The problem with me and Netflix is that I have a terrible memory for which movies got really horrible reviews, and I’m too lazy to check on the Movie Review Query Engine before I add something to my list. So essentially I sit at my computer and put things in queue vaguely remembering that I heard something about a given movie at some point, but I can’t remember quite what, and how bad could it be?

It could be as bad as The Brothers Grimm, that’s how bad. There are movies that are Netflix bad, ones you’d have regretted paying to see in a cinema, but it’s only a couple of hours of your life at home, and it’s not like you have anything better to do.

Then there’s The Brothers Grimm. The seconds it took to add it to my queue? I want them back. The effort wasted by postal employees bringing it to my home and carrying it back to the nearest delivery facility? I regret it deeply. It was freakishly windy out while we were watching it, and my partner eventually said, “Even Mother Nature hates The Brothers Grimm.”

I haven’t yet seen Brokeback Mountain, and I’m prepared to believe that Heath Ledger is wonderful in it. But I think that, before he’s even nominated for another major acting award, he should have to do around ten really good films as atonement for his work in this… thing.

Just how many books about ruthless Italian nobles can the comics market sustain? Two came out this week, Borgia: Blood for the Pope (Heavy Metal) and the second volume of Cantarella (Go! Comi). I bought both, but I’m obsessed.

They’re very different animals, obviously, with Borgia taking a more strictly historical approach, cheerfully emphasizing the lurid details. It’s a little odd, as the physical object reminds me of a children’s book, oversized, hardback, and brightly colored.

Of course, I can’t remember any children’s book covers that had a buxom noblewoman sneering out at me with her dress hanging off her shoulders, but this is Heavy Metal, not Little Golden Books.

And the cover is perfect, mingling sex (the aforementioned noblewoman), violence (a black-clad assassin drawing his dagger, which come to think of it probably connotes sex as well), politics, and religion (tonsured Cardinals evoke both). The illustration is laced with cracks, suggesting a timeworn mural. It’s lurid, but those cracks try and lend it just a smidgen of dignity.

And that’s the consistent approach of the book. It’s got an introductory piece by Antoni Guiral, providing background on the historical period and the book’s creators (writer and “psycho magician” Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrator Milo Manara, “one of the ‘princes’ of sensual and erotic comic books”). It’s informative enough, particularly in filling in some of the details of the events that follow, but it isn’t essential if the reader just wants to get to the beheadings and boobs.

Both are in ample supply in the lushly illustrated pages that follow. While Jodorowsky’s script does present a reasonably comprehensive look at Rodrigo Borgia’s rise to the Papacy (and the adolescences of his passel of quasi-legitimate offspring), it leans heavily on the juicy bits. There’s scandal, scheming, madness, and murder on virtually every page. The Borgias demonstrate a breathtaking range of venal behaviors, and Jodorowsky is scrupulous in including them.

It would sound weird to describe Manara’s illustrations as restrained, given the subject matter, but that’s my impression. The images are carefully rendered, rich in sense of place and detail. Faces are expressive, and body types and language are varied. It’s also beautifully colored. And while Manara doesn’t shy away from anything lusty or violent, it rarely seems particularly voyeuristic. (The exception to that is a protracted schoolgirl catfight towards the end that concludes with lusty kisses and nuns with whips. Don’t they all?)

The production team made a rather irritating choice with the lettering. Every bit of dialogue is printed in bold italics, no matter what the tone of the conversation. It essentially puts everything at the same volume, loud and urgent. With so much sensational material splashing across the page, a little nuance to the text would have been welcome.

Ultimately, though, Borgia is what it is – a lusty history lesson. It’s perfectly content being both informative and titillating, and it somehow manages to balance both pretty well. With this clan, I guess that shouldn’t be entirely surprising.

You Higuri’s Cantarella is what it is, too. Higuri uses the Borgias as a starting point to explore her own themes, and it works very well. In the second installment, young Cesare sinks further into his dark, supernatural destiny, but finds comfort in the companionship of conflicted assassin Michelotto. It’s not as tightly paced as the first, but Higuri has less ground to cover, focusing more on character than set-up.

She also ramps up the shônen-ai elements. Michelotto’s kiss-him-or-kill-him dilemma is compelling, and Cesare’s battle with his darker impulses plays off of it nicely. Higuri has managed to present these characters in a way that’s sympathetic but not naïve. There’s a nice mix of melodrama and unexpected emotional delicacy. And it’s just so pretty, with plenty of historical detail rendered through a shôjo aesthetic.

