Ahoy! The legendary BOY of Austin heads back to Jackson this Wednesday, January 11, with the ILLLS of Oxford. Won’t you join us?

Alt “newsrack” format:

Matte steel scrapes against
limestone. There is
a squeak in the corner.

The king grits his teeth &
looks down. The king is always
gritting his teeth.

He doesn’t see limestone, hasn’t since
he was little, sleeping to the gentle
squeak of the wagon. The king sees
CaCO₃, not limestone, he sees
calcite and aragonite, chalcedony and
jasper. The king sees that which is
there and not there.

He thinks of Hercules’ Cudgel, of the
dead fool in Giza, of the souls who
tore the limestone from the mountain
two miles hence, and dragged it here
with ropes and pulleys, donkeys and
sweat, carved blocks from Latverian
fossil, built his home.

While the king is staring at
his feet the little mouse
in the corner
makes her
escape.

Thanks for stopping by!—Brannon

Well, it’s finally here: Sixteen interviews with comics great (and great talker about comics) Howard Chaykin, from an early 1975 interview with a young Dave Sim to a previously unpublished interview with yours truly conducted in 2010.

Chaykin is a fascinating character in the development of American comics: Steeped in the idioms and tropes of mainstream adventure comics, working mainly in the monthly serial format favored by the industry’s major players, he’s also a fierce proponent of comics as a complex medium capable of offering unique aesthetic experiences and dealing with politics, culture, and human nature with intelligence and humor. Comics may be stupid junk, Chaykin’s work tells us, but they don’t have to be. For anyone interested in the development of comics as an art form and as an industry, Chaykin’s appraisals—sometimes caustic, sometimes hilarious—of his contemporaries and their employers are must reading. I’m glad to have had this opportunity to bring them together and bring them to light again, most of them for the first time since their initial publication.

Assembling this book further cemented my firm belief that Chaykin’s contribution to comics is broader, weirder, and more varied than even many of his staunch fans usually acknowledge. The tendency to see Chaykin as playing endless variations on the first three issues of American Flagg! vol. 1 is understandable—those are aggressively ambitious comics, comics designed specifically to make you feel bad about everything else on your pull list, and many of his most persistent themes and spectacular formal effects are present there in highly concentrated form. But such a view neglects how Chaykin’s art and writing are perpetually evolving, how what seem to be the basic premises of his visual style and his thematic preoccupations are constantly being challenged (as I suggested in this post on the second year of American Flagg!). A major takeaway from the book for me is a sense of Chaykin’s basic restlessness: the Chaykin of “Cody Starbuck” is not the Chaykin of Flagg! is not the Chaykin of Time² is not the Chaykin of City of Tomorrow, and on and on. Chaykin’s range of influences is deep and wide—and completely idiosyncratic—and his reflections on how his relationship to those influences has changed over the years offer valuable insight into his craft. They also underscore just how omnivorous a medium comics can be, capable of adapting visual styles from a diverse array of traditions into the service of narrative.

The book is available from the publisher, as well as from Amazon. Barnes and Noble has it at 10% off (as of this writing). The best discount I’m seeing at the moment is at Sci-Fi Genre, where it’s listed at $31.99. If you prefer to do your buying through the direct market, it should be in comic shops as early as this Wednesday.

I don’t want to rehash the acknowledgments page here, but: Much appreciation is due the crack team at the University Press of Mississippi, including Walter Biggins, Valerie Jones, Shane Gong, and Steve Yates for their patient and unflagging assistance throughout the process of putting this book together. Thanks to Seth Kushner for use of the cover photo. I’m glad to have this book out in the world and delighted at how great it looks.

Batman and Robin #21
Batman Incorporated #3
BPRD: Hell on Earth: Gods #3
Captain America and the First 13 #1

Hulk #30. Hand it to Jeff Parker: If he is writing a comic whose cover promises a compound red-green Hulk, then by golly he is going to give you a compound red-green Hulk on the inside. In this Parker, perhaps unwittingly, helps make up for one of the great disappointments of my youthful comics reading life, West Coast Avengers #30:

Come on, doesn’t that look amazing? Wouldn’t you have flipped out over that if you were 13? But o villainy most foul: There is no composite Avenger inside. So my thanks to Jeff Parker for healing the psychic paper cuts of my adolescence.

