Good Guys and Very, Very Bad Guys in the Penny Press!

Despite the fact that the latest issue of GQ hypes itself as a "football issue," there's quite a bit of good stuff in it - and one piece of such appallingly bad stuff that it sets the senses reeling.

The good stuff centers, as always, on pretty much the last thing you'd think about when thinking about a 'lad mag' - even one of such long-standing as GQ: the strength of the writing. The always-entertaining J. R. Moehringer, for instance, is back pounding his customary beat, profiling pretty-boy football players. In this case it's New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez, who's buff, beautiful, and, according to Moehringer's rather modest check-list (showtunes? check! Glee? check!), bi-curious (it's odd that Moehringer would attempt to make such a mystery of things, actually - one picture accompanying the article clearly shows Sanchez wearing 'skinny' jeans, and since all adult males who wear 'skinny' jeans are gay, the picture settles the question). Moehringer writes snappy prose about the ability of this athlete he calls the "consummate little brother" to simply not see what he doesn't want to see:

Selectively not noticing might be Sanchez's gift, his secret for surviving the pressure and scrutiny of New York. When it comes to his fame, for instance, Sanchez is often oblivious - which has kept the craziness from changing him. After two years of adulation and jeers, he still calls older men "sir," still opens doors for women, still sends thank-you notes, still poses with fans and spends long afternoons with sick children - and still won't say a bad word about Tom Brady, no matter how much you egg him on.

We're given to believe that Sanchez is a genuinely nice guy, and elsewhere in this same issue, nice guys finish last: Alan Richman, the best food critic writing today, has always been that singular anomaly: a genuinely nice restaurant writer. No prima donna antics, no bellowed "Do you know who I am?" threats - opinionated, yes, but fair. Which makes his latest piece, "Diner for Schmucks," all the more startling: it's a full-length torch-job of the trendy Queens restaurant M. Wells, generated more by the boorish behavior of the place's owners than the place itself. The piece winds up with a refreshingly candid admission that food critics - and by extension, all dining patrons - have allowed trendy restaurants to get away with crappy service in exchange for the dubious honor of being allowed to eat there. "All we care about is accessibility," Richman writes, "getting through the door. Such restaurants are rarely held accountable, no matter how

[caption id="attachment_3492" align="alignleft" width="194" caption="note: this is not Alan Richman"][/caption]

uncaring they might be. I doubt that the people who operate these sought-after spots ask themselves if they are treating their customers properly. They are not obliged to do so."

I couldn't help but sympathize, of course, although it was something of a stretch. I only regularly patronize one restaurant - once a week like clockwork, I go to my little hole-in-the-wall Chinese food place in order to hunker down over a gigantic plate of fried rice and read the week's stack of periodicals (yes, it's right at that back-wall table that I actually encounter The Penny Press!). I get that same heaped-high plate every single week, and I'm on my second generation of staff there. There's never anybody else there, and I'm accorded the highest display of courtesy: I'm served and then ignored. I doubt the place would rate even a moment of Richman's expensive attention, but at least its owners wouldn't show him the suicidal rudeness that M. Wells' owners did.

Once you venture past dreamy Mark Sanchez and affronted Alan Richman, however, this issue of GQ becomes solely the province not of nice guys but of one very, very bad guy: Philadelphia Eagles quarterback and convicted dog-torturer Michael Vick. I couldn't believe it when I first turned the page and encountered this article, couldn't believe the very talented writer Will Leitch could suppress his nausea long enough to write it - and to write it morally neutral, as he studiously does throughout despite the rather obvious fact that he didn't actually like his interview subject.

And there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to like. The gist of the piece is that Vick was convicted of dog-fighting, served time in jail for it, and emerged a changed man - a changed man with a large and never-idle PR team whose job is to promote the living brand that is this new, changed Michael Vick. We're dutifully told how golden he is on the playing field; we're informed of all the community service he does, the speeches to underprivileged youth, the PSA's for animal rights groups, etc.

The one thing we're not told is that he's personally repentant, because he's obviously not. Leitch plays it as straight as he can and gets back responses that turn the stomach. At the time of his arrest back in 2007, Vick said:

"I'm never at the house ... I left the house with my family members and my cousin ... They just haven't been doing the right thing ... It's unfortunate I have to take the heat behind it. If I'm not there, I don't know what's going on."

He tells Leitch during the interview four years later:

"I was walking away, just totally refocussed on something else ... I just happened to get caught out in the yard trying to help out."

He also tells Leitch:

"For a while, it was all 'Scold Mike Vick, scold Mike Vick, just talk bad about him, like he's not a person. It's almost as if everyone wanted to hate me. But what have I done to anybody? It was something that happened, and it was people trying to make some money."

Leitch goes on:

It benefits Vick to be just like every other athlete again, full of braggadocio and bromides and advertisements for lime sports beverages. This is all Vick could ever have hoped for: to reclaim the normal, pampered, stupidly happy life of a professional athlete. And why shouldn't he? He served his time. We can be repulsed by his past, we can choose not to root for him, but we can't drown out the cheers from Eagles fans. In the $9 billion juggernaut of the NFL, Michael Vick's transgressions just don't matter anymore, and maybe they never did.

