Graffic Traffic
And the Beat Goes On…
by Ryk McIntyre
It’s winter, and the President denies having oral affairs, while Monica appears in public with a pearl necklace. No wonder Ken Starr is ready to openly wear his Gestapo uniform, if only he could learn to stop bending his knees when he marches. None of which has anything to do with comics (apparently, only the movie Wag the Dog lucked out in the “Relevant Art” lottery…) So, shall we get on with discussing comics? Let’s shall!
With issue #56, Supreme (Awesome/Alan Moore – words/Spouse & Gordon – pictures) continues on its mission to tie together all the loose, ambient, contradictory threads that have made up the many decades of Superman stories. This time it riffs off the whole “there’s a ‘Negative Zone’ where you can imprison criminals, and what would happen if they all escaped?” (I think you’d call it Superman II – The Movie, but enough about me.) Y’know… it is good, most anything Alan writes has natural high-quality to it, but… uh… so? Is this a way of getting back at DC Comics for screwing him so many times by writing a better Superman than they can with four or five books? Okay, on that level it legitimizes itself. Still, with all the money Alan makes from this company, you’d hope, I hope, that we’d see a few Lost Girls issues, or even (dare I say its Holy Name?) Big Numbers. There. I said its name. Now it’ll never come out.
This is not a comic, of course, but still I want to use the massive weight of this column and throw it behind the bandwagon of Trey Parker and Maft Stone’s South Park, enjoyed weekly on Cable TV’s Comedy Central, and, undoubtedly one of Ani DiFranco’s 32 flavors. You see, I liked the first season of Ren & Stimpy a lot, I never found anything about Beavis & Butthead even vaguely amusing… go figure. But there is something about South Park that is mined directly from the same motherload of wild, raw talent, profane sense of humor, street-smarts all armed with an Edward-Albee-on-crystal meth misanthropic world view that blessed this planet with the Insane Clown Posse. When I was watching the Christmas Special, and Kyle did his plaintive solo song, I was fiercely praying that either Parker or Stone were Jewish, or they were in for a P.C. shit-storm. And this praying thing is hard to do with any dignity when you’re laughing your genitals off.
It would be unprecedented for me to do two reviews in the same column for books I haven’t even read, it might even be irresponsible. So that said, it gives me awesome pleasure to predict that you and I will love New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (Homage Comics/ Scott McCloud – everything). I mean look: this is from the same brain that humanized a super-hero in Zot, and then set the standard for what made up the bones, the soul, and the infrastructure of comics, as well as its awesome potential with Understanding Comics. So I can recommend this one completely blind. Trust me here.