Incredible Hulks #624

New Avengers #10. Hey, so this Avengers book has Howard Chaykin drawing Dominic Fortune narrowly escaping being murdered by a sexy Nazi spy in stockings. Can you imagine how much better every Avengers book would be if it featured a Chaykin protagonist doing something so distinctively Chaykin-y? What if, at the end of the Kree-Skrull War, instead of Rick Jones extruding a bunch of golden age heroes from his psyche, a transvestite prostitute murdered a vampire with a Nazi blowjob and then listened to some jazz records? The Kree-Skrull War would definitely deserve its reputation then.

Punisher: In the Blood #4. I cannot believe how much Rick Remender has made me care about the Punisher.

Thoreau at Walden. I loved reading this book panel-by-panel; the muted brown tones allow Porcellino to pull off some lovely low-tech chiaroscuro effects, and Porcellino’s rendering of subtle moments—Thoreau lying in bed listening to a whip-poor-will—are achingly effective. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that in focusing so much on Thoreau’s transcendent communion with nature, Porcellino does a disservice to the complex voice that Thoreau develops in Walden. Thoreau is in awe of nature, sure, and maybe that’s even the dominant mode. But he’s also snarky, caustic, and sarcastic—coming across sometimes, frankly, as a self-righteous prick. And it wasn’t until I picked up on that side of Thoreau that I really began to appreciate Walden as a great work of literature instead of an interminable collection of platitudes about living simply, its only contemporary relevance as a source of material to be quoted endlessly over images of flocks of geese at the end of CBS Sunday Morning.

To be sure, no one’s afternoon is going to be wasted by spending an hour or two with Porcellino’s adaptation; and as the adapter, it’s his prerogative to pick and choose which elements to highlight. But I do wish Porcellino had grappled with the thornier aspects of Thoreau—I think it would have been a more interesting book, and I’d be curious to see how such a critical engagement might inflect Porcellino’s voice in his own comics.

Venom #1

Sunday funnies in the Baton Rouge Advocate
Assorted webcomics (same as last week)

Afrodisiac. Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca have a (black) dynamite high concept: What if the tropes and idioms of blaxploitation narratives had come to dominate mainstream comics the way that the tropes and idioms of superhero narratives have? How strange, how uncanny, would it be to read a sampling of stories from a world in which these conventions were naturalized in the same way that the no-less-bizarre conventions of superhero comics have been here? I thoroughly enjoyed Afrodisiac, but I can’t help but feel that Rugg and Maruca could have pressed further: I liked the array of imagined covers from a variety of genres and eras (Bronze Age Marvel, Dell funny animal, EC horror, romance, shojo manga, et cetera), but the “excerpts” from various Afrodisiac comics are all drawn in roughly the same style. Why not bring the same variety that we see on the covers to the narrative portions as well? And as long as you’re imagining a world dominated by the blaxploitation genre, why not reflect on the business and economic decisions that led to that dominance? Ultimately the book comes off as fun but slight; maybe that’s all its creators were going for, but it feels like a missed opportunity nonetheless.

Black Heart Billy. You read Tim Jones’s interview with Rick Remender, right?

Fight!

Hark, A Vagrant!

Incognito: Bad Influences #4. Colorist Val Staples is killing it here.

Incredible Hulks #623. My plan was just to stick with the Parker/Hardman Hulk series (justly praised by Chris Sims here) but the issue’s jaunt to the Savage Land convinced me to give it a shot. I actually didn’t realize that Greg Pak was back on board as writer; he wrote some of the best Hulk stories of recent years, so I’ll stick around for a while and see how this plays out.

