Pop Rocks

A dog (looking remarkably like Mickey Mouse circa 1928) goes back in time to kill Adolf Hitler. Or rather, Hitler (also a dog) steals the time machine and then goes forward in time (twice, because this is time travel) and is shot by the dog, all thanks to a scientist’s bright idea to preempt the Holocaust in a world where murder-for-hire is more common than couples’ therapy. Norwegian cartoonist Jason’s I Killed Adolf Hitler is the perfect high-lit comic book, no bones about it. The story would be flimsy in prose, and a lame gimmick of a movie, but it’s affecting and rich when paired with clean-lined anthropomorphic pups and birds and sparse dialogue. Jason understands that comics don’t have to be about tights-wearing superheroes expounding on justice and loneliness, nor do they have to be about lame twentysomethings coping with life on the brink of adulthood as their girlfriends leave them for men who do things besides cry and draw. He is to the graphic novel what Hemingway is to the short story (if Hemingway had spent a little more time in his basement watching episodes of Dr. Who and reading H.G. Wells). (Alli Katz)

Cuddly uber-homo pop combo Bearforce1 are back, and this time it’s seasonal. Pop Rocks’ favorite band of tubby gay furballs traded in their pastel polos and white madras pants for fuzzy sweaters and red snowsuits just in time to make this holiday season a little merrier. Thankfully, they kept their signature dry-humping dance moves and bear gang signs. Their latest video “Christmas Is Here” remixes your fave holiday classics (“We wish you a hairy Christmas”) with a techno dance beat and a catchy chorus while showing the Bears doing seasonally adorable activities—canoodling with doodle-doggies, sledding across blankets of fresh white snow and even opening presents with the original bear, Santa Claus. Presumably before getting down to some hot man-on-man action. (Erica Palan)

If punk rock was a book, this would be it. Brian Joseph Davis’ I, Tania—a (super)fictionalized (auto)biography of Patty Hearst—is fast, hard and totally about screwing over the Man. Davis manages to mock the rich, the pig middle class, revolutionaries, the media, Bad News Bears, Don DeLillo and Katie Couric without breaking his stride, all while serving a heaping plop of Marxism for Dummies. But be warned: I, Tania only really appeals to four groups—Weather Underground fugitives who now watch a lot of VH1, pinko-intellectual college students who did a lot of coke in the bathrooms of their elite high schools, terrorists and super-smart post-hip PW readers who use Pop Rocks as their infallible guide to all that’s truly supergroovy in the increasingly balkanized melange of insanity and inanity that is modern pop culture. (A.K.)

If you can manage for just a second to pull your eyes away from Hillary Clinton’s remarkable cleavage, you might notice something amazing. No, not her angry jowls. Her mullet. This is no high-end John Edwards trim, nor is it the illustrious headband of yesteryear. It’s a power mullet. The hair shows anyone on the fence about Sen. Clinton that she’s not a she-devil. The message? Here’s a woman who has all the qualifications necessary to seek and even win the highest office in the land, but she could just as easily sit next to you at a South Philly salon getting her highlights touched up. And after Clinton’s inevitable victory the power mullet will become as ubiquitous as the astronaut’s wife’s beehive was in the early 1960s. Just remember you felt its hypnotic awesomeness here first. (A.K.)

Ties are classy. They show you mean business. But Two Kings Neckwear, based out of Las Vegas and Philadelphia, bridges the gap between dapper and dangerous with its graffiti-scrawled logo and trademark pseudo-gang sign (arms across the chest, fingers contorted into a “2” and a “K”). Hey, finger-twisting and street cred are practically synonymous, right? With ties offered in colors like “Rasta Green” and styles including “Facemelt” and “Skulls,” their designs are guaranteed to bring out the ’hood in the most suburban of cubicle serfs. Windsor knots under white collars? Oh, how boring. Beat the system. Damn the Man. You have a roaring, vicious, savage, silk twill lion hanging down the middle of your chest. You are the new American gangster. Obviously. (Danielle Cheesman) >> www.twokingsneckwear.com