I don’t just hate comics…

…I hate criticism too. Two sentences from the introduction to Fantagraphics’ Popeye Vol. II, by Donald Phelps:

1) It is extraordinary to reflect that in this comic strip, which calls to mind Gilbert Seldes’s dour reflection on The Katzenjammer Kids — they looked the way people who never read comic strips thought they all looked — what appear to be drawing conventions, and the most rudimentary at that, turn out, on close and serial scrutiny, not to be conventions in the generally acknowledged sense at all; nor the “style” to be any acknowledgeable style, even a bad one; least of all, the sense of any authority, any fanfaring of the strip’s personality, its worthiness and beaming future intentions, in terms of a visual plumage, such as the daft elegance of Bringing Up Father, the jaunty scurry of Jerry on the Job, and the slapstick swank of Polly and Her Pals alike convey.

Hey, I like asides and semi-colons, but you can have too much of a good thing. And, worse, the sentence is so long that, by the time he gets to the final clause, the author himself has forgotten to give it a verb. Seriously, parse that last clause–what is being predicated of “the sense of authority”?

2) He [Segar] evidently acquired early on in the Popeye sequences not only the grand operatic gravity which he imparted to the lovely little businesses, like the one with the pillow described above, or Olive Oyl’s kittenish-wistful tilting of Popeye’s sailor hat in the Skullyville adventure; but of Segar’s apprehension and general deployment (at once “primitive”, i.e. in its literalness, and sophisticated beyond most of his contemporaries) of “actual” time-space, his use of both attenuation (the longueurs, the off-stage sequences of action, chronicled in the characters’ reactions); the use of pause and double-take (in which I do not believe he was matched until the advent of intimate-toned comic strips like Johnny Hart’s B.C., Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, and Mell Lazarus’s Miss Peach, and later, Momma); and, on the other hand, the excited jamming of conversations, interjected comments, hasty summaries of relevant information, or the conveyance of which he advanced the use of dialogue balloons in alternating tier or stair-steps.

…I’m sorry, what were we talking about again? First of all, something has gone wrong with the expression “he evidently acquired … not only [blah] … but of Segar’s apprehension”. He acquired of Segar’s apprehension? What? Second, “his use of both attenuation”…and what? Both blah and blah, right? What’s the second “blah”? Third, something has gone seriously wrong with this phrase: “or the conveyance of which he advanced the use of dialogue balloons in alternating tier or stair-steps.” Huh?

These aren’t cherrypicked examples. They are two of the particularly egregious sentences, but they’re far from the only frankensteins in the introduction. There seems to be lots of interesting stuff in the introduction. But I’ll be damned if I can get through the syntax.

I’m not just being an arsehole here (emphasis on just). I literally cannot parse these sentences; they do not make syntactic sense to me as English sentences. If it was just some blog-post, then the reaction would be “whatever” — god knows I live in a glass house, a glass house made of over-long sentences. And, uh, glass. But this should have been proof-read at least once, preferably by somebody concerned with whether the sentences, you know, actually made any goddamn sense whatsoever.

The strips themselves, of course, are the shit. Not least because: first appearance of the real Jones.

Random reviews of comics that everyone was talking about ten months ago #1

Acme Novelty Library #18. Chris Ware. Drawn and Quarterly, 2007. $17.95, 56 action-packed pages.

Over the fifteen or so years that he’s been publishing Acme Novelty Library, Chris Ware has shown an impressive emotional range. He’s written depressive cowboy loners, depressive schoolboy loners, depressive superhero loners, depressive funny animal loners, depressive robot loners, depressive space explorer loners and that one issue about the little dancing potato guy.

Who was a depressive loner.

With this volume, #18, Ware branches out and writes a depressive young woman loner.

Now that’s what I call progress.

As with many of Ware’s characters, the protagonist’s emotional shortcomings are here embodied as a physical abnormality. Sparky the cat was a bodyless head. The Quimbies, Ware’s most gruesome jeu de corps, were conjoined twins, one of whom died and decayed while the other lived on. Jimmy Corrigan broke his leg and had to hobble around on crutches. The protagonist of #18 stands somewhere between Jimmy Corrigan and Sparky in the seriousness of her condition, which is permanent but at least humanly tolerable–she has a prosthetic leg.

OMG it’s teh symbolism coz shes emotionally criplled!!!!

