Train Wrecks Possibly Avoided in the Penny Press!

Naturally, like all the rest of the blogosphere, I can't resist commenting on the Zac Efron article in the latest GQ, if only to weigh in on one of the foremost questions other bloggers have had: what's with the cover photo? Not only have many posters commented on the eerie similarity between that shot of teen heartthrob Efron and Steve Carrell from the movie poster of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," but almost everybody has wondered about the proportions of the photo - surely, they've said, something about the shot is Photoshopped? It just doesn't look right.

Such doubters are reckoning without two things: first, Efron is eensy-weensy. He's not what those of us In the Know refer to as Kennen-sized, but he's not far off: five feet tall in his argyle socks, and tipping the scales at barely 100 pounds. And second, every single day he puts roughly 2 pounds of polychemicalized gunk in his hair, causing it to attain the size and molecular consistency of a second head. When you combine these two things with the fact that Efron is apparently deeply lost in the current ridiculous fashion of skinny clothing - not just jeans but suits as well - you see at once that the cover photo need not be doctored: it's entirely possible for Efron to look that epicene naturally.


Ah, but the real pith isn't in the photos, despite how many gay computer monitors now sport that hanging-from-the-parking-meter shot as their background! No, the real merit is the article (made of boring old words) that accompanies the pictures. "The Graduate" is by the always comment-worthy Alex Pappedemas, and it's consistently, gloriously better than its material.

That material is incredibly skimpy. Not only does it seem like Pappedemas got very little time with with his superstar subject (one brief hike in the Hollywood Hills, one brief drive to one brief lunch on an outdoor deck)(both of which combine to assert one big omission, of course - if your reedy little star is first hiking outside and then, despite oft-voiced anxieties over intrusive paparazzi, lunching outside, the reason is because your reedy little star regularly needs to smoke, which can't be done indoors in California these days; there's no mention of this in the article because, almost certainly, the reedy little star - or his handlers - asked that there not be)(similar omissions were regularly made on Justin Timberlake's behalf, back when he was Zac Efron), but all during that time, the portcullis is firmly locked in the 'down' position. This isn't just the result of a studio ordering its breakout star not to set tongues wagging - it's also genetic at this point, since Efron has been conditioned by Disney since he was a fetus. The Mouse's control of the Dark Side makes Palpatine look like a piker.


So Pappedemas has an interview with the hottest young male star on the planet, and he knows before he starts that he's not going to get much in the way of meaningful dialogue, although Pappedemas can be such a good interviewer - and, you get the impression, such a personable guy - that he gets more than you expect and turns it out nicely:

When Efron talks about these guys [Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, believe it or not], or when he talks about meeting DeNiro and how all the "dedication and hard work" DeNiro had put into all those great roles was written in the lines of DeNiro's face, or when he talks about how the movies of the '70s were better because they didn't test-market everything, you get the feeling he just wants to say the right thing. That he wants to make sure we know that everything he's done up until now - the basic-cable ratings record set by the second High School Musical TV movie, his decision to take a smallish role in Hairspray that winked charmingly at his own decidedly retro teen-idol persona, even his leap into the world of PG-13 movies with the winningly goofy old-dude-becomes-young-dude comedy 17 Again - means exactly jack, cinematically. That at least for now, he does not yet have the kind of history a man can hang in a barn.

To his credit, Efron throughout the interview seems wary not only of interviews themselves (Pappademas must be GQ's go-to guy for this kind of assignment)(either that, or he knows where all the bodies are buried) but of the easy way he could lose everything he has. Pappademas is very good on some of the raw variables that come into play:

You can tell this is what got him here, what drove him through the endless basketball drills and dance rehearsals High School Musical required - this sense that the work was a challenge and that the challenge was necessary. Sure, he's cute as a damn button - but he's pushed himself this far with the iron will of a mathlete bent on crushing his crosstown rivals. Whether this is going to be enough to get him into better films - as opposed to just bigger ones, which will undoubtedly come - remains to be seen. Better films demand certain intangibles, stuff an actor can't necessarily pull out of himself by buckling down and studying hard. He could smack the ceiling of his talent and that'll be that. But it won't be for lack of drive.

