On HU

We started the week off with Matthias Wivel’s new column titled DWYCK (in honor of Guru; Matthias has a lovely obit here.) This month’s column on HU focuses on the relationship between cartooning and classical art.

I sneered at the title of Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism. (Prompting Matthias to call me “asinine” in comics — welcome aboard Matthias!)

Suat reviews Dan Clowes’ Wilson.

Richard Cook reviewed Peter Milligan and James Romberger’s Bronx Kill. (James himself weighs in in comments.)

Old HU hand Tom Crippen returned for a guest post about writing criticism.

Vom Marlowe discussed comic character perfumes and the virtues of fandom.

And I digitized one of my old zines, titled “Superheroes I Have Known.

Utilitarians Elsewhere

At comixology I have an essay about pregnancy and homosexuality in Junji Ito’s Uzumaki.

Ito seems to be suggesting that all men secretly want to — that the only thing preventing constant man-on-snail coupling are a few thin taboos which will warp and dissolve like cardboard before the smallest liquid spray of desire. This is, of course, the fever-dream behind the most alarmist kinds of homophobia; the terror, not so much that gays are recruiting, as that, with just a little prompting, men will embrace any excuse to abandon heterosexuality, and with it humanity. From a Freudian standpoint, you can see it as the combined fascination with and horror of the father; a desire for the power of the phallus which must be carefully regulated through totem and taboo if we are not to all slide into cannibalism and anarchy.

I review Pam Grier’s new memoir over at Splice Today.

Foxy: My Life in Three Acts certainly is affecting in parts. As the father of a six-year-old, I found Grier’s account of being raped at that age actually nauseating. Less somberly, Grier’s discussion of one of her visit’s to the gynecologist has to be one of the top gossip anecdotes of the year so far. In her account, Grier explains that the doctor discovered “cocaine residue around the cervix and in the vagina” and asked Grier if her lover was putting cocaine on his penis. “ Grier responds, “That’s a possibility … You know, I am dating Richard Pryor.”

Then she admits to the doctor that during oral sex her lips and tongue go numb because, apparently, Pryor did so much coke that it made his semen an opiate.

Other Links

Tom Crippen sneers wearily (and effectively) at John Constantine.