Broken Windows

Not the movie

The Adventures of Tintin: Cigars of the Pharaoh, by Hergé. Originally published by Casterman, 1934 (French); by Methuen, 1971 (English). 

The close relationship between Tintin’s early volumes and the film of its day is a pronounced one. The greatest values (and strengths) of the the Old Hollywood system—structure, clarity of storytelling, redundancy of given information—form the skeleton of Hergé’s masterwork, a framework so robust that it sometimes outcompetes the stories’ other, subtler virtues for the reader’s attention.

It’s a blending of influences that lends certain strengths; the narrative of Cigars of the Pharaoh, (the series’ fourth volume) gains from Old Hollywood a balance of clarity and complexity, an intricate, globe-spanning plotline emulating and often elevating the tropes of adventure fiction, detective stories, and those aforementioned films—all places where an engaging, twist-laden plot is valued as the greatest possible asset. And that means a lot of ground gained for narrative complexity in these stories, but there are times when that means ground lost for artistic expression.

That’s not a jab, exactly. Tintin excels at everything it attempts; the density of the story, the sheer quantity of things happening trumping nearly all its predecessors (successors, even) in any medium. Cigars of the Pharoah boasts more fights, kidnappings, heists, and twists than some of the most successful genre work out there—and, marvelously, manages to fit all those pieces into just sixty-four pages. Each piece of the story unfolds with near-perfect coherence, ensuring that the reader understands at all times exactly what Hergé wants them to.

With all the book’s meticulous structuring, though, it’s hard to shake the feeling that some of the opportunities for more personal, even frivolous flourishes of artistry got pushed aside. It’s not like they’re absent—this is comics, so the depiction of action, the sequencing, the figure-drawing all carry a sense of whimsy that is very much Hergé’s. He comes in throughout the book in the small tics that permeate it: stars that show impact, the fine, curled lines that illustrate characters’ movement—but despite all that, though, there’s hardly a panel in Cigars devoted to pure whimsy; it’s rare that there’s anything that doesn’t directly motivate the plot.

It’s a welcome relief, then, when Hergé casts a playful interlude into the mix. (The previous volume, Tintin in America, seems to be made almost entirely of them). For the most part, here, though, those bits of fancy are mostly kept separate from the plot points, two pieces of the work fighting for page-space rather than working in harmony.

So, in Cigars, as with most all great commercial work, the place we see the most tinkering is with the framework of the existing structure, the inversions of the existing tropes and the subsequent layering of irony upon it. That’s not exactly surprising—like every artist, Hergé must familiarize himself with that existing structure before he can skillfully manipulate it. Though Cigars is certainly charming and its writing very strong, the familiarity of the plotting makes looks a bit rote when pushed up against the always free-feeling illustrations; in fact, it seems to be all that holds them back.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Blue Lotus, by Hergé. Originally published by Casterman, 1936 (French); by Methuen, 1983(English).

The point at which the bits of whimsy overpower the the work’s careful structure, though, is where Hergé’s voice appears most full. As Hergé gains skill at developing the complexity of his plots, he also comes to take them less seriously, gaining the confidence to turn them, and the work along with them, into something far more personal. The initial merging of the artist’s previously warring tendencies doesn’t work perfectly at first, but it’s a pleasure nonetheless when it begins to happen—it still grants us entry into the more playful corners of Hergé’s mind, and a bit of roughness isn’t much of a price. And it’s from there, a point of far greater confidence, that the series, too, becomes more confident in its commitment to experimentation. The artist’s questions surrounding colonialism, satire, cultural exchange, and travel are interrogated in a way that is matched only by a heightened, ever-increasing penchant for new formal plays—all of which lend a remarkable and appropriate sense of unity to a series that promises to its reader a veritable abundance of adventures.

It’s a fitting revelation, then, when at the end of The Blue Lotus (the volume that follows Cigars, and completes its narrative), it is the series’ film producer, who has been secretly manipulating the story for its duration, is revealed as the villain our hero, Tintin, has searched for all along. Tintin is comics, after all, and, having the ability to be the inimitable product of a single mind, is different and fundamentally opposed to anything you might see at the movies—at least once it chooses to be.

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Good Foundations

“Fiction is so very much an incarnational art.”

