Category Archives: Utilitarian Review

Utilitarian Review 3/27/10

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On HU

Biggest news this week is that we got an exciting new banner courtesy of artist Edie Fake.

I defined comics, and everyone from Eddie Campbell to Charles Hatfield to Jeet Heer agreed with me.

Vom Marlowe reviewed Song of the Hanging Sky.

Richard Cook reviewed Girl Comics.

Suat discussed Streak of Chalk.

And finally this week’s download is a little bit funky and a little bit Thai. Also mashups.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Over at FlashlightWorthyBooks I contributed to a list of graphic novels by and about women. Other contributors include HU friends and acquaintances Jog, Kate Dacey, Melinda Beasi, David Welsh, Matt Brady, and more.

Utilitarian Review 3/20/10

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This week we finished up our copyright roundtable.

Richard Cook reviewed Nola, a piece of Katrinasploitation.

Suat compared Hal Foster’s work on Tarzan and Prince Valiant.

I published an interview with Best Music Writing series editor Daphne Carr.

And this week’s download features lots of metal.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Suat is over at Robot 6 discussing what he read last week.

And I review High on Fire’s latest over at Splice Today.

Utilitarian Review 3/13/10

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This week was devoted to our (still ongoing) roundtable on copyright.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Comixology I talked about Steven Grant’s Punisher series, Circle of Blood and the connection between super-heroes and noir.

From the neck up, though, the Punisher isn’t hyper-competent at all. Instead, he’s more like the classic noir dupe. Though he has a certain tactical animal cunning, his inner monologue is obsessively repetitive in a way that suggests borderline idiocy — where Batman’s traumatic backstory has, supposedly, made him smarter, the Punisher’s has left him, in Grant’s writing, a monomaniacal mental and emotional basket-case. The Punisher is, like most noir men, childishly easy to fool. He stumbles into traps, is bamboozled by a shady conglomerate called the Trust, and, inevitably, betrayed by a woman. His solve-it-by-shooting-it approach to every problem results in heaps of dead bodies, including that of one child. Said child’s death sends our hero into a self-pitying funk, complete with flashbacks and profound utterances (“It’s got to stop. The poor children.”) which, at least from my perspective, makes him appear more damaged, dangerous, unsympathetic, and unheroic than ever.

On tcj.com I reviewed Fumi Yoshinaga’s All My Darling Daughters.

At Madeloud I interviewed Best Music Writing series editor Daphne Carr: Part 1; Part 2.

Also at Madeloud I reviewed Priestess’ prog metal opus, Prior to the Fire.

Other Links
Dirk kicks ass.

Jason Thompson on incest in manga.

Tucker argues that illegal downloading is bad because it betrays the can-do rapacious imperialism of our forefathers.

And Tucker also pointed me to this article about why contemporary poets should just go ahead and die already.

And here’s a long, academic, and pretty fascinating article about yaoi and homophobia.

Utilitarian Review 3/6/10

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We started the week off with my six-year-old son commenting on Peanuts.

Suat offered an appreciation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.l I still didn’t like it.

Richard surveyed current horror comics.

I explained why I hate Chip Kidd’s Peanuts book.

Vom Marlowe reviewed the manga A Wise Man Sleeps.

And this weeks download features mashups and more.

Utiltarians Everywhere

On Splice Today I review Johnny Cash’s last album.

At the Reader I survey my neighborhood’s bookstores.

And on tcj.com I review The Cartoon History of Economics.

Other Links

Tucker’s been on fire recently.

Shaenon has a highly entertaining take on the idiot copying panels from Bleach controversy.

Comics Comics brutally pwns TCJ.com again (and the rest of the comics blogosphere too) by doing the so-obvious-it’s-brilliant, and asking Jog to do his weekly previews on their site.

Alyssa Rosenberg is so so wrong to prefer Solange to Beyonce.

Utilitarian Review 2/28/10

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This week was devoted to a roundtable on Ariel Schrag’s graphic memoir Likewise. The roundtable finished off with a lengthy guest post by Ariel Schrag herself. Jason Thompson also kindly contributed a guest post.

Utilitarians Everywhere

It was a slow week for me in other published writing, but this essay about the spiritual purity of crappy art was reprinted over at Proximity Magazine.

Other Links

Bucking the general trend, Jeet Heer says that there’s nothing wrong with tcj.com (though he’s not so sure about HU.)

Derik Badman has a entertainingly snarky review of Crumb’s Genesis. Bonus appearance by Suat in comments.

I’ve been semi-obsessed with mashups recently. Here’s one I liked:

Utilitarian Review 2/19/10

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TCJ.com/fail

Much of the blogging this week was devoted to sneering and snarking at our host, TCJ.com. I started things off by noting that, after two months, the site still sucks. Suat concurred, only moreso. In comments, former TCJ editor Robert Boyd also agreed. Bill Randall, somewhat despite himself, did a guest post offering tcj.com his professional advice as a web marketer.

A number of folks also weighed in from around the blogosphere, including Johanna Draper Carlson, Heidi at the Beat (Update: and Heidi again, even nastier this time) and Sean Colllins.

