PIMPING COMICS: Makura no soshi Karin has a review of 9/11 comics up on bookslut. Check it out --I didn't know the comics majors did anything like this, as I've been in one of my non-comics reading periods lately. Karin offers this:

It can be argued -- and indeed, it has been, especially with regard to 9/11 -- that it's wrong to criticize a piece of heartfelt art for its sentimentality, and certainly there are those who will accuse me of being a curmudgeon (or worse) for having any kind of problem with, for example, the 2-pager depicting a fictional Superman lamenting his helplessness from within the pages of his comic book. History will pass the final judgement, long after many of us are dead, but even now, surely we the living can see that it does the shades of 9/11 little service to wish that Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash had been around to save them; nor, for that matter, does it add any honour to the heroes the the four-colour pages to mix them up in the troubles of our real, messy world. For some of us, it may alleviate the pain, but the question of appropriateness remains unaddressed.

Without seeing the comics, I mean, a 2-pager with Superman "lamenting his helplessness" just sounds horrible. And didn't DC nuke one of their fictional cities --Keystone City or Central City or Fawcett City-- recently? In the past few years, I think. Superhero comics diverge from the real world at moments of real horror, because the superheroes operate on such a hyperreal scale that something as horrible as the 9/11 attacks happens pretty frequently in your D.C./Marvel continuities. I don't think 9/11 is really something the genre can address, or, rather, it already has addressed it, in fictional crisis after crisis. But I haven't read the comics so enough.

Hey, there's a bookslut blog too. Kewl.