Freelance writers (Leitch is more than that, of course - he's the brain behind Deadspin, the consistently most-enjoyable sports-site on the Internet, but in this case he's cashing a check), I've come to learn, are obliged to spin a certain ration of bullshit in order to make a living. It can be a fairly good living, so you accustom yourself to the bullshit - and if you're clever, like Leitch, perhaps you seed your neutral-seeming paid work with subtle, subversive hints. But we should all be absolutely clear: Vick's 'transgressions' did matter, and they do matter. He didn't just happen to get caught out in the yard, and the hateful cynicism of such a line is all the more reason to condemn this conniving little lying coward. He didn't just get caught out in the yard on the wrong day - he helped to drown head-clubbed fighting dogs who hadn't performed viciously enough for him. He stood alongside the jerking, pivoting bodies of dogs hanging by their necks and punched at them like they were a boxing-bag at the gym, laughing with his employees the whole time. And the criterion by which he judged a dog's viciousness was simple: he clocked how long it took that dog to tear apart the bewildered, old, helpless, friendly suburban house-pets his employees had plucked out of their yards earlier that day. There aren't words to describe how vile, personally, those employees are, and Vick is worse than all of them, because despite his conniving little cowardly lies, they took their orders from him.

I don't condemn Leitch for whatever bullshit he felt he needed to spin. But I condemn the NFL, and I condemn all those animal rights groups, and I sure as hell condemn GQ for doing its part to aid in the public rehabilitation of Michael Vick. He should be in the void, alone, forever.

A Harlot High and Low in the Penny Press!

As I've had occasion to inform you all from time to time, I read a LOT of periodicals. I subscribe to more than two dozen (it's oft said but bears repeating: subscribing is the only way to go), which means I actually read a lot of periodicals every week, ranging across almost the whole gamut of intellectual content.

The magazine industry spent quite a bit of money in 2010 on in-house ads assuring readers that magazine-reading has seldom been healthier, and I like to believe that - for one simple reason: if magazines were to die, I'd lose a great deal of first-rate reading from my life. For while it's true that roughly a quarter of my subscriptions are for periodicals I use far more than savor (and virtually all of my non-subscription impulse-buys are of this nature - sometimes, certain Australian-produced magazines will have such alluring nature photography on their covers that I'm prompted to pick up the issue and learn all about that wildlife's mating habits), I read the vast bulk of it in search of the same thing I search for in books and in online literature: first-rate writing.

Of course, first-rate writing can take many forms, from the slash-and-jab buzzings of 'lad mags' to the Churchilllian eloquence of the stately literary reviews. But that very spectrum is one of the strongest appeals periodical literature has for me: it keeps my aesthetics limber - it keeps my eyes open for how well some piece of writing works, not just how many times it references Religio Medici. We're all prone to a calcification of our likes and dislikes - but that calcification is deadly to the brain, and every safeguard we can take against it is well-justified.

That's one of the main reasons I subscribe to the number of 'men's interest' magazines I do, even though a) I disagree completely with their world-view (in which it's presumed that if you graduated from business school and are male, you will share a lock-step 100 percent of the dreams, desires, irritations, preoccupations, and relaxations as every other male who graduated from business school) and b) I dislike intensely their hypocrisy (which are impossible not to notice, when every three-page article on some new fat-burning way to exercise is interspersed with colorful full-page ads for cigars, and when magazines devoted to exercise feature on their covers male celebrities who are devoted to tobacco and couldn't exercise for more than ten consecutive minutes without coughing up slush-balls of blood-flecked sputum that writhes on its own for a full minute after ejection): they tend to have comparatively deep pockets, so they tend to attract some talented writers.

And sometimes, the little confluences are fun too - like the resonance between the latest Outside magazine, featuring a black-and-white photo of head-shaved, dead-eyed tobacco addict and champion surfer Kelly Slater on the cover, and the latest GQ, the cover-feature of which is a list of the 'coolest' sports stars since 1957 (when GQ was launched, naturally) - a list on which Slater appears. The Outside editors felt defensive enough about putting Slater on their cover to include an editorial note defending the decision - largely on the grounds that Slater -and pro surfing in general - doesn't get the coverage he deserves anywhere else. It was amusing to see a little of their 'if not us, then who?' grandstanding defeated by the generous write-up William Finnegan gives him in GQ, including this little hymn of praise:

I didn't get him when he first burst on the scene. He came out of Cocoa Beach, Florida, and had the choppy, histrionic style that small, crummy waves encourage. But his raw talent was supreme, and his surfing smoothed out in bigger, better waves. His balance, reflexes, speed, and wave-reading ability were off the charts. His thinking, moreover, about the mechanics of wave riding is densely analytical. Hearing him break down what actually happened inside a barrel from which he emerged, seemingly miraculously, is a master class in what makes the previously impossible possible.

Boston readers might remember that Slater is connected through one of his few non-surfing-related organs to local sports, since back before he started shaving his head Slater was briefly the owner of Gisele Bundchen, who's currently owned by New England Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady (Brady's studious mug graces one of the issue's many alternate covers; there is no version that features Slater). Bewilderingly, Brady is also featured in this issue, even though calling him in any way 'cool' is a open-palmed insult to other nominees like Muhammad Ali or Julius Erving. The always-entertaining J. R. Moehringer digs deep into his b.s. bucket for some justification:

You can't watch Brady stroll the sideline like the love child of Clark Kent and Grace Kelly without imagining every detail of his private nirvana. The trick is not letting it torment you. Even if you live in Indy or Jersey or Pittsburgh, don't begrudge him. Next time Brady hoists the Lombardi Trophy, put your hands together, give it up. Recognize that the game has been elevated, sanctified, by his artistry. Celebrate his good fortune and good looks with good cheer. Surrender. Only then, if karma exists, will you have any chance of coming back as Brady in your next life.

