I've been watching so many movies of late. In fact, i think my film-to-comics ratio is pretty out of whack. Not that that's a bad thing, really.

•Â Just last night i headed to the Laurelhurst Theater, grabbed a pint of Bridgeport IPA, and settled into a late-night screening of Little Miss Sunshine. I'd heard very mixed reviews, and frankly, i loved this flick! The characters were fabulous, and the actors across the board were amazing. The little girl who played Olive was unbelievably excellent. Films like this that can capture little tiny moments of the infinite, through subtle emotional dramas really float my boat. Kudos to Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris on a wonderful first effort.

•Â Requiem for a Dream, directed by Darren Aronofsky.

Whoa. I'd heard about this film for years. And now i can say that it's one of the darkest yet most beautiful and humanistic films i've ever seen. The story launches with all the well-meaning in the world, then slowly crescendos towards a nightmarishly horrific ending; masterful filmmaking, especially in the way in the stories of all four main characters were interwoven. I've never seen the actor Jared Leto (who is a dead ringer for Jesse Recklaw), but he and the rest of the cast were superb. Incredible haunting music, featuring the Kronos Quartet. The cinematography, by Matthew Libatique is breathtaking. If you have a strong stomach and can handle dark films, this examination of addiction, in all its forms, is highly recommended. Many thanks to Alexa for tipping me off to this incredible film.

•Â Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder.

Yet another fabulous film noir classic and, according to the short film in the extras, one that really helped set the table for the wave of noir that followed its release in 1944. At first i wasn't as taken by Fred MacMurray or Barbara Stanwyck as i was by Michum and Greer in Out of the Past. But that was really just the brilliant set-up, throwing me off base. Needless to say, not 30 minutes into the film the leads start their spiral out of control, and the performances knocked my socks off. I really don't know how i can gush much more about the greatness of film noir. How the villains aren't even really villains, but just everyday people who make a bad decision, followed by another and another, overtaken by greed and lust. You know, tapping into the darkside we all have buried within us.

•Â On the political front, Greg Palaste explains in chilling detail something Bush made passing reference to in his State of the Union; the totally unconstitutional desire to create a federal citizen profile database. More Orwellian freakiness by the commander-in-chief.

• Nifty show in Vermont, news item courtesy of James Kochalka

• Here's a large version of Craig Thompson's amazing art for the new Menomena record, and a link to hear the entire record as streaming audio. What's hard to tell here, is that those red areas are actually die-cuts. This is a mindbending illustration job by Craig. Seriously. I mean, the album is a wonderful slice indy brainy indy pop, but the cd case alone is worth the $10 price tag i saw this going for.

•Â Finally, how cool is this cover for Matt Kindt's forthcoming Super Spy.

First, a sneak peak at the early stages of our forthcoming sampler book, with a spiffy by Jeffrey Brown. Super cool stuff.

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Here's a great review of Renee French's The Ticking. It will run in German, in the superb Swiss anthology magazine, Strapazin, and as far as i know this is the only review in English.

Beautiful on the Inside: Renée French’s The Ticking
Review by Mark David Nevins, January 2007

It is likely that the average person in this day and age does not often employ the word “ticking.” Unless in reference to a clock, and even then probably not that often, because how many clocks tick anymore in our digital age? Ticking is, of course, the heavy and coarse cotton fabric used in manufacturing the covers of mattresses, and if there’s any ambiguity in the word’s meaning as the title of Renée French’s latest work, then the first few pages of the book clears it up right away: there’s no title page to be found, but rather a series of five drawings of swatches of that tough striped canvas you see every time you change your sheets.

Renée French is a gifted artist who sometimes creates what could best be described as children’s books which should under no circumstances be given to children and which tend to make adults feel rather uncomfortable. The Ticking is a picture story full of mysteries, not the least puzzling of which is the significance of its title. Other than the first and last pages of the book…extended end-papers of a sort…mattress fabrics do not seem to appear anywhere. However, to be fair, beds do play an important if not prominent role in the story. Poor monstrous little Edison Steelhead doesn’t have the luxury of coming into this world in a bed: his mother dies in childbirth on the kitchen floor. But some of his happiest moments are spent (alone) in bed: drawing, reading, talking to his various puppets and imaginary friends. And his story (at least this chapter of it) ends with a horrible discovery, when he’s interrupted in bed during a moment of reverie in the hotel room he comes to call home. Like some of French’s other creations, Edison is bizarrely disfigured on the outside but intelligent and gentle on the inside. Over the course of this tale he eventually finds peace with himself, but he does so by and large without anyone else’s help, unless you count his little sister, a chimpanzee who sleeps comfortably tucked into a proper human bed, blankets and all.

