having it be this kind of abstracted dialogue told in fashion and juxtaposition of imagery. That thread is gone, and now there is just this cacophony which is fairly pleasant and interesting to contemplate, but lacking the immediacy of resonance to be found in classical forms like storytelling.

Anyway. I'm looking forward to Ben's Black Math/Men's Group book coming out this year, along with his contribution to the just-announced-today Kramers Ergot 8, (with a cover designed by Robert Beatty, who I mentioned in the last post) and I'm looking forward to the world getting weirder and harder for me to parse. Getting old, I believe is what people call it. The future belongs to folks that place audio of themselves talking over TV shows and upload it to Youtube. I saw a thing on Twitter yesterday about Al Roker watching season two of Archer on an iPad while riding on a plane. I'm not really into that show, but the lead animator is my buddy from college who hung a Paper Rad poster up in the school animation lab. I still work crappy jobs and have no influence on the larger culture at all, and somehow that is assuring and gives me peace.

I just read a thing that I am pretty much convinced I will be thinking about a lot in the days to come. It's a new story, posted on Pitchfork, about Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel writing a score for a thought-controlled synthesizer, that was performed by Robert Schneider (of the Apples In Stereo and the inventor of the instrument in question) and Robert Beatty (of Hair Police and Three Legged Race).

The "score" is a book of collages, basically, that the mind responds to as it reads in order. Which seems a lot like a comic. Images that you read. I'm sure text could be included, although there's nothing in the story that says such is the case for Mangum's piece.

I don't even know where to go with this. Abstract comics, collages, Neutral Milk Hotel, noise, harmonies. The main thing is the harmonies created just in this story alone, when filtered through my brain and its interests. Humming in consonance, richly.

This Micachu And The Shapes record with the London Sinfonietta, "Chopped and Screwed" might be the best record of 2011. A pop band, whose first record was produced by Matthew Herbert, doing a live one-off collaboration with a strings and woodwind ensemble to emulate the sound of DJ Screw, it ends up being really rich and beautiful, but maybe not satisfying to people expecting a pop record. I can imagine it seeming too gimmicky for classical music fans, as well, but anyone who's into sound and music should be able to get behind it.

Someone I know has been asking the question "Do you think The Strokes were influential?" It sounds sarcastic to hear it said aloud. Sonically, their music feels like a dead end, a rock band among many, at the start of a decade that was maybe most highlighted by the integration of computer technology and acoustic sound sources.

Over at The AV club, Steven Hyden just completed writing an overview of 1990s alternative rock culture. It avoids talking about a lot of bands to construct its narrative, which culminates in an essay about Woodstock 1999. The series might be frustrating to a reader looking to read about certain areas of interest, but giving the story being told, that particular ending makes it more clear what happened next.

I've talked about this before, because it's endlessly fascinating to me: That nu-metal essentially precipitated the end of rock radio, because in chasing the testosterone ideal, stations stopped playing female artists, or anything soft, and alienating 50% of the audience who had started listening to the station for 10,000 Maniacs. So, somewhere early in the decade, the rock radio format, as a thing that plays new music, dies an ignoble death. This is also parallel with the end of MTV as a channel that plays music. The main device of getting these "alternative" artists out to the public in a crossover form fades away, ostensibly to be replaced by the internet.

The arrival of The Strokes, and their heralding in the press, is the moment where a separate narrative is addressed and becomes dominant. The reference points- The Velvet Underground, Television, Pavement- were absorbed into the popular audience's collective consciousness, if only as names and vague concepts. New York City becomes posited as this bohemian ideal. Obviously, this was seeded by other things. The audience I'm imagining had probably watched Kids on VHS in middle school. But without The Strokes, you don't get Interpol, or, more importantly, "hipster" as a common slur. The whole idea of "indie rock," as a thing no longer having to do with independent labels, but designating a type of aesthetic, increasing in popularity, stems from this shift.

American Apparel plays a part in this too, and in some ways can be considered the same thing as The Strokes, in terms of its general appearance of lifestyle projected. The ubiquity of their advertising for a few years in the middle of the aughts serves as connective tissue for an underground turning itself into a thing of commerce. Due to the internet, nothing could succeed on the basis of selling itself as a product- records couldn't sell, and music magazines couldn't sell. But magazines could be given away, provided advertisers subsidized their printing, and websites could exist, if advertising could cover the cost of server-space. It covers compensation for contributors as well, although by all accounts this is largely minimal.

The internet's abundance of free content devalues culture, but the Bush administration does an even better job. I can't even begin to unpack all the ways that occurs, actually. Despite all this collapse, the idea of growth still persisted. Specific to my interests today is the fact that art schools and liberal art schools felt the need to increase their enrollment, bringing more people in: I tend to believe that most of these new students are aware of the fact that there is little chance for success after graduating, and are just saying "fuck it." I can't begin to unpack all the reasons they would say that, either, although the venn diagram overlap with the Bush administration's damaging effect is one of them, and so, in all likelihood, is the hipster archetype.

Essentially, with The Stroke you have a paraphrase of the old Velvet Underground quote: Not everyone bought their record, but everyone that heard about it got the idea that you could make records that no one would ever buy. Planting the seeds of mouths you can't feed. The fact that they came from privilege is what allowed them to receive attention enough for the idea to proliferate. Obviously, some people already had the idea; art schools have existed for ages, and some people will always consign themselves to a life of barely surviving.

So now we're at a moment where there's a million musicians out there, or artists, or whatever you want to call it, this white noise chamber, where CDs are basically valueless and vinyl records are frequently in limited edition to appeal to their small niches, all influenced by Sonic Youth inspired ideas of record collecting culture.

What's interesting is the fact that, originally, the internet produced new mediating structures, music criticism websites based on a personal canon gaining parlance in the culture at large. I am largely talking about Pitchfork, but the fact that most other websites were viewed in relation to that one, which in itself didn't really have that much different from what all the free weeklies and skate magazines were interested in throughout the 1990s. The most interesting thing to me about that website is how, in its ascent to the top of the mass mind, it sort of consolidated its power structure in a way where it was essentially promoted to the place where it could do the least damage, while doing the same thing to its writers: Note the way Mark Richardson, once a champion of Keith Fullerton Whitman records, was given a head writer position where he is largely brought out to extol the virtues of reissues. The shit-talking dismissals of certain scenes which they gained notoriety for has evaporated, aware of the power they now hold and seeking to not do harm.

I sort of suspect that the whole idea of this independent sphere having a mediating agency has collapsed. The world's exploded into too many tiny spheres for the attempt to be possible in any efficient way, and most anyone producing work has said "fuck it" to the point where trying to find things of value beyond "this sounds pleasant enough" shouldn't even be attempted. Which, I guess, is where the narrative for the next decade, this decade, begins: With the triumph of Kanye West and celebrity, because that's the only thing large enough to be seen, and the only world with enough awareness of having an audience to try to make an impact. How funny is it that Altered Zones doesn't even credit its writers? (Altered Zones is a website I heard about in the context of it being the absolute worst, total style-over-substance in its choice of coverage, only to learn that it is a sort of "little sister" site of Pitchfork that I think largely finds out about things from blogs, home-recording projects e-mailing them) How funny is it that the world I am aware of, an "underground" where people are constantly touring and playing shows with their friends, somehow continues to elude coverage in a world where people are trying to stay on top of things?