If I had to choose between the two, I’d almost certainly go with Cantarella. Borgia is an entertaining oddity, but I prefer the emotional urgency of Higuri’s fictionalization to the tawdry accuracy of Jodorowsky and Manara.

Defenders 5 (Marvel): The plot of this mini-series feels like about a dozen other Defenders stories and about a hundred other super-hero stories. An all-powerful super-villain remakes the world in his image, leaving a handful of protagonists to put things right. Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, and Kevin Maguire don’t do anything to reinvent the story, but they invest it with enough character-specific humor to make it a very enjoyable read all the same. The creative team doesn’t go overboard with meta observations, striking a nice balance between straightforward storytelling and knowing smirks at how familiar this all is.

Fallen Angel 2 (IDW): Writer Peter David’s combination of complex character interactions, dark humor, and underlying supernatural mysteries make for very entertaining reading. David reveals more about Lee’s background and gives a better sense of the dynamics of the shady citizens of Bete Noire. Unfortunately, J.K. Woodward’s art seems even less suited to the script this time around. Dive bar Furor’s takes on an inappropriately elegant sheen. The use of black and white to distinguish flashbacks makes those sequences look washed out or unfinished. And at certain points, it looks like characters have been cut and pasted into the frame. There’s some very nice work with light and shadow, creating some interesting effects, but there’s also a stiffness that doesn’t fully express the nuances of the story.

Polly and the Pirates 3 (Oni): Ted Naifeh could easily have delivered six issues of comic counterpoint between his heroine’s primness and the seedy, shabby pirates who think she’s their princess. It’s a great and durable joke, and Naifeh finds lots of riffs on it. In this issue, though, Naifeh puts Polly in a position to learn the difference between doing what’s proper and doing what’s right. It isn’t a huge tonal shift, and it doesn’t hamper the comedy and adventure, but it does give Polly extra layers of complexity and sympathy. Polly and the Pirates could serve as a textbook for mini-series pacing, with new revelations and twists cropping up in each issue and a consistently appealing underlying vibe. It’s great fun, like a terrific kid’s novel brought to illustrated life.

At Written World, Ragnell decries the overuse of sexual assault as a means for comics writers to give female characters added layers. Ragnell concedes that there are some examples of the effective use of this plot device:

“I honestly didn’t care much about it in Identity Crisis. I mean, it was pretty vile, but it was about the only horror that could explain away the irrational actions of the Justice League.”

Kalinara of Pretty Fizzy Paradise backs this position up in the comments section:

“(Sue Dibny’s rape in IDC actually wasn’t that bad in this respect, as having it set so far back in her past that it made it clear that she *had* overcome it and continued to be strong and capable up to her death. And they needed something truly vile to motivate the JLA-ers toward that end.)”

and at Pretty, Fizzy Paradise:

“And you know what, maybe I’m being selfish, maybe rape survivors do like seeing so many characters recover from being raped to become strong happy women, but I’d like to see it a little less. Comics are escapism for me, and while I like lots of drama and angst…I could do with a bit less hitting close to home thanks. I don’t mean cut it out entirely. But save it for something like Identity Crisis, where you need something that monstrous to motivate the heroes into crossing a line.”

And, oh, I could not possibly agree less. I think the worst possible reason to include sexual assault in a story is to give other characters motivation to act. And I can’t think of a worse offender in that category than Identity Crisis.

I think Brad Meltzer very purposely concealed Sue’s reaction to the rape because it wasn’t about her. It was about what the powerful people in shiny spandex do when they fail to protect someone. Even a glimpse into Sue’s emotional state would have probably undermined the intended effect of including the incident at all: to incite the characters (and, via a graphic depiction of the act, readers) into positions they would not normally have taken without appearing merely vengeful.

In narrative terms, she was cast aside so that the heroes could avenge their failure to protect her by committing an act of violation of their own, maintaining a vague sheen of moral ambiguity. In experiencing one of the most personal violations imaginable, Sue became a plot device – a symbol of the failures of the people around her rather than a character in her own right. She’s dehumanized out of necessity, serving instead as a symbol of the innocent. It happened to her, but her reaction is immaterial, discernable only via readers’ assumptions. And her reaction is immaterial because it would have been too disruptive to the quasi-moralizing Meltzer was trying to sell.

It’s not her story; it could have happened to any associate of the Justice League, which reduces something real and specific and horrible to something lurid and inflammatory. It cheapens the subject by turning it into a generic catalyst.