In coincidental eat-your-hear-out-news, Comics Comics got a lovely redesign and Fantagraphics publisher had a major article analyzing the direct market and book market which he wrote for…the Comics Reporter. (Both links and schadenfreude courtesy of that Sean Collins link above.)

And also coincidentally — while we were all sneering, tcj.com had what was probably it’s best week thus far, at least in terms of content. They posted a brand spanking new knock down drag out Kevin O’Neil interview conducted by Douglas Wolk; a monumental three part history of the Direct Market from the archives courtesy of Michael, Dirk, and Gary; a short but very good essay by Dirk about the shake-up at DC; and a timely essay on the Captain America vs. tea partiers brou-ha-ha, which even energized the comments for a moment there.

On the one hand, this hits a lot of the things I said I’d like to see more of on tcj.com: interviews, a greater presence from editorial; and more creative use of the archives (I don’t know if I said that last one, but I should have.)

On the other hand…it’s when the content is going great guns that you really feel the crappiness of the site design. The direct market essays have already disappeared down the pooper shoot. Sticking the O’Neill interview to the top of the page seems like a good move given the options — but it still looks amateurish, and results in everything else essentially being invisible for the entire week. And there are still those what-the-fuck moments, this week provided by Ken Smith, who, love him or hate him, needs to be moved to his own blog.

Still, improvement is improvement. I feel more hopeful about tcj.com’s future than I did when I wrote my post at the beginning of the week, and I am duly grateful.

Update: Gary Groth responds with a bunch of good news, including a new staffer, plans for a news feed, and plans to do some more redesign. All of which makes me cautiously optimistic that this may be the last edition of tcj.com/fail.

Also on HU

Our new blogger Caroline Small (better known as Caro if you read our comments sections) started out with a bang, reviewing The Bun Field and discussing copyright and free culture.

Richard Cook reviewed the Planet Hulk DVD.

And I did a short review of the comic about copyright, “Bound By Law?”

Also, inspired by all the web design talk, I added a couple of features to the sidebar there, including a search function and a Recent Comments section. Let me know if the changes work for you all, or if there’s something else I should try to put over there. My wordpress skills are pretty lame…but I can always give it a try.

And no download this week…because I’m busy working on my essay for our Ariel Schrag roundtable, which will start tomorrow. We are focusing on her last book, Likewise, and Ariel herself is going to guest post (probably at the end of the week.) Critic Jason Thompson is also going to do a guest post, so there’ll be a lot of activity here. We’re starting tomorrow, so click back.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I explained why indie rockers Untied States can’t get out of the avant garde alive:

Not that Untied States has just one influence. “Not Fences, Mere Masks,” has a few bars lifted from the Beatles to break up the Sonic Youth. “These Dead Birds” sounds like Sonic Youth pretending to be the Beatles until it shifts into just sounding like Sonic Youth. And “Grey Tangerines” sounds like Robyn Hitchcock fronting Sonic Youth.

Other Links

I liked this discussion of the politics of yaoi.

I liked these awesome Japanese gag cartoons.

And though I maligned him earlier in the week, I nonetheless liked this essay on abstract comics by Kent Worcester.

Utilitarian Review 2/13/10

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We started out this week with me explaining why R. Fiore is wrong about the Watchmen. A lot of comments, some of them even about Watchmen.

I posted my report on a panel on Gender and Cartooning in Chicago.

Richard reviewed the first volume of Parasyte.

Suat discussed a classic comics adaptation of the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber.

I reviewed Manhwa 100, a catalog of Korean comics.

And this week’s download featured Beethoven, prog, and other things.

Utilitarians Everywhere

In my monthly Comixology column I review Craig Yoe’s recent collection of Joe Shuster’s fetish comics.

So Shuster was into kink, then? Yoe does manage to uncover some evidence that the artist had an eye for chorus girls and the female form. But while that’s interesting, it’s not really the main issue. The point here isn’t that this or that creator had a personal thing for spanking or sadism or masochism. Rather, the point is that as a genre superhero comics simply aren’t that far removed from the kind of pulp fetish porn that Shuster retailed in Nights of Horror. Read through Yoe’s plot synopses of the sixteen plus issues that Shuster illustrated and you’ll get a definite feeling of déjà vu. Damsels in distress, evil hooligans, manly private dicks, and fiendish torture devices — didn’t Shuster illustrate all of this somewhere before? You’ve even got a fair number of men getting shown up just like that milquetoast Clark Kent…though, admittedly, Kent’s humiliation didn’t usually involve a French maid.

On tcj.com I sneered mean-spiritedly at kid’s manga Dinosaur King.

Also on tcj.com, also sneering, my review of the shojo title Book of Friends.

On Metropulse I review Sade’s new album.

And on Splice Today I talked about why John Le Carre’s famous novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, is an idiotic, melodramatic piece of horse dung.

Other Links

I enjoyed this mean-spirited manga review by Erica Friedman.

Shaenon defeats Captain America.

And Matt Yglesias
makes with the Watchmen reference.