Meanwhile, the last post I made featured a video by Riff Raff, a dude whose aesthetic is both understandable in its precedents and totally baffling in how that particular manifestation came into being. That stuff is a counter-narrative to all that I have discussed, some of it with more roots in Woodstock 1999 than others.

The other story I could tell involves Ladyfest, an outgrowth of the 1990s riot grrl movement that specifically reacts to the fact that multiple rapes occurred during Woodstock 1999. That's an important part of the "indie" framework as well: As apolitical as things might be, a place where you don't get raped is going to appeal to people. Although American Apparel remains more popular. But then, there's also the internet as a place where people don't get raped, and that increasingly becomes the world in which we all are living.

Full screen this.

Meditate.

Recently I returned to the United States from a ten-day stint in Israel. It was called a Birthright trip, which I find a little obnoxious, but it was a free trip paid for by, I believe, the Israeli government and some wealthy American Jews, so I will accept their nomenclature. Since being back in the USA, most conversations I've had about the trip have involved responding to knee-jerk cynicism, informed by political readings. For my part I attempted to enter the whole thing without any kind of political agenda, my lens focused on consciousness, an awareness of the narratives people construct for themselves.

On a bus with 49 strangers, it is odd how quickly you begin to feel as if you've known them all your life. Staring at people's faces, trying to place them to college classes or summer camps, thinking they might be recognizable as someone you've completely forgotten and never really known. Until it dawns on you that you have, in face, known these people all your life, that there are archetypes that reoccur over and over again, filling up the background. These roles do not have names, I don't think, but if they did, I'm sure that, within this particular group, I could be labeled with the "weirdo" tag easily. A clear outlier. Partly this followed my decision to think the way I did, but that comes easily enough: Really, the idea behind my behavior was a conscious naming of the way I already act.

This is not to say I did not make friends. It probably would have become intolerable had I not done so. On my first evening, as the rules were being discussed, I thought about breaking them simply to be released from duty. We were told that anyone hungover in the morning would be placed on a plane, and even though being hungover is deeply unpleasant, and easily avoided, I considered it as an option. But I stuck it out, found some nice people to converse with, and had a pretty nice time, a welcome change of pace from the rhythms of everyday behavior. Time was structured fairly rigidly, which is annoying in a lot of ways, but this reduced me to my essence.

The goal of the project is to make young people love Israel. I am too double-minded to be an ideal target subject, but most of the conflict I felt was due to the corrupting influence of commerce, of tourism. Too much of what I saw for sale was tacky souvenirs, sold to tourists. This was most pronounced in the town of Tsfat/Svat, the supposed center of Jewish mysticism, a mountain town with a beautiful layout, narrow streets, and an artists' colony. It is only when you walk through the artist's colony and realize that you are looking at a "fine art gallery," of the kind that sells prints of paintings in suburbia, that takes up blocks and blocks, for an audience of sixty-year-olds. We were spoken to by a guy who'd really found an angle to work- existing in the artist's colony as "the mystic artist," drawing geometric patterns outlining the Qabalic tree of life. Speaking in vagueness but seeming really cool to those who had not had much experience with the genuinely strange, and successfully selling large quantities of work. It makes sense that there is a constant economic pressure leading to conservatism, in a country so old and beautiful, but that is exactly the same problem that makes me avoid large chunks of America. There are parts of Jerusalem where people are still plainly living, but I can only assume those areas have been family-owned for generations. Other parts of Jerusalem are incredibly expensive due to wealthy Americans having purchased properties that they then do not live in.

Cooler was a Drues (sic? sorry, only heard the word spoken aloud) village where, for tax purposes, everyone lives in unfinished homes, continually with chunks under construction. Or the Bedouins, a semi-nomadic group of desert dwellers. Much as it is in discussion of war: My sympathy is with those that are just trying to live their life. I understand that it is difficult.

As for other conflicts: It seems pretty likely to me that any American liberal that is more pissed off about Israel than they are about America is basically retarded. Partly, this is because America is much more distanced from what it's doing. This makes it easier to forget about, but is absolutely an actual fault, moreso than a strength. To me it seems likely that there will be peace in the middle east long before the United States ceases to exist in a state of perpetual conflict. Despite the fact that everywhere you go in Israel, you see people carrying machine guns, and it does not take much for casual racism to manifest itself. The mandatory military service makes everyone much more invested in peace, and there is not a massive military-industrial complex perpetuating itself.

The weird presence of religion, dictating the lives of even those who do not observe it, is more pronounced there, but in a way that makes it that much more open for discussion. The presence of religious sites, monotheisms overlapping with one another, only serves to remind that, in spite of it all, everything is holy. Cats overrun everything; like the guns, a common presence one becomes accustomed to despite the deep strangeness once you think about it.

Strip away the levels. In the hotel in Jerusalem, I saw Fox News coverage of a shooting of Congresswoman and felt like weeping. I can talk about my trip more, to those who want to know what I saw, what I witnessed. I have a journal detailing events and memories. This is an attempt at processing the whole thing, simply, as a response to the cynical that I do not want to talk to.

The response is that what I saw was contrived, a view of a country placed into an easy frame. There is an artifice to it, the same way there is around anything else.

What is artifice? What Israelity? Swimming nude in the Sea of Galilee in the middle of January, floating in the dead sea, peeing in the Mediterranean. A soldier next to me saying that, as a drill, first thing in the morning, everyone strips down to a bathing suit and swims in the ocean. Another soldier made the punchline that I was going to make, in other situation, during a moment where I hesitated. We should all be aware that every soldier is some mother's son, that every loss is a human tragedy. Too often I think that the greater tragedy is that war exists at all, as a result of economic factors: Even this abstraction is a result of my distance. I made some friends who I do not wish to die. They want peace for themselves and the people around them. Can my own feelings of living in a city where there are people just a few blocks away from me who might not want me to live here be projected onto them? I think they can. Everyone needs a space. Most spaces would be nice were it not for money corrupting everything. It is notable that America is the only country besides Israel where circumcision is the default practice for newborns. We are closer than we think, but maybe I know that closeness a little more intimately than the abstraction of it that we often think of.

I doubt I will ever return to Israel: There is much more to see in the world. I am grateful to have seen it, even if it was easily recognizable, if I anthropomorphicize it in the projection of my features. I am grateful for the bit of self-knowledge reflected back to me. I hope I keep in touch with the people who I met, even though I might not have much to say to them without a constant barrage of shared experiences to reflect on.

These are my favorite comics of 2010. It's guided by what came out this year, but alludes to work from years prior, as a rough guide to what feels contemporary. To make this a top ten, please reserve places for Chris Ware's latest Acme Novelty Library and Edie Fake's Gaylord Phoenix, as yet unread. To better imagine a guide to comics I read this year that feel contemporary, please be aware of CF's fondness for Matt Wagner's Grendel comics and Michael Deforge citing his two biggest influences as being Richard Corben and Saul Steinberg.

