In which I babble for a while about The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All

How many posts do you think it takes to qualify as a series? If it's just two, then I guess we could consider this post the second in a series in which I check out extremely popular manga only to find out that it's not really for me, following last month's post on Blue Lock. 

This time it's Sumiko Arai's The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All, AKA "the Green Yuri", based on its distinctive green covers and Arai's use of that same particular shade of green as an accent color throughout the comic.

Yen Press released the first volume of the series, which is now up to volume three, in 2004. I passed on it at the time for what probably seems like a weird, even random reason: I tend to avoid manga with really long titles. 

Since then, a manga-reading friend mentioned that she was following it, Renee Scott posted about it having blown up in a post on Good Comics for Kids and, most intriguingly, I saw an interview in which Dave Grohl talked about it in conjunction with the announcement that the upcoming anime adaptation would use Nirvana's "Bloom" in the opening sequence...an unusual state of affairs, to say the least.

As to why a Nirvana song might be used for an anime opening, well, the manga's two protagonists Aya Osawa and Mitsuki Koga bond over their love of (mostly) '90s American rock music, and Nirvana is, of course, a favorite of the pair, and the first of the three chapters in the first volume is actually entitled "Teen Spirit". ("Kurt definitely would've loved this," Grohl says in the interview.)

The format is a bit unusual compared to most of the manga I read, although the premise is solid (and, for someone who came of age listening to "alternative" music in the nineties, the focus on the music of the era is appealing).

As for that format, beyond the use of an accent color over the mostly black and white art, the story unfolds in super-short, four-page stories or chapters, and thus reading it in a collection like this felt a little like reading a collection of an old-fashioned "continuity" comic strip, with the constant stops and starts and a hint of narrative feedback, as elements get restated (I don't know the exact origins of the manga, but in the thank you section at the end of the book, Arai writes "When I first posted the story of these two on Twitter, I didn't have the slightest idea that it would turn into something like this..." From what I read on Wikipedia later, it seems as if the comic was originally published online, which likely explains it's super-short chapters and comic strip-like feel).

As for the premise, well, popular, girly-girl Aya is a fan of Western rock music from 30-ish years previous, unlike her friends, who have more modern (and, presumably, Japanese taste). And thus the first lines of the book, which appear over a scene of her listening to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with ear buds in school, are "Music is best... ...when you listen to it alone."

One day, she discovers a CD shop—Do these still exist? In America, or is this a purely Japanese phenomenon?—and, attracted to the rhythm she hears, walks in, only to lock eyes with the young person behind the counter.

This person wears a black hoodie with the hood up, disguising all of their hair save for the black bangs, a black mask that disguises the lower half of their face and, although we can't see it in the four-page, full-color prologue that opens the books, pants. Despite the eye make-up and black nail polish, Aya assumes this person is a guy.

She's wrong. This person is a girl, Mitsuki, and not only is Aya mistaken about the CD shop employee's gender, shes also doesn't realize that she already knows her. Mitsuki, it turns out, is in her class, where she sits right next to her.

At school, of course, the shy, quiet Mitsuki wears the school uniform, complete with a skirt, and she also wears glasses and eschews make-up, even diligently removing her nail polish before school, not wanting to stand out in anyway at school.

In the shop, it's crush at first sight for Aya:

He' so stylish...

...and mysterious.

He's got impeccable taste in music too!

I LOVE NIRVANA!

I CAN TOTALLY FANGIRL OVER HIM...!

Just watching him from afar gives me joy...

And then, when she gets her hair tangled in the headphones there so customers can listen to the music before they buy it, the "guy" comes over to help her, smilingly apologizing for touching her hair.

The next morning, she recounts this whole encounter to her two friends...mere feet away from Mitsuki, who is overhearing how her "flashy" classmate has a fangirl crush on a boy...who is actually her.

Now, the way Arai draws the two Mitsukis is, of course, quite different, and I know from experience that we don't always recognize people when we see them out of the context we expect to see them in (The image above is a photo of Arai's design pages from the back of the first volume, featuring the two Mitsukis). Still, wouldn't Aya recognize her classmate if she took off her glasses and put on a mask, hoodie and pair of pants...?

Well, as someone who has spent a lifetime enjoying Superman stories in various mediums, I'm obviously accepting of the idea that a pair of glasses can completely change someone's identity (Additionally, one of my all-time favorite movies is She's All That, a movie which would have us believe that the super-cute Rachel Leigh Cook of 1999 is barely worth noticing when wearing glasses, but a radiant beauty the moment she takes them off). 

I could even buy Mitsuki being so freaked out at first as to want to keep it a secret of sorts, not introducing herself to Aya at the shop, or butting into the next morning conversation to admit that she was the guy at the shop that Aya was fan-girling over.

But this double identity plot gets pretty weird pretty fast, as Aya becomes a regular at the shop and soon, friends with The Guy At The CD Shop. Mitsuki's continued maintenance of a secret identity with a friend and classmate strikes me as...odd. 

Arai's teasing about whether or not Aya is about to discover Mitsuki over the course of the stories is fun and cute (And, again, makes me think a bit of Superman...particularly from the stories where Lois doesn't yet know that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person). 

But why is Mitsuki keeping a secret identity?

I mean, it's not like The Guy At The CD Shop is a superhero like Superman or Spider-Man, like she has arch-enemies in the criminal underworld who might target her loved ones. The mistaken identity turning into a secret identity is, at the very least, extremely awkward, and makes Mitsuki's actions seem questionable in the earliest strips in the book 

(Also, I am not entirely clear if Aya just mistakes Mitsuki for a boy because perhaps she is a bit androgynous and elements of her wardrobe are more male than female coded, or if Mitsuki is intentionally dressing up as a boy for work, and that's why she hides her long hair under a hood and much of her face with a mask. Whatever the case is, after she hears Aya talking about her, she knows that Aya thinks she's a guy, and never does anything to disabuse her of this which, again, seems weird.)

What at first seems a little odd or weird gets downright ridiculous at the point in which they actually become friends, and Aya gets The Guy At The CD Shop's number. At that point, she puts "his" contact info in her phone, as "My Guy." That's right; she doesn't even know "his" name...! How does one get to the exchange-phone-numbers stage without first exchanging one another's names...? (When Mitsuki calls Aya for the first time, she introduces herself thusly: "Um... I'm the person from the CD shop in front of the station...")