Other things we learn about the teen heart-throb in the course of the interview? He's got a potty mouth (rule of thumb: if sixteen "fuck"s got onto the printed page, sixteen thousand were uttered into the L.A. air), he respects his parents, and he's never worn false eyelashes. And he's not much more satisfied with the shape of his career thus far than anybody else. Here's hoping Pappademas is still interested in interviewing him in another ten years.

Comic Snobbery in the Penny Press!

Well, despite its grotesque cover (that's Robert Pattison, star of the hit movie Twilight, and for the occasion of his photo-shoot, he decided to show up a) unshaven, b) unwashed (hair helmet-hard with filth and, I'm guessing, live vermin), and c) very visibly high as a kite), I of course perused the latest GQ. How can I not, when I so often find gems of quality in each issue? This time around is no exception, although the cover interview itself is a standard chunk of bald-faced lying in virtually its every word. There are two things a celebrity interviewer must do in order to stay in the job, apparently: first, you have to create the impression in your piece that you've become part of your subject's world, that you've bonded somehow (the most common way to do this is the old 'there I was writing my piece two days later when the phone rang - it was Famous Person X, just calling to see how I was doing' ... pay attention to the next few full-length celebrity interviews you read: you'll see it everywhere, including in the Ben Affleck interview in this month's Esquire), and second, you have to hide your subject's dirty laundry from view, even if it means airing fake dirty laundry in its place (take this interview, for instance: before the meal the two share, during the meal, in between bites of food during the meal, instantly after the meal, and for every moment until they parted, Pattison was continuously smoking cigarettes - but our writer, Alex Pappademas, never mentions it, because although some smoking might be spinnable as cool ... there's one photo to that effect, accompanying the article ... constant smoking might suggest the star is addicted or something, and that might hurt tween box office - but instead of simply remaining silent on the whole subject - because who knows what twitching, amputated stump of journalistic integrity Pappademas might still retain? - he transmorgrifies the smoking into coffee-drinking and has that be the compulsive thing, and the only compulsive thing, Pattison does the whole time they're together)(although it's not all bad: when Pattison ass-shits on and on about not being able to lie, about not understanding, just plain not understanding where all these rumors about his incessant late-night partying come from, Pappademas' writing makes it clear he, at least, wasn't fooled by the enormously transparent liar sitting across from him) (needless to say, this lying applies extra-strong to your subject's sexual secrets ... if, for instance, you're interviewing, say, one of the macho young stars of Baywatch back in the '90s and he begins groping and then French-kissing your male waiter, you'd better make with some snappy patter about unnamed Brazilian actresses and the like).

Fortunately, I wasn't totally reliant on chain-smoking pygmy vampires to carry the issue! There's a really good piece on the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, and of course any profile of the comic genius that is Amy Poehler is welcome. And then there's the article that most caught my eye: it's Alex Pappademas yet again, but he's not redeeming himself in my eyes one little bit (except with honest-to-gosh work ethic! For that, he gets two thumbs up and an invite to write for Open Letters!), because his second article, "The 20 Graphic Novels You Should Read (after 'Watchmen')," is so choked with lame pretension and latent contempt for the comics genre that only sheer, seething rage kept me reading. Pappademas co-wrote this piece with Kevin Sintumaung, but somewhere our very own Kevin the Comic Snob is smiling, because the 20-graphic novel list here is absolutely fraught with the kind of plotless, narcissistic, "indie," too-cool-for-school sequential garbage that can be relied upon to get Kevin's Flexographic press running.

When Kevin indulges in his weird love of this crap, I cut him some slack (I know it's not exactly noticeable when I do this; it's more of an interior thing), because he himself is a talented comic artist. When Pappademas and his co-conspirator the great Steve Ditko Doctor Strange supervillain the Merciless Maung do it, I declare Open Season on pretentious Android's Dungeon nersteins everywhere.

