100 ROOMS. My (belated) contribution to the “100 things I love about comics” thing. I’m tired, so I’m only doing 25, at least for now–more later I hope. And I’m only doing stuff Jim Henley and Johnny Bacardi didn’t list, but my interpretation of “didn’t” may become slightly creative w/r/t, say, Los Bros. Hernandez. In no order:
1- Lynda Barry’s Come Over, Come Over and My Perfect Life: Sometimes (and a lot of the time, for the past few years) she slips, but when she’s on, she has an incredible ear not necessarily for how kids actually sound but for this awkward, exaggerated, off-kilter speech that is even better than verisimilitude. These are early volumes where Maybonne, Marlys and crew are at their best.
2- Alex Maleev’s pigeons (in Daredevil)
3- Stan Lee’s total, complete, shameless wigginess, on display in ’60s X-Men
4- Grant Morrison’s dialogue for Beast
5- A Small Killing
6- ElfQuest, vols 1-4
7- those awesome squares and rectangles and stuff, in Sleeper
8- the guys who work at Beyond Comics in Georgetown, because they have always been awesome, and they made me get Alias the first time I went in.
9- the fact that there is a character called MATTER EATER LAD
10- journalists!!!! When I am not broke, I am absolutely getting one of them J. Jonah Jameson action figures–“with desk-pounding action”!
11- that guy on fire at beginning of Marvels
12- Planetes, but you knew that….
13- Asterix the Gaul!
14- “It’s Ant-Man, all right? Ant-Man.” Awww….
15- Oooh… pretty.
16- Foggy Nelson
17- Charlie Brown.
18- “The Coyote Gospel”
19- Gone and Forgotten
20- The Wisdom of The Tick
21- “People send me stuff. One girl sends me weird stuff–in a good way. Last time she sent me emu feathers. Somebody sent me an eggshell. …I’m starting to think soon I’ll be able to build an emu from parts.” (Carla Speed McNeil.)
22- the Love and Rockets entry… featuring the inky inky blacks of Chester Square; “Flies on the Ceiling: The True Story of Isabel in Mexico” and “Human Diastrophism,” two of the scariest comics I’ve ever read; all the weird stuff, like Chepan and Penny Century and prosolar mechanics; Letty in Wigwam Bam; Poison River; Carmen and Heraclio; the biography of Frida Kahlo; “Hey, Maggot! Where you at?”; the tattoo on the bicep of that Twitch City guy, the one that said, “YOU LIVE INSIDE A BOTTLE AND PRETEND YOU’RE IN A CAN.” And, pretty much… everything else.
23- the fact that every time I say “Daredevil,” Ratty thinks I’m about to say “Derrida.” He’s the Philosopher Without Fear.
24- comics are just really, really out there, willing to do crazy stuff, in a way that most contemporary fiction isn’t (because it’s self-conscious and worried that the popular kids will look at it funny) and most genre fiction isn’t (because the genre tropes have mostly become tics). I just love how you never know what you’re going to get in comics; even the most predictable superhero titles can have awesome, experimental layouts, and bizarre “greatness… or madness?” ideas. The kind of ideas you come up with when no one else is looking.
25- And the biggest reason I love comics right now, a totally selfish one: I’m pretty sure they sparked my return to writing fiction. Finding a whole new form to obsess over, in which to work out the ways that form and content interact; wondering about whether I could replicate some of those effects in fiction; regaining the willingness to wig out in public, to do those unpredictable collisions I just talked about: That got me writing again. You may not care about that, but I really, really do. (And I hope to start posting a new piece this weekend!)