If Mitsuki did want to continue the deception that she was some random guy that Aya met and not her classmate, she could have given her a fake name or, this being Japan, maybe just her family name ("That's weird," Aya might have thought, "There's a girl in my class with that same name!"). If she wanted to come clean, that might have been the point to do so. Instead, when Aya writes her number on Mitsuki's hand at the shop, Mitsuki neither volunteers a name nor does Aya ask for one.

Eventually, Aya discovers the deception and is rightfully pissed at Mitsuki. In an attempt to make it up to her, Mitsuki goes into boy mode to play and sing a song at the school festival; she doesn't wear the mask, but otherwise dresses up like she does at work, with her hood up and, conveniently, no one at school seems to recognize her.  She's introduced as a "musician dressed in all black!!' and when kids in the crowd look up at her on stage, they say "I can't see their face against the backlight...Who is that?!"

Aya recognizes her, of course, saying to herself:

Even with so many people around... ...It sounds like she's playing just for me.

—Since...

...I'm sure no one here... ...knows stuff like Radiohead...

My guess is that Mitsuki was playing a cover of "Creep", as that's the name of the third and final chapter in this volume.

After that, the pair introduce themselves properly, and begin a proper friendship, one based on their love of old Western music, despite their different styles and apparent social statuses at school. 

I'm not sure where things will go from here—there's a lot of kinda sorta almost flirting between the pair, and it is called "Green Yuri"—but by the end of this volume, they are merely friends getting to know one another, and Aya hasn't yet completely transferred her apparently romantic feelings for Mitsuki's boy mode to her real, female self.

I think now that we are past the weird dual-identity bit—which I don't think Arai handled particularly well, as we only see the characters' emotional reactions to this plot business, and never get any explanations for why they act the way they do and what they might be thinking—the series likely improves....or at least will annoy me personally less.

That said, the four-page format wasn't particularly fun for me to read, so I'm not sure if I'll pick up the next volume or not. We'll see.

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Can we talk about the music a bit...? 

Despite Nirvana's prominent place at the beginning, essentially bringing the two together, I was kind of surprised at how...basic the two characters' taste was throughout. As I said earlier, their favorite Western music seems to be what we called "alternative" in the '90s, but from what I can see from kids' t-shirts these days and what I hear on the radio, this is essentially classic rock now. 

In addition to Nirvana ("Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Heart-Shaped Box") and Radiohead ("Creep"), what other artists appear in the manga...?

Boy-mode Mitsuki (who, amusingly, finds herself falling into her "role" as Aya's crush, surprising herself by flirting with her and trying to act cool in front of her), lends her the new Foo Fighters album. I'm not sure which one this might be (um, the only Foo Fighters album I've ever actually listened to was their 1995 self-titled debut), but apparently, it's "based on a fictional band they created", as Aya tries to explain to her completely uninterested friends.

Later, Aya sends Mitsuki/her "guy" a playlist, which includes Blur ("Song 2"), Black Sabbath ("Paranoid"), The Strokes ("Repitlila"), Bon Jovi ("You Give Love a Bad Name"), Beck ("Loser"), Pearl Jam ("Alive") and what I believe is Royal Blood ("Figure it Out").

When Mitsuki's uncle, who owns the CD shop she works at, scans the stongs on Aya's list, he's shocked. "What the heck?!" he thinks. "This selection really matches my tastes... ...but given how cool these songs are... ...did some middle-aged dude put this together...?!" (He is relieved—and in awe—when Aya walks into the shop, and his niece says it's her playlist, and not that of some creepy older guy.)

But I don't know...Bon Jovi...?

A few scenes later, the school principal plays an Aerosmith song over the loudspeakers, one from their early days, and only Aya and Mitsuki seem to appreciate it. 

Later, Guns 'n Roses and the Chili Peppers are mentioned, as well as a "Willow", which is the first time I've heard of her. I was a little disappointed to look Willow up, based on the song title on Aya's phone ("Coping Mechanism"), only to discover that "Willow" is Willow Smith, daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. Of course, it's probably not fair to her for me to judge her based solely on her celebrity parentage, without actually listening to any of her music. 

Hey, Robert Ableman listens to Cub!

It wasn't something I was expecting to see in a comic book, least of all in the pages of Mayor Good Boy Turns Bad, the third installment of Dave Scheidt and Miranda Harmon's Mayor Good Boy series, about a talking dog mayor of a small town. 

Early in the book, Robert Ableman, the father of the book's heroes Abby and Aaron Ableman, is shown going through his record collection. When Aaron interrupts him, Robert clutches the album he's holding to his chest defensively and holds it there for several panels. As you can see above, it's a Cub album, specifically their second album, 1995's Come Out Come Out.

For those of you who don't know, which I assume is most of you, or at least most of Mayor Good Boy's young readers, Cub was a Vancouver-based all-girl band in the 1990s, their sound defined by simple, lullaby-like pop punk rock tunes with sing-songy lyrics that could be either extremely charming or somewhat cloying, depending on your level of cynicism. They self-branded their style as "cuddlecore." As a teenager, I loved them unconditionally, my favorite song being "My Chinchilla" from their debut album Betti-Cola, which was either a cute and innocent love song...or an ode to an actual pet chinchilla. I interpreted it as the former. 

In an earlier panel, we see Aaron holding two other albums, They Might Be Giants' 1988 Lincoln and The Cure's 1989 Disintegration, so perhaps Robert came to Cub through They Might Be Giants, who covered "New York City" from Come Out Come Out on their 1996 album Factory Showroom. At any rate, we can agree that Robert has pretty good taste in music, and a worthy record collection. 

This isn't the only Cub comics connection, or the only reason they might be mentioned on a comics blog. The cover art for Betti-Cola was from legendary cartoonist Dan DeCarlo.

Now the only question is who on the Mayor Good Boy team is the Cub fan, Schedit or Harmon? Or both? 

"He's so much more like Spider-Man than you will ever, ever be"

That's EDILW favorites Los Campesinos! performing "Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats" from their 2008 album Hold on Now, Youngster...