Joe the Barbarian #8

“Portrait of the Artist as a Young %A?*!” from Art Spiegelman’s reissued Breakdowns.

Secret Warriors #25

Shadow #9 (1988)

Tales of the Fear Agent

Thor #620

Thunderbolts #154. I was perfectly okay with Jeff Parker not explaining why it made any kind of sense for the Man-Thing to join the Thunderbolts, but then we would have missed a clever and graceful story that makes the Man-Thing more monstrous and more human all at once. Parker is adept at pulling together pieces from Marvel’s big patchy shared universe to develop character and generate emotional resonance, not just to earn nerd points. Although nerd points are not to be sneezed at! I’m hoping to redeem mine for a new Schwinn 10-speed. (This reminds me that I once actually sent away for the Captain O sales kit. I didn’t sell much.)

Secret Avengers #10

Secret Six #31 This comic had a very last-season-of-Angel feel. I mean that in the best way.

Sunday funnies in the Baton Rouge Advocate

Uptight #4. Jordan Crane uses visual clutter in a highly appealing way in these two very different stories.

Witchfinder #2

PF is proud to present Tim Jones’ interview with celebrated comics scribe Rick Remender, writer of Fear Agent, Uncanny X-Force, and an acclaimed recent run on Punisher, among other titles. Remender has been making headlines in the comics world for a high-profile gig coming up on the new Venom and on FOX News for his role as writer of the recently released Bulletstorm video game. Tim and Rick discuss punk rock, comics, and what the two have to do with one another.

Tim: So, I wanted to ask you about punk rock and comics, because those are the two things that I’m very heavily into that you are also, from your work, obviously very into.

Rick: You are the first person in my 11 years in comics to ask me those two questions together. That’s true, that’s real.

Tim: Wow. See, that’s one of the things, I always feel like nobody else likes those two things at the same time, but then when I found your Punisher stuff I was like “Holy shit! Look at this guy!”

Rick: Yeah, no, we, I, I, spent 3 years. Well first, is this for a podcast, or a type interview that we’re talking about? What is happening right now? What is going on? Where am I? Where are we?

Tim: I’m going to type it out, but I’m not great with formulating questions, I’m more conversational, I guess.

Rick: Oh, that’s fine. I just didn’t know, yeah, I guess the interview has begun. Yeah, speaking of that, when I first started doing comics books I did this thing called “Captain Dingleberry” with some friends of mine when we were working on Anastasia, we were animators, and we were listening to Frank Zappa and Joe’s Garage a bit and thinking that comics needed more of that, and how much fun it would be to do things that were that ridiculous. And it did fairly well, but we got tired of it pretty quick. The absurdity thing is fun, but it only took us so far.

The next thing I developed was Black Heart Billy which was going to be sort of my love letter to growing up in the 80’s hardcore scene as a skate punk. And I guess this was like 1997, 96, when I started drawing the character and coming up with ideas. I didn’t have much to go on. So when I moved to San Francisco, I teamed up with Kieron Dwyer we started making Black Heart Billy and we gave it a real go. We did a couple issues of it, and it didn’t sell very well at all, it did okay: 3000 copies, then down to 2. Not enough to make any money, so you have to do it for love, and at that point I was already destitute.

San Francisco has crazy expenses and I moved there during the “dot-com” boom, which was a crazy nightmare. So I took the stuff to Fat Mike at Fat Records, who are local in San Francisco, and he really liked it, so he started paying us to do more Black Heart Billy stories and covers for the Fat Wreck comic book catalogue they started doing and it was cool. You know, everyone can say what they want about the 90’s punk stuff but Mike’s money was always where his mouth was in terms of politics and what they were trying to do. They paid us to do our comic, and that was cool. We did some album covers for NOFX and Lagwagon, No Use For A Name and stuff like that.

But long story short, speaking of what you were saying, they did realize that there aren’t a lot of punk-minded people in comics and that’s sort of something I deal with to this day. You know, people who don’t have the same sensibilities. The people who do, you know like Steve Niles, he was a DC punker, he was in Grey Matter, on Dischord. He and I have struck up a friendship immediately based on our love of hardcore and growing up in the 80’s punk scene. So, we are out there. Just few and far between.