What you'll do in that next life - apart, apparently, from carrying a man-purse, walking your chattel's pocket-pet, and choking at crunch time - will presumably be up to you. One thing's for sure: a shaved head would be such an improvement.

I'm perfectly willing to admit that stuff like GQ and Outside (and let's not even get started on Details, which makes those two look like serialized installments of The Gulag Archipelago)(seriously, if you're actually able to read an issue of Details, get yourself to the nearest emergency room as fast as possible - you have suffered a concussion, and every minute could count) often represents the shallow end of the periodical pool, but in both these issues, well toward the back, after the broads-and-brewskis antics have calmed down, there are serious - and seriously good - pieces of writing. By far the most entertaining example this time around is Mark Harris' hilarious and thought-provoking screed "The Day the Movies Died," in which he laments the way Hollywood has been overtaken by marketers packaging multi-million-dollar products rather than directors creating art. He locates the origin of this evil in the moment Top Gun struck American theaters like a fratboy-hurled brick to the intellect. I of course find this touching, since it's exactly what both Locke Peterseim and I were writing (I ponderously, he entertainingly) thirty years ago (I'll include relevant links as soon as the dear old Daily Iowan joins the rest of us in the 21st century).

Of course, thirty years ago we had no idea how bad the phenomenon Harris describes could become, although that phenomenon is rendered at least a bit more palatable by how damn zingy Harris is in describing it:

In Hollywood, though, not all [marketing] quadrants are created equal. If you, for instance, have a vagina, you're pretty much out of luck, because women, in studio thinking, are considered a niche audience that, except when Sandra Bullock reads a script or Nicholas Sparks writes a novel, generally isn't worth taking the time to figure out. And if you were born before 1985 ... well, it is my sad duty to inform you that in the eyes of Hollywood, you are one of what the kids on the Internet call "the olds." I know - you thought you were one of the kids on the Internet. Not to studios, which have realized that the closer you get to (or the farther you get from) your thirtieth birthday, the more likely you are to develop things like taste and discernment, which render you such an exhausting proposition in terms of selling a movie that, well, you might as well have a vagina.

Hee.

Harris allows that all his doom-and-glooming has a silver lining (basically, cable TV), but whether he's right or wrong about Hollywood today, reading prose like that is a pure pleasure.

Of course, when it comes to the pure pleasure of reading prose, much is determined by the subject of that prose - heck, that's where the term subjective comes from. The very best writing on big-wave surfing or Hollywood blockbusters will always interest me less than even second-rate writing about books - precious little book-writing in the mighty TLS ever descends to second-rate. I've mentioned countless times here what a banquet of delights every issue is, and the 14 January issue was no exception.

The highlight for me was an intensely, memorably thoughtful review of the new volume of Christopher Isherwood diaries. The piece is written by James Fenton, and from first to last it's searching where it could easily have been merely summarizing. It's a perfect demonstration of how the very best book-criticism makes fascinating and worthwhile reading entirely independent of the books on which it's predicated. When Fenton is writing in this key, I could read him forever:

If the sexual world of Isherwood seems in some ways dated, that is partly because some of its assumptions have indeed dated. It would be one thing, perhaps, to propose sexual freedom within a relationship, as a way of asserting that the gay man belongs to bohemia rather than the bourgeoisie (although it seems hard to insist that every gay man should live by the laws of bohemia). But supposing, buried somewhere in the psychology of this phase of a social revolution, there was a pessimistic assumption about male sexuality - an assumption that the homosexual male would be promiscuous because he couldn't be otherwise. And suppose this pessimism derived from a source (religious, psychiatric, conventional) which was fundamentally anti-gay, and which had an interest in warning men off what it conceived as a lifestyle choice: don't go down that road, sonny, or you will end up sad and alone. Then we might just conclude that the whole matter of gay promiscuity deserved a second look.

"But what do I know?" he writes. "I know only what I read." But when a reviewer has range and wit enough to invoke Thom Gunn to counter the self-pitying morbidity of somebody like Christopher Isherwood, I'd say he knows plenty.

Two ends of the spectrum, then, in some ways, in every reading of the Penny Press - but the quality-hunt is thrilling in its own right, and being provoked to laugh out loud or re-examine an old opinion over a heaped plate of cheap Chinese food ... well, that's plenty thrilling too.

Believing the hype in the Penny Press!

The Penny Press bounced around quite a bit last week on the profundity scale (or rather I did the bouncing, by reading all kinds of stuff), and of course near the low end of that scale is where you’ll always find anything connected with the latest Hollywood micro-phenomenon, pint-sized himbo Taylor Lautner.