It's the chorus that is of particular interest, for its mention of Spider-Man as...an ideal not being lived up to by the addressee as well as it is by someone else. Or Something.

Anyway, the chorus:

Plunge your hand, rip out my spine
Replace it with a UV light
So I can be the beacon of hope that you'd always expected

These constant broken heartbeats sound like breakbeats
Looping round and round to me
You know he's so much more like Spider-Man than you will ever, ever be.

You can hear what the song sounds like on the actual album here.

Does Scott Pilgrim's band Sex Bob-Omb sound like...Times New Viking?

Bryan Lee O'Malley, Edgar Wright and Beck say yes, according to a recent LA Times article:

O'Malley recalled some of his early discussions with Wright on the sound of Sex Bob-Omb. He said he tried to sell the director on Times New Viking, a Midwest punk band signed to Matador and steeped in rudimentary, low-fi noise. Wright, however, wasn't having it, at least not until the pair met with Beck in his tour bus at San Francisco's Outside Lands music festival.

"We wanted them to sound like a garage band," O'Malley said. "We wanted them to sound rough and really distorted. There's this band called Times New Viking who had just released an album, and I was like, 'These guys are perfect.'"

"Edgar wasn't completely taken with them," O'Malley continued. "So we start down with Beck, and the first thing he said was, 'I think they should sound like Times New Viking.' So Beck totally understood what we were going for. Edgar and I just kind of looked at each other."

—From Todd Martens' article on how director Edgar Wright went about finding the right sound to give Sex Bob-Omb in his film adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim series, from the LA Times' Hero Complex blog.

Columbus readers may recognize the band name Times New Viking, as the "Midwest punk band" is actually Columbus-based (That's them above, playing at the Wexner Center in 2007).

You can hear a handful of their songs here ("My Head" is my favorite).

And you can see the unfortunately Times New Viking-less but (otherwise quite strong) soundtrack play list on blog The Playlist, and check out Bryan Lee O'Malley's discussion of who picked what and why on his blog, Radiomaru.com.

This is This is a Comic Book

The title of the show is a confrontational one: This is a Comic Book. It’s simple, declarative and unequivocal, challenging whoever hears it to check and see if that really is the case, and then to either agree or disagree.

The confrontation is intentional. This is a Comic Book curators Jimi Payne and Colleen Grennan know this, and are doing more than simply hanging comic art in the Mahan Gallery for a show. They’re also asking questions, starting and engaging in a conversation about what a comic book is, what comic book art is, and how the art world and the comic book world get along, particularly at this point in time, when comics are no longer strangers to gallery walls, and no longer a novelty acts within the “fine” art world.

Now there are an awful lot of challenges to putting comic books in gallery spaces, a topic discussed at length in the show catalog, and This is overcomes two of the most obvious ones in interesting ways.

The first is that comic books are comic books, meant to be handled and read, not simply looked at one random page at a time. The show acknowledges this by including actual comic books in the show. The walls are covered with flat pages, covers and original work, but in the center of the gallery is a little island, strewn with minicomics by many of the artists with work on the walls; you can take in the pieces of the show, but you can also linger by the island, and experience the work of the creators as it was intended to be experienced. There on the walls are comics-as-art, captive and domesticated. Here on the table are comics-as-comics, wild and native. Neat.

(In the corner of the gallery there’s also a bookshelf containing graphic novels for perusal and purchase, so if you’re wondering what that Cochise character is doing climbing up the mountain in one of Lauren Weinstein’s pieces, you can get a Goddess of War Vol. 1 and find out).

The other major challenge is the fact that, because comics are meant to be read, not taken in as wall-art, gallery presentation sometimes means a white room full of big white rectangles, each including grids of smaller, black and white rectangles within the frames. Not exactly an appealing look for anyone other than comics-fiends, really.

But there’s a great deal of color in the gallery.

The most eye-drawing aspect is certainly Columbus-artist Phonzie Davis’ contribution, a column on the south wall of the gallery, wrapped like a gift in big, bright, poster-sized pages from his Left-Handed Sophie comic book.
Among the half-dozen others or so also working in color are Panayiotis Terzis (whose contributions include big, bright, King Top strips with borders bordering on design elements, and a multi-layer, silk screen-looking piece piece that Payne says is part of Fantagraphcs’ new Abstract Comics: The Anthology), Lee Mei Yan (whose works are incredibly busy and detailed jumbles of cute, colorful images, only “sequential” in that their size and scope mean they must be taken in one piece at a time, although it’s up the viewer how big the implied panel, and what sequence in which to “read” them), Ron Rege Jr (whose cover to Cartoon Utopia is equal parts classic cartooning and street art). Among the more expected sorts of pieces are those from cartoonists you’re most likely to heard of, although there were certainly some surprises there.

There are a trio of pieces from Nate Powell, who’s recent Eisner for Swallow Me Whole certainly made his inclusion a timely one. There are several standalone pages from his work, and as always it’s fascinating to see the real, original art that the artist’s hands created: The finished product may be the published books, but it’s undeniably exciting to see what the artist made before it went to the printer, and look for clues about how Powell applied his ink or drew his letters into the art.

Weinstein’s pieces were surprisingly large; there are a couple of page from Goddess, and they were remarkably large. Weinstein works big. The finished, printed Goddess is a gigantic comics (Which, as much as I liked it, continues to frustrate me; I can’t figure out what to do with the damn thing now), at 10-by-15-inches, but the original pages looked even bigger; I’m not sure how big she works, but some of the pages were much larger than the traditional 10-by-15-inch piece of Bristol board, so she must work even larger than that and have it reduced? (At least for the Cochise page).

The pieces I personally found most remarkable were those by Anders Nilsen. There are a few pages from his Dogs and Water a very strong and very representational work from Nilsen.

The Dogs and Water pages were marked here and there with white correction fluid, and patches of other pieces of paper placed atop the originals, apparently covering mistakes or drafts that Nilsen wasn’t happy with. For example, this page in the book…
…has a large, polygon of paper covering almost half of the original image, with the drawing extending over both fields of paper.