Tim: It’s strange thing to me because they seem very similar in terms of the climate or the fans; it’s just a small, very dedicated fan base.

Rick: Yeah, it’s an underground art form. It really is. I guess it’s more prevalent now that Hollywood has started making movies of things, but you know, for me, when I was a kid . . . I think it was like, 1987 when I was in the 8th grade, and my days were filled with punk rock and skateboarding and comic books. And that was my life, you know, those are the things I look back on, when I was 12 years old, those were the things I loved more than anything and it sort of shaped me more than anything.

And I remember, and then that led to more the underground art scene where I think Robert Williams was introduced to me via a Thrasher magazine in 1987 that had an expose on old Robert Williams and his paintings which blew my mind, because there were such technique and such amazing energies and at the same time it was a holdover from that psychedelic era that he came from, you know, Zap comics and all that stuff. So at the same time he was speaking to me as a kid of the 80’s, as a punk rocker, he was speaking to me about something that was relevant and exciting. And it was, if you look at what Juxtapoz gave birth to, what Robert Williams gave birth to in the 90’s, I know that we’re still not at the point where we can appreciate anything from the 90’s, you know, we all have to be super fucking hip and look down our nose at everything because it hasn’t been 20 or 25 years yet and anything that wasn’t incredibly hardcore is to be shit on but, I think that scene gave birth to a lot of really talented artists and a really cool scene in general, Mark Ryden, all that sort of stuff.

Tim: I think Raymond Pettibon, his art is pretty similar to some comic type stuff.

Rick: Yeah, I think if we saw more, and I don’t wanna sound preachy, but if we saw more people in comics that were accessible, it needs a groundswell, it can’t just be one or two people or something like that or people who are trying their best to make something sort of punk minded. There is a market for that, there are people who want that. Unfortunately, the majority of the comic book fans that are left, the diehard fans, they’re mainstream comic fans. And that’s fine, I like that too, I grew up reading Marvel comics and it wasn’t till I found Dan Clowes’ A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron that I sort of made my way over into the indie stuff, it was ‘91 or ‘92 when that came out. I think that it would be great if there was a way to . . . maybe the iPad, maybe it will be the vehicle to get more comics into more hands.

Tim: I wanted to get a sense of your background with music; where did you grow up?

Rick: I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, with a governor who still called black people pick-a-ninnies and a population that stridently opposed the Martin Luther King holiday. I got beaten up for being a punker, I got bottles thrown at me, I got chased by guys in trucks. It was always really cute, by the time I moved to San Francisco in ‘98, punk had blown up again and it was more like a costume that everybody wore. It was so nice, it was so safe. If you had a pineapple or liberty spikes in Arizona in the mid ‘80s you got fucked with, pretty hard. And we did. In terms of the scene it was almost like a spillover from Los Angeles, it was a six hour drive from LA so we were like LA-lite. We got Agent Orange, Adolescents, FEAR, Suicidal Tendencies came all the time.

Tim: The late 80s is the start of the metal crossover thing.

Rick: Yeah and this is right before crossover. Circle Jerks were still touring for Wonderful, DRI was still punk, it was right before all the metal crossover stuff. So I probably found punk when I was 12 in ’85, just at the tail end of when hardcore died for the people living in the cities where it was thriving. So for a kid who was living in Arizona, and I always felt like a bit of an outcast, to hear Ian Mackaye sing about not adhering to the norm and not adhering to mindless stupidity in terms of hopping in a Camaro and slamming down a beer and being misogynistic, it was eye opening, it was liberating to hear that there were smart people out there that were young and making things.

