Links...I have a few

I'm a little leery of putting together a links post for this week. Earlier this afternoon I started reading The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel by Dan Sinker, which is something between an annotated compilation and a novelization of Sinker's @MayorEmanuel account, and I'm afraid spending too much time with such a powerful and particular voice is going to rub off on my writing if I blog too soon afterwards. I don't know if any of you experience something like this, but I have a bad habit of picking up "accents" of voices I spend a lot of time with, and sometimes I have to censor myself from letting the voices overly influence me.

In this case, I'm finding I have to try really, really, really hard not to swear constantly.

Anyway, that book's pretty funny, and has a great cover by comics artist Paul motherfucking Hornschemeier. (Dammit! See?!)

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When I first saw this headline at The Beat, I assumed the "NWA" in it referred to the early '90s gangster rap supergroup that launched the careers of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy E and others. It's actually New World Animation, though. The results are kinda cool, but not as cool as I hoped for a split-second there....

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I think the premise of Kristy Valenti's article "Elements of Style: Rob Liefeld's Passion for Fashion", an examination of the ways in which Liefeld's costuming seem like a particular collection by a particular designer, is as funny as anything specific within it.

I suppose it's especially funny when you think of Liefeld in that jean commercial, as if he were some kind of pant expert. Dude should draw the best jeans of any comics artist, based on his resume, not those weird mom pants he has cable wearing in that panel Valenti posts.

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"Why not have them acting like assholes on the cover?" Ken Parille asks in his Comics Journal piece on Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's Justice League #1 (Jesus! Are we still talking about that one? Where's #2?). It's a reasonable question since, as Parille says, Batman and Green Lantern act like assholes inside the comic, so a cover of the two of them acting like assholes would be better than the generic group shot of them and a bunch of other characters who don't show up in the book at all.

In that piece, which comes with a pretty rollicking comment thread, Parille has a nice point about why the issue was kind of boring. The characters seem a lot more interested in the goings-on than the readers, because a lot of what they're discovering for the first time (Batman's just a regular, power-less guy in a bat-suit? Is Superman friend or foe?) are things the reader knew going in. From the cover, if not years of familiarity with the characters.

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Despite my love of Norm Breyfogle (he's my hands-down favorite Batman artist, surpassing even Kelley Jones, whose Batman art I passionately love) and the hundreds of pages of Batman comics I read between 1991 and 1999, I somehow never read this comic. (I'd like to, though). Nor have I ever noticed that the Bat-symbol on that alternate costume is supposed to evoke the collar of a priest. I've seen the ad featuring that image of that alternate Batman scores of times over the years, but never connected the costume to a priest's garb until this week. Weird.

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This makes me wish I better understood the concept, and use of, RiffTrax. Especially since I've been on something of a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 kick of late.