In any case, the shock twist of this volume is not that Ware has turned his pen to female depressive loners. For he has, in fact, already created another female protagonist (or co-protagonist, at least) in previous volumes for the ensemble of Rusty Brown. No, the real surprise of this volume is that it lacks entirely any of Ware’s usual ironic distancing prose.

That’s right, there’s not a single sentence outside the comics themselves, not even in the indicia or on the bar code. These convoluted apologiae, at once conspiratorially self-mocking and bitterly funny, have been a crucial part of Ware’s design aesthetic since the very first issue of Acme Novelty Library. As far as I know, they’ve been prominent in every comic or collection he has produced since then, filling paragraph after paragraph with layers of protective irony. So it’s genuinely shocking to see a volume with them nowhere in sight. It’s like opening a Captain America comic to find Cap wiping his arse with the American flag. The mind boggles.

That’s not to say that this artistic departure is necessarily a bad thing. (As a non-American, I’d be more interested in Captain Arsewipe, too, for that matter). Personally, I enjoy the apologiae, but they have always seemed like the defence of a younger artist, unsure of his own talent. Maybe, by leaving them out this time around, Ware is signalling that he has come to terms with his status as a cartoonist. Or maybe it just means that the prozac is working.

But then again, probably not. The most striking composition in this volume appears on the inside front-cover, and it pretty clearly shows that Ware is still no stranger to the black dog. The composition in question is a loop of words and pictures which shows the protagonist pondering suicide, deciding against it (because she doesn’t want to bother anyone by leaving them a body) and generally lying around being depressed. There’s no privileged starting place for the reader on this loop, and no privileged direction for the eye to follow, either. While Ware has used these tricks before, of the democratic page, he’s never used them to such brutal effect, matching form to content perfectly. A loop that starts at any point, never ends, and goes anywhere except outside itself? That’s as fine a depiction of depression as you’re likely to find anywhere, in any medium—matched, for mine, only by the film Last Days.*

And that’s why Ware is still the king. In two pages–in the inside front cover, no less–he does more than most artists can manage in their whole careers.

Even if it’s still about a depressive loner.

* Although that Achewood strip which showed Roast Beef’s decision flowchart is pretty good, too.

Recommended? If you have to be told to buy anything Chris Ware releases, you’re probably not reading this blog in the first place.

It’s at times like these that I miss Fanboy Rampage

As everyone knows by now, some stupid judge on Wednesday decided to destroy Superman by handing him over to the money-grubbing, undeserving heirs of some schmuck who barely had anything to do with making Superman great. And you know who will pay for this? The fans, that’s who. Goddamn Siegels, sticking it to the fans.

Oh, wait, you didn’t know that? Man, you must not have read this blog@newsarama thread, then. But of course you haven’t read it. If you had, you would have committed hara-kari in shame over being associated in any way with this hobby, and then you wouldn’t be reading this very blog entry.

I wonder how many people are like me here–I’m more familiar with the fictional history of the injustices suffered by Siegel and Shuster than with the actual history. That’s the fictional history presented by Michael Chabon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Rick Veitch in Maximortal. And this legal decision is one hell of a victory for the good guys, if that fictional history bears any resemblance to the actual one–as it surely does. Well, apart from the monstrous homunculus whose kryptonite is human faeces.

Anyway, I just wanted to share two of the highlights from that thread, for anyone who for some crazy reason baulks at trawling through the approximately nine-thousand other comments. First, Abhay, as usual, knows the score:

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND ANY OF THE FACTS, HISTORY OR LEGAL ISSUES BUT I HAVE AN OPINION ANYWAYS! LET’S HUG! LET’S HUG WITH OUR TONGUES!”

Amazingly, Abhay makes this gag well before the clusterfuckery comes out in full force. It’s almost like he can tell teh futare! But even Abhay’s comment gets topped by this comment later on from “Jerk-El”:

“OH NOES! I MUST HAS MY SUPERMANS! IF I NOE HAS MY SUPERMANS I WILL NOT BE ABLE TO MAKE WHITE WEE-WEE AT NITE!!

IF THEYS BAD SIEG-ELS TAKES MY SUPEMRMANS AWAYS FROM ALL-GOOD AND MIGHTY AND WEALTHY DC COMICKS WHAT THEN? WHAT THEN?

I GO MAKE WHITE WEE-WEE NOW WHILE I STILL HAS MY SUPERMANS!”

Now that’s entertainment.

