Joshua Malbin

Zombies and vampires have traditionally held quite different cultural appeals.  Vampires are vehicles for taboo and passion, while zombies are often deployed to make a social point (think Dawn of the Dead or 28 Days Later).  A corollary is that while individual vampires are often given distinctive characters, all zombies are essentially the same mindless killing machine.  The only difference among them is how fast they can run.

That’s why iZombie, centered on a cute, human-looking zombie named Gwen, feels like a fresh take on some otherwise fairly stale material.  (I, Zombie? IZOMBIE? It appears on the cover as iZombie, which makes no sense and instantly gives you this.)  It has a bit of a Buffy feel with all the different beasties in Gwen’s gang (a vampire, a werewolf, a ghost, I think maybe a witch), and much of the first issue is spent just bringing them all onstage, along with the villain who wants them all dead.

But in the last few pages it’s revealed that Gwen is a zombie (if we somehow didn’t get that from the title) who must eat a brain each month to survive.  She digs up a fresh corpse, eats, and absorbs the guy’s memories, learning he was murdered and thus setting up the continuing series.

I’ve never heard of Chris Roberson, who’s doing the writing, but the art is by Mike Allred, who did the totally fun Red Rocket 7.  It’s got a Scooby-Doo vibe that feels right.

The preview below the fold is actually a prelude previously printed in Vertigo’s “House of Mystery Annual.”

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Verlyn Klinkenborg’s latest editorial-page impressionistic L.A. vignette has some scratching heads, but the paean to Inscrutable L.A. deserves praise for limning the National on-ramp.

Not once, but twice, does Klinkenborg allude to what must be an obsession with L.A.’s most awesome freeway entrance

The iconic glimpses don’t help me in my quest — not the sudden view of the Hollywood sign I get from the Hollywood Freeway, not the view of downtown almost floating in the sunset from Pasadena. Every now and then, I turn a corner and think that something essential is about to be revealed. The feeling intensifies all the way up Venice Boulevard into Culver City, and then I’m on National taking one of those curious hidden freeway entrances and suddenly the feeling vanishes.

[snip]

If I had an extra lifetime to live, I’d live it here. I don’t mean one lifetime lived, in the usual way. I mean a lifetime living within a block or two of the insurance shop on Venice Boulevard with the wrap-around neon facade. Another watching cars turn off National onto the 10. Another sitting by Santa, seeing who comes and goes. Perhaps then I could grasp what always escapes me here. Then I’d know whether it was worth looking for in the first place.

(Emphasis mine.)

To anyone still innocent of the on-ramp in question, this must look like an odd refrain for such a short column. It’s not. The National on-ramp is wicked cool, Airwolf cool.

Your approach disorients you three times over: once, by virtue of being anywhere near the baffling Overland/National/Motor/Palms mess, where streets turn into one another and then back, confounding any sense of gridded stability; twice, because the on-ramp is actually on Manning, not National; thrice, because you are trying to get on the freeway going east, but you must drive west (technically northwest) alongside the westbound 10 to approach it.

It doesn’t look like much — you’re going up a hill into a residential area, and then –

boom! you’re making a 90-degree turn on a flyover, crossing eight lanes of traffic and swooping down onto the 10 East.

Good call, Klink.

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Although homicides still occur at a steady pace, the beheadings, massacres and dissolution of victims in lye that were Garcia’s terrorizing trademark have largely stopped.

Tijuana club scene revs up as drug-war fears ease, Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times 5/9/10. Emphasis mine.

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I wouldn’t have heard of this stupid, question-begging Newsweek article if Kristin Chenoweth’s skewering hadn’t lit up everyone’s Facebook page. Ramin Setoodeh argues that gay actors like Sean Hayes in the musical Promises, Promises and Jonathan Groff on Glee can’t convincingly play straight characters. Chenoweth writes in defense of her co-star Hayes, saying “yes he can” which is about all you can say to someone who, knowing that an actor carries the dreadful gay, can no longer suspend disbelief (what if he’d rather do me than little Kristin Chenoweth? Shudder). But the response still dignifies his argument far too much.

