Mindless Ones

I hope – for your sakes, my friend – you are buy this little, red star. More on that at later date, but is out now, in this week, do not be missing. Jog spoils the conclude, many months ago.

So, I don’t know, I normally try and provide a narrative throughline about all the disparate, but also not so disparate (i.e. they will be published by Marvel and, occasionally, their competitor and the bandwidths… they might not be so terribly wide – bandnarrows, more like.) comics, but really all I can think about this week is my gushing mancrush on Alexander Skarsgård.

“Daddy’s home.”

Siiiiiigh. Sooo dreamy.

I dunno, yeah. I was in the metal club this week, and you haven’t really felt like dying, dying like a suicide bomber near the – well, it’ll be a Spotify booth or something now, an mp3 booth – quite so much in 2009 as when the DJ drops Limp Bizkit’s cover of ‘Faith’. You couldn’t, possibly. And I thought, much as Neil Kulkarni had in Plan B a decade previous: “there’s really no room for gay in metal. But there should be!”

Superhero comics are a bit like that, and also the marine core.

So, one of the comics I read this week featured a former marine, heavy metal icon and man involved – nay, victimised – in a troublingly homophobic, if fictional incident. I’m just writing here, it’s all occurring as the finger hits the keyboard; additionally, serendipitously, I am not making this shit up, there was some longhaired skinny kid rocking the classic white-on-black 2D skull iconography of the man in question. In the metal club.

He did not, in many other respects, look terribly like the Punisher. The metal club – it makes me into an asshole – I’d hiss “the vampire, Lestat” as these entirely pleasant, harmless and probably really positive young people with seriously quite bad hair (serious, guy: drop some product on that curly ponytail, split ends are a nightmare) ventured into my spectrum. This was a Warding Spell. Still, you can’t fuck with the white-skull-on-black.

But, wait! It seems Rick Remender and Tony Moore have, by chucking a bucket of schlock on it. Punisher(noMAX) #11 has, in the occasional manner of what passes for critical thought in the wider comics ‘net been one of the worst advance-reviewed – and I say “advance” and I say “reviewed”, by which really I mean neither – items of recent. Because there is only one way to do the Punisher and Samael* forbid you disrupt his stylistic integrity which is – as I discussed last time about – absolutely made of perfection, and in no way vile.

Anyway, yeah, this is daft and in no way profound because: i. Marvel comic, It is a. They are the anti-seriousness, which is why the Ennis MAX Punisher overhaul is such a huge achievement. It’s the kind of flavour I like, though, one of several; it’s not for milksop boys (comfort comics = 4 babies,) applecart-upsetting and, shit, Tony Moore hits the stratosphere. It’s hard to overstate just how good this looks, especially when you’ra barely capable of writing about art at the best of times. I’m sort of dreading the ongoing current shift in comics-blogging into stronger focus on art because I suck so fucking hard at writing about it.

Moore’s bibliography is actually reasonably scant for a decade in the game; he was the best Walking Dead pencilman and his recent 3-issue tour on Ghost Rider was, equally, the best that book had looked. The only way I can think to describe the game upstep is, chinstrokingly, in terms of world-building and physics – Moore’s prior work was great and all, but there wasn’t the hard-to-place feel of contiguity, the sense of branes’ spillin’ direct on paper, that there is here. Quitely has it, of course, David Lafuente has it – it’d be easy to say JH Williams III has it, but he’s more a formal trickster – but it’s just that feeling of shared physical space, laws of movement. There’s this great splash page of a HAMMER agent getting smashed into a sewer wall by the Man-Thing and it’s just… it’s top-tier stuff.

*They also played “Creeping Death” in the metal club, which was a major highlight. Who knew my weekend was to provide such material?

I know, I know, the metal stuff is played out. I did it before. But there’s the whole knifey-gunny-deathy unreconstructed crossover thing. Brah?

I mean, like, dude the dude is eating the other dude’s brain or some shit? It’s like Hannibal, yeah? God, that film was abysmal otherwise. I don’t really have an ethic of horror but I do like wallowing in the detritus of an age, clearly. I can feel my skin worsening even with each keypress here; would you like to see the only good bit in Clerks II, which relates to a prior, better Hannibal film? ‘course y’would. It’s recursively structured, my shit, like the Morrison Batman – hopefully amy will be speaking to you about the last issue, last arc, sometime in the indeterminate (isn’t it all?) future. hopefully before the Cameron Stewart stuff drops. Anyway! Wolverine: Weapon X #7, starring above-noted homophobe Wolverine, is as grindhousey as Punisher is Hammer-y. It’s fine, it’s a decent comic, it’s nice to see Marvel hybridising with something other than crime-noir or thriller or terrible, transient TV-show-of-the-moment, in both cases. I really like Wolverine, you know? A lot of people seem resistant to Wolverine. I am not one such, which actually puts me in the majority, of people who are in no way resistant to Wolverine. It’s not like I buy every single Wolverine comic or that, but I get some. Get some. Wolverinecomics. ComicswithWolverine. D’you know the kids of the 1970s fucking hated Wolvesnipe? Yeah, man, read an old lettercol. Read a 4th World lettercol, maybe Jimmy Olsen, where they fucking have. the. audacity. to complain about Kirby art instead of, I dunno, Curt Swan. Comics fans have always been the same, but publishers maybe used to be more resistant to them? They stuck it out. They got Wolverine. Wolverine. What can you say about Wolverine? I dunno, man. Dude is cool with the knifehands. Sells comics. At this juncture, I would like to appeal to Marvel Comics to be about putting together a Jason Aaron scripted Hearts of Darkness sequel based, maybe a bit more structurally around the Conrad novel, yeah? Bit of Apocalypse, Now? Punisher. Guns. Wolverine. Knives. Ghost Rider. Fire. Listening to: The Great Kat performing ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ Dreaming of: The love that dare not speak its name.