(Allcaps in the original)

Spoilers for the series finale of The Wire

• McNulty, Greggs and Bunk have a hawt three-way
• Bunk keeps smoking his cigar while he’s getting his cigar smoked, if you know what I mean
• Although that’s probably not a spoiler; I mean, everyone already thought the Bunk did that anyway, right?
• All these years, the real kingpin of the whole Baltimore drug trade has been Bubbles
• Herc becomes a real police
• Fuzzy Dunlop is a skrull
• The wire itself is a ghost; why, no one’s lived in the old Major Crimes Unit place for years
• Wallace killed Edena Watson

ZOMG!

Once more unto the breach

For those of you who can’t wait to get your wonk on until Brian Hibbs writes another 70,000 words on Bookscan sales, Dick Hyacinth has more on his meta-list of 2007’s Best Comics.

I kid, I kid. The entire blogosphere thanks Dick for doing this. As they say where I come from, you’re a dead-set legend.

(Oh, and we thank Brian too!)

As you probably know if you’re reading this blog, Dick collated all the best of lists into a meta-list. In his new post he splits the lists into two types: those that came from comics-specific sources (like Jog, the Journal, etc.), and those that came from more general sources (Time, Salon, etc.).

Then he points out an interesting difference between the two. Lists from comics-specific sources summed to this meta-ranking at the very top:

1. I shall destroy all the civilised planets
2. All-star Superman
3. Alias the Cat
4. Scott Pilgrim gets it together
5. Powr Mastrs
6. Exit Wounds
7. Shortcomings.

By contrast, general sources gave Exit Wounds and Shortcomings meta-rankings of #1 and #2, respectively.

Prima facie, this is kind of surprising. You might expect to see a lot of variation further on down the list, but more agreement (across the two types of source) about the very best comics of the year.

As an analogy, think about films of 2007. Critics might disagree about the rest of their top ten–was Zodiac among the best of the year? Was The Bourne Ultimatum? Was Norbit? But they mostly agreed that No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were, between them, #1 and #2, the exact order to be determined by a no-holds-barred cage-match.

In other words, people disagree about the very best. But you might expect them to agree about the very very very best.

Obviously, when it came to the comics of 2007, they didn’t. General sources liked Shortcomings and Exit Wounds rather more than comics-specific sources did. Well, what gives? Here’s Dick’s suggested explanation:

This alone doesn’t prove the “Chris Ware and his ilk have undue influence” theory (especially since there isn’t a whole lot of formally ambitious work on [the general] list), it’s interesting that the four [I think he means five; even Homer nods] titles which bested Exit Wounds and Shortcomings on the comics-focused lists could safely be described as more “fun” than these two graphic novels.

That’s an interesting suggestion. But I’d like to suggest another couple of explanations for the disparity in ranking.

Dick sort of acknowledges this in his aside, but Chris Ware has at least two (often conflated) “ilks”:

(1) the formalist/experimental ilk–think Fort Thunder, Paper Rad, Dash Shaw, et al.

(2) the autobio/depressing/tales-of-everyday life ilk–think Clowes, Bechdel, Matt et al.

The higher ranking of Shortcomings and Exit Wounds on list collated from general sources shows, I suspect, the influence of each ilk among the different types of source.

Comics-specific sources often care a lot about visual aesthetics and get excited about books that look distinctive, use comics-specific technique in novel ways, etc. That’s certainly true for me, and it seems true for Dick from some of his past comments.

By contrast, general sources seem to respond more to more universal narrative elements–by which I mean elements that are common to artworks across different media. Things like dialogue, thematics, plot, etc.

Yeah yeah it’s an overgeneralization blah blah blah…but it seems plausible that lists appearing in general sources, in comparison with comics-specific sources, are more likely to be either (a) written by someone with more experience in other media (film, prose, theatre) than in comics, or (b) written for an audience with more experience in other media. Doesn’t that sound plausible?

And PLEASE note that I’m NOT making any claims that one set of emphases/interests is better than the other, or that one side has a better idea of what makes for good comics. Different strokes for different folks, man. It’s all good.

Anyway, the five books that beat Shortcomings and Exit Wounds on the specific list are–to be as polite as possible to those two works–MUCH more visually interesting than they are. I’d guess that that probably explains as much of the disparity as their greater “fun” value.

The general list would probably look very different if art/visual culture sites and mags published their own top 10 lists and they were included. I bet stuff like Maggots (my personal #1 for the year, although I didn’t do a serious list) and New Engineering would rank much higher. Although I don’t know whether there’d be call for such lists at, fuck, I don’t know…Wallpaper? Taschen Readers’ Digest?