Just like the stories she tells, the work of Renée French is rather difficult to describe satisfactorily. The description “dreamlike” is often used, but The Ticking is at once more strange and less nonsensical than most dreams tend to be. It reads as a nightmare experienced with great tranquility and in slow motion. The films of David Lynch offer a good counterpoint to her work…and Edison even resembles the creature in Eraserhead a bit. Like Lynch, French is interested in exploring the unsettling and mysterious things that lie just below the surface of the normal and mundane, the way the ticking of a bed lies under the layers of linen. In 1919, Sigmund Freud made a rare foray into literary criticism with his monograph Das Unheimliche, and it might be said that French has devoted her work in the comics form to an exploration of Freud’s concepts of foreignness and the uncanny. That essay by Freud makes great reading alongside French’s oeuvre, by the way.

French’s work is both shocking and poetic, and with every book her stories seem to become simpler but also deeper and more moving. Books by Renée French come along far too infrequently, and she clearly grows and evolves as an artist from book to book: here she employs pencil drawings as deft as she has ever executed, which are punctuated by what appear to be dry-point etchings that offer a surprising additional perspective on the tale’s elusive themes. The Ticking leaves the reader with a feeling of mellow introspection…a peacefulness in spite of the weird and sad events that plague poor Edison. As French matures as an artist, and as we mature with her, perhaps we are becoming less repelled by her monsters and her fascination with physical violence and bodily functions because we recognize that the things she is trying to show us are in fact metaphors for our own lives…although not necessarily those aspects of our lives that we are most comfortable thinking about or tend to disclose or talk about much.

After several readings of The Ticking, I’ve come up with my own personal meaning for the book’s title. When I was very young (and French has now caused me to reflect on my childhood while thinking about her book), I could spend hours on my bed, losing myself in the patterns in my bedspread or in the texture of the pillow’s fabric (or, indeed, in the ticking if I pulled up the corner of the sheets). I would discover universes in the dust-motes swirling in a ray of light coming through the window, or in the swimming after-images I could create by squeezing my eyes tightly shut. Time stopped in these moments, and for the first instances in my young life I found myself asking questions such as “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” and “Am I really loved?” and “What will happen when I die?” In the rush of adult life it’s far too easy to forget the perceptions and insights we were able tap into when we were children…the wonder and fear brought about by our bodies and our emerging consciousness…and I am grateful to Renée French for giving us the occasional opportunity to see again, new, through her eyes.

Vegas was fun AND quite productive for Chris and myself. (Although it was so friggin' cold, we were both unprepared and froze out little tushies off.) We've mapped out the bulk of '07 and into '08. Stay tuned.

(Fuzzy Chris & Brett)

(View from my room at one of the MGM Grand condo towers. Notice the Eiffel Tower in the background.)

On the flight there i read the three volumes of Dylan Horrocks' wonderful Atlas, published by Drawn & Quarterly. Like his previous comic series Pickle, Atlas is a bit of a catch-all book. It has a longer running narrative (in this book, "Atlas: A Life of Emil Kopen"), as well as mish-mash typical of single-author anthologies. In the first issue, it was a James Kochalka piece, and in issues 2 and 3, the serial titled "Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen," a thinly veiled autobiographical strip concerning Sam's (Dylan's) years-long cartoonists' block. Both serials are, true-to-form, blindingly brilliant. I really hope … for Dylan's sake and the sake of comics in general … that he gets his shit together and starts cranking out the pages, because Horrocks is truly one of the world's elite cartoonists.

Let's go Dylan!

The night we flew in we went to see one of the world's best Elvis impersonators, Trent Carlini. He was shorter than The King, but he sure had the moves. Saturday night we saw Penn & Teller. We were late (thanks to an incompetent curbside service at our hotel), but P&T really impressed. Very funny and very very smart. Even their promotional imagery was excellent, and quite ubiquitous; their b&w mugs appearing on billboards, taxicabs, and in print in every brochure in town.