1. If N Oof/Puke Force by Brian Chippendale. These comics are exhilarating. Reading Ninja in 2005, where each page would be dated with the day of its composition, I would think "He's getting better, steadily. HIs focus is increasing, he's becoming clearer." And now the new stuff arrives, and it's great. The new layout in If N Oof frees up his ability to go back and forth and not just hold its focus on characters animating themselves. The shorter strips in Puke Force move at such a pace that you get a sense of a plot developing itself over the scope of a full city. I also read Mat Brinkman's Multi-Force collection this year, and that's what Puke Force reads like, in its sense of scope and pacing, while If N Oof reads like Taiyo Matsumoto's Black And White in its sense of adventure and emotional resonance. These are some of the best comics ever, filled with some of my favorite drawings. There is a whole world of drawing stories here, a type of energy that signifies "fun" for me but there's a horror underneath it that defines its world and its stakes, to not just signify but to actually be fun, triumphing in the face of death-anxiety.

2. Michael Deforge comics. His most recent publication, Spotting Deer, is this science fiction triumph: I read it thinking "Where is this coming from? Who thinks like this?" What makes this more powerful is not only is that not his debut, but it's the follow-up to a couple of comics that seem to precisely map his psychic territory. Issue 1 of Lose, published last year, gave the reader this sense that they do know where Michael Deforge is coming from, and its a place with a lot of comics. That comic, with its vision of Hell populated by cartoon characters, was really powerful, and the fever dreams that followed possessed an intuitive sense of a polluted inner landscape. Twelve months later it seems like that sense of home has already been moved on from, into streams polluted not by cultural detritus, but by dead bodies.

3. King City by Brandon Graham. I read a lot of Seth Fisher comics this year. Those feel like the closest thing to predecessors to King City, with their manic delineations of architecture, easy flow, and sense of humor. But Brandon Graham isn't drawing other people's scripts, and he's not drawing Batman comics. This distinction is what makes his work feel like the future, which seems important when you're drawing science fiction. It's not hard sf, it's pretty clearly a fantasy, in that there are cats with magic powers, but when I read it I feel the potential for a better tomorrow, not just an escape from the drudgery of today. That potential better tomorrow is all for the world of comics, but comics are a way of processing one's world, and it's the global nature of Brandon Graham's influences that you can see an exciting and open-minded tomorrow.

4. Wally Gropius by Tim Hensley. When I travel, I look for things that appear "foreign," indigenous to the area they originate from and organic to it, but percolating with strangeness. Wally Gropius is that comic, for America. Speaking in a dialect learned from 1960s teen comics, run through the filter of anti-ego to be almost anonymous, talking about this thing of American commerce. Funny and strange and precisely itself, it's hard to imagine how Tim Hensley will follow up a work that feels so channeled from such a coalescing of disparate elements.

5. Love And Rockets Volume 3 by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. The Hernandez brothers do not always work for me, based as it is in serialization and the rhythms of understated daily life. Sometimes they can rip it, though, and a panel or two will make me sit up and take notice, and things can get pretty jarring. Jaime's story here is one of the ones that feels a bit more focused on editing between moments than simply letting the camera run. The other great Jaime comic I read for the first time this year, "Everybody Loves Me Baby," that ran in issue 7 of Penny Century, is up there as well. These are comics of his that feel like endings, climaxes, to whole stories, that bring in fresh elements late in the game to make it feel all the more focused and complete. This comic deals in more uncomfortable subject matter than usual, but it's the ending, after that stuff, that really got to me.

6. 1-800-Mice by Matthew Thurber: Like Michael Deforge, Matthew Thurber seems deeply influenced by Marc Bell. But rather than the polymorphous cartoon composites that people Bell's pages, Matthew sculpts narratives out of this bizarre language-imagery, that move forward and onward. His approach is perfect for discussing this modern world: The weird grammar scans like nonsense, but is easily parsed as you focus in, only for it to remind you of the nonsense that we are drowning in, and taking for granted as understandable. Watching him crack wise about lingo like "apps," an abbreviation for "applications" used in reference to technologically advanced cellular phones, that might not have even been a part of common parlance at the time he began drawing the series, might be one of the great pleasures of our age. Another one would be watching him integrate pages of incredibly well-done action sequences that are still funny even as they are effectively thrilling. If this comic had a taste, it would be honey and moss.

7. Spider-Man: Fever by Brendan McCarthy. The psych-noise cover version of Steve Ditko, who's already pretty psychedelic to begin with. Think of Daily Life's interpretation of Faust's It's A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl. The collection places them back to back and reduces the passage of time to a feeding into a digital storage unit, like consciousness after the singularity.

8. Mr. Cellar's Attic/Black Color by Noel Freibert. Lighting a room with an oddly-placed lamp suffuses the space with a sinister luminousness, creeping across your face as you go about your business. I was up too early this morning, the lamp on the bathroom radiator lit me before the dawn gazed in. How old is Mr Freibert, exactly? Have we considered the possibility that he might be the reincarnation of Rory Hayes, his soul now scared away from drugs?

I read other good comics this year, but these are the works that hit me the hardest, as I was reading them. The next five would be: Carlos Gonzalez' Steam Walkway, Daniel Clowes' Wilson, Brecht Evens' The Wrong Place, David Hine and Shaky Kane's Bulletproof Coffin, and CF's output.

Music, like any art, consists of component parts. At a base level is sound, traditionally made on instruments, turning into melodies, contrasting with others, turning into songs, given meaning by lyrics, collected into albums, existing in a cultural context, made by human beings. Over time, the idea of what constitutes "good music" has become increasingly complicated- the set of values of rock and roll put forth, the idea of the album as an ideal form, punk notions of integrity- have created a world in which one would pretty much need to be a genius polymath in order to excel. At the same time, the very proliferation of music in our culture has made the idea of music-making have a wide appeal. There is an idea that anyone can make music, which is true- but when the year-end lists get tabulated, people begin to talk about albums as timeless pieces of art.

In 2010, there are simply too many bands. Many people just want to make sounds, or play an instrument, or travel. Beyond any contemporary trends, I see things returning to a level akin to folk music, emphasizing home recording and peer-to-peer interactions. Partly I think this because it seems like the music-marketing apparatus has failed. Pop music creates monoliths in the shape of celebrities, and the thing calling itself "independent music" now standing in the center of a corporate circle-jerk hasn't really made anything that struck me as "good," according to the old criteria; existing, as it seems to, with the goal of only being "interesting," new enough to be used to sell the idea of cool.

In 2010, the music that struck me came from what could be called the underground, or simply the work of friends of friends. There are hundreds of undergrounds, and what was valued by people I knew when I lived in Olympia is irrelevant and dismissed by those I know in Baltimore. I pretty much ignored local music in Olympia, as it wasn't of interest to me, than the main producers of it seemed to possess a different sense of values and interests than myself. In Baltimore, home of "the best scene in America" according to a Rolling Stone article a few years back, the realm where it seems like the action is could be called noise music. It's not that I'm particularly fond of noise as an end to itself, but just that the realm of dissonance allows for freedom. None of my top albums are pure "noise records," but all come from that cultural sphere.