In the latest GQ, Mickey Rapkin is given the thankless task of sleepwalking through yet another high-profile interview with this kid, who’s clearly been given a somber talking-to since he nearly outed himself under Neil Strauss’ careful supervision in Rolling Stone. As a result, Rapkin gets absolutely nothing for his trouble except the standard entirely hypocritical “I’m just amazed to be here!” line. At one point Lautner self-servingly exclaims, “Is this really happening? Am I really here?” In response (to us, not to Lautner, who would have burst into tears), Rapkin gets in a good observation:

Those are pretty good questions. He might also ask: What on earth did I do to deserve that $7.5 million contract and the adoration of millions? He’s handsome, yes. But in two Twilight films, Lautner has logged fifty minutes of screen time. Total. In the first movie, he spoke 239 words.

In other words, the hype associated with this tiny little packet of muscle and mindless ambition far, far exceeds any thespian payoff that’s yet happened or is ever likely to happen. Apart from the Twilight saga, Lautner’s next movie is a special effects extravaganza called Stretch Armstrong – but then, Tom Cruise did Legend and still ended up being a gigantic pain in the ass.

And we’re not free of hype even at the opposite end of the profundity scale! In last week’s TLS, Iain McGilchrist turns in a witty, wonderful review of Raymond Tallis’ Michelangelo’s Finger, a popular science book touching on many subjects, mostly related to the particularly human capacity to charge a pointing gesture with meaning. McGilchrist is chugging along just fine until he gets to the subject of non-human animals – one species especially:

Dogs are particularly sensitive to human attention, to the direction of our gaze, and, for example, whether we will be able to see them stealing meat. They make use of a very human feature, the whites of the eyes, thought to have developed precisely because of our sensitivity to gaze direction, a remarkable turn of events that Tallis oddly does not mention. Tallis says dogs don’t – can’t on principle – understand “meant meaning” associated with a sign, the basis of human communication. But the evidence suggests they almost certainly do just that. Without any training, they will fetch things if merely shown a photograph, or presented with a replica, and, of course, they understand the intentional nature of words and commands. Walkies, anyone?

I don’t know what canines McGilchrist has been hanging out with, but if any dog in the history of the world has ever, “without any training,” gone and fetched an item after being shown a photograph of that item, I’ve never met that dog. I doubt even Taylor Lautner could do that, although he probably understands what ‘walkies’ means.

He-Meat in the Penny Press!

GQ is a magazine perennially underestimated by my more bookish friends. People who pretend to read The New York Review of Books always make a point of their discrimination; GQ and other 'men's magazines' are sniffed at and deemed beyond the pale of serious readers. For such people, 'serious reader' always equates to 'reader of serious stuff,' but for me it means something very different: a 'serious reader' is somebody who reads anything - but who takes that reading seriously. An enormous amount of work goes into getting a monthly periodical out on time and keeping its editorial standards respectable - and like I've pointed out here before, magazines like GQ and Esquire pay some good money for the freelance pieces they accept ... which means some of those freelance pieces will be quite good.

Take this month's GQ, for instance. There's an article on the victims of the Khmer Rouge, our old friend Alex Pappademas writing about Quentin Tarantino, and a smart, off-kilter guide to travelling in Europe.

But we won't be talking about any of those today at Stevereads. Instead: bring on the he-meat!

Well, OK, it's not quite as bad as that. But still, one of the pleasures of GQ is watching its ongoing relationship with young Hollywood. The editors and photographers gravitate toward the almost-breakouts and give them lavish treatment just prior to their receiving said treatment from the rest of the world. No doubt this is all orchestrated by movie studio publicity departments, but it can still make for interesting star-spotting, and sometimes the accompanying articles can be fascinating glimpses into the lives of these plastoid beings, at a stage in their careers before they learn to completely bullshit every answer in absolutely every interview and withdraw into that fully-gated community from which true big-name Hollywood stars never thereafter venture. It's in the pages of GQ that some cheekboned young thing will blurt out 'shit' for the last time on the record - the last legitimate time, after which every blurting of 'shit' will be carefully choreographed to feed into the buzz surrounding that young thing's upcoming movie "Shit," in theaters July 11.




Of course, movie studio bullshitting classes start earlier and earlier these days, and even somebody like this month's cover boy, Channing Tatum, somebody who's still very much in the 'Channing Who?' range of the general public's knowledge, has no doubt already been sat down and given some fairly comprehensive seminar-work on What Not To Say when some perky lady-reporter from GQ comes looking for an interview. This is certainly the case if said young thing is about to star in a summer blockbuster that cost said studio gazillions of dollars (which it absolutely has to make back in the first fifteen minutes of the movie's opening weekend, or three thousand people will lose their jobs and none of them will ever work in this town again) - which describes Tatum, who stars in July's G.I. Joe mega-whatsis.

This goes both ways, naturally: that perky reporter - in this case Lisa DePaulo - has no doubt been given her own corporate playcard. After all, can't have her breaking any scoops or doing any damage to Tatum's budding career now, can we, not if GQ wants him to return for a photo-spread six years from now, after he's won an Oscar for his starring role in the critically-acclaimed remake of Rocky (with Stallone in the Burgess Meredith role). So DePaulo has to play along - no mention of recreational drugs, no mention of smoking, drinking described in settings that would please a pair of Mormon parents (in the article, once young "Chan" has had 1.5 beers, he conscientiously refuses to drive DePaulo back to her hotel), no mention of ogling, leering, or groping. Readers are prospective ticket-buyers, after all: they have to come away liking Channing Tatum.