I suppose any actual cartoonists in the reading audience will here think this simply stating the obvious, but from a reader’s perspective, because the finished product so often looks perfect, I often assume it was created perfect, and it’s something of a revelation to see how many imperfections go into reaching that finished perfection.

Also on the more representational end of things are a few complete strips.

Dorothy Gambrell* has several Cat and Girl strips that can be read in their entirety in the space of a single piece.

Here’s one, entitled Times New Viking**: Matt Furie, like Gambrell, has complete strips, although his characters and use of space and line makes his work seem at a greater distance from what one imagines when one imagines “comic strip” than Gambrell’s. Gambrell’s strips could easily appear in newspapers, if newspapers were more awesome than they actually are, where I can’t see in a newspaper…maybe an alternative magazine of some sort. John Porcellino*** also provides complete strips, although his—interestingly enough—aren’t original pages from any of his minicomics, but recreations of them. That is, instead of giving them his original art, he created original art from the original art, if that makes sense. It’s pretty neat.

Porcellino’s work has a special place in my heart, as I first became aware of him shortly after I moved here (at the inaugural SPACE) and found it quite inspirational (In a “Shit, if this guy can publish comics drawing baby raccoons like that, certainly I can draw comics too!” kind of way), particularly the way his work has evolved into the graceful, beautiful, airy abstracted aesthetic it is now.

This is a pretty Porcellino type of piece too:
On the other side of the spectrum are sequential pieces without any real story or, like Chris Day’s Droop Till You Drop, which shows Droopy going from drooping to melting, and Noel Friebert’s excerpt from Son of a Gun, which is a six-panel grid with no images in it, simply words written in several different styles. (Shit, I wish I thought of making comics that way).

I know it’s all art (it’s in an art gallery, after all), but is it a comic book? It must be. The name of the show says it is, and, after seeing it and thinking about it, I can’t disagree. It’s comics, and wow, what a multitude of definitions to that term there are.




*Speaking of Gambrell, check out her awesome Baba Yaga t-shirt design. I’m not one of those wealthy people who can afford to buy “clothing,” and simply cover my shame with strategically placed back-issues and yarn, but if I were, I would totally buy that


**Hey, here’s an additional Columbus connection to this piece. Did you know that, in addition to being a type font, Times New Viking is also the name of wonderful Columbus band? It’s true! You should totally go buy their album Rip It Off right this minute. I like track 2, “My Head,” and track 9, “The Early ‘80s” best. Also, if they happen to be playing near you, you should totally go see them, as they’re even better live than recorded.

Here, watch them perform with poor sound quality:





***According to publisher Drawn and Quarterly, Porcellino will be in Columbus on October 12 to promote his new book Map of My Heart at Wholly Craft, a swell store I would spend a lot of money at if I had a lot of money (which I don’t). No confirmation at Wholly Craft’s site though; I imagine they’ll eventually have some info up here.


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This is a Comic Book will remain on view through Friday, August 28. For more info on the show and/or Mahan, click here. You should really go see it if you can. And buy a catalog, if you can—they are only 125 of them in existence, so maybe it will be worth money some day! (There much rarer than copies of Chew #1, and people seem to think that will be worth money). And hell, if you got scratch to spare, buy something off the wall while you're at it. I think one of Terzis' pieces would look perfect right above your couch. Thanks to my friend who doesn’t want me to name her for letting me use her retarded Mother Box to take the photographs of the show above. This is my last post on the subject of this particular show, I swear.

Today is Easter.

When I was a little kid, that meant it would have been the third most exciting morning of the year, following Christmas morning and that of my birthday.

My siblings and I would look for the Easter baskets the Easter Bunny had hidden around our house the night before, and then hunt for the little chocolate, foil-wrapped eggs he had hidden around the house before our dog Jacoby sniffed them out and ate them all (You know, neither chocolate nor tinfoil are supposed to be very good for dogs; Jacoby must have had a stomach like a robotic goat).

Then I'd be dressed in a powder blue, polyester-y little suit with a clip-on bow tie, and go to Sunday morning mass, followed by dinner with my extended family, consisting of ham, lasagna, cracker meal or wedding soup, and a variety of bizarre (to me) seasonal pies: rice pie, meat pie and Farina pie.

Now I'm a grown-up, as well as a non-practicing Catholic and a vegetarian, which strips away pretty much everything that was once special and significant about the day. And I live far away from my family, so I'm not even spending the day with my littlest relatives and relations, watching them look for baskets or turn up their noses at rice and meat pies.

This is how I celebrate Easter now. By listening to an album about a radical ancient hippie who changed the course of world history for both good and ill when he martyred himself for a cause, completely boning his friend and fellow poverty activist Judas in the process...

...while blogging about children's picture books involving rabbits.

Rabbit related content to follow shortly; in the meantime, please enjoy the hymn above, and ponder the theological implications of a disco-themed heaven.

A holiday greeting

Hey, the guy who unknowingly helped name my blog has a new album coming out. Here's a single from it:

Replace "Paris" with "Comics" and "stone and steel" with "paper and ink," and it makes for a perfect love song, doesn't it?

What...?

Don't you rewrite Morrissey songs in your head to make them apply to comic books? No...? It's just me then...? Huh.

Well, happy today anyway.

PSA: Attention Ohio comics and/or jazz fans

You may be into this:



NPR's Weekend Edition has a pretty big piece on it today, and their website has a text version of their story, images and more.

The Penguin doesn't know if it's art, but he knows what he likes

A grab bag of links and miscellaneous stuff:

—A story on NPR last weekend talked about the birthplace of Superman—the house where he was made-up, not Krypton—and featured interviews with Northeastern Ohioan comic book folks Mike Sangiocomo, Tom Batiuk and Harvey Pekar.


—Did you know Chris Claremont will be the guest of honor at this year’s Mid-Ohio-Con? Well, he will be.


—Matt Fraction’s dream about trying to take a picture of Doctor Doom in the bathtub makes me feel less weird about the dreams I’ve had where I’m Robin helping Batman on cases.

Well, slightly less weird.


—My original intention for Tuesday night’s Raymond Briggs post was to take a look at every single Briggs book I could find, whether they seemed to be comics/sequential art or not.