The idea that they were making things opened me up to my entire life. I know it’s clichéd but DIY is why I succeeded. On all my own terms I’ve managed to do 90% of only what I want to in print. The rest is jobs I had to take while I was starving and had to pay bills, but the DIY concept is what I picked up and the positive mental attitude. Everything these guys were talking about and singing about, it was like modern day transcendental anti-conformity, it spoke to a 12 year old pretty well. For me it spoke to me not just at that age but stayed with me my entire life. So I share ownership on all my projects, I can go to bed soundly at night, I have been fair to the point of being stepped on by every artist I’ve ever worked with and really everybody I’ve ever worked with so that’s when you discover people who don’t have the same mindset. Those people are looking more for monetary gratification, ego gratification, to have the spotlight put on them, more than people who are into the craft and the art form. But all of that stuff came from punk rock.

Tim: When you were talking about Minor Threat, I was thinking about how I had that album when I was about that age too, but I found them through the internet, and I guess the internet has a huge effect as far as the idea of a “regional sound” or a regional anything really. And I was able to use it because I was just devouring everything I could get my hands on associated with punk, and after I read Please Kill Me I was like “Oh comic books are punk too?”

Rick: Yeah, and that goes back to the Ramones and stuff. There’s always been sort of a connection between the cultures, but it’s not as prevalent now as it might have once been. You can’t get a handful of comics at a 7/11. And that’s how I found comics, I was with some friends and we were skating in front of a 7/11 in 1984 and I went in to get a slurpee with my friends and I saw a bunch of Marvel comics on the stands and I just couldn’t not buy them. It was Secret Wars #4 with the Hulk holding up a mountain with all these dead superheroes and I was like “What the fuck, I gotta find out what that’s about.” But it’s cool that there is still connective tissue there. The culture’s changing quite a bit, but I’m glad to hear that there are still threads that lead one to the other.

Tim: Frankencastle was the first thing of yours that I read, and that someone took a really crazy idea to the Punisher after he’s been pretty much shaped entirely by Garth Ennis’ run. A lot of people did not like it at all which was shocking to me, knowing that the Punisher has had things like turning himself black happen.

Rick: You know, I think there’s a lot of people who take the stuff so seriously that, if, on the surface it doesn’t look like something that the rest of the world can see as a mature art form that they have to walk away from it. Those are people who are mired in the perception that other people have of them and not really my kind of people anyway. The people who like sitcoms. They like shit that doesn’t change, that has a beginning, a middle, and an end where everything is back to where it was when it’s over. It’s very comfortable. And there are people who love the Universal monsters and the Legion of Monsters who predate Monster Squad by like 15 years in Marvel Comics, in love with all of that, who have the idea that Marvel should be chocolate and peanut butter all the time. There should be all kinds of crazy things happening all the time because you shouldn’t be able to control what happens to you. The X-Men shouldn’t always fight X-Men villains, they should stumble into MODOK one day and be like “Oh shit it’s MODOK!” I just the like the way that the themes work and the interconnectivity of the characters. So for me, the idea of taking two things that were so dissimilar and mixing them together in the way that we did, we found a way where it was natural for it to happen and it worked really well in terms of structure. Some people were gonna respond to that and some people were gonna hate it. But those people weren’t gonna buy the regular Punisher either, they’re just gonna bitch because you changed something and they don’t like it, they don’t like change.

Tim: In Fear Agent, you manage to do something that is both very difficult and very cool by establishing that bad things are going to happen to major characters early and often.

Rick: Yeah, you gotta surprise people. You have to surprise them five times. You have to keep them guessing or its “oh I can see where this is going, I know what you’re doing here.” And it’s easier in a creator owned book where I can do anything. I don’t have to get it approved or convince anyone it’s a good idea, I just have the idea and my buddy draws it and it’s there. The downside to that is you don’t have an extra pair of eyes to talk about your structure and make sure that you know what you’re doing, but it allows you the freedom to do things that are unexpected and hopefully surprising.

Tim: The aesthetic is pretty unique too, the 50s Buck Rogers rockets.