There’s another factor which might have contributed, too. At least three of the top five on the comics-specific sites (Superman, Planets, Alias) either draw heavily on tropes from the comics of yore, or need a lot of context to appreciate them, or both. Which would, again, boost their standing among comics-specific sources.

As for Scott Pilgrim, well, comics-specific sources are all big fat nerds, so naturally they’d respond to a book that grossly pandered to their stunted development.

(Again, I kid. The problem with the most recent Scott Pilgrim volume was that it didn’t pander enough. It was at its best when O’Malley stuck to the dopey video game fights and throwaway gags that dominated previous volumes, and at its worst when it attempted anything more. You can clearly see O’Malley straining against the formula he has written himself into, since that formula so patently doesn’t allow for the sort of depth that he apparently wants to mature into. Unfortunately, he’s stuck with it…but “My Scott Pilgrim Problem–And Ours” is a post for another day, a day that I can pretty much guarantee will never come).

Anyhoo, that’s my 2 cents. None of this is to say that Dick is wrong–the comics-specific top five are more fun and less serious. I just reckon they’re also more visual and, well, comics-specific. We can both be right; every child gets a prize!

Of course, the real explanation is probably that it’s just statistical noise and there is no deep meaning. But where would be the fun in that? Or, more importantly, the blog posts?

The canon

In no order, the real comics canon:

• Detective #whatever it was that Batman first appeared in
• DC Comics Presents #87 (first appearance of Superman Prime)
• Every Millennium crossover except for The Outsiders #28
• That issue of X-Men where Wolverine is all like “I’m gonna bust yo ass” on the Hellfire Club
• Fantastic Four #286 (return of Jean Grey)
• Secret Wars #9 (no particular reason)
• Avengers #58 (”Even an android can cry!”)
• Kingdom Come/Marvels (first appearances of Alex Ross)

…I toyed with the idea of including some “indy” comics like Spawn or Invincible, but I thought it best to stick to the widely recognized classics. If they are still reading comics in a hundred years, these are the works of sequential fiction they will be reading.

Excelsior!

In that dream where you find the comic store with all the cool comics that don’t exist, these are the comics you would find there

Sixteen comics that I wish were currently available in convenient English language editions.

Some of these have been reprinted but are currently out of print. Some have never been translated into English. Some have been reprinted in bits and pieces, but never properly collected.

Three cheers for the current Golden Age. But I’m greedy and want a little more gold.

16. Museum of Terror, by Junji Ito

Dark Horse went through three volumes before puttering out, presumably due to poor sales. Maybe the re-release of Gyo and Uzumaki will spark a broader interest in Ito, although that probably won’t be enough to bring us the other umpteen volumes of this horror anthology.

15. Mickey Mouse, by Floyd Gottfriedson

The selection in the Smithsonian collection shows an incredible sense of dynamism and motion. Disney can be weird about its older material, so we probably won’t be seeing this collected any time soon.

14. Various Duck comics by Carl Barks

…this, on the other hand, is baffling. Everyone agrees these are all-time greats; kids and adults recognise and like the characters; the recent collection of Don Rosa’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern schtick was successful enough to merit a second volume; so what gives? The best Gladstone can manage is a feeble two-volume collection of stories, the pitch for which is that they inspired the cartoon Duck Tales??

13. Les Schtroumpfs /The Smurfs, by Peyo

Fairly puzzling that these aren’t widely available in English translation, given the popularity of the cartoon and figurines. I don’t even know whether the comics are any good, but I’d like to be able to see for myself.

12. The Jimmy Corrigan stuff that was in Acme Novelty Library but didn’t make it into the Jimmy Corrigan book, by Chris Ware

There was a lot of good stuff in those earlier issues of Acme that Ware didn’t put in the book, presumably to make room for that tedious flashback to ye olden days. It’s a real shame, because I preferred a lot of what was dropped, with its vicious black comedy and formal experimentation.

11. Polly and her pals, by Cliff Sterrett

A few years ago, just before the current strip-reprint boom, I was in a B.D. store in Paris. They had a complete collection of this strip, widely recognised as one of the greats. If the French can do it, why can’t Americans? Is this another jazz/Hollywood/Jerry Lewis thing?

10. The Demon, by Jack Kirby et al.

I’ve heard that this is some of the King’s weaker work, but weak Kirby is still miles ahead of most.

9. Boy’s Ranch, by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby

I actually own a copy of the hardcover collection Marvel released back in the (?) 80s. Despite the fact that (a) it sounds like a twink-on-twink porno and (b) I hate westerns, this is among my favourite of Kirby’s works. Pure comics.

