Just In Case You Didn't Believe Me About
How Awesome Realm of Kings #1 Is















(Click to biggify.)

There have been a lot of horror mash-ups in comics in recent years - straight on down to the latest DC line-wide crossover, and the latest X-Men event. Not to mention Marvel Zombies, et al. But my favorite horror is and always has been Lovecraftian cosmic horror - you know, of the mind-blasting, cyclopean variety. It doesn't get a lot of play in superhero books outside of mystic stuff like Dr. Strange - and even there, Shuma Gorath has had a hard time rising above the level of an evil cosmic kaiju. But this? This is promising. This is promising indeed. All I need is some Cthulhu mythos and I feel like how Sims must feel every time he sees someone getting kicked in the face. I love space opera, but Lovecraftian space opera? If they can somehow manage to get that peanut butter to taste good with that chocolate, Abnett & Lanning will have worked a modern miracle.

Plus: Quasar.

Well, I'll Be

Maybe this was given away somewhere else in advance and I missed out, but how come no one has said anything about Realm of Kings #1? I love Marvel's cosmic books, which should come as no surprise to anyone. The fact that so much love and respect has been laid out for Mark Gruenwald's Quasar is simply extraordinary, and the fact that Quasar is prominently featured in this next event is really cool. But the really interesting thing, which is what I'm surprised no one has mentioned, is the fact that the next big cosmic event is apparently going to be the Marvel Universe vs. the Lovecraft Mythos. And not in some kind of veiled pseudo-Lovecraft Shuma-Gorath way, either, but the actual Cthulhu Mythos tearing its way through a rip in space-time and coming to eat the 616. Of all the possible directions for the cosmic books after War of Kings, this is pretty much not what I was expecting. But honestly, even though I didn't know I wanted it, this is now the thing I've always wanted more than anything.

Quasar vs. Cthulhu, with Rocket Raccoon and Darkhawk on the sidelines - it's like they're beaming these comics straight from my id into reality.

Old Enough To Drink

Also, old enough to make me feel even older.

(Older than I've ever been, and now I'm even older.)







(Amazingly, could not find a video of "Snowball in Hell." Or at least not in the five minutes it took to type this.)

The End of Everything

Just took a few minutes to compile my year-end best-of list for Popmatters. It was surprisingly difficult - there was a lot of good music but it didn't seem like there was much great music. There was a bunch of stuff from high-profile artists which were OK but not awesome, certainly not "top ten" material. It's Blitz! had a handful of really good songs and a whole lot of boring, which is a shame considering just how much of a masterpiece Show Your Bones was. The Flaming Lips and Animal Collective both came out swinging and are to be applauded for both making interesting albums, if not capital "G" Great ones. Dylan's Together Through Life seemed more casual and, dare I say, more fun than his last few heavily lauded but highly sterile discs - but a fun trifle is still a trifle, even if it's Bob Dylan's trifle. Likewise, Moby, the Basement Jaxx, Rammstein, Franz Ferdinand - all hit nice doubles in the High Profile Established Artists category - but no home run action between them.

(The real Dylan action was in the long, long, long overdue remastering job on The Basement Tapes. Still not "one of the greatest albums in the history of American popular music," but a fun disc nonetheless. I'm still wondering why they haven't done a legit release of the five-or-so disc "Genuine" Basement Tapes bootleg that has been floating around for years, except to say that 1) they might be waiting to release it as a big collector's box some Christmas and 2) Dylan awfully resents all the bootleg stuff that was released against his wishes over the years so he may just not want to bother.)

So, here's The List - a lot of good but not too much great. #1 is only #1 because, well, none of these other discs were better. It's a great album, maybe one of their best, but I wouldn't have expected Yo La Tengo to be the best of the year when all the dust had cleared. There are a lot of these albums I wish were better than they actually are - Dan Deacon, the Field, Passion Pit, it seemed like there was something missing that kept them from going over the line separating very good from modern classic status.

The biggest surprise was Girls - a group I had absolutely no knowledge of whatsoever before I heard a song on Pitchfork, bought the album on sale on a whim, and was completely bowled over by how good it is. Definitely the breakout of the year. Some of this new lo-fi is actually pretty good. Now that lo-fi is less a political statement than an aesthetic choice, it seems a lot more fun than it did back in the 90s when people like Sebadoh were sincerely dedicated to being as perversely amateurish as possible. (I mean, really, anyone with a halfway decent computer can make their shoestring indie debut album sound like it was recorded by Jeff Lynne these days, so you're not really sticking it to The Man if you record it on a boombox.)

Neko Case gets her spot by inertia as much as anything - a good album, but I can't shake the feeling that she's getting more than a little bit complacent. This feeling was not arrested when I saw her over the summer - a depressingly perfunctory, if very professional show, complete with a fancy video projection show.

I might say more later. In case you haven't noticed, my hiatus is kind of a joke.


10. Passion Pit - Manners
9. Gui Boratto - Take My Breath Away
8. Neko Case - Middle Cyclone
7. Jay Reatard - Watch Me Fall
6. Dan Deacon - Bromst
5. The Field - Yesterday & Today
4. Girls - Album
3. REM - Live At the Olympia
2. The Juan Maclean - The Future Will Come
1. Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

Brief Hiatus Thots

Donald Duck Orange Juice is the coelacanth of pop culture detritus: just when you think there is absolutely, positively no way it can have survived into the present day, up it pops again.