I couldn’t get thru this thing. The Eternals is a snooze. It is to boredom what a head-on auto collision is to fear and pain: a cataclysm that can be outlived but never analyzed. So don’t ask me why this comic is so bad; just chip in to my hospital fund.

John Romita Jr.’s stuff is fine; he’s not the problem here. Neil Gaiman is, and he baffles me. A few years ago I did a piece about him for The Comics Journal, one that featured a lush aria detailing all the ways a Gaiman script can run aground. As far as I can tell, none of those ways are present here. The Eternals features straightahead, streamlined storytelling with the occasional imaginative touch that … Christ, it’s still boring.

Years ago I worked for a bright, energetic fellow who screwed up everything he touched. He had incompetence in its purest form; no other factors assisted him in his production of disaster. Gaiman has a similar isolated gift for producing boredom. He didn’t use to: about 40% of his Sandman run counts as the most entertaining bunch of comics I’ve read. Then the rot crept it and then it spread and then I had finished The Kindly Ones and never got around to The Wake.

Some people you just can’t appreciate, but I sure used to appreciate him and it’s not like his new stuff is so different from what came before. In fact it’s too much the same old but with the removal of key elements that I’m pretty sure include fresh dialogue, unexpected ideas, and interesting balloon-caption-picture interplay. So maybe there’s the problem. But why did those elements go missing? He isn’t even 50 yet; Wodehouse kept churning out his formula for half a century and it stayed fresh.

An additional mystery: I have never met anyone who said they liked Gaiman’s post-’93 comics, but figures indicate that people buy the stuff in great quantities. 1602 was top seller for its year, I believe, and won some sort of award.

His books aren’t so bad, those that I’ve read. They rehash his old ideas, but I can get thru them. Coraline underwhelmed me, but American Gods was all right; a friend found the reverse. Whatever. They’re still a long way down the slope from the Sandman issues that I liked. Maybe I’m just older; then again I really liked “A Study in Emerald,” so I think I can still respond to what he’s got when he bothers to bring it along. He just doesn’t bother, and why not?

Anyway, I took The Eternals out from the library, so no money was lost. That fucking thing … I couldn’t get thru it.

A fellow in England named Carl Warner assembles tableaux, very elaborate tableaux, from common foodstuffs. The pieces resemble landscape paintings (plus the occasional still life) and are the damnedest things. You can see 14 of them here.

For the leadoff I chose one that might be a trippy prog-rock album cover. There are some others in that vein, but most of the pieces are more traditional. Warning: all of the works are lush stuff, so stay away if you have a low banality threshold. Also stay away if you’re weirded out by camp mimicry.

Via Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein.

UPDATE: Holy, shit, there are two people in England doing this crap. I guess everyone got tired of writing good comics.

The other one is named Gayle Chong Kwan and a few of her works are here, along with some pointless photos of London Metro crowds looking at the works. You’ll see that Ms. Kwan doesn’t try to fool the eye the way Mr. Warner does. Her stuff is obviously a lot of pasta arranged with care. You’re supposed to experience the food on its own terms even while it functions within … oh, never mind. The title of her exhibition is Cockaigne, after the magic medieval land of food everywhere. Kind of a pretentious choice, but she put in the time gluing pasta and she did it well, so she can be forgiven.

Ms. Kwan comes to us by way of a commenter at Ezra Klein’s site. Thanks, Marc!

I’m reading I Am Not Spock by Leonard Nimoy. From it:

While being interviewed by Dick Cavett, Katherine Hepburn said: “You come into town with your box of goodies and that box of goodies is you, and you start to use it and sell it and eventually the box of goodies gets used up and then you must go back to something else to fill up the box with some new goodies.”

Imagine listening to her deliver that whole sentence in her quacking Katherine Hepburn voice. How could anyone do it and not tell her to shut up?

I was complaining about them here. Now there comes news that Japan will produce a manga version of Das Kapital. Will it be better than Howard Zinn’s American Empire? Not likely, because all manga sucks (bid for controversy). The Independent reports here.

(I should note that the link comes by way of Ezra Klein.)

Again we sample From Sawdust to Stardust: The Biography of DeForest Kelley, Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy. (See here for the last sampling.) I was going to call the post “Pseuds Corner,” but that’s been done. Anyway, the author isn’t a pseud. What she shares with us isn’t pretension, just the authentic wonder of her soul.

A reflection on Star Trek III:

The new energy created an archetypal gravity now invested in the three heroes and their story. The Star Trek crew had crossed from static icon to active mythology through the passion play, once introduced in 1968 with “The Empath.”

I especially like bringing in “The Empath.” (Good episode!) Because she figures it’s where the Star Trek passion play got started and she wants us to be clear on that point. She’s conscientious.

Fans worried that Star Trek III downplayed women. But the author feels they missed the point because, after all, the Enterprise blew up in that movie:

The Enterprise herself was a mother goddess. The mother’s sacrifice for the sake of the children is one of the oldest and highest myths of ancient humanity. The Enterprise destroyed herself so that the crew might live on, a holy event in the spiral of life.

And it is. A holy event in the spiral of life produced by Harve Bennett. So you know it was on budget.