That was before I realized that just within the few libraries around town there are actually millions and millions of Briggs books, so I just stuck to the ones I found that were particularly comic book-y, and cold skipped the ones that were straight-up picture books/illustrated prose.

But I had already scanned these images from Fee Fi Fo Fum, a collection of nursery rhymes illustrated by Briggs, which I will proceed to post simply because I like them so much:




—I got the new issue of So Super Duper in the mail this week, and it is intense, including the shocking scene of cryptosexual lead Psyche’s first-ever kiss:

Man, I did not see that particular kissing partner coming!

But the last page, that I totally saw coming. Like, the second I glanced at the cover of the first issue.

Aside from big plot twists, this issue is somewhat noteworthy because it contains this

a seven-page, fourteen-panel back-up story by some jack-ass named J. Caleb Mozzocco.

It is seriously not very good. I mean, look at this panel here:

See the character on the left half of the upper left-hand corner I’m gesturing too? See how her legs extend to the bottom of the panel? Where are the legs of the two characters on the right half of that panel?

The lazy artist tried to hide them under a dialogue bubble, but he didn’t make the bubble big enough, so they just look like floating torsos.

If for some reason you want to peruse this crudely drawn short story for yourself and/or follow the continuing adventures of the gayest superhero ever (who isn’t Batman), you can find out how to order it at Sosuperduper.com.

Here’s the first page of that back-up story:

So Super Duper creator Brian Andersen has also written a brand new comic called Reignbow and Dee-Va which is illustrated by Celina Hernandez, an artist who’s better than both Andersen and this Mozzocco joker, so you might want to order a copy of that too. I’ve been planning to review it here for a while now, and will hopefully get to it in the next week or so.


—I used to rail against Ed Benes’ entirely inappropriate choices for depicting the women in Justice League of America until I eventually just quit buying the damn book, but one of the (many) things that used to so bug me about it was the cut of Wonder Woman’s battle-briefs.

After seeing photos of the women’s beach volleyball players at the Olympics however, I realize maybe Wonder Woman’s tiny little bikini bottoms are actually kind of realistic.

I mean, some of those volleyball players seem downright Amazonian, dwarfing our Commander-in-Chief with their height, their bodies rippling with muscles.

If Wonder Woman were really real-real, might she not look a bit like a black-haired Kerri Walsh, with Walsh’s height, musculature and build and, therefore, maybe Walsh’s taste in extremely small bottoms? If they’re comfortable enough to play beach volleyball in, are they not also comfortable enough to fight crime in? Is fighting Amazo really so different from playing beach volleyball?

But then, Wonder Woman’s physical strength, speed and endurance are magical gifts from the Greek gods, not the result of working out, so I guess there’s no real reason for her to have killer abs and toned back muscles; it’s like when artists (like Benes) draw Superman as if he were a bodybuilder—he’s not super-strong because he has a 38-pack and six triceps in each arm, he’s super-strong because of, um, yellow sunlight and Kryptonian cells or Earth’s gravity or whatever (i.e. more magic).

So maybe Wonder Woman wouldn’t really share Walsh’s physical appearance, and thus wouldn’t share her taste in small bikini bottoms.

Now, I wasn’t thinking this makes Benes a “good” artist or anything. The guy still can’t tell a story or differentiate his characters from one another. Nor does this make his JLoA comics less creepily obsessed with his characters’ boobs and butts. Just that his giving Wonder Woman tiny, tiny, tiny little bottoms seems less unrealistic to me than it did a couple weeks ago.


—Here’s an extremely well-written review of the last issue of Batman by an extremely good writer. Not a single mention of the art; and this is only the latest time I’ve seen critics talking about how great Grant Morrison’s Batman is without mentioning the fact that it is so terribly illustrated some parts of each issue barely make any sense visually.

Is there something wrong with me? Is Tony Daniel a perfectly competent artist that I for some reason can’t appreciate at all? That is, maybe it’s not him, it’s me?


—PSA: When Fangirls Attack is back.


—The best reason to read Secret Invasion continues to be that doing so makes it easier to get all of Abhay Khosla’s jokes about it.


—Mike Sterling posts one of the best panels of Millennium #5, in which the heroes of the DCU congratulate Batman on the phenomenal success of his latest movie. Or something. Go check it out.


—Not comics: I have a review of Star Wars: Clone Wars up at Donewaiting today. Short version: Just rewatch the 2003 2D Cartoon Network version, as the new movie is much, much, much worse than its trailers would lead one to believe. And man, those trailers made it look awful.

Plus, no one says “Kit Fisto” out loud.


—Also not comics: If you live in Columbus (or nearby) and are looking for something to do tomorrow night, Caleb-approved band Miranda Sound is playing their final (Columbus) show before wussing out and breaking up.

Details are on their website, as are some downloads of ten of their songs, so you can listen to them, realize they’re pretty good and then you too can be disappointed that they’re quitting like a bunch of little girls.

And if you live further south, then their very last show ever is the following night, in Newport, KY.

The only good thing about Miranda Sound (maybe temporarily…?) calling it quits? Clint Reno drew a kick-ass poster for the show involving dinosaurs:



—Presuming I get it drawn in time, tomorrow will the last installment of the Justice League Ice Cream Social (although since it’s after 9 p.m. haven’t even started yet, something tells me I won’t make it), after which I will have drawn every single Justice Leaguer ever—plus a few of the honorary members—doing something ice cream-related.

In retrospect, this was a terrible, terrible idea and a huge waste of time on my part, but I did like essentially betting myself that I couldn’t draw a few pictures a day for so long. It’s a great motivator.

Now if only I could channel that motivation into something more positive than lame-ass gags about obscure DC superheroes…

Valentine's Day Special: I love Cub

“My Chinchilla,” from 1993 album Betti-Cola. This is by far my favorite love song of all time.



“New York City,” from 1995’s Come Out Come Out. Another great love song. (And yes, They Might Be Giants did cover it.)



“My Flaming Red Bobsled,” also from Come Out Come Out



“Freaky,” from 1996’s Box of Hair.



What does now-broken-up Vancouver-based band Cub have to do with comics exactly, aside from some of the imagery in the above “Flaming Red Bobsled” video?

Well, here’s the cover of their debut album Betti-Cola, from Canada’s Mint Records:



Hey, is that…



Yes. Yes it is.