Rick: Yeah, what got Tony and I motivated is that we’re big fans of Wally Wood, and the 1950s Science Fiction stuff from EC Comics and the Frazetta covers and stuff. In my time as an artist, Wally Wood and Will Elder were the guys I sort of emulated the most. I just had a raging hard on for all of that sci fi stuff, especially the aesthetic. So I wanted to take them and mix it with some modern storytelling sensibility and do some postmodern pulp.

Tim: I saw a 1930s Buck Rogers serial recently where a scientist looks through a telescope pointed at Mars, which is inhabited by people with tiger striped eyebrows, and he says “let’s see which way the war arrow is pointed! At Earth! The war arrow points to Earth!” Which makes perfect sense, because alien civilizations have giant arrows to remind them which way the war is. So, is that the kind of old-school crazy sensibility you’re into?

Rick: Oh that’s so great. We need more and more of that stuff. I just wish there was a bigger audience for it. I think you have to find a way to make things that crazy. A lot of people give Marvel shit because they don’t try new things, but Marvel let me turn the Punisher into fucking Frankenstein. Not all the mainstream fans really dig the craziness of pulp, which I don’t understand it at all. What you just said? I wish I was writing that story right now. There’s something about the purity of the Saturday morning set up that gets me more excited than anything else but there’s just not a giant market for it. But that’s not why you do that kind of stuff, you do it because it’s what you like.

Tim: Does Old Heath Huston look like Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4 on purpose?

Rick: No, I’ve never played those, Tony knows nothing about them, it’s just a coincidence. I have seen the character, but I’ve never played the games. Once you batter up a guy and flash forward him into the future, a mustache and an eyepatch happen naturally in the story, especially since the body he’s in had its eye gouged out by…Heath. It’s ridiculous to explain that to anyone who hasn’t read the story. But it was definitely not an homage, it was beaten up old Heath. If look at the design for his dad it’s more Sam Elliot, and the idea is that he looks like his dad, he has the mustache.

Tim: Grizzled old guy with an eyepatch is a look that has a long storied history as well, Nick Fury, Snake Plissken, countless Westerns.

Rick: Yeah, and so much of it is leaning into men’s magazine cover pulp ideas. There’s a lot of art types and tropes. It comes down to the character sensibility, the aesthetics are all somewhat classic.

Tim: X-Force has been selling really well, congratulations. Why do think it sells so much?

Rick: Thanks, you’re always gonna sell a ton of comic books when the Wolverine is running around.

Tim: And the Deadpool, people like the Deadpool. Did you get to pick the team?

Rick: No, I didn’t. They had already put the team together when I was in talks to do the book. The team was obviously why I wanted to do the book, more than anything because of my connection to Fantomex and my love for Betsy/Psylocke. Obviously Wolverine and Deadpool are a ton of fun to write and great characters. But the big juice came from what I saw in the potential for these other characters and how they would interact with the popular ones like Deadpool and Wolverine. I had some ideas that I’m getting to now to develop Deadpool into a three dimensional person where we see his motives a little more, and you start to see more of what’s going on behind the curtains. He’s the guy whose schizophrenic, he’s always wacky and making jokes, but there’s always some kind of personality issue at the core of that. For him, I imagined that he’s this guy who is refuse. He’s a failed product of Weapon X and he’s never been accepted anywhere and always sort of been the pariah. So the humor is a protective wall to shield himself and I like trying to tear that down and show the gooey human core in the middle. So there’s a lot of great character stuff with those five together. Someone told me that those were the five they were thinking, I got to work on connecting them with interpersonal dynamics.

Tim: That’s kind of surprising to me, especially with Fantomex because he doesn’t really seem to have the same historical pedigree as the rest of them.

Rick: I think he’s a great character who just needed to be handled correctly. He’s over in the regular X-Men book right now as well as this one, and I think everybody writing him has a lot of love for him. You get a lot of love for a character, you can build it into something pretty great I think. There’s big things coming up for him and I think he’s getting really popular. And that’s what you want, to be a part of taking an underutilized character that was created by somebody as wonderful as Grant Morrison and to help more people appreciate him.