8. Corto Maltese, by Hugo Pratt

Apparently, Heavy Metal was planning to release a new English translation of at least one volume, but that hasn’t happened yet. What are they waiting for?

7. Cerebus, by Dave Sim and Gerhard

Sim was way ahead of the curve in collecting his work for all the readers who didn’t happen to be reading in December of 1983 or whenever. But there’s a lot of material that didn’t make it into the phone books, particularly (a) the covers and (b) the extra material in the “Swords” collections. I won’t hold my breath, however, not when there’s all these other windmills for Sim to tilt at.

6. Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy, by Roy Crane

Maybe the reprints of this strip that I’ve read in the Smithsonian collection and elsewhere are misleading, and this isn’t an exciting, funny strip. Or maybe not.

5. Big Numbers, by Alan Moore and various artistic psychopaths

Even if there are only two issues and I’ve already read the first one.

4. Anything by Shintaro Kago

Amazing formalist mindfuckery. While you wait for official English translations, read some scanlations here.

Seriously, go read them.

Now.

3. Marvelman, by Alan Moore et al.

A no-brainer, even if parts of it haven’t aged well.

2. Flex Mentallo, by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely et al.

The other no-brainer. I suspect that scarcity has inflated its reputation, and that Morrison and Quitely have done better work since, but even so.

1. More by Osamu Tezuka

By all accounts, the man produced approximately ten million pages of manga during his life. It’s excellent to have Astro Boy from Dark Horse, the one-volume works from Vertical, and Buddha and Phoenix, and BlackJack coming out again (yes!). But my Tezuka appetite is insatiable.

***

You can assume that everything else didn’t make it onto the list because (a) it sucks and (b) if you like it, then you suck too. Prove me wrong.

Bizarrely Inappropriate Trailer Dept.

Not comics, as Mr Spurgeon would say.

So I start the disc for Guy Maddin’s avant-garde film The Saddest Music in the World. As is not unusual these days, the DVD plays a few trailers at the start.

The second trailer was for Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes; fair enough, it’s highly likely that anyone hiring this moving will also dig Jarmusch.

But what trailer do you think played first? Which film do you suppose that MGM thinks will interest viewers of a film that A.O. Scott called “a beguiling and hallucinatory black-and-white musical”, starring Isabella Rossellini and adapted from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro?

Why, the remake of Walking Tall, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Johnny Knoxville. Of course!

***

As for the film itself, I couldn’t make it past half an hour. The conceit of the film is that it’s an old black-and-white film, made during the thirties. I could get into the concept, but the execution kept taking me out of it. The shots looked great in medium-frame, but showed themselves to be modern whenever the camera got any closer. And that sound was just terrible, sounding nothing like the thirties. A film like The Saddest Music depends on getting every detail just right, and too many just weren’t.

***

Now I’m off to watch Walking Tall.

Spleenage

Oh God.

Oh, God, I’m not even halfway through The Black Dossier and I don’t know if I’m going to make it if somebody finds this note please tell my family I love them oh God I don’t want to die I don’t want to

***

Even before I got the book, I knew I was in trouble when I read the second paragraph of Jog’s review:

“If you’re the type that finds Moore’s various approximations of period writing styles to be cloying, whether via adorned prose, or his scripts for the fake old comics that tend to dot his sequential works - please, do not read this book. You may well take your own life, and I’d hate to have your blood on my hands, True Believer.”

Alas, I am exactly that type.

Still, I’d made it through most of Moore’s extended self-indulgences before. I even made it through Promethea. Mostly. (I just skipped any sentence with the word “kabbala” or “quark”). Besides, I enjoy his faux old-timey comics scripts, as in Supreme; it’s his prose that drives me up the wall. So I could make it through The Black Dossier, right?

Right?

Yeah, maybe not.

Later in his review, Jog compares the text sequences that form the bulk of The Black Dossier to the bits in Cerebus where Dave Sim would dump page after overwritten page on the long-suffering reader. That’s a fair comparison, but you know what they both remind me of? Well, you know when you’re playing a video game, and you make it to the end of a level (or whatever)…and the big “reward” is that you get to stop playing the game for thirty seconds, or five minutes, or whatever, and watch a shitty cutscene with bad scripting and worse acting?

That’s exactly what it’s like reading The Black Dossier. Come on, can’t I just press “escape” and skip back to playing the game already? The reason I bought this video game is–amazingly–that I wanted to play a video game, not watch a shitty movie. If I wanted to watch a shitty movie, I would have hired Mulholland Drive.

