I’m so exhausted after moving home this weekend, I can barely type. With this in mind, I shall do a little gentle weblogging by deploying some well-chosen links.

Newsarama has a nice intro to The Eternals [EDIT: dead link] in preparation for the new mini-series from Neil Gaiman and John Romita Jr. Being only 6-years-old when the original series came out, I have no idea what the Eternals are all about, apart from the words ‘Gods’ and ‘Jack Kirby’, which doesn’t really tell you anything. The article jogged a memory fart, as it included the Walt Simonson-drawn cover to the 12-issue limited series of more recent times. I didn’t pick up the series, obviously, but I do remember the cover because Simonson is one of my top five artists of all time.

Clandestine Chum Greg, wearing his Comics Should Be Good hat, didn’t like Desolation Jones #6. He posts again today, asking why he seems to be the only one who didn’t like it. Despite the spectre of Women In Refrigerators looming over the issue, I didn’t think the comic was bad. On the contrary, I thought it was very good. A story set in the milieu of hard-boiled detective mixed with the bleak end of the espionage genre is not supposed to be happy and fluffy; death is a constant, the randomness, brutality and despair of it being a vital part of it. The characters in the book are not heroes in the strictest sense, nor should they be. The power of Robina’s death is in the fact that she is a fully realised figure who has been crafted into a character about whom we care deeply. Her gender is irrelevant to the power of the story. I’m siding with the likes of Jog and JB on this one: Desolation Jones #6 was a Good Comic. Sorry Greg.

In a perfect world, Dave Campbell would post his comedy reminisces about his comic book collection every day. We don’t live in a perfect world, so we make do with his still-regular output. His current themed-week is The X-Men, warming the cockles of my heart; Chris Claremont’s run on The Uncanny X-Men is what got me into comics in the first place (see here for my recollections on my first comic), so I have an unhealthy love for those books, which means I am more than happy for Dave to take me on a trip down nostalgia lane. His post for today is about a Bill Windsor Smith-drawn Wolverine story from The Uncanny X-Men #205, and the tingling has begun already.

Finally, via Johanna, a link to a brilliant turning of the tables – comic book covers if we lived in a matriarchal world. I’m a heterosexual man with lusty appetites, and even I’m embarrassed by the way the female form is depicted in comic books in such a casually sexual way. I’m not talking about the cheesecake stuff; I can enjoy Adam Hughes or Terry Dodson books without worrying too much, because that is what they do. I’m talking about the way seemingly ordinary artists show female characters in a solely sexual and inappropriate manner. For example, I was reading the first trade of Mark Millar’s Crossover storyline in the Ultimate Fantastic Four the other day. There is a panel where Greg Land is supposed to be showing the transition of the Ultimate FF characters to the Zombie FF in a prison cell. The most prominent aspect in the panel at the bottom of the page is the zombie Sue’s backside. Not only is it blatantly gratuitous, it is also diagrammatically incorrect because, in the next panel, Sue is not standing on her own in order to display her perfect bum, but is surrounded by the zombie Thing and Torch. So, three cheers to Karen, the creator of the male sex object covers and for the point they make.