-Flannery O’ Connor, from The Nature and Aim of Fiction

Beginnings are a tricky thing. Right from the get-go, a creator of any sort of fiction is expected to set up ground rules, giving the reader a sense of the space they occupy, cementing the reader in a firmly-established world of the senses.

If makers of fiction break that rule, electing to leave the reader adrift, in a world made solely of the abstract, they’re more than likely to lose them. If that loss is taken, as it should be, to be a large consideration, then that technique of immersion through the senses becomes almost an obligation—one that should never be forgotten, and only to be set aside only with good cause.

Open Country, by Michael DeForge. Summer 2011.

Michael DeForge breaks all sorts of rules, but he doesn’t break that one. From the first page of his minicomic, he grounds us in a world filled with textures we can see and touch. The velvet lines of the curtain, the treading along the curved wall—these details create a launch-pad for storytelling, placing us in a physical world before assaulting us with an abstract one.

It doesn’t feel like an assault, though, when those abstractions rest upon a perfect foundation. The book’s plot, centering around characters who conjure psychic projections, feels firmly grounded even when the visuals become bizarre. It’s a neatly conscious metaphor for, among other things, the way art is created.

Sprouting from the mind of the book’s inhabitants, the abstractions that fill the narrative, whatever they may signify, still need something physical, a peg on which to hang them. All comics are abstract in some sense, but it’s nice to see a cartoonist with a knowledge of what he is dealing in, his strong affinity for bits of horror and odd mysteries counterbalanced by a level sensibility. As a result, these abstractions, grounded as they are in a perfect physical foundation, unfold smoothly here, eliciting fascination rather than objection. 

DeForge goes a step further, though, couching the strange deftly in the mundane, postponing the characters’ telepathic activities until after a blasé dinner. It’s a small thing, but it’s a storytelling move that’s more careful than it seems, reflecting the book’s self-knowledge and stemming from its humility. It’s dangerous territory, the world of the abstract, but DeForge wins fairly the trust that he asks of us, the ability to lead us into uncharted ground. 

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Three Stairways

I’ve spent a lot of time lately looking at theater—more specifically, the use of spectacle in it. It’s something many have argued is inherent, or at least necessary in the medium, which may be the reason I so often find myself pushed away from it. 

In traditionally sequenced, gridded comics, there’s no more drastic way to conjure of spectacle than drawing a page at full-bleed. Full spreads, whether one page or two, remain are one of the oldest tricks for grabbing a reader’s attention, disrupting the regular stacatto of a gridded comic.

“Paparazzi,” from Amazing Spider-Man # 559, written by Dan Slott and Marcos Martin. Marvel Comics, 2008.

Such a shout for attention, though, is something that has to be earned, and such breaks in rhythm are often ill-advised. There’s a lot to love in Martin’s art, but the guided flow of this page doesn’t quite work; the camera flashes are itended, less than subtly, to lead the eye down the page, but they don’t dialogue with the panels well, if at all. The eye could move rightward or down after that first panel to the second. Even if they get that far, though, it’s unlikely that they’ll move upward from the second panel to Peter Parker’s leaping form. In short, it interrupts the story.

“Full Stop,” from Amazing Spider-Man # 578, written by Mark Waid, pencils by Marcos Martin. Marvel Comics, 2008.

This page, taken from later in the same year, is a bit better. There’s no spectacle inherent in the action to subvert, and the use of color, as Peter’s lighter jacket draws the eye, combined with the lettered speech bubbles—sparer, and the work of a better writer—move things forward a good bit better. In then, though, it’s not exactly integrated into the story. It propels the story in a way, it still in some way interrupts it.

“Bonus Tale” from Daredevil #1, written by Mark Waid, pencils by Marcos Martin. Marvel Comics, 2011.

By the time the same team worked on Daredevil, though, something changed. The art has ceased to showcase itself at all, instead smoothly propelling the story forward. That dialogue, strong though it is, couldn’t function well without it, and this page, dense with all sorts of information, couldn’t feel more carefully woven. The action is closely tied to the ones in the images before it, but it’s slower and more cautious in every possible way. There’s a kind of spectacle at work here, but it’s careful, nuanced, and wholly makes up the page. It’s slowly paced and perfectly integrated, and and it’s that second part that makes it possible to miss, as good as it is. Once observed, though, it reveals an artist with a newfound mastery of a subtle kind of spectacle—the only sort that can be fully earned, in this or any medium.