Tim: In telling people about X-Force, I realized that if I can’t sell people on the concept of your books: “They have to kill Apocalypse who has been reincarnated as a child,” I can sell them on a moment like, “Deadpool talks to his butthole for three pages.”

Rick: Does Deadpool talk to his butthole? I didn’t know I wrote that. Oh, he is talking to his butthole, I did write that. I’m sorry, I’m questioning you and you’re like “no dude, you did write that.” I do enjoy with the Deadpool doing things that are comic relief, but I want him to be clinically crazy, I want him to feel like you’re reading a crazy person. I think he works great in limited doses, especially in a team like X-Force where they missions are serious. It lends itself to having a nice bit of comic relief, and that’s one of the aspects of the team that works perfectly.

—Tim Jones, 20, is from Ocean Springs, Mississippi. His interests include punk rock, comic books, comic books about punk rock, and punk rock about comic books.

Action Comics #898

Amazing Spider-Man #654.1. I dug this intro to the new Flash Thompson/Venom status quo, although it maybe moved the inevitable “when will the symbiote take over” storyline farther down the road than I would have liked so soon. Then again, I’m someone who always complains that not enough happens in any given issue of a superhero comic, so really I guess I’m just hard to please.

Captain America #615.

DeadpoolMAX #5. If you’re going to write a comic about a villainess sadistically murdering a group of cub scouts, you should definitely get Kyle Baker to draw it.

Fantastic Four #588. I liked Nick Dragotta’s art on this mostly dialogue-free requiem for the FF’s fallen member. An issue-long “in memoriam” issue like this is tough to pull off in the superhero genre, since we know that Johnny Storm is coming back at some point, and since Hickman knows we know, and so forth. Smartly, Hickman doesn’t dwell too much on the melodrama but instead focuses on how the various characters’ reactions to their friend’s death set new plot threads in motion. You know what it made me think of, though? Justice League America #40, the funeral for Mister Miracle issue. Still the best superhero funeral ever—an all the more impressive achievement since if you were reading the ongoing Mister Miracle title at the time you knew for sure that he wasn’t dead. Adam Hughes turned in some lovely moody artwork on that, and Giffen and DeMatteis nailed the various JLers responses. I’m pretty sure I cried.

Hulk #28.

Iron Man 2.0 #1. I might keep reading this just because they gave at least a passing mention to Rhodey’s stint in The Crew in the character history text piece. Also, there is apparently a story where War Machine travels back to WW2 and fights alongside the Howlers? I’m going to need to read that.

Knight and Squire #3, 5. Paul Cornell’s playful and sweet-natured adventure series takes a sudden turn into the darker DCU proper. I don’t know what the plans are for the characters after this but I hope Cornell keeps working on something in this vein—the DC line-up needs it.

Thunderbolts #152-153. Jeff Parker’s King Hyperion is a great heel.

X-Men #8. This arc probably isn’t an official audition for Gischler to write Spider-Man, but maybe it should be?

Batman and Robin #20

Blackhawk #217 (1966)

BPRD: Hell on Earth: Gods #2. Fury’s Tenets of Reading Speculative Fiction #27: A well executed infodump is a thing of beauty. Recognize.

Brave and the Bold #157 (1979). Batman and Kamandi! Also notable because Jim Gordon asks this question of a kidnapped senator: “What did Extortion, Inc. want with you?” Gee, I dunno, Jim! We better call Batman in on this one! No wonder Gotham is the crime capital of the world.

Casanova: Gula #2.

Detective Comics #492 (1980). Notable for slice-of-life Bob Haney/Bob Oskner short about the “Gotham-not-Brooklyn Bridge” and a Bob Rozakis/Romeo Tanghal/Vince Coletta Man-Bat story in which the Man-Bat reveals that he is the least curious superhero of all time.

