Here comes Honey Boo Boo! (Bluewater Productions)

There is probably not a human being on this earth who believes that Honey Boo Boo is being given a healthy amount of attention with her TV show and constant face-slapping, president-endorsing appearances on the late-night circuit. We know, deep in our bones, or hearts, or whatever, that the blonde pageant star has another 6½ minutes left--at most--on the Andy Warhol clock. But is it really necessary to make a whole comic book about her upcoming irrelevance?

Bluewater Productions, the graphic novel version of TMZ.com, which has brought you stories on politicians, princes and Kardashians, thinks so. But even it is having a hard time defending its position.

From the 15 Minutes: Honey Boo Boo website (where you can now pre-order the comic):

You better redneckomitize! Bluewater Productions continues it's examination of the under belly of FAME in the second installment of their new "15 Minutes" biography comics line that focuses on the stars of reality television. Alana Mitchell better known to the world at large as pint sized pageant queen "Honey Boo Boo. Join writer/artist Michael Troy as we uncover Honey Boo Boo's rise to FAME from her breakout appearance's on Toddlers and Tiara's to landing her very own reality series. Discover why self-named Honey Boo Boo has garnered the attention, if not the hearts from Anderson Cooper to The White House.

Okay, so it's a history of Honey Boo Boo and her rise to fame? Fine. We mean, how many pages could this subject possibly fill, even in illustrated form?

But already, Bluewater's publisher is defending his recent product as sort of a preemptive strike against anyone offended by the comic, which makes us think that besides putting a countdown timer next to her name, this book has other dirty tricks up its sleeve.

First, a message from the author:

“Andy Warhol's quote about 15 minutes of fame is one of my favorites, and as a pop culture junkie, I jumped at the chance to put my spin on spoon-fed America's latest reality obsession, Honey Boo Boo,” said writer/artist Michael Troy.

And then the head honcho:

“Clearly this one was meant to be fun for people and not to educate society,” said publisher Darren G. Davis. “There are some of these biographies we do for strictly the entertainment value.”

Ooooh. Okay? Thank you for the clarification that your comic book about Honey friggin' Boo Boo is not meant as some larger critique or thesis about our culture's celebrity obsession.

I am Kimmelman... I mean Batman. (i09)

Who needs Paul Goldberger and Michael Kimmelman when you have Batman? The Observer knows where we will be on May 30, when three of our favorite things collide: Chip Kidd, Gotham City and architecture criticism.

Mr. Kidd has created a new Batman Graphic novel for DC Comics called Death By Design that he recently previewed with Gawker’s geek webside i09 (we saw it first on Curbed). It’s funny, because the famed book jacket designer and author claims a poverty of ideas on what to write when approached by DC with the offer to pen a comic book when in fact it is clear he knows exactly what he is doing and has come up with one of the best story lines since Grant Morrison’s Arkum Asylum.

I got this extraordinary opportunity where [DC Comics editor] Dan DiDio said, "Do a Batman graphic novel for us." It became a case of the "be-careful-what-you-wish-fors." Even though I'm a lifelong Batman fan, I didn't have the Batman novel in my head I had been dying to write for 20 years. What I came up with first was the title, as it sounded like a story I could bring something to.

I started thinking about living and working in New York, and one of the great tragedies was the destruction of the original Pennsylvania Station in 1963, because it was a beautiful building needlessly torn down. As somebody who has to use the modern Penn Station, it's a horrible, stifling thing, after they threw it in the basement of Madison Square Garden. And there were these Manhattan crane collapses in the spring of 2008. I thought, "How could these two things possibly be related?" Batman is very much about architecture, as he uses the buildings as transportation and defense. Great Batman stories always incorporate architecture in some way, but I hadn't seen a story that particularly dealt with that."There's a cliché that Gotham is "hell opening up on Earth," but that's not the way I approached it. I see the architecture as much more hopeful than a zoning board gone berserk."

Quite delightfully, he goes on to say: "There's a cliché that Gotham is "hell opening up on Earth," but that's not the way I approached it. I see the architecture as much more hopeful than a zoning board gone berserk."

Really does sound like New York.

It’s true that no comic book character is more architectural than Batman (with the possible exception of personal favorite Transmetropolitan). Superman may be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but he does not rely on “the buildings for transportation and defense,” as Mr. Kidd points out Batman does.

Indeed, The Observer was recently taken with the backwards bridges Christopher Nolan blew up in his final installment of the Dark Knight series, a disguise that would be unnecessary in almost any other movie. Aliens and monsters invade New York all the time. To play the part of Gotham, it takes three cities or more.

Nowhere does architecture play quite the role of sidekick as in a good Batman story.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

We also included some costume-specific pick-up lines, because you never know.

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