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Lacking Words

The shortcomings of the vocabulary surrounding comics are frequently mentioned but rarely addressed. It’s an important thing, though, that the critical vocabulary—the set of words we use to describe comics—is pitifully unrefined. Borrowed largely from film grammar and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (which offers a few unwieldy terms at best), the words most typically utilized to discuss comics hardly touch any of the mechanics specific to the medium And that deficiency isn’t just the critic’s problem; it’s any reader’s, making the medium difficult for anyone to explain while rendering the craft of it considerably harder to observe and internalize .

Memories No. 1, by Katsushiro Otomo. EPIC COMICS with Kodansha Ltd, 1992.

Comics lack the words for even the most straightforward of tricks. Even in Otomo’s work, which borrows heavily from film (he directed several, including Akira), a filmic vocabulary doesn’t suffice. For instance, the two panels in the top-right have a clear visual relationship. The shapes of the figures in their compositions could almost fit together like puzzle pieces, a visual play that creates a sense of completeness, also serving to establish their relationship. There’s little out there to describe that phenomenon, though, which might be better utilized were it also better remarked upon. So, in cases like this, we have to get creative. I’ll call it an inverted match—a snakk tweak tojargon film editing jargon, but it is at least a tweak. 

Even with layouts as apparently simple as this one, there’s still a need for greater specificity in terms. It may seem especially filmlike, with its references to 2001 and The Shining, but film terms are only a starting point. Call the first panel wide-angle if you like, or the transition to the second a zoom, but the linework, the use of white outline—plus the way the first panel looms over the second, dominating real space—these are things that occur only on the page.

I don’t have a name for these, but that’s no just cause for surrender. The limits of vocabulary are simply another boundary to push against, not a hard constraint of language itself. In that way, film is a useful reference—the work of Godard and the other Cahiers du Cinema critics revolutionized the language surrounding film, something Comics Comics Magazine has broken ground in doing for comics. And it’s altered perceptions, commentary, and the art itself—just observe how Frank Santoro’s term “fusion comics” has spread recently.

Even the smallest feats of linguistic invention can help comics—simple borrowings and tweakings from art theory, film, or anywhere else can prove incredibly helpful. It’s the responsibility of critics and perhaps artists—best upheld by those serving both roles—to mend and patch the language surrounding the medium. Not bothered with often enough, it’s a responsibility best viewed as imperative.

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Nailed

There are few things any artist can aspire to so much as perfect formal control. That kind of control—the ability to make a creative decision, then have it produce the exact desired effect in its recipient—is about as good as it gets for an artist in any medium. It forms, with medium as vehicle, a perfect bridge over the gaps that normally impede human communication.

“The Long Story,” by Matt Furie. From Boy’s Club #3. Buenaventura Press, 2009.

“Perfect” is always a dangerous word to throw around, especially in criticism, but in terms of control, Matt Furie’s just about there. Boy’s Club could easily be cast off as ”stoner comics” (its whole cast is consistently high), but the craft behind it renders it successful on almost all counts. More specifically, it’s brilliantly effective and meticulously controlled, overcoming one of comics’ greatest challenges: a virtually flawless manipulation of time.

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Regardless of your state of mind, Furie brings you right into his world. I’ve had friends enter this unassuming comic depressed, happy, drunk or high, and it’s worked the same wonders on every single one of them. They laugh at the same moments, read at the same pace, and all come away satisfied, but asking, still, for another issue. Of the books I’ve loaned to people, particularly non-comics readers, even Asterios Polyp, which took its artist a decade to create, hasn’t had so consistent a reception.

That opening, coming after a brief page introducing the book’s cast, then another with only the story’s title, sets the pace for the entire story. The control of time is elegantly manupulated in the rhythm of those pages, dialed back to the beat of Furie’s own slow and druggy metronome. The simplicity of the grid and the decompressed, methodical depiction of the action within it (the lighting of a cigarette) provide, not coincidentally, the perfect opening for Furie to work his magic.

The page, too, forecasts the entire book. The book trademarks in weed and toilet humor, with light, slow content that is perfectly easy to process. The simplicity of the lines and the consistency of the grid, too (every panel a squares or rectangle) feeds the reader a steady stream of carefully planned action, dialogue, and gags—letting each page breathe while drawing the reader in for the full experience.