(This is the back cover of a tourist brochure i picked up in a taxi.)

Oh, and we ate like king's every night (ahi tuna / steaks/ sushi), each time at one of the plethora of amazing restaurants in the MGM Grand. Mmmm... food.

And we certainly didn't want for hospitality or service; many thanks to Matt O'Brian from City Life: Luigi, the sommelier at Shibuya, and the beautiful waitress Alexa, a film student from San Diego. (Luigi, make sure you call me for a pub crawl if and when you come to Portland.)

On Saturday morning, while i was sleeping off a serious hangover, Chris went to the Wynn hotel, and hooked up with Elvis' right-hand man, Joe Esposito, the foreman of the Memphis Mafia.

On Sunday afternoon Matt took us off of The Strip to go see the infamous comic shop Alternate Reality. And an excellent store it is, with a tasty selection, including almost the complete Top Shelf line. Nice work, Ralph!

Meanwhile:
• It snowed here yesterday, so my sister Nicky and i took Carter on a little snowy walkabout. His first one, and he had a blast. (Though he couldn't quite figure out how to keep his fingers in his gloves.)

• Gregory Benton is part of yet another show in New York. This is a piece for a show in Brooklyn curated by Rich Jacobs. The concept is "blue ballpoint pen drawings on 8.5 x 11 paper". It has to do with going back to school & doodling your way through existence.

Cinders gallery in Brooklyn. The opening is Friday, Jan 19 from 7-11PM. The show runs from Jan 17-Feb 18. Some great artists involved: Jordin Isip, Eric White, Melinda Beck, Rich Jacobs... just to name a few.

• For all you Italian speakers out there, here's a nice review of James Kochalka's American Elf.

•Â Off to meet Staros in Vegas tomorrow, so we can map out 2007 and into 2008. While Chris and i both love working at home, and have no real problems working across the country from each other, the one thing that we just can't do so well over the phone and/or internet, is heavy planning. It's the kind of thing that has to be done face-to-face, and without interruption. (Which is also why we rarely have the time for deep planning while we're at conventions together.)

•Â Based on The Brube's enthusiastic recommendation in Criminal #2, i went out and bought Out of the Past, the classic film noir with Robert Michum. Of course, Michum is a freaking stud. He gets burned once, and then from there on out his steely resolve is absolute. The guy has ice running through his veins. But really... oh my god, Jane Greer. I'd never even heard of this actress, and let me know tell you, it's a crime. Her performance here is literally mesmerizing. Quite possibly the most intense femme fatal i've ever witnessed in a film. She smolders, she struts, and even while you know she's nothing but trouble, you can't help but want her more than anything in the world. If you like classic film, you owe it to yourself to watch this asap.

•Â Was sent Ezra Claytan Daniels' wonderful new greeting card set, Loaded Blanks. Each card is a one-page comic strip, and the word balloons are blank, so that the giver (or receiver) can fill them in to their own liking. They really turned out swell. Contributing artists include: Vincent (King Mini) Stall; Aaron Renier; Hector Casanova; Tim Degner; Tom Herpich; Ezra himself; Becca Taylor; Grant Reynolds; Jeremy Tinder; Dash Shaw; Alec Longstreth; and Dave K.

Thanks Ezra!

Art by Aaron renier

Art by Jeremy Tinder

•Â Here's a teaser webpage Renee French set up for Micrographica. It has just a few images from the book and the mock up. This is going to be a sweet little book. I'm so happy to be publishing Renee's singular visionary work.

Just a few things worth checking out.

Excellent advance reviews from Johnny Bacardi, about our Next Four New Books. [James Kochalka's American Elf vol. 2; Jeffrey Brown's Feeble Attempts; Aleksander Zograf's Regards From Serbia; and Jeff Lemire's Tales From the Farm.]

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Why i loveYouTube reels, and why net neutrality is so important:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqyZ1ys6d3s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_WcfbaY8o4&mode=related&search=

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James Kochalka has two pages of American Elf comics in issue #9 of SWINDLE.