Which is funny: To me all of culture is one big "noise sphere," in terms of how much information there is to parse, with so little of it having any value. But these are the records I found to have value, that come the closest to succeeding in terms of the classic idea of an album, consisting of songs. Admittedly, past a certain point traditional notions of songcraft become negated, and I just mean that they have vocals and lyrics grounding them in something human, away from the pure abstraction of bent machinery. With the diminished expectations of little hype, things can simply succeed on their own merits, achieving one idea in a live performance and another on record.

1. Sun City Girls - Funeral Mariachi. (Abduction Records) Dante's Disneyland Inferno was reissued this year, and that record, with its epic scope, feels like a bid for immortality on Charles Gocher Jr.'s part, a concentration of what it was he brought to the band. Now he's dead, and with his contribution diminished, what exists is a tribute to a human being who earned said tribute by being a chaotic force. This is a major work in a year that lacked for them, but might not be recognizable as such without a deep knowledge of the band and their history of dicking around. "Dedicated to you know who and the souls who know." A great many couldn't deal with Dante's Disneyland Inferno, either, so I will stop acting like the lack of discussion of this album demonstrates the criticism industry's grand failure. Although: by coming at the end of their career, it cannot be trumpeted as "the next big thing," the way so many are interested in. I saw Sir Richard Bishop perform as part of Rangda this year, and while their record False Flag is not going to make this list, live they were a reminder of all the force he can conjure. On this record, force is subsumed into beauty.

2. Big Blood - Dead Songs. (Time-Lag) Big Blood were the best band of 2007, though I didn't know it at the time. They pressed a series of CD-Rs, all great, all offered online for free. This year, there are two more CD-Rs available for download, which could actually be better than this official release. This is the sort of behavior I so value in bands. This is their first official CD/vinyl release, but unlike Rain In England, the only purchasable Lil B album amongst a sea of free mixtapes, it's a pretty effective concentration of what makes them a good band. (I listened to a ton of Lil B as well, but none of his mixtapes are super-consistent, or of a manageable length.) These two used to be in Cerberus Shoal, whose final album, An Ongoing Ding, also dripped out this year, on a Japanese label, though I have only heard bits of it. A married couple making folk music and recording it immaculately, this album might not be better than their previous work, but it's available commercially, on Amazon even, and so this makes it "real" in a notable way. Although much of what I will go on to praise is not as tangible. Double standard.

3. Daily Life - Necessary And Pathetic. (Load) Christopher Forgues and Sakiko Mori's pop band, whose previous release, There Is No Solution Because There Is No Problem, I was asked to turn off at work, here make something more recognizable as a pop record. Specifically, it is a synth-pop record. Lots of drum machine. Crooning. I process this as being akin to CF's City Hunter zine in its vision of modernity, but this is a lot less abstracted. I listened to this record quite a few times, as November turns to December. I was talking this record up elsewhere on the internet and a dude responded by saying that anyone who cares about synthesizers has to hear this record. That struck me as crazy nonsense, but maybe this has got something to teach the people. Double standards, man: I like this sort of music when it comes from an unexpected place. There's a heft to knowing where this record is coming from that makes it hit so much harder than a band that is just making new wave in 2010 for some unfathomable reason.

4. Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot, The Son Of Chico Dusty. (Def Jam) There are good songs that were made for this album that didn't make it, and bad songs that are still on it. A lot of the subject matter is that of an old man complaining about the youth. But it's still pretty great. I liked that Kanye West album too, but when I listen to that, I think "oh, this is interesting. This is ambitious." When I put this on, I am constantly reminded "oh, this is a really good song. This beat is really heavy." This record makes me think of the southern hip-hop ideal of driving around in a car with bass turned up, windows down. That Kanye record makes me think about celebrities. Even if I think about the phrase "30 K for a verse no album out!" like a mantra, Big Boi makes me envision a better world.

5. Humanbeast- Queer Marriage. (Gross Domestic Product) This record is available online for free, also. This band/couple/performance art project has an interest in bondage that I find fairly uninteresting. I don't understand why it's considered transgressive, or shocking, when it seems to me that's been in the public sphere since early '90s Madonna videos. But Humanbeast kind of remind me of Madonna also, with this record's addition of vocals. But really smart, both in their knowledge of building electronics and in their conceptual foundations. I saw them play two great shows, and this is their better release. They are a cool band. I remember, years ago, talking about the lushness of noise pop, how much sex there is, and also this soft womb: Humanbeast has a lot of the same ingredients reconfigured into terror. Putting on their clothes as the cops arrive. They make the argument.

6. Angels In America- Allergic To Latex. (Digitalis) This band makes me think of the glamour of junkies. They are not junkies, and they're not glamourous either. A pile of trash. An oil spill. Watching TV on a dirty couch. Heavy drum machine, murky vocals. Tank Girl comics. Inarticulate. Uncommunicative. Secrets. Saying a lot just by existing. Most of this tape is on the Free Music Archive. They've got a bit of a love for sleazy modern America and its gloss, but their aesthetic is that of caked on dirt. There are miles of empty space between these zones, and empty space is where I want to be. If industrial music evokes the dehumanization of factory labor pumping out plumes of black smoke, this is an a town with a Wal-Mart in it, these are the kids in the parking lot: An evolution of industrial music that is completely the opposite of Nine Inch Nails romanticism.

7. Salamander Wool - Lunarsophic Somnambulist. (Ehse) A folk record. No evil. Real pure: Which is not to say its for purists. Naive, almost? Free. Weird. Carson builds his own instruments, but there's a lot of guitar on this record. You can get this one for free as well, but I am proud to own it. The first time I saw this dude play a set, I hated it. He was just jamming. He continues to do sets like that, and sets that are completely thought out and planned to be mind-blowing. That's what I mean by purity, that's what I mean by freedom. These are good songs, though, once it gets moving.

I paid for all of these. Other records of note that folks I know made and the larger world ignored: Jenny Graf, Os, and her Marcia Bassett collaboration, Peradam. Lazer Zeppelin's cassette on Night People and LP on People In A Position To Know. Alex Body's "Chief Of Time And Frequency" on Night People. Russian Tsarlag "Unleash The Chain" tape that Discogs says came out last year. Lil B mp3s. Matmos, Wobbly, and Lesser's Simultaneous Quodlibet LP is better than Matmos' collaboration with So Percussion and Wobbly's collaboration with People Like Us, at least to my mind. Daniel Higgs' Say God and his collaboration with Twig Harper, Clairaudience Fellowship were talked about, but it is a wonder just that they exist and were put out by Thrill Jockey.

Best song I heard for the first time this year:



Runner-up:

Netflix has abandoned its "Community" features, which means that all of my compulsory ratings of movies I watch is now just myself, muttering into a void, helping only to aid a mathematical algorithm which seems to function pretty well already. Surely I have rated enough things at this point for my opinions to become predictable. Here's the latest things you could've already imagined I would have liked.