And Furie’s careful, too, not to let things get boring—adherence to the grid doesn’t prevent small twinklings of innovation. The humor pulls the focus from the page, but the comic is littered with bits of formal play—like the lettering above crossing over panels, providing the illusion of a continuous sense of motion. 

It’s nothing serious, granted, but Boy’s Club is great at being just what it is: unpretentious, clever, simple fun, nailing every single thing it could have hoped to accomplish. Gag humor may sound like a low bar to shoot for, but it’s more challenging than it sounds, and relies on hitting every mark most heavily associated with comics as a medium. Stoner comics these may be, but in the most basic and traditional of ways, what Furie hits on here might just be the essence of formal perfection.

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Quick Hits: David Lynch’s Angry Dog

The Angriest Dog in the World, by David Lynch. From The Universe of David Lynch, Original publication date unknown.

It’s strange that a bit more attention hasn’t been paid to Blue Velvet director David Lynch’s comic, The Angriest Dog in the World, which, if my research holds, was published weekly for nine years, giving it a run that spanned most of the 1980’s.  The concept is familiar: it’s a strip that repeats the same images with most every installation, changing the text each time to give its images new meaning. And that makes it the obvious parent to Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics, in spirit if not in terms of direct influence.

Dinosaur Comics, by Ryan North. Published online at qwantz.com, September 2011.

From what I can tell, though, Angriest Dog hasn’t received anywhere near the audience Dinosaur Comics has, and that may have something to do with its scarcity on the internet. (I’ve found little information regarding its publication, and less than 30 strips of the long-running series, on only a few scattered websites. That’s strange for a strip that was published for nine years on a weekly basis, especially one by a renowned artist in a popular medium like film and television, but I suspect there are reasons for its apparent lack of an audience. The morbid puns, playful existentialism and bad jokes are present here as they are in Dinosaur, and though it shares, too, in a sense of satire, there’s something in it that sits less well.

The content and delivery of Angriest Dog is fierce, and cutting, and raw, placing Lynch’s chronic concerns on prominent display. The same, recurring symbols of innocence seen in much of his work—the picket fence and suburban home, along with the frustration juxtaposed with them—lend the strip a distinct and painful sense of the defeated. The house’s inhabitants, as in his other work, are monitored by an outside, animal observer, one with the distance required from humanity to incisively cut through to its flaws. And it’s that seemingly playful positioning, which places Lynch right at the heart of this thing, that makes the comic into yet another of the artist’s stricken interrogations of innocence.

It’s tortured, gutsy work Lynch has put out here, and I’d be lying if I claimed that I thought anything else accounted for its scant reception. The rampant silliness present in Dinosaur Comics is gone here, and for better or worse, so is its wide audience.

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Gateways

It’s hard to blame anyone for pursuing old comforts. Seeking the forms of art and entertainment that are most straightforward, most easily consumed is something we all do at times. And it’s a fine thing now and then, but that tendency’s impact on art on a broad scale is undeniable.

In comics, that tendency hits hard as an emphasis on readability and realism, a trend most visible in corporate comics, which strive almost always to appear slick, polished, and, in a way, hyperreal—failing, often, to fulfill even that flawed aspiration.

“The Flash: A Fragment,” by Brendan McCarthy, written with Jono Howard. From Solo #12. DC Comics, 2006.

Brendan McCarthy’s Flash story, a riff on one of DC’s more-loved properties, shares none of those aims. It begs to be felt and understood on a variety of levels, and to be read and interpreted in a number of ways.

The page, like the story, doesn’t concern itself with realism or ease of ingestion. Refusing to indicate any “right” way of reading, the page offers several points of entry, then paths to follow through it, once entered. Everything on the page demands an open-minded means of interpretation, demanding, similarly, open-minded readers. 

               

The result is something wonderful and vast, implying much more than its already rich pages contain. From the top of the page alone, a reader could begin at the left, right, or center, entering via words, doorways, portals, or pictures, an elaborate meshing of the fantastic with the mundane. After, the reader can move across, or up, down, or even out from the page (guided by the Flash’s monologued direct address to them at the bottom). Each path affects the flow of time in unique ways, and the whole page, along with the devices it contains,emphasizes that same sense of flexibility.

To start with, the large, blue geometric form in blue at the top of the page isn’t just a shape—it’s McCarthy’s Flash himself, looking down to confront another version of himself. And the twin images of the house flanking him aren’t just ornamental. Each serves as both entrance and exit, allowing the reader even greater maneuverability to migrate through the page in a truly immersive, albeit surreal, reading experience.