GLAAD has announced its nominations for “fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community” in comics. I saw them first at The Beat, and Dorian and Johanna have commented on the list. (GLAAD has since posted the full list of nominees, so you can skip the Variety site, if you’d rather.)

I have such a mixed reaction to this whole enterprise. While I can kind of understand the rationale for concentrating on mainstream comics for the nominees (i.e. comics by Marvel and DC), the “beggars at the feast” quality of it all unnerves me. It’s depressing to feel like the organization is purposely lowering its standards to raise its profile. (I’m glad that Young Avengers got a nomination, though.)

There have been really good comics published in the last year that have rich, varied portrayals of LGBT characters. There’s Capote in Kansas from Oni, Off*Beat from Tokyopop, Only the Ring Finger Knows and Antique Bakery from Digital Manga, and Rica ‘tte Kanji!? from ALC. And if all it takes is a gay or lesbian supporting character to make a book eligible, I’d much rather see nominations go to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Oni) or even Tricked (Top Shelf), though the latter wasn’t one of my favorite books of the year. It certainly meets the “fair, accurate, and inclusive” standard, though.

Seriously, can any genre of comic books really be considered all that mainstream? With Marvel and DC seeming to become more and more focused on an insular, Direct Market audience, “mainstream” seems like a painfully relative term. I can find Off*Beat and the DMP books in more places than I can Strangers in Paradise or Gotham Central. Same with Tricked and Scott Pilgrim.

Has anyone ever walked into a comic shop because GLAAD recognized a title? And if someone is going to walk into a comic shop for the first time because of GLAAD’s nominations, is that really the list of comics you’d recommend? Why not promote lesser-known titles with superior portrayals rather than try and ride on some shaky definition of what “mainstream” is?

This is going to be one of the costlier Wednesdays in recent memory, but I don’t really mind, as it promises to be a fun mix of books. Here’s my excessively self-referential look at the week’s highlights.

Fantagraphics delivers Comics Journal Library #6: The Writers. Lots of people are looking forward to the reprint of the Harlan Ellison interview, but I’m all about the chat with Steve Englehart.

Go! Comi has second volumes of three titles. My pick of the week would be Cantarella. (Nothing against Tenshi Ja Nai!!, which I’ll no doubt pick up eventually.) If that’s not enough Borgia action for you, there’s also Borgia – Blood for the Pope from Heavy Metal.

IDW offers the second issue of Peter David’s re-launched Fallen Angel. We’ll see if the painted art grows on me.

From the “better late than never” file is the final issue of Marvel’s Defenders. I’ve really enjoyed this series, even though it doesn’t feature c-list super-heroines forming a detective agency and fighting crime.

Oni’s Polly and the Pirates #3 provides more comedy and adventure from Ted Naifeh. Joy!

It isn’t listed on the NCRL site, but the second volume of Bambi and Her Pink Gun is due from Digital Manga. I picked up the first out of morbid curiosity, unable to resist the title but expecting to be put off by the gratuitous violence. I ended up liking it a lot more than I probably should have. I guess there are always exceptions.

This week’s Flipped is up. I’m not sure the world needed another review of Dragon Head after Rose Curtin, Jog, and Heidi MacDonald had their say, not even factoring in a recommendation from Bryan Lee O’Malley. (I’m still not quite sure how it’s “manga for the rest of us,” but that’s neither here nor there.)

Because I can’t resist a theme (or even the appearance of one), I also reviewed X-Day, one of the titles I received via MangaTrade. It’s an interesting book, and it has a lot of strong points, but I’m kind of glad I didn’t pay for it. I’m going to put it on my “available for trade” list, if anyone’s interested in giving it a look.

I have to admit that the column is kind of a fallback offering. I started off intending to write about the Viz-Tokyopop Big Two question, but after David Taylor, Johanna Draper Carlson, and Jake Forbes have weighed in on the subject, what is there to add?

Okay, maybe just one thing. I did come up with a really tortured anime analogy:

You know those cartoons where five or six formidable robots join seamlessly to form an even more formidable robot with the power to raze cities and send foes spiraling into the heart of the sun? That’s Viz.

You know those cartoons where a protagonist tries to scrabble out a living in a landscape made barren of resources by the greedy machinations of some military-industrial complex? That’s Tokyopop.

Okay, it really only applies as far as license acquisition goes, but I liked it.

Since Michael Dean has spent several issues of The Comics Journal evaluating the journalistic standards of web sites and on-line personalities (whether they purport to be journalists or not), the temptation to examine his contributions by the same criteria is strong. And if I could resist temptation, my life would be very, very different.

