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As always, there is only ONE right answer! It is a moral imperative to keep our categories clear, and our aesthetic bloodlines pure.

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First off, if you’re in Montreal, don’t forget your plans for tonight.

Second, intervening events have prevented me from being able to write the review of Alan Moore’s The Courtyard I promised would start up the CCCBC today. But I will get it up soon!

In the meantime, let me resurrect a post I almost wrote last February. (You have been spared about a dozen almost-posts this year alone.) I don’t remember what I had originally planned to say exactly (my surviving notes are sketchy), but mostly I just wanted to link to this really amazing, lengthy interview with screenwriter Lem Dobbs, which offers a stiff dose of Auteur-Theory polemics. (I’m not actually that big of a fan of Dobbs’s actual films—at least those that I have seen—but this is great stuff.) Eventually this will all work around to a discussion of comics, I swear.

Here’s a sample:

The Auteur Theory is clearly the most practical and, as you say, self-evident way of looking at or “reading” movies, and it’s mind-boggling after all these years to still have to listen to screenwriters rail against it without the least notion of what they’re talking about. It’s so funny/sad their undying belief that only an Ingmar Bergman can possibly be an auteur because he “writes and directs his own scripts.” “No one ever made a good movie from a bad script” is their other favorite cliché — now and forever blind to the power and the glory of Sam Fuller, Edgar Ulmer, Douglas Sirk, and countless sows’ ears made into silk purses by distinctive, individualistic directors, including many movies that have no script at all except — in Writers Guild parlance — “as represented on the screen.” (more…)

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Some Monday reading for you. The often enlightening and always at least thought-provoking (even at his most objectionable) Jonathan Rosenbaum has reprinted his 1995 essay on Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb. Here’s a sample:

Every American male knows the sound of that nervous tittering, and Robert Crumb’s comic world is not only suffused with it (his own adult sexual obsession is amazonian, big-assed, thick-legged women) but encircled by it. I can’t think of any other movie that’s dealt with this kind of laughter so directly. Cassavetes’s fictional film Faces probably came the closest, but there it was simply backslapping businessmen dealing with everyday sexual embarrassment. Crumb cuts deeper, letting us see the potential madness lurking beyond the simple nervousness of sexual panic — a madness disquietingly made to seem as American and almost as ordinary as that pie in the sky. This is one creepy movie, and it should come as no surprise that David Lynch, who helped to get it released, is mentioned at the top of the credits.

Rosenbaum has also written a new piece for the new Criterion DVD of the film, available here.

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A series of announcements.

First, if you’re going to be in the Montreal area next week, our very own Jeet Heer will be dispensing wisdom during a can’t miss evening at the Librairie Drawn & Quarterly on August 19.

Second, in the under-appreciated cartoonists department (nineties-wave division): Since April (how did I miss this?), the great Jon Lewis has been posting regular new pages of his classic True Swamp series. The first installment can be found here. This is welcome news.

Another alumnus of that same era of comics, Jay Stephens, has begun collaborating with Bob “Slylock Fox” Weber Jr. on a strip for King Features, Oh Brother! According to the publicity e-mail I received, this is the “first webcomic” built and launched by a newspaper syndicate. I am not qualified to judge the veracity of that statement. In any case, Stephens was one of a whole slew of interesting cartoonists published by the late, lamented Black Eye, a company whose output seems to have somewhat slipped from collective memory lately, but deserves more critical attention.

Oh, and finally, in regard to the CC Comic-Book Club discussed last week: thank you all for your suggestions. For various reasons, I don’t think that most of them will work for this particular purpose, BUT I still plan to review some of them as individual issues in the near future, particularly Smoke Signal and Glamourpuss. The Neal Adams Batman book is just too long—I can’t imagine writing twelve full posts about it. Maybe I’ll just do one of those issues too, but we’ll see how things go. In the end, it seems like the Alan Moore series will work best. Regardless of the book’s quality, which I don’t want to pre-judge, there are a lot of interesting angles to tackle—adaptation, prose vs. comics, sequels, Lovecraftian fiction, comics scripting vs comics art, how it fits into Moore’s larger body of work, etc.—that should lead to solid post and comment fodder.