The two new Picturebox books, Powr Mastrs 3 and If-N-Oof, showed up earlier this week. Powr Mastrs is wildly self-indulgent, which I find funny. An 8-page full color bondage sequence, several short stories completely apart from the narrative, sequences that don't need to be as long as they are. It's well-drawn, well-colored stuff, and possessed of a willful defiance which I recognize the need for. Approximately a third of the book actually pushes the plot forward. If-N-Oof is super-straightforward and confined with accessibility, and ends up occupying a similar space in my mind to Taiyo Matsumoto's Tekkon Kinkreet. I laughed along with the audacity of Powr Mastrs but was exhilarated by If-N-Oof. The sequence where If goes out in the sun, moves to cover his eyes, and then the reader gets a first-person perspective spread of a hand shading the eyes from the sun? Shit man. It doesn't reward flipping through the way CF's comics do, as it's so much about pacing and sequence. There's a sequence which reads like a Mat Brinkman comic. The opening and closing sequences riff on a thing from Ninja, where clean lines and open spaces feels menacing and inhuman. Meanwhile, the rest of the book is varying degrees of expanded drawing, and the bits that seem closer to the size they were drawn are packed with detail.

It blew me away enough that, when I did a Google search for Coober Skeber 2, from Highwater Books in 1997, and found it for sale when I was only looking for scans, I ordered it. Chippendale's 3-page Daredevil comic ends up not being that good, but a lot of the other stuff is great, even though it comes from cartoonists I either don't really like (Ron Rege, P'Shaw) or have never seen anything else by. There's an uncredited Dr Strange comic, and a Spider-Woman comic by Magnus Johnstone, which I assumed was a pseudonym until I found the dude's website. He draws in a style similar to that found in coloring books, but in that comic, there's large globs of black for depicting things like water and hair, and breaking the page into panels plays off the linework really well. On his website, all of his black and white drawings are labeled as manga. I should try to interview this dude. He might be the same person as Mango Johnstone, whose website he links to, and which features pet portraits and mandalas.

That comic plays off the recent issue 1 of Strange Tales II that Marvel put out in a pretty interesting way, depicting how the past 13 years have changed things. Coober Skeber was unlicensed, a publicity grab by the underdogs, most of which had never been published before. Strange Tales II is Marvel enlisting alternative cartoonists to do short stories. But that is just a surface thing. In 1997, all of these cartoonists are dealing with the source material- comics from the 1960s through the 1980s- nostalgically. In 2010, the best comics deal with this iconography as a thing that's shown up in film, but that's based in comics. Dash Shaw's and Kevin Huizenga's comics do this the most explicitly, but it's arguably present in Rafael Grampa's piece as well. Shannon Wheeler's comic deals with Captain America as a symbol of American capitalist imperialism, which is pretty much the same thing. Frank Santoro's comic is maybe the closest to a Coober Skeber strip, except for the fact that the formal things it wishes to investigate are based in color, which means that, economically, it could only be printed by someone with money. (It's nostalgic for the blueline process of a pre-photoshop era.)

Somewhere between these two comics is this Punisher comic Richard Corben drew. In that it's from 2004, and it's fully a mainstream comic in a lot of ways, in that it's written by Garth Ennis, writer of plenty of Punisher comics, but it's presented as a one-off anomaly, labeled "The End," and that exactly is what it is, dealing with this character as iconography and brought to its logical nihilistic conclusion. It's pretty great.

I went to a Six Flags amusement park and realized that just naming roller coasters after comic book characters is the perfect thing to keep in mind. Thrill rides! You have to be a certain height to ride, but I think most people reach said heights at the age of eleven.

I've been watching a lot of horror movies this October. Ingmar Bergman's Hour Of The Wolf does not actually constitute a horror film, but that was the appeal for me when I watched it. I love Ingmar Bergman, but this felt pretty much exactly like all of his other movies that aren't the best. I am distracted by his use of Liv Ullman and Max Von Sydow all the time. And Sven Nykvist.
Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant are actual horror movies. Isabelle Adjani stars in The Tenant, and I saw her in Nosferatu and Possession fairly recently as well, but none of these movies are similar to each other in any way, besides all basically being horror movies- but horror used as a thing to destabilize, and create unease. All of the horror movies I've been watching feel different from each other- Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is obviously unlike these movies as well, but it's completely brutal. All use scores that feature dissonance and atonality. That's the common link. I also saw Cronenberg's The Fly, and rewatched John Carpenter's The Thing. None of these movies are similar to each other. There's so many things to be horrified by! I have no idea what people mean when they talk about a movie being scary, but everything is rooted in anxiety.

I also saw Lars Von Trier's Antichrist. Garbage! I'm exaggerating: But man, that movie did nothing for me. I was talking about Possession to someone who hadn't seen it, and they brought up Antichrist, and I felt pretty certain that they were nothing alike, and I was just focusing on the wrong aspects of Possession. (Oh, the Possession I'm talking about is the 1981 Andrzej Zulawski movie) When I watched Antichrist I realized that they are similar, but Possession is a lot better, for no other reason than there's actual characters. In the credits of Antichrist there are 4 researchers listed! One for horror movies. One for psychology. Holy shit. Get it together, asshole. I am sure the fact that I seem like I am angry at Von Trier will be proof for some of how powerful the movie is. I am actually pretty ambivalent to it, but am holding up the fact that it seems coldly intellectualized for simplistic mockery.

It hasn't all been horror movies. I also watched the Martin Short/Charles Grodin comedy Clifford. It's great. I didn't really rate Martin Short as a comedian before, but his performance is incredible. Tom Scharpling talks about Clifford all the time. Or used to, I haven't really listened to The Best Show On WFMU in quite some time. Charles Grodin shows up in Rosemary's Baby. Martin Short plays Clifford as the spawn of the devil, but it's for laughs.

Records: I downloaded Mayo Thompson's 1970 solo album, Corky's Debt To His Father, today, after learning of its existence. I'd heard a well-regarded Red Krayola record before, but didn't really get into it. My friend Owen Gardner pointed out that record as obviously being bullshit: "It's supposed to be a free jazz record made by people who can't play, which is the whole point of free jazz. Why would you want to listen to that?" I think we were discussing The Parable Of Arable Land. Owen likes other records of theirs, which I have not heard in their entirety. Anyway, Corky's Debt To His Father exists, and is pretty listenable. Mayo Thompson also produced Raincoats albums, which makes it clear he is on the side of the angels.

(Let me take this moment to point out that Fairytale In The Supermarket was not originally included on the first Raincoats LP, but was a single appended to reissues. Everything on the proper album is easily better than that song. Which I guess is fine, but it's hard to not want to skip to "No Side To Fall In." The rest of that record is so good I would want to hear the preceding single anyway, so it's fine. Their second LP, Odyshape, is even more phenomenal and its a shame its unavailable and never really talked about by anyone other than me and Owen Gardner.) (Look for Owen's drone record to come out on Ehse Records sometime in 2011! It might be boring, but I expect to get a free copy and listen to it at least twice!)