Reminder

This is Bat Lash, the new comic book by Peter Brandvold, Sergio Aragones and John Severin, which debuts tomorrow:


This is Bat For Lashes, the British girl group led by singer/songwriter Natasha Khan:

Spider-Man 3, musicians' muse

Inspiration’s a funny thing—an artist can find it just about anywhere, even a big budget summer movie that hasn’t even been released yet but which their record label would really like them to contribute a track to the soundtrack for.

At least, if the “inspired by” part of Spider-Man 3: Music From And Inspired By is to be taken seriously.

As a film-goer, comic book reader and film critic, I’ve been enormously impressed with the whole Spider-Man franchise, and was among the more effusive when it came to praising the third one, which general critical and fan assessment seems to agree was the worst of the three (I should note that a second viewing, a few weeks later, made the weaknesses in pacing a lot more glaring than a single viewing—If anything, the film could have used another half hour added onto it’s running time).

I saw a critics’ screening the week before release, and went back with some friends to see it again a few week’s later, and that was the sum total of my experience with the film. I didn’t read any comic book adaptations or novel adaptations (do they still do those?) or play any video games or listen to the soundtrack or anything like that.

At least, not until a couple of weeks ago. Cruising my local libraries website to see what else they might have from some bands I liked, I noticed the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack came up more than once, so I reserved it to see what exactly the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Flaming Lips had to sing about Spider-Man and symbiotes exactly.

I’m not too terribly well-versed in the modern blockbuster soundtrack, and this is the first one to a superhero movie I’ve listened to since, I don’t know, Prince’s Batman soundtrack, probably. (I suspect Ghost Rider probably had a pretty good one though). This one seems to have a lot of original tracks on it, rather than simply songs culled from the contributors’ albums—is that unusual?

What did strike me as unusual was how few of the songs that I remember actually seeing in the movie appear on the soundtrack. The Danny Elfman theme? M.I.A. The marching band version of the old cartoon theme song played during the “Spider-Man Day” scene? Not here. The “Staying Alive” sequence, or Evil Peter’s piano and dance scene? That song Mary Jane sings during her play, or at the jazz club? Not here.

Here’s what was included. (Oh, and you can hear samples of ‘em all at Amazon.com’s entry on it).



1.) Snow Patrol, “Signal Fire” An Irish band? On a Spider-Man soundtrack? What the hell…Spider-Man is as American as Superman, and Superman is as American as apple pie. Why are we looking to the Old World to provide sad love songs capable of bringing a tear to Zach Braff’s eye in his movie?

No mention of spiders, symbiotes, goblins or men made of sand in it, so I guess Snow Patrol was more inspired by the romantic elements of the film.

For example:



In the confusion and the aftermath
You are my signal fire
The only resolution and the only joy
Is the faint spark of forgiveness in your eye


That sounds like it could be about Peter and MJ’s relationship troubles, right?




2.) The Killers, “Move Away” This one sounded familiar too, so maybe it was in the film. Or playing over the credits. Or on the radio this summer. Or something. There’s a lot of talk about ski, and the removal of it in the lyrics, like “Take off your skin when you listen to me,” and “I want to jump out of my skin.” Presumably, this song is about the Venom symbiote’s possession of Peter and Eddie Brock.



3.) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Sealings” I really love this band. “Date With the Night,” “Y Control,” “Maps,” “Modern Romance,” “Cheated Hearts,” “Turn Into You”…all of these songs spent quite a bit of time stuck in my skull, and the band definitely puts on one of the better live shows I’ve ever seen.

I was kinda surprised to see them on this soundtrack, but I thought it was pretty cool. They’re NYC-based, after all, and it would be kinda cool if Spider-Man, a very New York film franchise, featured a CD full of NYC bands. I mean, if Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson and Harry Osborn were real people living in NYC, chances are this is a band they may have seen, and would tell people, “Oh yeah, I was into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs before they were big.”

I have no idea what this song has to do with Spider-Man though. Here’s the chorus:



Drop drop
down a floor
Shoot shoot
out your mouth
These days are scraped from ceilings


I guess Spider-Man might, you know, drop down a floor here and there as he’s climbing down walls, and he does cling from the ceilings…?




4.) Wolfmother, “Pleased To Meet You” I bet Eddie Brock likes Wolfmother.




5.) Walkmen, “Red River” Another New York band, who belong here mostly because it’s possible that Peter, MJ, Gwen, Harry or Eddie could bump into them in a club somewhere. I don’t hear anything particularly Spider-Man-y in the song. Spidey wears red in his costume, maybe?



6.) Black Mountain, “Stay Free” Another un-American band, this one from Canada. I like this line: “Beautiful ponies/ So beautiful they’ll kill us all.” You know, I think a pony may be the only animal which Spider-Man doesn’t have a villain named after…



7.) The Flaming Lips, “The Supreme Being Teaches Spider-Man How to be in Love” This is my other favorite band on the soundtrack. This one’s definitely “inspired by” rather than “from,” as I’m sure I’d remember having heard it in the film itself.

Why’s that? Because it’s really fucking weird. Even for the Flaming Lips. Here are the lyrics, in their entirety, so you can explain the song to me:



The first round goes
We go to blows
I’m the Spider-Man
But nobody knows
But the spider conceals the truth

The spectrums raise
Your ringside gaze
I’ve been in love with you for a million days
But the fighter conceals his wounds

I’m in love with you
But I fight the urge
Muhammad Ali makes a third round surge
And the audience can see the truth

His punches land
I can hardly stand
I’ve got the power of a spider
But the heart of a man
But the power is in the truth

Honesty can kill the spider
Muhammad Ali feels the same
The audience can give you the power
And I hear them call my name (Here comes the Spider-Man),
Hear them call my name (Does whatever a spider can).
I hear them call my name (Here comes the Spider-Man),
Hear them call my name (Does whatever a spider can).


At the seventh round
You make a sound
Muhammad Ali only knocks me down
You whisper, “Tell the truth”

I say I’m in love with you
At the knock out count
The audience cheers as the champ wins out
But now you know the truth

Honesty can kill the fighter
Muhammad Ali knows the same
Honestly the truth is power
And I hear you call my name…


Apparently, an earlier draft of the film had Muhammad Ali as one of the villains in it, and he and Spider-Man had to box one another, while MJ was her boyfriend’s corner man.

