I never noticed Abrams's lens flares until every Internet film-school grad manqué started complaining about them … and even then, I still forget to notice them while the movie's playing. This might be one of those "problems" that isn't actually a problem for people not determined to make a meme of it.

Wu-Tang is St. Elsewhere: an enormous, protean cast that launched numerous careers (both sublime and ridiculous) across numerous media … and in whose universe everyone else might still be living.

Sure … but without something exterior and numinous to ground it, it risks becoming highly vulnerable and labile.  Constructing morality in an ad-hoc fashion as you go can be done, but can also lead you to some very unexpected places, and can fail you utterly at certain crucial detour points.  Which, I think, is where…

It's certainly oversimplifying Walt to think of him as simple Evil, period.  But by "the Devil," I believe TVDW means the Evil One who's proverbially so good at speaking and arguing with us in our own voice, who dresses up our basest wishes in the drag of our highest aspirations, and who lays waste as easily with a…

Dear rest of GWAR: now cast a vote and make Oderus do Ocean's "Caribbean Queen" dance on stage.

It was a somewhat SATISFIED death, but scarcely a noble one, and scarcely an endorsement.  One keeps thinking of Macbeth:  killed in honorable combat, and without any this-worldly reckoning or coming to terms that would satisfy a modern daytime-TV watcher.  But for all the Scotsman's dramatic potency and for all his…

For high-test crankery, there's nothing like an intelligent, curious, undertutored fellow who's well educated in one or two narrow fields, but few others.  Medicos and high-level business types seem peculiarly vulnerable to this—maybe it's the godlike comptetence they're obliged to project within their own narrow…

One of the best essays I've ever seen on matters conspiratorial points out the useful distinction between "local" consipracy (often plausible and feasible) and "global" conspiracy (not so much), and draws parallels between the philosophical effects of "local doubt" (was that really my brother I saw crossing the…

Something tells me that Keaton could have been the most memorable Bruce Wayne/Batman by a long shot … if Tim Burton had been even remotely interested in that character, rather than the rogues' gallery and sets.  Unfortunately, the '89 and '92 movies didn't give Keaton any scope for much of anything, beyond what we saw…

[Scrawls PINKERTON on T-shirt with a Sharpie; grabs lead pipe]

So far, every single Cleveland factoid makes me like the man more and more.

Kirby's stuff is VERY stylized, and only got more so as he aged.  The more highly stylized art is, the more viewers tend to love or hate it, regardless of whether it's good art or not.  I'm not surprised that Kirby isn't to the taste of many people; that doesn't necessarily say anything bad about the latters' tastes.

Maybe there is something characteristically American about "simplicity and emphasis on force and motion."  However, successfully depicting those things isn't as easy, artless, or uncerebral as it sounds; think of how many artists (not just comic artists, either) consistently try and fail to achieve it.  If the…

A more trenchant question, perhaps: Picasso was unquestionably the better artist … but were his attempts at comics better AS comics (not as art)?  Did his style meet the medium's demands and complement its strengths better than Kirby's did?  I'm gonna go out on a limb and say "no."

As a 45-year-old, I cannot tell you how deeply that quote offends me.

The salient feature of "Kirbyese" is that rhythmically and phonetically, it sounds AWESOME when read.  Its actual meaning is a distant second.

Fantastic recommendations,  but if you're going to buy only one Fourth World Omnibus book, I STRONGLY recommend going with Volume 2 or 3.  The first volume is palpably feeling its way at first, and is unbalanced in favor of the Jimmy Olsen issues (which came out ahead of the other titles).  By the later volumes, the Ne…

DC had the same policy for Jimmy Olsen's face in those issues.  It's hard to know how to take the few original pencils that survive, though.  Maybe that's how Kirby would have really drawn Superman's face … or maybe he just drew it less carefully as a mere compositional placeholder, knowing it would be erased.

One additional reason AHP might have gotten away with so much: despite its frequent visual stylishness, the show owed a lot to the not-yet-extinct genre of radio drama.  Even when they weren't outright adaptations, the stories would have fit right in on The Whistler, Suspense, or Inner Sanctum Mystery.

I'm just glad Nolan cut the Nilbog scene.