The final Sun City Girls record, Funeral Mariachi, is great. I say this as someone who doesn't really like Torch Of The Mystics, and is really into the spoken-word material that Charles Gocher provided. I also really like the stuff found on Grotto Of Miracles and 330,003 Crossdressers, which is what this is more in the vein of. Actually it seems sort of like an Alvarius B record with less prose and more Morricone influence. We all agree that Ennio Morricone is great, right? That's what I mean by accessible.

The new Matmos/Lesser/Wobbly LP, Simultaneous Quodlibet, is pretty great. Loose and improvised with a lot of fun goofin'. I don't have anything to say about it that is actually useful, or descriptive, but I am announcing it exists in the world, because I don't know of anywhere else that has acknowledged this. The cover is an image of Phyllis Diller, made from her possessions.

The new Fat Worm Of Error LP, Broods, has Mark Beyer cover art, and a lot of songs on their new CD, Ambivalence And The Beaker. The arrangements are completely different, and one who listened intently to both, and then saw Fat Worm Of Error play live, could probably work out how they operate. This would be a pretty big investment for one such as myself, who can't quite wrap my head around that band to the point of being psyched on it while it's playing for any extended period of time. I'm sure that if I lived up in Massachusetts and was seeing this band play regularly I would be pretty excited about it. As it stands I have two CDs that I process as sounding like post-punk bands without any sort of tightness or rhythm section. Specifically, when I hear them I think about the Black Eyes album Cough, but all the parts that have descended from Fugazi are removed.

There is nothing tying this post together. Nothing.

The drug experience Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void comes closest to is the moment when you've been high for quite some time and are now looking at your watch to see how much longer it will be before you can do something else more productive. There comes a point when you know that the rest of the movie will continue on much the same way it has already progressed, and there will be no scenes or performances to distract from the monotony. There continue to be shots that fly over space dividers in a blur, the same moments will continue to be revisited.

The second season of the show Delocated has been pretty incredible. I seem to recall the first season's shorter episodes as these unstructured strings, flitting about from things that were imaginative and surreal to things that felt too mean to be funny. The second season has each episode expanded to a full half-hour, each with its own individual sense of humor. One episode will get its humor largely from building up to an extended sight gag ("Mixer," the climax of which created some of the hardest laughter a TV show has brought about), while another will do an extended Face/Off riff that plays off watching an actor recreate another's mannerisms perfectly. I am missing out on the current season of East Bound and Down and the new Kids In The Hall series, and so can't make any definitive claims, but this is a very funny show. It seems to accomplish this really hard task, of communicating a sense of humor that seems too wild and free in its satire to ever be structured to narrative. It's funny the way some of my friends are funny- not in the Judd Apatow way of cracking a ton of jokes, "the funniest thing is just you and your buddies palling around" but in not taking anything seriously at all. If you are familiar with Jon Glaser and Jon Benjamin doing extended anti-comedy riffs on stage, you can maybe imagine the issue of how untranslatable that seems to a more palatable format. This isn't to say all the jokes land, but everything seems inherently funny and sometimes that then takes the plunge into actual laugh-out-loud gags.

More and more, it becomes clear that the idea of "indie" music in 2010 is a complete misnomer, and what it refers to is a culture of "the creative class." The mechanisms for the record industry when "indie" became a concept were completely different than they are now. Now I think the music press functions as part and parcel of an agenda of appropriation, taking what it wants and claiming it as a product. This is always how things always worked, music is a product in that records are available for sale- but now things move so fast that every new thing is just something to be consumed. This is an unclear way of putting it. What I'm saying is that the new webzines are written for a "creative class" of marketing people. That's who buys these records- Or who buys the most stock in them, by putting them into advertisements and Hollywood films. The purchase is done as part of their job. And the selling is done as part of the job of the music writer. Endless consumption, a snake eating its own tail. Everything is a job of selling the new- Listeners aren't necessarily being served, because old music is just as satisfying to discover. Sometimes, when a revival starts, canons are revised accordingly- Think of the bands being discussed when the eighties revival started. (Did The Pop Group have much cultural clout circa 1997?) Currently, music isn't even being sold on the basis of SOUNDING new, or futuristic, the way that people would talk about IDM ten years ago. It's just this weird world where The Arcade Fire are sold as being similar to Neutral Milk Hotel (when, actually, no, not at all), or Best Coast are compared to The Beach Boys (Again: Untrue) - An invocation of already popular reference points that does not actually explain what music sounds like, but positions it as an issue of "taste," but taste defined in the depressing way that Celine Dion 33 1/3 book did it- as a thing that people choose to fit their lifestyle expectations; a definition that completely neglects the fact that there are people who respond to weird music because it sounds new and alien and interesting and they're alienated from the rest of the dull culture. I have had a lot of conversations with people my age and slightly older about hearing Beck's "Loser" in 1992 and having our minds completely blown- despite the fact that people of the time would've considered Beck as related to Nirvana in some way, the sonics didn't bear that out to impressionable minds.

Aidan Koch is a lady who I'm fairly certain attended The Evergreen State College at the same time I did. She is my age, if not in terms of specifics, than in terms of generalities; which is to say, young. I have never had any conversations about her, but I can guess where she is coming from when I read her book, The Whale, published by Gaze Books.

Gaze Books' first publication was Blaise Larmee's Young Lions. I appreciate Blaise sending me another book after I wrote what most would consider a bad review. Like, I think it's a funny prank to keep sending someone work they're not really interested in, that isn't going to coincide with their interests. I support all pranks. Maybe eventually I will start evaluating the books on their own terms.

The Whale is a comic about dealing with the death of someone close. It is not as emotionally devastating as Anders Nilsen's The End, nor is it as formally audacious. It's not trying to be punch you in the gut with raw emotion. To me it is more about the feeling of the beaches of the Pacific Northwest, where the water is too cold for comfort and you just stand on the beach with your head empty.

What do we mean when we say "comics as poetry?" (When I say "we," I should point out that I don't think I would ever actually use that phrase, the same way that I wouldn't say "art comic" the way that people are using it nowadays.) When I read a comic like this, I think of it as being slight, but also sincere and direct. Does it flatter the work to put it out as a book with a spine? An actual book of poetry of this type would contain many more poems. You don't charge someone five dollars for a single haiku. (This comic costs ten dollars.)

Do I think the comic, "The Whale," could pretty much be eight pages long and not lose much? Yes. When I think of what is being conveyed- a method of drawing, wistful melancholia stemming from a place of loss, a bit of metaphor- I think it could be gotten across in a minicomic, and a few of those minicomics could one day form a book that would make sense on a bookshelf and constitute a major work. In dealing with it, it is probably best to view it as a minicomic. Granted, it's priced a bit steep for a black and white minicomic, but is only a little more expensive than something with silkscreened covers would be. I can imagine such a swap occurring between people viewing themselves as equals with different design aesthetics.