And they do. The star comes across as endearingly genuine, somebody who regularly returns to his roots (in East Bumbfuck Alabama, to a family of rednecks who themselves worry that they'll look like the Clampetts to Tatum's more sophisticated Hollywood friends) to get away from the phoniness of the West Coast. There's the usual pussyfooting about craft - a painful thing to watch when Tatum's G. I. Joe co-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt tries to spin Godard out of an action blockbuster, but almost as painful here, with all the aw-shucks admissions that G.I. Joe doesn't really afford its young stars any chance to do any serious acting. In Tatum's case, the thing could be G. I. Hamlet and still not do so, since he has no serious acting anywhere inside him - he's just really pleasing to look at (DePaulo also faithfully relays the usual crapola about our young star suffering from dyslexia and ADD, because simply calling him stupid would sound harsh)(even though it's not - I've spent lots and lots of great time with some stupid people and been the better off for it ... no, it's dumb people who are life's chief irritant, and that's a very different thing, bespeaking willful ignorance and loud over-talking; even in as carefully-scripted a profile as this one, it's completely obvious that although Tatum is stupid, he's nowhere near dumb).


His family, not so much so. It will come as no surprise that rural East Bumbfuck Alabama is no more ready for its close-up now than it ever has been. Tatum's kinfolk disdainfully refer to President O-bam-a (DePaulo's discretion is marvelous to behold here - she never comes anywhere near saying or transcribing it, but you hear the word "nigger" clear as a bell), and at one point one of the women, talking about the stern paterfamilias, says "my daddy never even seen a homosexual before," to which this reader wanted to respond: "Oh yes he has - but you can be damn sure that 'homosexual' didn't identify himself, because he knew if he did, your daddy - and a buncha his good ol' boy friends (because bigots never act alone) - would have beaten him just plain dead.

Tatum tells DePaulo that he's currently studying for his upcoming role in Eagle of the Ninth - so our poor dyslexic ADD-riddled pretty boy has two Roman history books on his Kindle, and somewhere a Hollywood handler is hoping Eagle of the Ninth will be Tatum's Gladiator. It could very well be, if G. I. Joe isn't - time will tell, but whether it's burnout or coronation, GQ was there nice and early.


Same thing with the issue's other piece of he-meat, the ethereally beautiful Hunter Parrish, who stars in Weeds and did a memorable turn in Spring Awakening (he has a lovely if predictable singing voice and the requisite poreless porcelain skin, although a burgeoning tobacco habit will take care of both those things pretty quickly). Unlike Tatum, Parrish is already a complete creature of sound-bite publicity hacks; if you look at six or seven Youtube clips of his various interviews, you'll see a script performed with myna-bird precision every time. To its credit, GQ doesn't bother actually talking with this kid - they just dress him up in various "college"-inspired outfits in order to give their readers, the great majority of whom are young cubicle-dwellers pining for their great old collegiate years, some sartorial inspiration. The copy is hilarious, as all fashion copy is: "When we say collegiate-inspired gear, we don't mean a USC sweatshirt and a pair of Adidas slides. Think about the kind of East Coast classics that a Kennedy might have worn back in the day."


Hee.

Parrish's career has yet to map the kind of inevitable-feeling trajectory that Tatum's has, despite the fact that Parrish is considerably prettier and every bit as willing to hit the weights. There's a big-cast romantic comedy on the horizon for him to get lost in, but apart from that, only the barren wasteland of Weeds stretching until contract's end. If Parrish is smart (sentences have had stronger beginnings), he'll soak up as much craft as he can in that time; a gorgeous young man who learned acting from Justin Kirk and comedic timing from Kevin Nealon could come to rule Hollywood, if he played his cards right. No doubt GQ will be right there on the spot when and if that happens.

P.S. OK, OK - as shamelessly eye-candy as this post is, it's still Stevereads! I can't leave a discussion of this issue of GQ without mentioning that at least one thing in it will thoroughly engage your brain, not your, er, other parts! Michael Joseph Gross turns in an absolutely fascinating article, "Sextortion at Eisenhower High," about that kid in Wisconsin who tricked lots of his male classmates into emailing him naked pictures of themselves (they thought they were sending them to a hot female classmate) and then extorting sex out of those poor saps or else the pictures would go all over the Internet. Gross does first-rate work, and this piece deserves to be anthologized somewhere far away from profiles of Channing Tatum. Writing about the kid whose Internet machinations will likely land him in prison for the rest of his life, Gross smartly hits a bigger note:

He rode the wave that more and more kids ride, out to a place where every flesh-and-blood kid is also a phantom, where adolescence isn't so lonely, where you don't have to wonder, isn't there anybody who wants what I want? In this world, no IM goes unanswered - and for every teenager who types the question will u send it? there is another typing, Yes.

That's good stuff, and a normal Stevereads entry would have started with it and only latterly got around to mentioning the fluff and hypocrisy of photo-features on the likes of Hunter Parrish. But it's a bright sunny summer morning, and youth, too, has its allures!

Back to books next time, I promise.

Fact and Fiction in the Penny Press!

