Headstone for the 20th Century

Comics 2010

1. BodyWorld
A graphic novel that straddles dimensions as radically yet effortlessly as it does genres, Dash Shaw's BodyWorld feels like an artifact from an alternate reality—one in which post-apocalyptic teen drama and telepathy-inducing drugs magnify a deeper narrative about the malleability of symbols, logic, and consciousness. On a strictly visual level, though, it's stunning: With a dizzying command of paint, pixels, paper, and sheer spectacle, Shaw writes and draws rings around not only his competition, but the very fundamentals of comic-book linearity and language. Even better: It's a hell of a flesh-crawler.

2. Artichoke Tales
In clear, unfussy green-and-white, Megan Kelso depicts the fictional world of Artichoke Tales as an agrarian, allegorical land scarred by war but gripped by deep roots and desperate love. That love—romantic, familial, ecological—is played out in quiet, graceful episodes that somehow encompass everything from cooking to lovemaking to childbirth to military campaigns. But amid the epic and cyclical turmoil, Kelso's intimately soft yet barbed storytelling renders her elfin Quicksand Family potently, poignantly human.

3. X'ed Out
X'ed Out, the first installment of Charles Burns' new, not-yet-collectively-titled project, sees the Black Hole mastermind branching out into an even eerier domain, one that mixes his horrific surrealism for what appears to be hard science fiction—that is, with a heavy dollop of dream-logic and shout-outs to Burns inspirations like Hergé, Moebius, and William S. Burroughs. But rather than simply namechecking these influences, he works them into the fabric of his warped and hyperlinked narrative. And then applies some gorgeous full color.

Prose bath

Seriously, I could take a long, hot soak in Catherynne M. Valente's prose. Her latest, fragrant vat of verse-worthy fiction: The Habitation of the Blessed, the first installment of a new trilogy titled A Dirge for Prester John. Shimmering, poetic, and approaching the alchemical, her language spreads through my skull like blood through water. Sheer fucking magic. Cat, you're a demigoddess.

Dispatches from the Land of the Steroid-Eaters, Day 3

Shorn of circadian regularity, my hypothalamus now bobs upon the gentle breezes of synaptic backwash (i.e. the jasmine in my mind). Times passes. Events occur. The two phenomena even seem to somehow eerily correlate.

Piratical Agenda

The cover to my very firstest book of all time -- Quirk Books' The Captain Jack Sparrow Handbook -- is now up on Amazon. Color me stoked. It's giving me some much-needed fuel to push through and finish this novel manuscript for Quirk that's due at the end of January. My first novel... When that cover finally gets unleashed, I'll probably just fucking pass out.

Hey Hey, We're The Solipsists

A minute ago I dropped the remote on the floor and, lo and behold, that sage little device decided I needed to be watching The Monkees. And it was right. It's been far too long... How could I possibly measure the effect this show had on my when I was a kid in the '70s? I had no idea what the fourth wall was when I was five, but I knew something was getting broken. For sheer absurdist subversion, I rank The Monkees right up with Captain Beefheart. Or maybe even this guy.

Digesting the insides of clocks* (and other pastimes)

Procrastination isn't laziness, mismanagement of resources, or a deficit of attention. It's an eating disorder. Touch, if you will, my stomach. Feel how it trembles inside?* It isn't my stomach at all. It's my brain. And all those tubes and loops of purple-gray membrane are intestines -- plumbing through which is pushed and flushed the chewed-up pulp of stopwatches and chronology. Some time comes in incontinent trickles, others as fibrous clumps of roughage. Ticking off seconds like grams of carbs, we consume our recommended daily allowances of hours in an attempt to maximize mouthfeel and minimize absorption. Failing that, we binge and purge and binge and purge and binge and purge -- until time, late for its own demise, passes.


*Apologies to WSB and PRN.

Clash of Scatology

The seventh and latest issue of the British speculative-fiction magazine Polluto has just been loosed upon the world. Within its pages squirms a short story of mine titled "The Feast of the Night-Soil Man." What secrets lurk in the shit of the gods? Find out now.

Tenured, Ten-Armed Shucker

My lengthy A.V. Club interview with master cartoonist Jim Woodring just got picked up by Boing Boing. Says Woodring of the feature: "The A.V. Club pried all kinds of words out of my unwilling mouth with the skill of a tenured, ten-armed shucker." In other news: I'm putting "tenured, ten-armed shucker" on my business card.

Purple Bitch

Grimace: rectal-tumor-turned-milkshake-salesman or the giggly personification of early onset diabetes?