And that’s what it’s like reading the text sequences: come on, man, get back to the comics. Oh man, can’t I just skip ahead–nah, I’d better read all this shit now or I’ll have to read it later. That’s not a good way to feel about what you’re reading: that it’s a burden.

Look, I’m no droog who only wants to read words if they’re in speech bubbles. I write and read dry academic prose for a living. I’ve made it through the books that break weaker readers, and I can throw down with the best of them when it comes to the literary canon. Life of Johnson? A la recherche…? Moby-Dick? War and Peace? The Faerie Queene? The Man Without Qualities? Motherfucker, I’ve done all those, and Finnegan’s motherfucking Wake.

I’ve even read A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.

And let me say, Alan Moore, you are no John Kennedy Toole.

We get it already. You’re well-read. Congratulations, but that’s no longer as impressive as it was in the nineteenth century now that any dickhead with a modem can access most of the same information.

The worst thing about The Black Dossier is that the same self-congratulatory spirit clogging the prose seeps into the comics sections too. Hey, you know what would be really fun? A five page sequence in which some fat guy clumsily name-drops various fictional characters just to give Jess Nevins something to do. A sampling of the sparkling bons mots that fall from fat-boy’s lips:

Francis Alexander Waverly. He runs some spy-ring for the United Nations these days.

His father named him Kim after the famous spy who worked in Afghanistan.

Spider-Man can bench press 40 tons.

Oh no, wait, that last sentence is from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

Bravo, Mr Moore. You’ve proved that you can write as well as Peter Sanderson and Mark Gruenwald.

And don’t get me started on Moore’s treatment of other people’s fictional characters here. In interviews Moore now decries the way so many unimaginative writers followed his lead after Watchmen by turning fun, light-hearted escapist fare into depressing deconstructions. Fair enough, he’s entitled to change his mind about the validity of that sort of aesthetic move. And he has famously railed against the treatment of his creations in stupidized Hollywood films; again, fair enough. The films do suck.

It almost makes you wonder whether it really is aesthetically valid to grittify the characters of popular fiction set in a broader continuity, and whether there may be some moral value in respecting creators’ wishes.

So what do we get in The Black Dossier? A rapist James Bond and sad, old, fat Billy Bunter. Excellent! Oh, and Ulysses, it turns out, was “a shifty little swine”. Making Moore just as reactionary as Dante, who placed the hero of the greatest epic poem in the eighth circle of Hell because, like, he lied and stuff. Yes, that’s the point. That’s why they call him Odysseus of many wiles.

***

I could go on, but why bother? Beside, I’ve still got another 7,000 of Moore’s thrilling pages to slog through. I’ll just add one more thing: it would be a drastic exaggeration to call The Black Dossier underwhelming.

Truth is, it’s not even whelming.

***

If I don’t post for a while, it’ll be because Jog was right. I’ll have killed myself.

It’s Grant Morrison’s world, we just live in it

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid “illegal restorers” set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building’s famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.

…

Klausmann and his crew are connaisseurs [sic] of the Parisian underworld. Since the 1990s they have restored crypts, staged readings and plays in monuments at night, and organised rock concerts in quarries. The network was unknown to the authorities until 2004, when the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine. They have tried to track them down ever since.

I repeat: the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant under the Seine, run by guerrilla monument restorers.

Full story at the Guardian. Tell me this doesn’t read like something straight out of The Invisibles, only with less claptrap about futurism or the occult.

***

“Regular” readers of this blog will know that I’m fond of silly neologisms (and that I’m “also” as fond “of” misplaced “quotes” as “Geo. Herriman”). Well, I’ve just found my new favourite new phrase: “Shy Schlumpfs in Specs Comix” (h/t JK Parkin) It sort of overlaps with “Cancer Comics” and “boring, shitty art comics”, but has a more specific meaning. As defined by its coiner:

“The rough gist is this: comic book artist, who is (like most comic book artists) a shy schlumpf in specs, mooches around feeling sorry for himself, worries that he might be too self-obsessed, has a short and self-loathing infatuation with a girl, returns to drawing board, creates comic describing the aforegoing events.”

Yes.

Oh, yes.

Not that all SSS Comix are bad; the author mentions R Crumb, and Chris Ware is surely very similar. But it’s a great inflammatory and reductive put-down.

I must steal it and claim credit for it immediately.