On HU

This week on HU, Erica Friedman wrote her first column, in which she discussed whether or not feminine and lesbian perspectives in comics exist.

I highlighted some comments from the Fiore/Berlatsky grudge match.

Suat explained why the Unwritten doesn’t deserve an Eisner.

I discussed time and change in volume 3 of Ooku.

I reprinted a review of Lilli Carre’s The Lagoon.

Vom Marlowe looked at Bran Doll

Caro talked about how Anke Feuchtenberger writes the body.

And Suat provided an appendix of Feuchtenberger drawings.

Tomorrow we’ll have the first of Matthias Wivel’s columns — so be sure to click back!

Utilitarians Everywhere

Speaking of Matthias, he’s got a discussion of the Fumetto festival online at tcj.com.

Anyway, good art tends to thrive on the fringes, and Fumetto is as great as any showcase of the best contemporary comics have to offer. Amongst the highlights was an inventively curated exhibition of the work of Nadia Raviscioni, with focus on her new, autobiographically inflected fantasy, Vent frais, vent du matin, ten years on the making. Beautiful, funny and inventive work synthesizing big-nose cartooning and textural illustration in pages that alternate naturally between gag mode and oneiric suggestion, this promises to be a major book.

Also on tcj.com, I reviewed a really bad coffee table book about Wonder Woman.

Instead, we get a hodgepodge, mishmash Wonder Woman; a Wonder Woman thrashing about helplessly, but alas, not fetchingly, in the piss-golden strands of indifferent storytelling, sub-par artwork, nonchalant exploitation, and endless, grinding, remorseless continuity. Author Robert Greenberger [Update: with art Director Chris McDonnell] is a wonder himself, choosing illustrations by blindfolding himself and stumbling around DC’s offices after closing hours, while all the while cheerily and randomly retailing the intimate minutiae of idiotic, best-forgotten subplots.

At Splice Today I compare Shelby Lynne to of all things, death metal.

I’ve been obsessed with death metal recently. Decapitated, Disincarnate, Dismember, Deicide, Demilich and, of course Death; the best fucking band names in the world of music, and these are just the ones that start with “D.” I love that listening to death metal on an iPod is like collecting every word in the dictionary that could possibly be considered morbid and gross and putting them together almost at random. And yes, I’m sure there’s a band named “Morbid Gross” out there somewhere, and their singer sounds like he’s gargling knives and the music is like being bashed upside the head with a decaying goat tied to a spinning helicopter motor because that’s what death metal is, damn it. Just ask Carcass or Cancer or Cannibal Corpse or Kreator.

And at Madeloud I review the latest by nu-doom metallers Apostle of Solitude.

Other Links

Bert Stabler muses on faith, capitalism, and my recent fracas with R. Fiore.

Also in re said fracas, Charles Reece pointed me to this great essay about cultural and psychological darwinism.

And coffeeandink has a quietly but bracingly negative review of Natsume Ono’s Not Simple.