Archive for August 19, 2010

Skull Animation

August 19, 2010

Here’s a low-rent animation I made special for blogging

Music Time: Adam Lambert – “20th Century Boy”

August 19, 2010

Adam Lambert

“20th Century Boy”

Live at Erie, Pennsylvania, August 10, 2010

What do we talk about when we talk about Adam Lambert? I talk about the only American Idol contestant in nine seasons’ worth of regular viewing that nearly always included a “favorite” contestant by whom I was ever even remotely interested in buying a record, let alone actually going out and doing so. (“Since U Been Gone” is the exception that proves the rule.) I talk about a person I would sit around and daydream up lists of covers I wanted to hear him perform. I talk about the closest I’ve ever come, in my dully, ardently heterosexual life, to having a crush on a man–a reduction of myself to literally swooning, literally shrieking Beatlemania-level hysteria when he did things like cover David Bowie or Muse or Led Zeppelin. I talk about the kind of man I once dreamed of being–the ideal self I saw in the throes of my turn-of-the-millennium glam obsession, when I was known to go to Target in heels. I talk about a man who I’ve pictured covering “Sweet Transvestite” from Rocky Horror in full Frank N. Furter regalia only to realize that were this to actually happen I think I’d be in danger of fainting. When I talk about Adam Lambert I talk about the kind of infatuation with a pop star we, and by we I mean tween girls, usually experience only to grow out of and forget how to feel.

I don’t talk about the actual album he ended up making. I like it, for the most part–it certainly has a kick-ass opening track in the form of the Darkness-penned “Music Again,” and the throw-it-all-at-the-wall pop-house and “rocker” balladry the label provided for him are all a lot more palatable when issued from behind that beautiful half-smile and from those genuinely astounding musical-theater pipes. To paraphrase Stardust (not Ziggy, not Alvin), music sounds better with him. But “better” isn’t “PERFECTION,” and I find that contrary to the Lambert of my dreams, For Your Entertainment is something I rarely have the patience to sit through. That cacophonous production, a full-on casualty of the loudness wars, just doesn’t have the strut and slink and kick that Lambert himself does; the blandly orgiastic videos produced for his two dancey singles “For Your Entertainment” and “If I Had You” and the utterly sexless (literally–the significant other never appears!) video produced for his Top 10 hit “Whataya Want from Me” are all too fitting an act of commodification and de-interesting-ization.

So what do I talk about when I talk about Adam Lambert? This, even when it’s not what he’s actually doing. A glam anthem. T. Rex’s best, ballsiest song, previously covered with ear-splitting sleaziness on the seminal (!) Velvet Goldmine soundtrack by Placebo, now kicked up several keys and strutted to like it’s what he was born to do. Which it is, for better or for worse. In today’s pop climate, it’s Lady Gaga who’s the exception that proves the rule: whether because polymorphous perversity is more acceptable coming from sexy ladies than openly gay men, whether because the Idol machine exerts more control over Lambert than Gaga ever had to deal with, or whether it’s simply because he’s a performer first and an artist second, my hero is at his best when embodying the glorious provocative pop of the past. He’s a 20th century boy.

posting it all over the internet

August 18, 2010

So I made a large one page comic and submitted it to a free comics newspaper. I then posted it on flickr as I do with all unpaid work, including the name of the comics newspaper I submitted it to as to promote the publication even though I know my piece might not get published. I then get a comment on facebook from the guy who puts it out telling me that if i want to get printed “then don’t post it all over the goddamn internet first”. It says nowhere in the submission form that I can’t post my comic online, and there’s no logical reason why I shouldn’t, and since it’s unpaid I own the comic and am only lending it to be printed for free. So fuck all that shit, I’m posting it “all over the goddamn internet”.

no comics in here

August 18, 2010

hey dudes. wish i could say i’ve been drawing a lot, but as conor put it i’ve been doin the ‘Fuckin Bob Vila’ thing. i built these boxes for my pedals. the larger is for the B&P setup and the smaller for the Witch Hat trials. here are some progress shots and the final product. pretty classy huh? i would never do this life-posting but i gotta post something right.