Maybe it would seem as if I am talking about the Closed Captioned Comics folks with that last remark. Lane Milburn made a perfect-bound paperback for his last publication, Death Trap. Lane is a dude I actually have had conversations with, and I got the impression that he is dialing back such handcraft elements in favor of an emphasis on the craft of comics as a thing you read. With these modifications in presentation, Lane's book reads like a deliberate response to horror manga. It feels appropriate, a thing that makes sense with a real sense of itself. On the other hand, if Aidan's comic had been a minicomic with a precious and ornate form, I would probably be more psyched on it. I imagine most readers would feel the same way. But that's not how the book-publishing game works, I suppose, and until the people of Portland work out a way to steal photocopies, Gaze Books will have 1000 copies of The Whale for sale to interested parties.

I went to the Small Press Expo, in Bethesda, for the first time this past Saturday, with my roommate Adam. Enough people seemed excited to hear my name after seeing it on the internet that I thought I should get back to blogging. The show is overwhelming, constant fluxes of people. There were moments when crowds would clear and I would see tables I'd completely missed, previously obscured by masses of people.

There were less people I had met before than I expected. (I think the only exhibitor I've talked to before was Eamon Espey.) I thought Secret Acres was hoping to debut a collection of Edie Fake's work, who I know from Baltimore, but that didn't happen. Luckily, Edie is in the new Monster, alongside Roby Newton, another friend/former Baltimore resident. Also in that comic: Nick Thorburn of Islands and The Unicorns, a big Mat Brinkman admirer. Also, a lot of the usual suspects/hitmakers, who do great comics. Chippendale, CF, Goldberg, etc. Jim Rugg is in there, and he is really drawing the shit out of things these days, as his Rambo comic also feels really fresh and modern in its choices.

There were a lot of people saying "take this, it's free" and they'd hand you a business card, or a flyer for their website. Some of these had terrible drawings on them, and I had no interest in seeing how their sense of web-design compared. I didn't see any crazy comics coming out of nowhere. There were some folks who were printmakers, but they were just selling prints and t-shirts, not books or zines. Those are things you can mark up higher, I suppose. Kate Beaton had a line that went out the door. Like, maybe she was the only person with a line. Everyone else just had a crowd, or a conversation.

An exhausting show. When I got home I had been so inundated with social stimuli I couldn't even really read the comics I'd picked up. The next day, though, I read Renee French's H Day. It is pretty abstract, with the back cover copy maybe giving you the biggest clue as to what it is about. It's a cool book: The left hand pages are drawn in a minimal line style, with smudges, and are probably best read as quickly as possible, as a flipbook. This story is an abstracted body horror about migraines, as a head swells and contracts and has taffy pulled from it. The right side of the book is drawn in the soft colored pencil look of The Ticking, but here there's only a panel a page, making it more of a storybook, and the compositions change more- You can't read it at the same pace you read the opposite side. There are also other elements going on, chapter breaks, a section that is just weird cages. It's cool, the farthest out Renee has gone. The narrative is diminished and the anxiety is turned way up. The title seems unrelated to the contents, and I wonder if this is the same thing as the book titles previously attributed to Renee French working with Picturebox: Towcester Lodge, 44 Vessels.

I also got a copy of the Paul Pope THB Comics From Mars 2. I missed out on tracking down a copy of the first one because it seemed like it would be collected in Total THB, if/when that comes out. I don't think that's going to happen, looking at the contents of the new issue: It seems like the branding of these comics is just as a catch-all for Paul Pope. Which is cool. Talking to Frank Santoro he said that the stuff in the Cold Heat zines he wants to not have in the collection, (if that ever comes out) because he doesn't like the ending anymore. The issue 7/8 that would be effected looks really fucking great to the eyes of me, someone who didn't draw it, though.

There were some Fantagraphics debuts that will apparently be in stores this Wednesday- My roommate bought Prison Pit 2 but it seems like the new Love And Rockets sold out. There was a new issue of The Acme Novelty Library that I will wait until it shows up in a library to read.

I picked up some minicomics that were kind of old- Rumbling Chapter Two (great), the Tom Kaczynski Trans comics (nothing to do with the Neil Young album, although thinking about it I think that record plays into a lot of Tom's themes) (more autobio than I was expecting, although still good, thoughtful work), Stay Away From Other People (apparently Lisa Hanawalt is doing a second issue of I Want You, which I didn't know at the time, having just learned it from her website- if I had known I would have asked her who was going to publish it), the aforementioned Rambo comic. Were there new people doing quarter-sized, black and white minicomics? I don't think there were, besides people at Ian Harker's table (but I sort of suspect Ian is more of a comics history buff than a lot of other people).

I went to the Jaime Hernandez panel and it was packed. Gary Groth pointed out that most of the attendees weren't even born when the first Love and Rockets came out, and that seemed true, and mindblowing. The Fort Thunder panel was less packed. Neither was non-stop insighful, but the latter had some good anecdotes/color-slides.

I went to see Inception with two of my roommates. None of us thought it was very good as a movie. It seems like it would be a particularly next-level video game, and I imagine the people that would most enjoy it are people that are really into currently popular video games. This is the sort of nerd who would be very excited by the prospect of a follow-up to a Batman movie being a science-fiction movie, like I was, but then the truth of it is it's not really science-fiction at all, at least not in any way that involves ideas.

There is, however, a lot of exposition in it, laying out rules as if they were ideas; although the rules later change, and always seem arbitrary. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but not in a surrealist dream-logic way, or any cool kind of way, nor is it even hard to follow. It's speaking a language, unaware that its using the words its choosing incorrectly, the way that Scientologists or the kids in the movie Dogtooth are brought up.

It is not based on what dreaming is like, at all- which is odd considering that sleep and dreams are a profoundly human thing experienced by almost all of us. When the movie uses phrases like "dreams within dreams" I instinctively think of false awakenings because that's a real phenomena, but in this movie it just means some bullshit. The whole structure, which gives the movie its ostensible reason to exist, is not based on anything correlating to human experience, or is any kind of metaphor for anything. Basically, "That's not what dreams are like. That's not what the unconscious is like."

In terms of the language of genre, also, on a meta level, the movie says, about itself, "this is a science-fiction thriller" but then there's no consistency in terms of what those words should mean. It's not really thrilling, because it can't make you care about it, at all, and the rules change arbitrarily. The villains are personality-less dudes with guns, projections that don't make logical sense to be there at a certain point, and the thing that sets the story into action is this corporate espionage story which feels incredibly arbitrary.

Essentially, it ends up being an action movie with a conceit that allows for the fact that action is staged really badly because a lot of directors can't establish a sense of place, by creating nonsensical places. This works sometimes, with Escher-inspired "impossible architecture" but also allows for a runaway train to come out of nowhere.

There came a point where I was thinking "Maybe the ending will sell this to me" but oh my god did it ever not do that. It felt like a twist of the M. Night Shyamalan school, of trying to be a good ending but not really being satisfying.

Sometimes a movie is mediocre and people still say "it's worth seeing." This really didn't feel like it was worth seeing. It's not about any of the things it seems like it would be about. It's not really about anything. There's "cool visuals" but I think I would like the ones in The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus more. I can't say for sure because I didn't get around to seeing it- because it's really hard to interest people in seeing movies that are "cool visuals" in that sort of style. What's funny is that it's fine. It's better than mediocre. But it's pretty emphatically not good. I haven't seen the new Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie yet, Micmacs, but what people are saying about that movie: That it's emotionally hollow and you walk out feeling empty, even though it's pretty- applies to this movie, which isn't really that fun to look at if you have a sense of aesthetics that prefers hand-made warmth to computer-generated sheen.