In any case, next Thursday, I’ll put up the first post. If it goes well, we can follow Neonomicon up with something else, and if a new obvious series hasn’t shown up on stands by then (please feel free to keep suggesting nominees), maybe we can pick an already completed series or run from the past. Until then, next Thursday, I’ll write about The Courtyard, a rather lackluster comic book not written by Alan Moore, but adapted by Antony Johnston from one of Moore’s throwaway prose stories. The book is relevant mostly because Neonomicon is a direct sequel to it. The Thursday after that, I will cover Neonomicon issue 1, and so on.

Okay, now go look at that Jim Rugg cartoon again and forget all about this.

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…or, if you want, wait until a safe and appropriate time, but definitely read this amazing career-spanning interview with Drew Friedman. Subjects include Albert Brooks, Groucho Marx, Will Eisner, MAD magazine, Mark Newgarden, Woody Allen, and David Levine, among others.

UPDATE: Now available in audio form!

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All of this recent talk makes me wonder if it might be fun to discuss a serialized comic book as it is published, issue by issue. Sort of a Comics Comics Comic-Book Book Club (I’ll think of a better name) or something. Unfortunately, here in the universally proclaimed “New Golden Age” of comic books, the pickings are surprisingly slim—most of the books Frank mentioned here are well underway by this point (or in the case of Bulletproof Coffin, has already been covered). So the best book for our purposes is unclear.

Initially, I thought Alan Moore’s new four-issue series, Neonomicon, might be a good fit, both because it just began and because it will be short. (Also, apparently, it is his LAST COMIC EVER, but somehow I feel like I’ve heard that song before.) But maybe Moore is too much old news. Do any of you have any suggestions? Ideally, an anthology title such as Weirdo or Eightball, in which the contents changed dramatically from issue to issue, would be best, but I’m not aware of anything like that existing today. If Kramers Ergot was coming out on a regular basis, it would be perfect, but it’s not. I guess we could cover MOME, starting with the current issue (which is kind of crazy actually), or even backtracking to discuss the issues of it from the beginning. Or heck, I haven’t read Heavy Metal in a thousand years, but Joe keeps plugging it, so there must be something there. Any readily available series would work, probably, though I think something contemporary and/or ongoing would be the most fun.

Anyway, the hive mind probably has many good ideas that I haven’t even considered, and nominations are welcome. Either way, a chosen title will be announced within the week. The resulting series might not make it past a single entry or may become a thousand-post epic. At one post a month that would mean the club would run until 2093–by then comic books (and Comics Comics itself) will be downloaded directly into our brains. An uplifting thought, for sure.

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Following last Thursday’s post, my friend and colleague “Jolly” Jeet Heer graciously sent me the following letter, written by Charles Schulz to Walt Kelly in 1954. I’m not sure how much light it shines on what Schulz thought about how his strips would be read when collected (at least unless we read between the lines, as I invite you all to do), but it is definitely a fascinating glimpse into his mindset at the beginning of his career, and displays well his trademark humility and understated humor.

A transcription of the letter can be found after the jump:

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Ah, the passions of youth. Could this letter, found in the 58th issue of Fantastic Four, be the first published opinion of James Wolcott?

[Tip o’ the mouse to Senses-Shatterin’ Sean Howe for the scoop!]

UPDATE: And the answer is … Yes!

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Well, one of my initial impetuses for the way [Wilson] was told was that I was reading the collected Peanuts editions […] And to read them in sequence, it felt like a new way to tell a story, in a way. I mean, that wasn’t Charles Schulz’s goal was for you to read them all at once, that you’re supposed to read them every day. But to read them in sequence, it really felt like it was replicating the way that you remember the passage of time in memory. It – you know, you remember just these sort of high moments, emotional highs and lows or certain resonating moments of a given year.