With a post title like that, you're all probably expecting me to turn right away to this week's People magazine, which features a corporate hack-job "profile" of Gossip Girl rancid tobacco addict boyequin Chace Crawford as one of the summer's "hottest bachelors" ... since the piece hyperventilates quite earnestly about how hot Chace is, how funny Chace is, how romantic Chace is, and how straight Chace is (and since the profile never alludes either to the stench of tobacco or the fact that Chase is life-splittingly hung over every single morning, that he wasn't even blow-dryably close to photographable for the first two or three hours of the shoot), it certainly qualifies as an example of the grey nether-ground between fact and fiction.



But no, I leave such vitriol for others (including the good folks at IHateChaceCrawford, who've certainly got their work cut out for them with this vacant-brained piece of pork rind)! We've got slightly bigger fish to fry in this installment of In the Penny Press, and we'll start with the Fiction end of the spectrum, which brings us to the latest issue of Esquire. This issue has some other interesting stuff in it (although it's once again simply loaded with stupid mini-articles giving tips about grilling, and once again simply loaded with full-page ads for cigars, for all the world like we lived in an alternate reality in which none of the magazine's hip young go-getter subscribers know that smoking causes mouth, lung, heart, kidney, throat, brain, and skin cancer, not only in you but in all the people you smoke near)(top-notch habit, that - ever so attractive), but the clear highlight from a marketing perspective certainly has to be the short story by Stephen King. It's called "Morality," and it's a big-boy work - as its title implies, it's a little morality play about normal people facing abnormal moral choices, with not the slightest hint of the supernatural anywhere to be seen.

Quite apart from its merits or lack of them, "Morality" only solidifies in my mind a conviction that's been growing for some time: sooner or later, American readers are going to have to figure out what to do with Stephen King.

It was one thing when he was just churning out progressively unreadable schlock horror novels - plenty of people do that, and it's easy for those so inclined to ignore. That got a little more complicated when he bought a picturesque mansion, let Sunday magazines photograph his enormous library, and most of all started donating serious amounts of money to worthy causes. These are literary warning signs, the kinds of things a schlock horror novelist does when he's beginning to want to be taken seriously as a writer.

Uproarious laughter is the proper response from the publishing industry, accompanied by a brayed version of the rhetorical question, "If you wanted to be taken seriously, why'd you write about friggin killer clowns?" But it's been a long time since the publishing industry had what's known in bull-riding circles as "a pair," and so King's steady encroachment on the lower slopes of Parnassus hasn't been endured stoically - it's been actively encouraged. In 2003, the National Book Foundation gave King a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and psychics from every state in the Union were bombarded with the same message from Nathaniel Hawthorne: "What the fuck?"

There's been a book of essays on the craft of writing; there's been a couple of novels with only nominal horror-elements (if you don't count the prose); there've been straight-up fiction stories in mainstream quasi-literary magazines, and now there's "Morality" in the latest Esquire.

Reading the story doesn't help us know any better how to think about this new, emerging Stephen King. It's the story of a struggling young couple in New York - Chad is a substitute teacher who never gets enough work to pay the bills, and his wife Nora is an in-home care-provider for a wealthy stroke victim named Reverend Winston. The two of them are living a life of quiet desperation, always on the edge of solvency, when Winston makes Nora an offer she at first wants to refuse: all his life, he's been a perfectly good, moral person, but before he dies, he'd like to know what it feels like to commit a sin. Since he's recovering from a stroke, he's not really able to do the actual committing himself, and that's where Nora comes in. If she'll perform his sin by proxy, he'll pay her an enormous sum of money, enough to solve the young couple's money problems. She agonizes over the idea, Chad agonizes over the idea, and then they decide to do it.

The sin? Nora is to enter a playground, walk up to one of the little children, and punch him squarely in the face, while Chad films the whole thing for the Reverend's viewing pleasure. Nora does it, they collect their money, and then King hauls in a rather predictable array of moral aftershocks. And by that point, any reader of short fiction that isn't by schlock horror novelists with Nobel aspirations will see more problems than can be readily counted, starting with the biggest three: 1) the entire story is based on coincidence, 2) all three main characters in the story behave in ways no real person would ever behave, even for a moment while very drunk, and 3) the act the good reverend chooses for Nora to perform might be a crime, but it's sure as Hell not a sin.

1 & 2 are the real problems here, though: King might want to try his hand at mainstream fiction, and certainly everybody in America is entitled to try a little self-reinvention, but there's no getting around the fact that King's apprenticeship for writing conventional fiction is nearly 40 years of writing schlock horror novels in which lazy, shopworn contrivances of the worst ilk are standard reading fare, in every book, on every page. You can't snap your fingers and suddenly be a writer who didn't learn his trade that way - and no matter how many high school water polo teams King underwrites, he doesn't strike me as having one-thousandth the humility necessary to re-learn writing from the ground up.

And if he's not willing to do that, we're all going to see more variations on "Morality" from him - in Esquire, in The New Yorker, and who knows where else - "serious" tales of ethics and suburbs and characters lunging at three-dimensionality. None of it will be any good - how can it be, when all of it was learned in a candle-lit House of Wax? - but all of it will want to be, and when one of the top-selling novelists of the 20th century so loudly wants something, every reader is pulled into the melodrama of it.