Dean’s criteria for what’s considered journalism were as follows:

“1) it was about a newsworthy topic or issue, not just selling a product or promoting a company; 2) the reporter asked questions of people; 3) the sources of the story’s perspectives and information are identified; 4) the story reflected the reporter’s research into the context and implications of the story’s subject.”

Because it’s the meatiest of Dean’s articles in TCJ #273, I decidd to look at “Comics and Corporations: Creativity Under Contract” from the Newswatch section.

Newsworthiness: It clearly is. Dean cites extensive discussions on Warren Ellis’s The Engine and other message boards to reinforce the substance of the issue, and quotes blog entries from creators and Heidi MacDonald’s The Beat (one of the sites evaluated in his series). Two recent developments in particular are cited: the posting of a draft work-for-hire contract between DC and Dave Sim, and the rather heated discussion of the content of Tokyopop’s contracts with the creators producing its OEL titles. The topic of creator’s rights and work-for-hire versus ownership certainly bears substantial scrutiny, so this criterion is absolutely met.

Asking questions: The answer would be, “Yes and no.” Dean spoke to a number of people for the article, and he quoted a number of message board and blog postings related to the issue. The primary interview subjects are creators such as Sim, Kurt Busiek, Neil Gaiman, Steve Leialoha, and others, along with comics creator representative Harris Miller. (I’m not quite clear precisely what Harris’s role as a representative is, though agent or attorney seems most likely.)

Unfortunately, Dean speaks to very few representatives of the comics publishing industry. There’s a brief response from Image’s Erik Larsen to a claim from Comicon’s Rick Veitch about ancillary rights for a reprint project. Whether Veitch’s comments were obtained through interview or from the message board thread cited in the previous paragraph is unclear. No follow-up response to Larsen’s denial from Veitch is included.

A number of interview subjects make strong statements about Todd McFarlane’s contractual and residual practices. There are no rebuttals from McFarlane or indications that Dean had attempted to obtain them. That said, McFarlane’s legal battles with various creators, notably Gaiman, have been covered widely in TCJ and a number of other venues.

Smaller publishers such as Alias, AiT/PlanetLar, and IDW are characterized as being mindful of potential movie development, and Alias’s Brett Burnett does comment on the subject.

Miller makes a characterization about Marvel’s position on “incentive bonuses,” and Dean notes that Marvel’s Joe Quesada wasn’t available for comment.

A significant portion of the article tracks Sim’s abandoned negotiations with DC to contribute three pages to a Fables project. Sim provides considerable detail on the situation, but there is no comment from anyone on the DC side, nor is there any indication that Dean made inquiries that went unanswered.

Identification: Again, the answer is “yes and no,” for many of the same reasons. Sim, Dean, and others characterize what they believe to be the corporate philosophy of DC and Marvel, but without confirmation or denial from anyone from either company, it can only be considered supposition, however plausible it sounds. Here are some examples:

“‘It seems to me a case of: Do you want the work or don’t you?’” (Sim on DC)

“‘My hunch is they’d be loathe to require such things, since they then would be obliged to pay for my travel expenses.’” (Peter Bagge)

“More upsetting to DC was probably [Sim’s] suggestion…” (Dean)

“DC apparently judged that…” (Dean)

“…almost as though the publisher was haunted by the prospect of a single right remaining in the possession of the creator.” (Dean)

Perhaps identification isn’t the problem so much as balance. Contracts are between two parties, and the perspective one of those parties is significantly underrepresented in the article. I’ll readily concede that DC and Marvel might be utterly unwilling to discuss contractual details and negotiations for any number of reasons. More evidence of an attempt to include their perspective would have been welcome, though. (And while a number of creators cast doubt on the prospect of doing truly creator-owned work for a company like DC, no one saw fit to mention that Peter David just took Fallen Angel from DC to IDW.)

Research, Context and Implications: Dean is transparent about his process and intentions, even if they weren’t fully realized. (Few to no creators were willing to send TCJ their work-for-hire contracts, as Dean had requested.)

The focus on Sim seems to undermine the context and implications. Given his well-documented partiality to self-publishing, Sim seems like an odd creator to choose when examining the work-for-hire situation. Unlike the relatively unknown Tokyopop creators, there’s no imbalance of power in Sim’s negotiations with DC.

If the undertone from the Big Two is “Take it or leave it” (which is undermined by Harris and a number other creators who talk about negotiable page rates and other contract variables depending on factors such as stature), I can think of few creators more likely to leave it. But, as Sim has nothing to lose from discussing the situation, and since he had already made his contract public, I can’t help but conclude that Sim received the focus because he was the only creator willing to talk frankly and at length about a specific contract. And while it’s interesting (if one-sided) reading, it hardly seems illustrative of the wider issue.