This is actually the only song on the album that mentions Spider-Man. Or spiders. I like how the boxing theme reflects his origins as a pro-wrestler too…



8.) Simon Dawes, “Scared of Myself” Some of the lyrics mention “crooked dreams” and “finding a way to watch over you,” so maybe this is like, a song from The Sandman’s perspective, addressed at his sick daughter.

But with lyrics like “I’m scared, scared of myself….without you” and “I have found a way to face the burden of my dreams” it’s so damn emotional, you could totally see Peter Parker listening to it and crying his eyes out. At least, the normal Marvel Comics version of Spider-Man. That guy’s always crying.



9.) Chubby Checker, “The Twist” The first time I saw S-M3, I thought it was kinda odd that this young, twentysomething millionaire Harry Osborn was into Chubby Checker, and, when I saw it the second time, the party I went with all laughed derisively during the scene.

On the other hand, selecting a song that old and dated is probably a safer bet than picking something an actual twentysomething would like, as that would seem dated and lame within a year or three. At least “The Twist” is already kind of dated and lame, so the scene won’t age any more when you return to the film a few years later.



10.) Rogue Wave, “Sightlines” This song’s okay.



11.) Coconut Records, “Summer Day” I really liked this one. Check out the link to hear a couple more songs by them. Some of the lyrics capture the Spider-Man-as-hero-who-can’t-catch-a-break feeling, well-illustrated in the opening sequence from the second film.

Check it out:



If it’s a summer day
With not a cloud in sight
Than tell me why
It feels like it might
Rainnn …onnn… me-e-e-e-e-e-e-e



Apparently, this is actor Jason Schwartzman’s current band. Listen close to the back-up singer—that’s Kirsten Dunst, singing with her Marie Antoinette co-star.



12.) Jet, “Falling Star” And now we’ve got an Australian band on this thing? These guys further irritate me by spelling their name in all capital letters. Which I have not honored.



13.) Sounds Under Radio, “Portrait of a Summer Thief” I stopped listening after one minute and fifteen seconds. That’s all I could stand. Maybe it gets more Spider-Man specific near the end. Otherwise, what’s it have to do with the film? Well, um, The Sandman was a thief. And the movie came out in the summer?



14.) The Wyos, “A Letter From St. Jude” Another Irish band, meaning the country of Ireland is as well represented on this soundtrack as the city of New York. I kinda like this song, too. There are some lyrics that really sound like they capture the whole great power, great responsibility hero’s dilemma Spider-Man faces.

For example:


I suppose I should feel something for everyone out there
And I do
And I want to be of help I do
I do want to be of use
I don’t know what to do
with all the prayers coming to


Wait, prayers? Oh, and it’s called “A Letter From St. Jude” too, huh? Well, never mind.



15.) The Oohlas, “Small Parts” Another song that has nothing at all to do with Spider-Man. But it does contain this nice little couplet: “Don’t go out the back door/ That’s what the front’s for.” I like that.

November 8th's Meanwhile, in Las Vegas...

This week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics column takes a look at Kazimir Strzepek’s The Mourning Star, which you really ought to read. The Mourning Star that is. Not the column. Well, actually, you should read the column too. I mean, that’s why I linked to it.

And speaking of links…




Aaaa! Man, that is one crazy-looking, scary-ass image! I suppose that’s appropriate though, given the subject matter.

Once I recovered from my initial horror and revulsion though, the second thing I thought of when I saw that image was how weird the very existence of variant covers are from a business standpoint. I understand they drive sales up, but, at the same time, the company is essentially paying two different people to provide the covers for a single issue, so, whatever the sales ultimately are, they spent twice as much as they would have if they just paid Jim Lee to draw the cover, instead of Jim Lee and Neal Adams.

Why is DC spending their money like this, particularly since a) Goddam Batman and Robin, the Goddam Boy Wonder is already one of their best-selling goddam titles and b) investing in variant cover schemes only encourages a collector’s mentality and speculation in the Direct Market, which history seems to indicate isn’t healthy for either the market or its leaders like DC?

Why not just have one Jim Lee-drawn cover on this issue, and pay Adams to provide covers for some other Batman-related books that won’t be anywhere near as high-selling as this one will be already? For example, why not put Adams on the covers for the “Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul” crossover in the Bat-books? That would have gave slow/hurried/lazy artists like Tony S. Daniel more time to make the interiors of his Bat-book good instead of having to waste time drawing a pretty generic Batman-on-improbable-gargoyle cover, and likely have boosted sales of each installment of the crossover. Adams art, even just covers, is pretty damn rare these days, after all, and he’s closely associated with Bat-characters Ra’s al Ghul and Talia.

Or if DC doesn’t want to abandon the asinine drive-sales-up-artificially-with-variants-and-damn-the-consequences schemes, why not at least apply it to the lower-selling Bat-books? Like, Batman #670 could have had the Daniel cover and an Adams variant, inflating sales for that book (and then the Detective, Nightwing and Robin, the last two of which sell dismally), instead of making sure All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder sells 90,000 copies instead of 80,000?







Fellow “Best Shots” shooter and controversial Fox Sports soccer writer Jamie Trecker has a new (prose) book out, entitled Love and Blood: At the World Cup with the Footballers, Fans, and Freaks. Here’s an article on Jamie and his book in The Chicago Reader, here’s the publisher’s page (featuring more info and an excerpt), and I understand you can impulse buy books right off the Internet now through sites like this one.

Is it the book any good? Well, I’m only on page 50 so far, but, well, I’m on page 50 of a book about World Cup soccer, and considering the part of my brain where any interest at all in sports would lie was long ago devoted instead to comics trivia, Jamie’s definitely doing something right with his writing. So far, the book’s as much a memoir of his experiences covering the Cup and a recent history of American soccer as it is sports writing. The narrative is fast moving and written in an engaging style.

Given the fact that Jamie and I are on the same comics review team, feel free to take this recommendation with a grain of salt if you like, but I’m enjoying it, so I imagine readers with any interest at all in soccer and/or sports will love it.