It’s a fascinating, bizarre, and circuitous world McCarthy’s concocted in these pages, the many doors hinting at others unseen—but the flow of time within them implies a sense of the cyclical, a devastating suggestion in more than a few ways.

 

The portal motif page from that first scan is overshadowed, crucially, by this preface—the Flash finding a set of Flash comic books torn open, hollowed windows to new dimensions. But each dimension McCarthy soon finds, is bound by, for starters, the genre they inhabit.

Just as crippling, though, I’m convinced, are the constraints of the readers themselves. Depicted here as empty creatures seeking empty work, they damn, both superheroes and their creators to spheres of limited creativity. No matter how many sprawling, escapist worlds, a cape comics artist creates, corporate comics are not boundless, and will always be subject to the weaknesses of their audience.

There’s no question that McCarthy can find the beauty in superhero comics. They offer nostalgia, escape, imagination, and much else—a gateway, oftentimes, to a great many beautiful worlds. But it’s McCarthy’s grasp of their limits, even as he attempts to subvert them, that makes this story really work. It’s his understanding of something hollow, dated, and dying, both in these comics and in their readers, that makes this story not just dazzle, but hurt.

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Lively work—Seth Fisher on Batman: “Snow”

From Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #196. DC Comics, 2005.

Big props to the late Seth Fisher for creating a Gotham in Batman: Snow that I’d actually want to live in, weather and all. It’s a beautiful, young, and glowing city, much more captivating than the one seen now, after the fall.

Of course, it’s well-populated, too—that’s Mr. Freeze up there, modeled, unless I’m mistaken, after Brendan Fraser, right next to his dead, hallucinogenic wife, who appears, for reasons beyond my comprehension or caring, as some sort of Norse fairy.

But I just get lost in it anyway—reason is not, and doesn’t have to be, the guiding force here, because it’s obvious from the level of detail and the formal play at work here that Fisher was a guy who was intent on making comics and having fun doing it. The character designs, the background details, the staging and the effects here—even the stuff available on his website—all evidence Fisher’s love for playing with comics, as both art and great entertainment.

From Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #196. DC Comics, 2005.

It’s not often that I find fight scenes I can get lost in, but there’s something wonderfully effusive in these. This work is in conversation with McCay, Kirby, and perhaps even Chris Ware (though less visibly here), and I can certainly see some influence on JH Williams III, and Brandon Graham more recently. His layouts and his architecture tricks are always striving, in some way, to innovate, as is the framing and blocking of even the quiet scenes. The use, too, of high and low angles, skewed perspectives, and quirky postures helps make the storytelling as deft and funny as it is engaging.

That last fall is terrific, the “1stop” sign is sweetly ironic, and the movements of the characters, like most everything else in the comic, feel delightful, spontaneous, and utterly human. It’s rare to see such obvious exuberance in comics, much less corporate, Batman ones—but Fisher nails them anyway, seizing an opportunity to use a second-tier title as a vehicle for his own unabashed expression. And that means his other works, the out-of-continuity and the creator-owned ones, are likely to be just as captivating, and, I would hope, even more free.

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StorySlam: Daytripper

StorySlam is a new series to be published occasionally. The basic premise is outlined as “me vs. bad comics.” Because sometimes it has to be done.

“Beautifully written and utterly gorgeous, DAYTRIPPER completely blew me away.”

 -Gerard Way, from the cover of Daytripper #1 (above)

If you don’t read comics, you might be wondering who Gerard Way is. If you do read comics, you might know him because he’s not “from comics.” And not being from them, he’s garnered some real acclaim from new and existing readership. But who exactly does that make this comics celebrity?

He is, I guess, a “real celebrity,” the lead vocalist from My Chemical Romance, a band I almost forgot still existed, and the writer of the middling but lauded series The Umbrella Academy. A guy whose opinions on writing or art I couldn’t care less about, but a guy, too, whose opinion, and pullquote, is apparently enough to make respected industry thinkers, artists, and critics elect to chuck an Eisner Award at this book. But following their example, let’s take a look at that claim, that this book is, in fact, beautifully written.

Daytripper,by Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon (script/pencils) with Dave Stewart (colors). DC/Vertigo, 2010.