And really, that same theme of overreaching finds its way into the "Fact" portion of the Penny Press this time around. In the latest GQ (the with a naked Sacha Baron Cohen on the cover, advertising his upcoming film, the most-hyped/least-funny film since, come to think of it, Borat), John Jeremiah Sullivan (think of that wedding! talk about schlock horror!) does his level best to write a serious, probing piece about a subject who was a walking punch line from the moment he first shuffled onto the public stage: Levi Johnston, the wavy-haired lantern-jawed bo-hunk who impregnated Bristol Palin, the idiot daughter of Sarah Palin, the idiot Alaska governor John McCain, in a desperately irresponsible gimmick-trick, picked to be his vice presidential candidate in the last election. The pick alone forced the majority of voters to confront the fact that McCain was just plain insane, and that probably cost him the election, and the entire world stepped back from the edge of an unthinkable abyss - but even before then, Levi and Bristol were "on the rocks," as the tabloids say, and once the votes were counted, the Palins pried him off the skin of their family like a bloated tick.



Cast off, cast out, no longer part of the apparently ongoing story of the Palins (Jeremiah Sullivan makes a horrifying offhand reference to a "2012 run"), and, touchingly, no longer allowed to be much part of the life of the child he engendered with Bristol - that's where this article finds young Levi. Jeremiah Sullivan meets up with him in small-town Alaska, where Levi does what can only be referred to as a sinful amount of bear-hunting but appears to have no job and no job prospects (beyond the offhand mention of a possible reality-show about hunting)(all these heart-stopping offhand mentions combine to make this piece considerably more frightening than King's story). Our author does a wonderful job of conveying what virtually every small town in Alaska makes a visitor feel:

It is a shithole surrounded by such loveliness. Stand there and blink back and forth, shutting your left eye, then your right. Left eye: spit of highway, aggressive proliferation of half-abandoned strip malls, a few roads dwindling off to little houses. Right eye: the mountains, the expanding sky, the shadowy crevasses, a bald eagle. Highway, strip malls, little houses; mountains, sky, crevasses, eagle. Highwaystripmallslittlehouses; mountainsskycrevasseseagle.

Both eyes: Wasilla.

And he's equally evocative on that sharp, nauseating moment in American history when all these various Wasilla people suddenly threatened to matter:

It takes some mental effort to recover the feeling of how much he seemed to mean at one time, and practically yesterday. Obama has made him seem kitschy already, has stolen his power to signify. Not presuming anything about one's politics - referring instead to the sheer dynamism of events since the election. We are a couple of beads further along the necklace of cultural time from Levi. We are post-Levi. It's decadent to think of him now. But the chemical traces remain of a plausibility structure inside which his very face seemed full of information and even warning. Something was happening to the country, it was splitting in two. Levi looked like a place where the ripping might start. We were laughing at him then too, of course - that was largely it. If McCain's choosing Palin had been cynical (as born out by their recoiling from each other in defeat), not until his embrace of Levi did it become farcical. .... We knew he was there only because it had been deemed worse for him not to be there. That gave him a curious magnetism. And John McCain, fine, he was trying to win a campaign, he's an opportunist. He's also a United States senator and a war hero, and there was something in how he greeted Levi - how for a second it mattered whether he greeted this boy, and in what manner - like an acknowledgment. Not of one man to another, exactly, but of one force to another. It was either the beginning or the end of something. Briefly recall when you didn't know which.

That's just about as good as hopped-up Red Bull deadline-prose gets, and the whole article shines with it. For the brief span of its pages, we can indeed recall when we walked around every day wondering very dark things about our own countrymen, urgently asking ourselves the same questions over and over again: Can't they see what's happening here? Can't they see what's at stake here? Are they REALLY going to treat the most important presidential election in modern memory like an evening of 'American Idol'? "Hey! The grumpy old guy picked a hottie hockey-mom who's JUST LIKE US!"

Then you stop reading, and you close the magazine, and reality reasserts itself. Fact separates from fiction and both start behaving themselves again: John McCain will never be president, Obama is alive, in charge, and still enjoying popularity in the polls. Sarah Palin will not, cannot ever be taken seriously as a candidate for national office, and apart from reading a very entertaining magazine article by John Jeremiah Sullivan, none of us needs to think about Levi Johnston at all.

May's GQ in the Penny Press!

I know it's anachronistic of me, but I can't help it: I read magazines, lots of them, and I read them regularly, attentively, and thoroughly. I did this even before I became so happily involved in the monthly goings-on at Open Letters Monthly (a gigantic new issue of which has just been published, for those of you who might want to spend some thorough attention yourselves), and in the last few years I've had all the more reason to respect the wit, reach, and sheer amount of work involved in pulling off a monthly publication of any quality at all (and for all I know, even the ones with NO quality are still Hell on wheels to bring to term - it's still a gigantic amount of verbiage needing to be massaged and finessed, after all).

Take the May issue of GQ, for instance. I know there are those among you (you know who you are) who deride the very idea of reading a magazine like GQ, but nevertheless: every issue comes bearing several items of interest or genuine worth. This issue features a cover story about world-class infantile moron Christian Bale (whose infamous tirade on the set of Terminator should have terminated all public interest in him of any kind), and despite such an unpromising opening, I read the whole thing scrupulously, cover to cover - and once again, I wasn't disappointed.