If you know anything about the comics world (aaaaaaand Beepy just began drifting away toward a different bed of seaweed ...), you'll be able to guess most of the titles on the Dastardly Duo's list. Just keep the criteria in mind: no action, preferably done in black and white, copious sexual dysfunction, endless fetishizing of one's own childhood, and absolutely, positively no superpowers. If you need more specifics, just go to your nearest comic book specialty shop, try your best to shrug off the projected contempt of the sales staff (trust me: The Simpsons understates the matter entirely), pick up the latest issue of Croatian Lesbian Cancer Victim (it's a year late, but if you even so much as notice that, you're an intolerant lesbo-hating Communist), turn to the in-house ads (in this issue, as in every issue, they'll be the last 15 pages of a 25-page comic that's, as we've already noted, one year late), and there you'll find most of the titles Pappademas and the Merciless Maung want to take to the prom.

There's Charles Burns' craptastic Black Hole, of course, and that bane of my existence, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. There's Concrete and Pyongyang (because the purpose of comics should always be to remind us how much life sucks). Saturday Night Live comedian Bill Hader recommends Jason Aaron's Scalped, even though if he actually grew up liking comics, those comics certainly bore no resemblance whatsoever to Scalped. The wan and pointless Bottomless Belly Button (I mentioned dysfunctional families already, didn't I?) of course makes the list, as does It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, about which the Dastardly Duo actually write "Ignore the title - this is not the indie mope-fest you'd expect" - even though that's precisely what it is, for page after interminable page. Y the Last Man wanders into the article even though it was mostly good, and there's one single super-hero: the Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely All-Star Superman, and don't kid yourself that this is on the list despite the fact that it not-very subtly mocks the very superhero conventions it's appearing to honor - it's on the list because of that fact (the book itself is worthless, from Morrison's cavalierly continuity-screwing 'I swallowed a baby universe and it allowed me to recover memories that show that not only am I a fallen angel rather than a Kryptonian but that I actually killed Jesus Christ' insano-plots to Quitely's endless parade of eensy-weensy heads stuck on top of fat bodies).

So I thought I'd append here a list of my own, a morning-after remedy if you would. The following graphic novels are brought to you all in color for a dime!

First, three about the greatest superhero of 'em all:

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? by Alan Moore, Curt Swan, George Perez, and Kurt Schaffenberger - Way back in the mid-'80s, when DC Comics decided to revamp the entire Superman concept, they published this two-part 'what if' story about the way you might write a finale to the career of the old, traditional Superman (prompting some critics to point out that if the character had been done this well all along, no revamp would have been necessary). The result is a tender, thrilling comic about the costs of heroism.



Superman: Birthright by Mark Waid and Leinil Francis Yu - Cynical souls might see this 2004 production as DC Comics' response to the ratings of the successful TV series Smallville, since here we have a Ma and Pa Kent who look a lot like their TV counterparts, here we have the same premise of a farmboy/football star named Clark Kent who's secretly possessed of unearthly powers, and here we have a brilliant, outcast Lex Luthor who's initially Clark's friend. But many such elements handily pre-date both the TV series and the aforementioned character revamp, and Waid and Yu breathe new life into them. This is the ultimate retelling of the mythologically familiar Superman origin story - and it's got a lump-in-the-throat ending for good measure.




Superman: Secret Identity by Kurt Busiek and Stuard Immonen - what would happen if you lived in the everyday real world and your name was Clark Kent? And what if, after years of suffering all the lame jokes by friends, classmates, and co-workers, you actually developed Superman-style superpowers? Busiek and Immonen (his best artwork to date) take the one-issue throwaway pre-Crisis concept of the so-called 'Earth-X' Superboy and flesh it out in glorious detail, as the story of what might happen if somebody actually developed the powers of Superman in the real world.

Now let's go from one character to a big ensemble:


Marvels by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross - the ultimate Marvel Comics graphic novel, this book tells the story of the rise of Marvel superheroes, from the likes of Captain America and the Sub-Mariner during the days of World War II to the mutant X-Men to the company's flagship character, Spider-Man. Busiek's writing and Ross' painted artwork combine to form a perfect extended tribute to all the creators who made the Marvel mythos - and the book also tells a touching story, of one man's grappling with the phenomenon of super-heroes.



Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross - I've praised this book before (just follow the labels at the bottom, people! they'll lead you to a treasure-house of wit and wisdom!), and it certainly belongs on any list like this one, no matter what the Dastardly Duo might say. Set in a near future in which the line between hero and villain has become irretrievably blurred, Busiek's sharp writing and Ross' stunning visuals dramatize the return of classic heroes like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman to a world they may no longer understand. No matter how many times I read it, the powerful climax still gets to me.


The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke and Dave Stewart - Another killer premise: what if the story of DC Comics superheroes unfolded in real time, running from the 1940s to the present, complete with the Cold War and the Space Race and Vietnam? Cooke and Stewart re-imagine the icons of DC continuity (virtually everybody makes an appearance in the two parts of this book) set firmly in the real world, and the result is incredibly entertaining - with one panel at the very end that's worth the price of admission alone.

And how about some single-character focus for a change:


Blood & Judgment by Howard Chaykin - Comics great Chaykin does a four-chapter update on the classic pulp character of the Shadow, with stunningly entertaining (not to mention violent and just a bit sexist) results. DC Comics hasn't seen fit to re-issue this classic for a long, long time (nor have they collected the first ten issues of the monthly comic it spawned, despite the fact that those issues are drawn with flair and enigmatic style by Bill Sienkiewicz), but if you attend Boston's Comic Con in the first week of April, I'm certain you'll be able to find a copy, and it's well worth the effort (and the disdain you'll endure from people like the Dastardly Duo).


Born Again by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli - Miller of course achieved comics fame by creating one of the greatest graphic novels of all time, Dark Knight Returns, but this story-arc featuring Marvel's blind superhero Daredevil is every bit as good and considerably less hammy. It's a superb character-study of Matt Murdock, who fights crime as Daredevil and who, in this book, watches his life entirely fall apart. As the title implies, this is fundamentally a story of redemption, and it's one you'll find yourself re-reading.


The Frost Giant's Daughter and Other Stories by Kurt Busiek (him again! and yet, the Dastardly Duo has apparently never heard of him) and Cary Nord - Here are some classic Robert E. Howard short stories of Conan the Barbarian, brought fantastically to life by Busiek's extremely restrained scripting on top of Nord's gorgeous artwork. The Conan character has never been handled better than this, and that's a tough thing for me to say, considering how fond I am of the long run Marvel did on the character in the '70s.

And as a sop to all the Jimmy Corrigan loseroids out there - and to Kevin the Comic Snob, who never met a non-superpowered character he didn't love - I suppose I should include two more-or-less "indie" choices that, unlike those of the Dastardly Duo, are actually good:



Bone by Jeff Smith - in page after page of stunning black-and-white artwork, Smith tells the story of Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone, three cousins who find themselves in a fantasy kingdom full of complex characters and even more complex politics. Some of Bone is pure slapstick, some of Bone is pure high fantasy, and lots of Bone is socio-political commentary ala Cerebus the Aardvark, only here brought to life by somebody who isn't a raging A-hole. Bone has it all: an appealing heroine, some props given to Moby-Dick, and two of the flat-out funniest villains in all of comicdom. The big fat one-volume collection is the best money you'll spend all month.

Hard Times, once again by Howard Chaykin - in this case, his seminal science fiction creation, American Flagg! Chaykin paints an enjoyably bleak and fragmented near-future of gangs and high-tech crime, and he adds his usual standards: sexy gun molls, one tough-but-fair central character, lots of fast, brutal action, and a talking cat. The other American Flagg! story-arcs are just as good as this one, but this is the place to start.

And so, too, is this short list a good place to start! It at least gives you an alternative to page after poorly-drawn page of hapless losers standing out in the rain, the victim of the consequences of their own inexplicable life-choices. Virtually every graphic novel chosen by the Dastardly Duo brims not only with pointless anomie but with the unspoken assumption that comics - sequential art, sorry - can only be good if they entirely forget where they came from ... in other words, that no good can ever come from superhero stories. Needless to say, as a big fan of both fantasy and mythology, I completely disagree with such snobbery, and this partial list is offered as an antidote. Like it or not, the comics genre is and always will be - and should be - about heroes and villains, about right versus wrong ... and those things can be complexly and richly done even without grotesquely late and overrated Croatian lesbian cancer victims.