As the thread on The Engine indicated, the real meat of the work-for-hire and creator’s rights issue is with more inexperienced creators at the beginning of their careers. They’re the ones who are more likely to struggle with the “take it or leave it” conundrum in the interest of launching their careers, and I’m a bit at a loss as to what they can learn from Sim’s experience with DC.

Dean’s stated aims for the piece are to answer the following questions (and I’ve added numbers in brackets for my own convenience):

“[1] What kinds of employment choices do today’s creators have? [2] Is there any difference between working for Marvel or working for DC? [3] What are the most important contract-related concerns and issues facing comics freelancers today? [4] What impact has the success of comics-based movies had on industry contracts? [5] Are today’s contracts negotiable or inflexible for comics creators? [6] To what extent are today’s comics freelancers able to share in the profits from their work?”

I’ll run through them and see what answers I was able to derive:

[1] Choices are numerous, depending on what the creator’s ambitions are and what level of control they’d like to retain of their work.

[2] The differences seem to be mostly in terms of accounting, though it varies from creator to creator. (The possible impact of exclusive contracts isn’t really explored in the article, which might have provided some dimension.)

[3] This remains unclear, as the pitfalls faced from someone like Sim are rather different than the ones faced by, say, Rivkah. But if full ownership of one’s work is a priority, then they should stay far away from work-for-hire on Marvel and DC’s trademarked characters.

[4] For some creators, the impact of possible movie deals is substantial, but mostly in the realm of smaller, independent publishers who make pursuit of such deals a priority and factor it heavily into their business plans. Marvel and DC don’t really sell specific stories or a single artist’s aesthetic to movie studios so much as trademarked characters, so it’s difficult to imagine a situation where someone working on Spider-Man or Superman today would see a specific change of circumstances based on a movie project. (Of course, if they’re writing a tie-in project or a title that gets a bump from a recently released film, they might see more royalties or incentive bonuses, but honestly, how often have Marvel and DC been able to really capitalize on a successful film?)

[5] It depends on the creator, their stature and popularity.

[6] Again, it depends on the creator, and also the publisher.

To sum up, I’d say Dean fully meets the first criteria and rates something of an incomplete on the other three.

Comic Book Resources has posted Diamond’s Top 50 Manga for 2005, along with the previously released Top 100 Comics and Top 100 Graphic Novels. (Scroll down.)

As I suspected, Whiskers McNinja made a respectable showing beyond the top 100 GNs, with the other seven volumes of Viz’s Naruto scattered across the manga list. As David Taylor predicted, Dark Horse’s Samurai Executioner did much the same, with four other volumes joining its top 100 GN entry.

None of DC’s CMX titles cracked the top 50. I vaguely remember mention of a plan for DC to target their traditional comic shop audience for carry-over to the CMX line (or was it the other way around?), but the publisher’s only entry is Dead Boy Detectives at #10, a digest-sized Sandman spin-off. (The first two volumes of Neil Gaiman’s legendary Vertigo title are still showing up in the Top 100 Graphic Novels chart.) David Taylor talked about DBD in his look at Diamond’s Top 50 Manga for July 2005.

Even Tenjho Tenge didn’t show up, despite regular appearances on the monthly list when a new volume arrives. The category that defines the year-end list seems to be titles that are evergreen performers, though, with consistent interest and steady sales of older volumes as new readers sign up. (Look at how many installments of Fruits Basket appear.) Tenjho Tenge might not be in that category, relying more on an existing base of readers.

After DBD, Dark Horse’s MegaTokyo Vol. 3 is the second best-selling OEL book, landing at #13. Only one of Tokyopop’s OEL books made the cut, with Warcraft Vol. 1 popping in at #23. I thought Keith Giffen’s excellent Big Two pedigree might give I Luv Halloween a bump. Giffen is present on the list, though, having provided the adaptations for the three volumes of Tokyopop’s Battle Royale that landed at 28, 32, and 33.

The manga adaptation of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (Disney Press) came in at #29.

There’s only one hit for Del Rey (Negima Vol. 5 at #46). Given their bookstore focus, it isn’t particularly surprising. Del Rey’s titles usually arrive in bookstores weeks before they show up at a comic shop. (Chris Butcher explains why.)

I’m looking forward to Brian Hibbs’s annual look at BookScan’s graphic novel numbers for the year, mentioned in this thread at The Engine.