—Dan Clowes, interviewed for NPR’s Talk of the Nation

I wonder if Clowes is right that Charles Schulz did not intend for his strips to be read all at once. When Schulz first began Peanuts, of course, the idea that the entire strip would eventually be collected in its entirety would have been beyond imagining, but at a certain point in his career, it must have become obvious that the vast bulk of his strips would, in fact, be collected into books. That must have influenced the way he created them on some level, right? Even if he was primarily concerned with the strips as standalone, daily reads (and he presumably was), it could not have escaped his notice that they would eventually be read together, and that after their initial publication, that would be more or less the only way they would be read. One of my co-bloggers (or our readers) might know more definitively what Schulz thought of all this, if he ever said anything about it publicly. (more…)

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A new low for Comics Comics? Here’s a quick, egocentric look at the rest of the recent comics blogosphere webonet.

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The most important comics internet writing of the week can be found here, of course.

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A few weeks back, the great Brynocki C posted his latest must-read epic, which included the following bit I wanted to republish just for Frank:

Didja hear? Artists can’t write unbiased criticism. They only see their subjects through the filter of self interest as a creator. As opposed to critics. Real critics. Real critics are as pure as new snow, with eyes of a child yet minds learned like the eldest philosopher. They castrate their creativity to write from the place of total mental stillness. Able to see through all walls of personal agenda. They use their pen of young lamb to judge what’s best not for themselves, but for all humanity. Such is the powerful power, the terrible responsibility of the true critic.

Co-sign (cosine?) that. Get it yet, Frank?

Coincidentally, by the time I read BC’s post, I had already bought and read (and decidedly did not enjoy) two of the comics under review, in the most recent of many misguided attempts to acquaint myself with the larger superhero comics world since we started Comics Comics. Every once in a while, I get the idea that it’s important to “know what I am talking about.” But that’s all over now. Honestly, I almost never write about Brian Michael Bendis or Blackest Night anyway, so I think it is safe to finally let that ambition slide. It’s healthier to rely on back issues or Bully when I need a fix of four-color fisticuffs.

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Which leads me to another recent post on superhero comics, written by everyone’s favorite new internet hyperbolizer, Matt Seneca, who seems to have genuinely taken the intellectualizing-about-capes beat to new heights in a very short time. He believes in treating “the entire mainstream like a quarter bin.” This philosophy has much to recommend it, except for a not entirely inconsequential math problem: four dollars can get you sixteen comics from a real quarter bin, but only pays for one copy of Neal Adams’ Batman: Odyssey.

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No comment.

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No comment either on Ng Suat Tong’s mostly negative take on Crumb’s Genesis, though it is the first solid online pan of the book I’ve read, and though he takes issue with things Dan, Jeet, and I have written. I’m sure all three of us would differ with some of his interpretations to varying degrees, but I am just grateful that he seems to have actually read the book in question, and didn’t manufacture our views wholesale, something you can’t always count on from certain quarters of the internet. I disagree with the ever thoughtful (if occasionally somewhat humorless) Ng on many, many things, but his essays and posts are always worth taking seriously. That comment thread is so forbiddingly unreadable, though, that it more or less banishes any thought (for me, at least) of attempting to continue the argument.

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Speaking of TCJ.com threads, could this be the most hilarious comment ever written? (Oh, to be a fly on the wall when it is read to Ken Smith over the telephone!) Of course, to really find it funny, you have to have wasted an awful lot of your life reading various blinkered self-proclaimed pundits going on and on about unimportant things in incredibly pedantic detail. … Then again, if you’ve made it to the end of this post, you’ve probably done just that.

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Did I miss anything? Is there any good writing about comics on the internet, or is the situation as dire as it sometimes seems?

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Okay, back to our regularly scheduled “comic book” coverage. Stay tuned as Dan and Frank argue over who should play Jarvis in the Avengers movie! (My money’s on Richard Jenkins.)