First, Groff on Glee. Speaking as a straight man experienced in the ways of high school musical theater, talented musical theater high school boys are pretty fucking queer. We haven’t quite learned the ways of conventional masculinity, which leaves us freer to express ourselves on stage but also never terribly persuasive as leading men. My h.s. drama apotheosis was playing Henry Higgins, who as an educated British man is queer enough. My other big lead role was as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, for which I played up my shrimpiness and probably put a little too much Yid inflection on So Sue Me. Frank Sinatra was a subtler Nathan. The romantic lead role, Sky Masterson, was played with much more convincing masculinity in that production by a boy who was out to a few friends even back in 10th grade.

Groff’s high school champion vocal stylist carries an ineluctable whiff of queer? We all did. Chalk a point for verisimilitude.

Missing from the article is any sense that a little queerness might give an actor some performance-inflecting insight into the crude construction of straightness. Missing is any nuance whatsoever into the last-legs binary of gay and straight at this fragile historical moment. America loves Glee, people. “Straight” is in decline. For the killing blow, look to the straightest man on television, How I Met Your Mother‘s Barney Stinson, played by America’s number one gay, Neil Patrick Harris. Harris’s Barney, a priapic epicure, is as much a straight man as the leads of Absolutely Fabulous were straight women.

This will be a hard lesson for the 27 members of Facebook’s Barney Stinson is NOT gay! group to learn. Their cri de coeur after the jump.

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FB coughed up this retro-soul version of Wilco’s “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” by J.C. Brooks & the Uptown Sound. Watch & let’s discuss:

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I didn’t review Nick Spencer’s Shuddertown #1 right away because…well, partly because I forgot, and partly because whenever I did remember it I wasn’t sure what to say about it.  The writing is self-consciously “writerly,”a lot of internal monologue about lying and truth that seems in the end only to be intended to serve to signal to the reader that the narrator might be lying, without having any specific meaning to the narrator himself. Perhaps it will later, but it’s not picked up in #2, so who knows.

On the other hand, the plot itself was built around a strong central horror mystery: a homicide detective gets four cases in a row with tons of forensic evidence leading in each case to a different, easily identified culprit. Unfortunately, each of these suspects is a man who died years ago, and whom the hero busted for one thing or another years before that.

Granted, that’s the kind of mystery that’s exceedingly difficult to pay off without a letdown, but it’s still a decent hook.

Adam Geen’s art is also nice, a lot of big color washes for background behind some kind of rotoscope process for the buildings and people. The combination is used to strong effect when the hero experiences sensory overload or dislocation, in a strip club, for example, or under the influence of pills or cocaine.

So I guess I could say I was waiting for the second issue to do a review, looking for a tiebreaker between the elements I liked and the ones I didn’t. Yet issue #2 has entirely different weaknesses, notably misjudgments in pacing that have us spending far too much time on events of seemingly little consequence. I am thinking in particular of the seven-page scene that opens the issue, when our hero wakes in the care of a priest who repeatedly offers him flapjacks. As far as we can tell, that priest knows nothing of interest to him or to us, except for the origins of the name “Shuddertown.”

The writerly writing makes  reappearance near the end, but at least this time it’s fit to the story instead of being off on its own. It does slip into past tense for the first time, though, leaving the reader wondering just what the hell the vantage point for the narration is supposed to be.

All in all, I guess I feel like Shuddertown is a promising glimpse of talent from a writer who hasn’t learned to edit himself very well yet, or hasn’t found someone good to do it for him.

Preview here.

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The summer I spent in England I found Viz magazine, which ran a Hints from Heloise-parody called “Top Tips.”

The one I remember laughing at out loud in the middle of Piccadilly Circus (so disappointing, by the way) was “Paint a small red cross at the bottom of your teacup. When you see the cross, you’ll know it’s time to add more tea.”

Anyway, here’s a kitchen tip. You know how it’s endlessly frustrating to chase a bit of eggshell around a bowl of cracked eggs? If you use a spoon or your finger, the little bugger will still get tantalizingly close, then slip away from your grasp. Or spoon. (Also, don’t use your finger.)

Here’s a trick that works every time:

Use an eggshell. The most solid-looking of your discarded half-shells.

It’s thin enough to scoop out the runaway without just pushing around the protective layer of white.

A small collection of Viz Top tips can be found here. I recommend installing Readability in order to turn the unintelligible small-white-text on black into something easier on the eyes.

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Featuring an amazing guest starring turn from Werner Herzog. It’s been three years, but Aaron McGruder remains a genius.

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