Some of the items in the issue were admittedly trivial (jebus gawd, the amount of space they waste talking about idiotic stuff - utterly fad-driven things and gadgets I guess the magazine's target demographic really is wealthy and stupid enough to amass and care about amassing), like the squirt of irritation I felt seeing that stupid Gillette ad that shows the same ass-faced young douchebag in like fifty different iterations of douchery - or the fond smile I cracked at another ad, featuring the very same all-grown-up tobacco addict Alex Pettyfer who is, as all the world knows, the idee fixe of my esteemed (and hilarious) fellow-blogger Vera, and I laughed out loud at transcribed chatter between GQ's "in-house Twilight enthusiast and Pattinson-picture-kisser" Raha Naddaf and a random bunch of Twilight fans contacted at a sleepover:

What do you think about the rumors that Pattinson dated Camille Belle?
[Thirteen seconds of mortified screaming]
Olivia: We don't like her.
[Three-minute conversation about the Jonas Brothers, with one girl concluding, "They wear promise rings, but that doesn't mean anything."]
Now for the big question: Do you ever imagine yourself making out with Pattinson?
[Again with the silence]
Abigail: We're only 12.

Hee.

There was also a throwaway photospread of a brand-new pro quarterback named Alex Sanchez, who was convinced to pose in a series of Baywatch-dorky beach outfits, presumably in exchange for permission to manhandle the vacant-eyed young thing posing in the photos with him. He doesn't seem able to fully shut his mouth, so he probably has a bright NFL career ahead of him.

But the issue wasn't all fun and games. Peter Savodnik turns in a riveting freelance piece on the Russian "Maniac" serial killer Alexander Pichushkin, who lured dozens of men and women into the woods of Moscow's Bitsevsky Park (three times the size of Central Park), killed them, and then dumped their bodies down municipal wells, where the sewage system washed the remains varying distances from the scene of the crimes (in typical serial killer fashion, Pichushkin got sloppier and sloppier the longer he went unsuspected and uncaught - which guaranteed he'd eventually be suspected and caught). Savodnik's article is very good - if grisly - reading, except for one odd bit of reaching he does that had me scratching my head:

... the detective who led the investigation ... rules out the possibility that the Maniac is homosexual. He says Pichushkin doesn't have any sexual longings for men; he just doesn't care about women.

But there's something else: In Russia, which remains violently homophobic, it may be that people have a hard time believing a gay man is capable of the kind of power or force of will that defined the Maniac. The Maniac is a maniac, and he's evil, and no one disputes this, but he is also very much a man in the way Russians think of men.

Hard to know what Savodnik is getting at here - so Pichushkin might be gay because his investigators might be typically bigoted Russians? He displays the absolutely textbook serial killer lack of any sexual identification, and suddenly that's enough to cast a doubt? Granted, I'm not the expert on the Maniac that Savodnik undoubtedly is by this point, but this still seems like a weird bit of projecting to me. Sometimes, a maniac is just a maniac, after all.

And only a couple of pages from the retailing of Pichushkin's homicidal horrors is a story about a real murderer, a serial killer of a scope and professionalism that makes the Maniac look like a piker: former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld is profiled by the very talented Robert Draper, with predictably chilling results.

As I read the piece, as I encountered quote after quote like this one:

"What Rumsfeld was most effective at doing was not so much undermining a decision that had yet to be made as finding every way possible to delay the implementation of a decision that had been made and that he didn't like"

I gradually realized that I know Donald Rumsfeld - I used to work with him. I had a co-worker who was every bit as mulishly self-absorbed and vigorously un-helpful as Rumsfeld is everywhere portrayed here as being. That co-worker could absolutely 100 % be relied upon to make any - and I mean any - work-related thing, no matter how big or small, no matter how important or trivial - more difficult, more annoying, more of an issue. You'd be off doing something else, and you'd suddenly realize the phone had been ringing for fifteen minutes - and when you hurried over, absolutely frickin guaranteed this co-worker would simply be standing there, obdurately ignoring the phone - and if you were dumb enough to ask why, he'd have a long, breathlessly self-centered rationale for why he'd been ignoring the phone, and it wouldn't matter what the Hell it was, because by the point of you being dumb enough to ask for it, you'd be stuck in it, trapped in the cramped, sweaty little mental world of somebody who's just one compass-tick north of being genuinely, helplessly, institutionalizably insane. Like that co-worker, the Rumsfeld in Draper's article gains absolutely nothing by his reflexive, non-stop obstructionism - and like that co-worker, the only reason his knee-jerk adamantly petty assholery didn't get him fired instantly is because nobody sane wants to interact with him long enough to get that firing done, because interacting with such a useless piece of cowdung, such a pathetically arrested 5-year-old, is intensely soiling. Reading this article, it was no shock to me that President Bush fired Rumsfeld on live TV, far away from the man himself. No shock either that at the man's farewell dinner, he intensely creeped out his guests - he probably ate every last morsel of the free food, too.

But as disagreeable as that article's subject might be, the article itself was a thrill to read - and it wasn't alone in this issue, and every issue of GQ is like that. So I keep reading, even though I don't know a Blackberry from a blueberry and couldn't tell you what kind of wood is best for your $500 loafer-tree.

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.