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Matt Rota has redone his whole website. There are about seventy images up, almost all new and done within the past year. Really really fine work.

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This is pretty cool! Renee's map of her upcoming book Micrographica.

Renee was featured in an excellent podcast interview by Charlito and Mr Phil over at Indy Spinner Rack.

Just returned from three weeks in Australia, so i'll try and do a quick recap. (I've got to show at least a few photos, right?)

Lisa and Carter

Carter and Brett

Australia. Summer. Hot. A week in Sydney, five days in Perth, then four more days in Sydney. Lots of Chinese food and BBQ. Drank like a fish, ate sweets all day every day, and gained six pounds. (Ouch.) Took Carter to see The Wiggles in person, and he had the best time of his life. He also really went apeshit at the Sydney Aquarium.

Met with Lisa's cousin Allie and her man Ash in an all Belgian Beer restaurant. If there is a heaven, this was it. Started off with a 500 ml mug full of one my all-time favorite beers, Hoegaarden. Then i had a crisp new beer, the name of which i can't remember, but the alcohol percent of 9.5% i do recall. Finished the night with a cherry-infused Kriek. And the food was great too. Yummy.

Now that's a beer, mate!

Totally got into cricket on this trip, and watched some amazing play by the Aussies to take back the Ashes (a tiny but all-important trophy) from the dreaded English, in a multi-day "test." This is an interesting sport. Since i got my dose of rugby last time i was in Fiji, now i need only get into some Aussie-rules football, and my Australian sports trifecta will be complete.

Reading material on the trip:
• The Surrogates. That's right, i finally read the very book i published last Summer (i didn't edit or do any production on this whatsoever, so it was all new to me), and it rocks! Rob and Brett have crafted a beautifully stylish and entirely fleshed out world, and a prescient cautionary tale. I only wish it was twice as long... perhaps we'll see more one day?

• Comics Journal no. 278 and 279. (Bill Willingham and Joost Swarte cover features.) And my love/hate relationship rolls on...

No. 278. Interesting interview with Willingham. He's got some bizarre politics i'm not real keen on, but i dig his ideas nonetheless, and when he also does art for what he writes, he's excellent. Three reviews that (not surprisingly) negatively reviewed Lost Girls, is called a "round-table," although i always thought that a round-table was a group of people discussing a topic TOGETHER, a back & forth. A nice yet qualified review of Renee French's The Ticking, and a nice bullet-review of Jeremy Tinder's Cry Yourself to Sleep rounds out a nicely represented batch of Top Shelf reviews.

Superb wrap-up posthumous interview with Bob Haney, a grizzled vet and DC Comics writer, and responsible for some crazy cool shit, like Metamorpho. He was a witty guy with sharp mind. Loved how he let fly with himself, and didn't care about stepping on anybody's toes.

No. 279. The Swarte interview was fine, though it was rather short, and i would liked to have heard more about his early development as a cartoonist. I was pleasantly surprised by the Johnny Ryan interview. Some good reviews (including a bash on Jeffrey Brown's Every Girl is the End of the World for Me, and some kind words for Aaron Renier's Spiral-Bound). I really loved Donald Phelps' overview of Cliff Sterrett's Polly and her Pals, and especially the piece Trina Robbin's did on a long-forgotten creator named Lily Renee, a Golden Age artist who did some amazing work featuring sexy, smart, and empowered heroines.

• Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal, issue #'s 1 and 2. Holy crap, these two guys are one of the best teams working in contemporary comics. Their 12-issue series Sleeper was a conspiracy infused, crime-noir super-hero masterpiece. While it was indeed tied into super-hero continuity (the "Wildstorm Universe," also responsible some awesome stuff, like The Authority and Planetary), i think it read splendidly own it's own.

Criminal on the other hand, is a straight and hard as it gets; pure 100% crime fiction, and not a whiff of spandex. It feels like classic noir, and looks like a contemporary Michael Mann film. Truly superb so far. It's beautifully designed too, also (i believe) by Sean Phillips. If Marvel isn't using a high-powered publicist to pimp this book to a wider audience, beyond the insular world of comics, then they have their heads up their collective ass. Because if comics are to ever reach the elusive "real-world" audience … which will have to be sans men-in-tights … this is as good as it gets.