This scene plays out as all of them do—as nonspecific, low-grade soap opera—the script containing the sorts of gems you see in introductory writing workshops. And they’re spoken not by characters, but by blanks, or bodies. And if that scene’s not enough to convince you of the quality level of the writing, there’s plenty more.

Warm drinks are pensive drinks, and this is all very literary. But let’s try isolating the text in the following panel, because this one just might not be revealing enough.

It’s the definition of overwriting, but sadly, it’s something I’ve gotten used to in comics—less so, somehow, then most of the book’s fans, or critics. That wouldn’t really bother me, though, if it wasn’t the story that had gotten so much praise, or if the art, ever the priority in comics, was anything like what it should have been. 

All the scenes depicted in the book, with few exceptions, are as mundane as this one, reneging on the tepid assurances of something imaginative offered by the series’ covers. Almost all you’ll find here are old comforts, vaguely defined—home, family, loves, tradition. And these, in what aspires to depth, are juxtaposed with airy philosophizing and vague platitudes, the sort you might hear from a stranger on a train. In Daytripper, though, each of ten issues contains a death in an effort to ground them, an appeal, surely, to feeling. Despite those efforts, the philosophies fall flat, rootless and unremarkable as the deaths they surround. The result of an empty, gutless narrative.

Instead, harmlessness is the book’s ultimate goal, despite its thinking-man’s aspirations. But it fails, too, at harmlessness, because of how it pretends to depth and substance. It presumes that through navel-gazing and looking back to a world where typewriters are still in vogue, that its characters can hope to solve the mysteries of life and death. And, horribly, it tells its readers to aspire to the same. 

But maybe I shouldn’t care, because it’s the same impulse allowed by consumers in every medium. To collapse, weeping, into the familiar, comforting, and ever-present arms of blandly sentimental narratives, then to sleep soundly at night with the sense that they have felt, done, or discovered something. The illusion of change and movement is presented in both product and in reader, dashing any hopes for them both of forward progress. It’s most alarming, I think, in comics, where the nostalgia for newsprint, typewriters, and solitary coffee is as present, almost, as it is in these pages.

There’s no courage here, there’s no progress, and, ultimately, I’m not sure there’s any serious thought. I know that comics, though, are capable of more, and I hope the same of its readers. That as consumers demand better, deeper, richer art, more of it can be seen, read, celebrated. At least when deserved. 

Because this story is crap, nostalgia, and social cement. But it’s still enough to make a huge percentage of comics readers swoon, and that fact alone means this work should offer readers and critics anything but its intended comforts, verging on at best the dull and at worst the sickening.

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In Transit

“Strange Adventures,” by Paul Pope with Jose Villarubia. From Wednesday Comics anthology, hardcover edition. DC Comics, 2010.

I’m doing a lot of traveling this week, and not the fun kind, so posting may be a bit light. I’ll resume soon, though, and should have more original content up by the end of the week. 

In the meantime, though, some links culled from around the internet:

Tom Spurgeon’s Kirby scan gallery, in honor of what would have been the latter’s birthday (yesterday), is a feast for the eyes.

Matt Seneca did a great meditation, another source of beautiful scans, on comics, beauty, and context.

Adam McIllwe posted a great investigation of Blaise Larmee, the person and the persona behind the equally mysterious, quite beautiful 2001. He’s also the creator of Young Lions and some other shorter works, but everything you need to know about him is over on Lust Brigade.

Not About Comics: I talked about depicting thought here the other day, and the way it’s a key benchmark for masterful work in almost all media. Well, Eula Biss does it consistently in this essay, a lucid, cutting meditation on Chicago, particularly the neighborhood of Rogers Park. It’s great writing, and, though it does a lot more, it’s probably the best introduction/explanation of the city I’ve yet encountered.

I’ve enjoyed Tucker Stone’s tweets on the Djurdegate scandal (Marvel artist Marko Djurdjevic tears into Marvel at a Marvel panel) about as much as the event itself. I haven’t seen a lot of people mention Djurdjevic’s blog, though, which is a story all by itself. It’s called Six More Vodka, and it’s—heh—illuminating.

The Criterion Collection has a number of cartoonist’s (and other people’s) top 10 lists of their DVDs, some more surprising than others. Seth, Bill Plympton, and Jaime Hernandez are included, but Mike Allred’s is easily my favorite.

A final note: This will not become a link blog. Again, the next thing I post will be original content.

Meanwhile, enjoy.

-:-

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