Megan Palmer’s song “Deadman” probably isn’t about Boston Brand, but you can listen to it (and two other songs) at her myspace page and decide for yourself. If you like what you hear there, her new album will be available through local label Sunken Treasure Records (from the makers of donewaiting.com!) shortly. Alternately, if you live in Columbus, you can check her out live and snag a copy for yourself at Andyman’s Treehouse November 15-17th.

Halloween Horror!

I can't tell you how many times I've had nightmares that were almost exactly like this. Except without the out-of-control feral children in party clothes wielding weapons. Or the dead dog. Or the guitarist and drummer.

This week, Wednesday is on a Thursday

Well, according to the calendar, today is in fact a Wednesday, but the most important element of any Wednesday—new comic books—are missing, and won't show up on comic shop shelves until tomorrow (Stupid Monday holidays).

Normally, today's the day when I'd post reviews of pretty much everything I bought and read that day, but since I didn't buy or read any comic books today, well, Weekly Haul is postponed until Thursday evening this week.

To mark a Wednesday without comic books then, here's a post that has pretty much nothing at all to do with comic books (although drawing is involved).

Here then are several more animated music videos I really like, to songs that have spent a significant portion of time stuck in my head...



Rilo Kiley; "It's a Hit"



This isn't my favorite Rilo Kiley song, not even from that album (this is), but it's probably my second favorite one. And it has an animated video. A great animated video. I teared up a little the first time I saw the way the Unipines' relatioship ended.




The Shins; "So Says I"



Not my favorite Shins song, but certainly my favorite Shins video. I generally prefer traditional 2D animation to computer generated 3D stuff, but given the relative hotness of computer animated penguins in the cinema of late, this works quite well, I think.




Stolen Minks; "Stop Talking" and "Boys on the Floor"





These videos are probably the most comic book-y, on account of some of the special guest-stars that appear in them, and that one of the stars is the animated avatar of comics blogger Rachelle Goguen.

I was originally just going to post the best of the two vdieos, but I honestly couldn't choose betwen the two, as they're both full on awesome, each ending with one of the two best ways to end any film: the explosion of the entire Earth, and the freeze frame on jumping characters (It's true! Trust me, I'm a film critic).

Learn more about the Minks at their super-cute website, and check out their myspace page, where you can listen to "Batman You're The Sex."

This post has pretty much nothing at all to do with comics (although drawing is involved in the things discussed within it)

I was walking through my local library the other day when the cover of this children's book caught my eye, and I checked it out on the strength of that image alone.

I'm glad I did; it was a fun read, and a really beautifully designed and illustrated book. 365 Penguins (Abrams Books; 2006) is written by Jean-Luc Fromental and illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet, both of whom are apparently rather productive in the world of children's books (I don't recognize their names, and I don't think I've seen any of their previous work...at least not that I can remember. But then, I don't read a lot of children's books).

This is a nice, big, sturdy hardcover, with a nice spine; it would look nice on a coffee table, and nice on a bookshelf, two things I look for in books because, well, I'm shallow.

As for the story, it's first-person-narrated by a little boy who lives with his mother, father and older sister Amy. It starts on New Year's Day, when they receive a delivery of a a penguin in the mail. They get one penguin a day for the rest of the year (hence the title). The book deals with the frustrations of having multiple penguins living in one's house, and how having 365 of them is pretty much impossible.

Jolivet limits her palette to just black, white, orange and blue and brown, and it works out quite lovely. The pages are all big and airy, which makes the encroachment of the hundreds of penguins seem all the more dramatic, and her penguin designs are killer. Each has a blank expression, only really betraying emotion when in the act of running towards or away from something, with its flippers back and beak open.




As problematic as the penguins prove, it could be a lot worse. The story refers to the cost of feeding them, and obliquely to the problem of penguin waste ("We can't stand the smell! Find a solution!" the family complains, after the boy tells us, "Let's not talk about the other problems...") But they are fairly docile, reamining motionless and going along with the father's attempts to organize them by stacking them in pyramids or cubes and, later, in boxes of a dozen, like eggs.

This works fine when there are only 144 of them, but then they all rush out to greet the 145th. I could actually relate pretty well to the whole "how do we organize these hundreds of things which increase in nuber with every passing day and are completely crowding us out of our home?!" conflict, since it parallels my own ongoing struggle to share my one-bedroom apartment with hundreds of comics and graphic novels.

Thank God I don't have to feed my comics.

Anyway, a really fun book. At $17.95, I probably won't buy a copy of my own, because it's repeated entertainment value is kinda low, but it is an all around well-designed, well-illustrated children's book.









And while I'm not really talking about comics at all, here are three animated music videos I really like, to songs that have spent a significant portion of time stuck in my head...




Peter, Bjorn & John; "Young Folks"




Well, they do use dialogue bubbles in this, so I guess it's kinda comic book-y.

I don't know why exactly, but this video really makes me think of the Legion of Super-Heroes. I think it's maybe because when I close my eyes and imagine Saturn Girl and Cosmic Boy, they totally look like the couple doing the singing here. Or that there's a real Mike Allred-ness about the character designs, and Allred's the artist I'd like to see draw the LOSH more than any other.




Los Campesinos; "You! Me! Dancing!"






I happened upon this video purely by accident, and it was my first exposure to Los Campesinos, and, as it turns out, they're a pretty great band. The video itself contains may of my favorite things—laser guns, giant monsters, rocket ships, flying surfboards—and it's cool that it has absolutely nothing to do with the lyrics at all. I really love the song though too, from the Sonic Youth-y slow build at the beginning to the chorus that will embed itself in your brain. See also "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives." (That seems to be it for videos, but you can hear more music at their myspace page).




New York Dolls; "Dance Like a Monkey"





Dozens of dancing primates, Darwin thrusting his pelvis, Hanuman, Dick Cheney's sneer, King Kong, dinosaurs, a mammoth, an orangutan pope, a hot creationist, a monkey with a jetpack, a gorilla with a top hat, skeletons, Bigfoot... it's like a buffet of awesomeness.

Note the bear who's haning out amidst all the monkeys all the time. He is a terrible, terrible dancer.