What's Happening

It’s been a while since my last blog post – longer than I ever intended – and I feel like I owe you loyal readers an explanation. In short, I’ve been insanely busy these past couple of weeks in ways that are both tangentially and directly related to my writing. If you’re at all interested in learning why, read on:



To put it mildly, my writing career – and I admit calling anything I’ve done so far in my 28 years a “career” is a stretch – has taken two unexpected yet interesting turns of late.

Thoughts on DC Animation's Dark Knight Returns, Part 1

The name Frank Miller has popped up a lot on this blog in its relatively young lifespan, which I suppose shouldn’t be a surprise even if I didn’t really set out to focus on him much when I launched this humble little home for my writing about comics. The man is a venerable Titan of the art form, and his vision and work has influenced nearly every mainstream comic from the past twenty-five years in some form or another. Whether it’s his integration of manga sensibilities into western comics, his reinvention of Batman into the emotionally tortured, Dark Knight avenger who has since starred in ninety-five percent of the Batman stories to follow in the wake of Year One and Dark Knight Returns, his sense of design and storytelling or any of the other myriad innovations he brought to the form, Miller’s touch can be felt everywhere in today’s comics.


Which I guess is why I find myself writing about him and his early comics so often, and why to this day I’ll buy, read and/or watch any project with his name on it even if he has gone more than a bit nutty in his old age. Even recent works like his highly controversial anti-terrorism polemic, Holy Terror, the insanely bizarre All-Star Batman and Robin and, yes, even his film bastardization of Will Eisner’s Spirit are worth watching if only as reminders that there’s still some artistic genius living in the eccentricities that have so clearly ballooned to cartoonish proportions in his later years. He remains an Artist in every sense of the word – one of the most important to ever work in the medium. And I’ll be damned if he’s still not one of the most interesting.

My love for Miller and his work, coupled with my general appreciation of anything produced by DC Entertainment’s animation division, made me eager to watch the animated adaptation of the Dark Knight Returns – the project that first established Miller as a comics master – from the moment it was first announced as two feature-length movies. Part 1 hit stores, online retailers and video-on-demand last week, and I recently sat down to find out whether the filmmakers succeeded in effectively capturing the revolutionary spirit of the original comics miniseries. My thoughts after the jump:

Back to The City: Rereading Transmetropolitan by Ellis and Robertson

I’m a huge Warren Ellis fan. He’s one of my favorite writers working in any medium today, and lucky for us his medium of choice often happens to be comics.


Terrifyingly intelligent, insightful and scathingly hilarious, Ellis’ voice shines through whether he’s writing about technology, futurism or the craft of writing, or in genres such as hard sci-fi, horror, superheroes, political satire, black comedy, neo-noir, detective fiction or blockbuster action (often, as in the subject of this blog, he’s tackling all of the above). And although there might be better, more polished Ellis works out there, there’s no doubt in my mind that Transmetropolitan, his and artist Darick Robertson’s cyberpunk/gonzo-journalism mash-up, encompasses everything that’s great about the writer more so than any of his other projects. Transmet is quintessential Ellis, which is why it’s right up there with his and John Cassaday’s Planetary as one of my favorite comics of all time.

This being election season, when bullshit spews from both sides of the political spectrum with a nauseating intensity, I figured now was the perfect time for a Transmet reread, and another immersion into series hero Spider Jerusalem’s particular brand of Truth.