It's one of the very very few books i EVER buy both serialized and (eventually) in trade paperback formats, if for no other reason than to support the creators and to help guarantee a collection.

• Peter Bagge's HATE Annual #6. More freaky goodness with seminal punk rock comics superstar Buddy Bradley, and his motley crew of misfits. You either love or hate HATE, and after all these years, is still LOVE it.

• Michael Ambrose's Charlton Spotlight No. 5. This issue spotlighted the insanely prolific Charlton stalwart Joe Gill. This one guy wrote tens of thousands of pages of scripts for a company with known mostly for their shitty printing. He tells unapologeticly how he initially took this particular gig (for way less than market rates at the time) because as basically a staff-writer instead of freelance writer, he was guaranteed a regular paycheck to support a healthy drinking lifestyle.

Also some articles about the work Ditko did for Charlton, including Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, and The Question. For my tastes, believe it or not, Ditko's work at Charlton from the early stages of his career up through, and past, his gig on Spider-Man is some of his best. Especially the stuff he did (most of which was in fact written by Joe Gill) on the horror titles. Hallucinatory and fun.

• Always on the search for nice book designs while i'm traveling, i stumbled across the work of an author i've read lots of great things about named writer Elmore Leonard. (His book Rum Punch was adapted by Tarantino and called Jackie Brown.) The jacket designs are what compelled me to pick up both Rum Punch and another book called Unknown Man #89, which were resting along with maybe two or three other crime fiction novels by Leonard, all with a luscious shared design scheme. Mostly all white over-sized paperbacks, each had the author's name a spot-varnished silver at the top, underneath of which was the title of the book, embossed, and using a color pulled from the spot illustration. Just below center was a four or five inch tall illustration than ran across full-bleed, from side-to-side, given it the effect of a movie screen. Tiny yet effective pull-quotes we added at the very bottom. The top of the spine of each book also goes the dvd route by adding a postage stamp-sized image from the cover. A nice element indeed. (And something Oni Press has been doing for years themselves.) The back cover lists the cover designs to Ghost, and the cover illustrations to Tim Marrs. If only American book publishers cared this much about design.

And as gorgeously designed as the books were, so too was the actual book i read on the trip, Unknown Man #89, written in 1997. I love how his characters are such normal people, who end up in wild scenarios that seem totally plausible. Not sexy at all, but gritty, chewy fun. I can't wait to read more by this guy.

I found this book at a tiny but wonderful bookshop called New Edition Bookshop in Fremantle, Western Australia. They had a copy of Jeffrey Brown's Unlikely on a modestly sized, but tasteful wall of face-out graphic novels. If only all indy booksellers were this savvy.

In Sydney i revisited a gorgeous bookstore called Ariel. I'd been here five years ago and forgotten about it entirely. This boutique bookstore carries mostly fancy artbooks, gift books, and a very few graphic novels (including Jordan Crane's Last Lonely Saturday). They had a copy of Lost Girls under glass, retailing for $175 Aussie!! I picked up a stunning book called City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912 - 1948. My god some of these people looked rough & tumble.

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• On a totally different note, i've said this before, but allow me to repeat, that Tom (The Spurge) Spurgeon is the King of Bloggers. His Comics Reporter was the one comics-related blog i went to first whenever i checked in from Sydney. Recently he's been conducting interviews with some of the most important people in comics, most of whom mostly working out of the spotlight. Admirable also is his willingness to reach outside his personal tastes with a fair amount of objectivity.

• Eddie Campbell has been adding some seriously divine posts on his blog about the creation of From Hell, posting reference photos, sections of Alan's Script, etc. Besides the inherent interest of the subject matter, Eddie could wax poetic about taking out the trash, or blowing his nose, and he could make riveting reading out of it. In fact, Eddie is such a good writer, that i feel like a tool rereading some of my blog entries. He's got the magic touch, that's for sure.

Hopefully he's also busy archiving pages of his Magnum Opus, the autobiographical series Alec, which we hope to be releasing in one or two mammoth collected volumes in the next 12 - 18 months. (Maybe for a San Diego 2008 release? Eddie?)

• There's a choice Renee French interview up at Indie Spinner Rack. Oh, and they've also got a great interview posted with inkstud Sam Hiti.