Devil Dinosaur #3 (1978)

Incognito: Bad Influences #3

Marvel Team-Up #59-60 (1977). Featuring Spider-Man, Yellowjacket, and the Wasp. Boy, someone needs to write about the gender politics of superhero comics in the late 1970s that begins with this Claremont/Byrne collaboration. It’s clearly an attempt to shift the Wasp away from her dizzy dame characterization and to make her more of a credible physical threat in battles, but the solution they hit on—she’s driven by judgment-impairing intense emotion over the supposed death of Yellowjacket, who it turns out isn’t dead at all, and also had been secretly injecting her with a serum to increase her powers—is, let us say, problematic. (On a side note, isn’t it crazy that there is no ongoing Wasp series, or even a planned mini or anything? I mean, aside from the fact that she’s dead right now? Now that Gossip Girl’s popularity has peaked a year or two ago, isn’t this the perfect time for Marvel to debut a series about a strategically daffy but secretly iron-willed socialite heiress superhero? Possibly drawn by Colleen Coover? I would read this, Marvel.)

New Avengers #9. I think we can all agree that a Howard Chaykin-drawn Nick Fury: Caribbean Nazi Hunter series should definitely be in the works.

Our Fighting Forces #174 (1977). Featuring the Losers! Why can’t I go online right now and buy wallpaper featuring Joe Kubert’s Losers covers? I would totally decorate the nursery with them so our children could learn to be ever vigilant against the Nazis, even—especially—when it looks like things are finally going their way.

Osborn #3

Power Man and Iron Fist #1

Sabre #1 (1982). There is something sublime about confronting the sheer volume of text in this comic. Not sublime as in “super-duper,” but as in “too vast to comprehend with the rational mind, and yet somehow there is something pleasurable in the pain of the failed attempt to do so.” I think there is some lovely atmospheric Paul Gulacy artwork under the word balloons, but who can really say?

The Scorpion #3 (1975). The third and final issue of this Atlas/Seabord title, published after editorial conflicts drove series creator Howard Chaykin across the street to Marvel, where he re-christened the character Dominic Fortune. (Or so the story goes; I think the similarities between the characters are vastly overstated.) The new story, by Jim Craig and Gabriel Levy, updates the setting to the 70s, with a new character bearing the name, this one a more traditional superhero type. There’s a pretty good golem rampage here.

Superboy #212 (1975). Actually, forget that: The conclusion of the Legion of Super-Heroes back-up story in this issue is way, way creepier than anything in MTU.

Superman/Batman #79

Superman Family #188 (1978). Jose Garcia-Lopez cover!

Weird War Tales #108 (1981). You would think it would be impossible to write a boring story about the Creature Commandos, wouldn’t you?

Alright—off to Atlanta to talk about Captain America and the South.

Visitation has attracted a fair amount of critical attention over the years, including some very worthwhile studies by Robert McRuer, Suzanne Jones, and George Hovis, among others. My essay is about the curious silence in the criticism on the subject of the novel’s dense web of allusions to superhero comics, science fiction stories, and general geekery; while critics have been quick to tie Kenan to William Faulkner, it makes just as much sense, I argue, to tie him to William Gibson—maybe more, given that one of the novel’s epigraphs is from Neuromancer. But ultimately the piece is about how Faulkner v. Gibson is a false dichotomy, about how our notions of what constitutes “southern culture” can be enlarged and usefully complicated if we think of, say, reading Batman comics and participating in a hog slaughter as mutually informing aspects of the experience of living in the South.

The essay was a ton of fun to write and research—I got to dig through old Avengers back issues at LSU’s Hill Memorial Library in search of a particular reference, which Kenan was generous enough to confirm for me. And of course anyone who followed our roundtable on Jujitsu for Christ, or read my interview with Jack Butler in Mississippi Quarterly, knows that this issue is a source of ongoing fascination for me, and one around which I’m hoping to build a larger project.

(This is essentially the academic version of my shorter, quasi-semi-autobiographical piece “Tony Stark in Belzoni,” soon to appear in Lost Battles alongside the work of some swell writers.)

This ends the self-promotion. For now.