One of my roommates, in comparing it to other Christopher Nolan movies, made a list of all the ones that were better than this. Basically, the ones that didn't make the list were Insomnia and Following. This might be a better movie than Insomnia, in that it's more ambitious, but it's also more frustrating, and the performances aren't as good.

Apparently it's a lot like the other Leonardo DiCaprio movie this year, Shutter Island, which I haven't seen, and now have no interest in.

A proposed double-bill: Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky (starring Anne Carlisle) and Kathryn Bigelow's The Loveless (starring Willem Defoe), both from 1982. Liquid Sky, to me, is the cooler movie, in that I respond more to its sci-fi signifiers than The Loveless' rockabilly aesthetic, but both are essentially movies looking at subcultures, eroticizing them, and using fairly spare dialogue. Both are really cool, highly recommended, pretty weird, etc. I feel the only real piece of insight I have is noting their similarities to each other. The Loveless looks backward in time while Liquid Sky, while not set in the future, is a science fiction piece set in the time in which it was made. While The Loveless was probably shot somewhere in the south, Bigelow would've recently left Columbia University, in New York, and the fifties bikers look like punks in a lot of ways: Notably, the presence of swastikas tattooed on hands makes me view its nostalgia through that lens. Liquid Sky is made by Russians, but the cast is New Yorkers- Carlisle's other most notable role seems to be a small part in Desperately Seeking Susan.

Another NYC-oriented double-bill would be to watch A Thousand Clowns, directed by Fred Coe and starring Jason Robards, and follow it up with Little Murders, directed by Alan Arkin. Two movies about struggling with male adulthood, both adapted from plays (by Herb Gardner and Jules Feiffer, respectively), both of which are pretty exhausting to watch. All the dialogue absent from the previously suggested double-feature is present here, and while it's all pretty funny, either movie by itself is a bit much to take in one sitting. Both of these movies are really relatable, and while A Thousand Clowns sort of has hope, Little Murders is a bleak point of view to contend with.

While the first set of movies proposed are all about style and subculture, the characters in the second set of movies are alienated from society to such a degree that subculture would not be a respite. Great stuff all around.

I've been thinking about moving away from the current template of this blog, as a place for my attempts to write criticism, in favor of a series of Q+A formatted interviews. In my mind, transcribing conversations with cartoonist pals would seem the best compromise between my imagined readerships, one-half comics-interested folk and one-half people I've encountered in physical space aiming to keep in touch. The thing that might serve as a deterrent is how, even if I were to just talk to people I talk to regularly, the presence of a tape recorder could make them think in terms of "talking to the press" and the whole endeavor sabotaged.

For now, though, here are brief reviews of comics I've enjoyed recently.

Hard Boiled, by Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow. The themes in this comic are really similar to those found within Grant Morrison and Chris Weston's The Filth, but this is much better. It's like the film version of that as The Filth attempting to be literature, which it turns out makes for much better comics. Formally, in its various approaches to action, it's like the Morrison/Quitely comic We3. Like, almost exactly- similar lengths overall, operating like movies but oriented towards a different kind of editing and drawing. Both have art influenced by Moebius but take it further into anatomical interest. Again, Geoff Darrow is better. (And this comic came out over a decade before We3.) Time gets broken down in a million different ways, all depictions of action, all action driving home this vision of humans as meat, this whole sweaty mess of life viewed on the picture-plane in perfect focus. All the flesh ripples and all the surfaces are cracked. Walls are a thing to write graffiti upon. In most ways this is the coolest thing you can do.

Wally Gropius, by Tim Hensley. This is the nerdiest thing you can do, like anagrams and math club. But the language being investigated is comics- This is drawn sort of to resemble 1960s "teen" humor comics, but in this bizarre way- almost no panel makes a point of distinguishing between ground and wall, everything just sort of hangs in space. Sometimes there are spots that employ perspective and their unexpected angularity is really stunning, despite the air of genericism at all times. Wally Gropius, the character, is a teen millionaire, but the comic takes the fact that comics are a commercial art as point number 1 to investigate commerce and wealth by extension- A large amount of the sound effects are allusions to currency or the rich. I get lost as to working out what the book's conclusion means thematically as an extension of what came before it. While the story ends, capitalism doesn't, the book persists on the shelf, timelessly, the same way that a new Richie Rich could be on the stands on the month. The ending is climactic for whatever it means, like the Bush administration winding down. Super-weird, totally compelling.

Lose 1 and 2, by Michael Deforge. These blew me away, as a one-two punch. The first one has this cover that's a self-portrait of the artist, covered in ink, sort of like the Paul Pope art book, but here it's a ton of cartoony deforming melty details. The comic inside is total anxiety infiltrated by having read a ton of comics- there's fun gags about dogs in college, and the Justice League paying for Green Lantern to go to art school, but the gist of it is this horror-comic trip to cartoon hell. It's kind of perfect as a comic book, a one-shot, which is what I first thought it would be upon it's release, and then the second issue comes out (WAY FASTER THAN THE SECOND ISSUE OF ANY ALTERNATIVE COMIC BOOK WORKING THIS FORMAT IN YEARS - for all the talk about how Crickets was trying to bring back the format, it fucked up by not having another issue come out for ages) and it actually is a semi-straightforward horror comic. I love the paper it's printed on, the way the black ink sticks to it- it's like the issues of Charles Burns' Black Hole, but made more appropriate here by the invocation of cartoon characters rather than just EC Comics. The second issue seems sort of like an Al Columbia or Renee French thing. I like this more than Al Columbia though, although part of that is the excitement of "whoa, this dude reads all the comics" recognition. I imagine that most of the people who would read the first issue are people who would recognize it and be creeped out by it, once they get past the level of "Is this irony? How comfortable to I feel about this person appropriating all the stuff he is?" It's more loaded than Paper Rad because I respect Peanuts and Bullwinkle way more than I respect Garfield, but I came to the conclusion to let it go and trust the artist. Garfield is used by Paper Rad because it's a ubiquitous thing in the culture, and Peanuts is used because it's a specific thing in the mind of a certain kind of comics nerd- using it makes you feel more uncomfortable because it's closer to home, but in a horror story discomfort is what's aimed for. I just listened to an interview where he said that two heroes/influences were Saul Steinberg and Richard Corben. Those are two completely different artists and it didn't feel like picking two opposite ends of the spectrum arbitrarily, so much as a useful hint at what's going on here. I hope he keeps making comics, because, while this is fully-realized work (especially for a dude that's twenty-two) I really want it to end up that he's actually going somewhere with this- because the first issue is such an all-encompassing, all-embracing piece of work, and then the second issue focuses on one particular thing. (In that interview he said he'd like to do an issue a year, which bummed me out as being kind of a noncommittal cop-out, although it's more realistic than saying two a year, which is what I would push for.)