Monday's Musings

"Go grab your bag, I'll bring the gun"
-- AFI, "End Transmission"

There are days that I truly wonder how, a decade ago, I could come up with volumes of words about just about anything. I had a million and one things to say. Now there are days when I don't really want to open my mouth, put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. The most interesting thing to happen in media was the release of AFI's Crash Love, and wait, that doesn't have anything to do with comics. Maybe passion really does fizzle? Anyway, here are some thoughts on this past week:

• Is it a conflict of interest to have DC's Executive Editor writing an ongoing comic for said publisher? I'd be tempted to say "Yes", even if it is such a lower tier title as Outsiders as opposed to say Superman, but maybe that's just my personal ethos coming into play. To a certain extent, I would agree that an editor on a project is intimitely involved in the characters and direction and the like, but some part of me wants to keep the "writer" portion separate from the "editor" portion to keep some sort of oversight. This is not to say that an editor can't transition to writer, just take a look at Mark Waid, Tom Peyer, Peter Tomasi or Chris Ryall.

• I got my shipment from Top Shelf this past week, after spending a goodly amount on their $3 sale. It made me happy, so I guess that proves I still have some sort of affection for comics and this isn't entirely an intellectual exercise. You can probably expect seeing a barrage of reviews, mini-reviews and musings on random Top Shelf material in the not too distant future, but so far the only thing I've read is Alex Robinson's Lower Regions. It's a visual dungeon crawl, and kind of fun.

• Blogger's auto-coding for HTML sucks donkey balls. That doesn't have anything to do with comics, but there, I've said it. Random complicated coding for the sake of random complicated coding.

• A book that has been seeing a good amount of press, is currently having a signing tour, and has piqued my interest is Hans Rickheit's The Squirrel Machine from Fantagraphics. I'll undoubtedly post a full review in good time, but in the interim, take a gander through the back cover copy:

Set in a fictional 19th century New England town, The Squirrel Machine initially chronicles the relationship and maturation of Edmund and William Torpor. But the two brothers quickly elicit the scorn and recrimination of an unamused public when they reveal their musical creations built from strange technologies and scavenged animal carcasses. Driven to seek concealment for their aberrant vocation, they make a startling discovery. Perhaps they will divine the mystery of the squirrel machine.

The Squirrel Machine is the legendary obscurantist cartoonist Hans Rickheit's most ambitious graphic novel to date. Exquisitely rendered, strange, and hauntingly beautiful, this evocative and enigmatic book will ensure the inquistive reader a spleenful of cerebral serenity that will require vast quantities of mediocrity to banish from memory.

• Even I have to admit that Mike Choi and Sonia Oback's X-Force sure looks gosh darn pretty. The only problem comes in the fact that it's X-Force.

• Comic Book Resources started up a new column a few weeks back focusing on Wonder Woman called Wonder of Wonders. By and large, the contributions have been pretty damn good, however, one recent column from Carol Strickland reminded me as to why I tended to hate letter hacks and many "fans" of characters. Throughout her contribution, she mentions bits and pieces of the Wonder Woman mythos and how to reconcile them into the character. The flaw comes in that she mentions keeping the "good" and getting rid of the "bad" without qualification.