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these are the guts. grey veltex.

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Comics Time: The Airy Tales

August 18, 2010

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The Airy Tales

Olga Volozova, writer/artist

Sparplug, 2008

128 pages

$15

Buy it from Sparkplug

Buy it from Amazon.com

Like some of the other Sparkplug titles I’ve sampled–Inkweed comes to mind–The Airy Tales, Olga Volozova’s collection of original short fairy tales and fables, is a tough sell at first glance. And as I’ve often said, first glance is precisely where I buy or pass. There are too many comics and too few hours in the day to force myself to plow through a book I don’t find appealing on an art-surface level. Every once in a while an imprint will come along whose guiding aesthetic, and this is nobody’s fault, simply has little Venn-diagram overlap with mine. First Second is one; Sparkplug seems at times to be another. But then for whatever reason–usually because I’m up against a self-imposed deadline and the book looks short enough to read on the train– I’ll say “What the hell,” take it off the shelf, give it a read, and exit gladder for having done so.

Such is the case with The Airy Tales. Like Inkweed, its visuals aren’t really too my taste. Volozova’s shaky line and mixed media elements come across a little bit Stieg, a little bit Salazar, and a lot alien from where I’m at. The painted colors read craft-y rather than considered, the character designs are too wishy-washy to stand out the way the great illustrated children’s-book characters do, and the placement of captions in particular is a detriment to readability. It’s clear Volozova’s intent is to combine the sequential storytelling of comics with the static image-and-text approach of a child’s storybook, but her solution–placing the text in little boxes surrounding the central image that are sometimes read from top to bottom and sometimes read from left to right–is confusing even to someone who got his altcomix start with Acme Novelty Library.

This leaves the writing to do most of the work–and it works. I really have to hand it to Volozova for capturing the ineffable quality of fairy tales before Disney simplified them into plucky can-do adventures. The recurring images bear the mark of springing unbidden and unexplained from her underbrain, whether it’s giant celestial birds using tiny threads thousands of miles long to guide each individual human around the Earth or a man made of rain who uses his godlike powers of growth to make the lives of the people who come to him for help just slightly better than before. Most of the time you get the sense that there’s some moral to the story, but it’s a, well, weird moral, a moral based on the moral-ity of an age or society lost to us. Like, there’s this one extended fable about a group of people who each live on a different leaf of a tree that sheds those leaves every day, only for them to drift back onto the tree each night. All the residents have full lives except this one guy whose sole possession is a bright yellow sweater; since his leaf isn’t burdened with family members or fun stuff, he ends up higher on the trunk every day, and his neighbors get jealous. Finally he catches on and deliberately builds a contraption to lower himself down to their level, and they’re all finally happy, and you think it’s a crabs-in-the-pot-type parable about how livin’ free means living outside society, or whatever. But then the story ends by telling us only the yellow-sweater man knew that in fact the leaves were never gonna re-attach to the tree again, because of the impending snowfall–and then the snowfall comes and each snowflake contains a little kid or animal cub. And that’s it! That’s the end. As Zak Smith recently said, the wonderful thing about Wonderland is that it makes you wonder; The Airy Tales certainly left me scratching my head. It’s alien from me in both the bad way and the good way.

rotwang

August 17, 2010

noel go easy on em, no one can follow that beautiful photo essay! anyways i just moved to anodda planet, so i thought i’d start this with some inspirational dancing:

&

and i wasnt quite prepared for this blog take over?? but here’s a 2 sketches of 2 new stories i’m workin on (sorry for the bobo quality, scanners are a rare delicacy now):

new pastabilitease

jazznred

and here’s an amazing pulsallama video, guaranteed to inspire:

bye biddies, back to waiting for the mailman

Music Time: Salem – “King Night”

August 17, 2010

Salem

“King Night”

from King Night

IAMSOUND, September 2010

Buy it, eventually, from IAMSOUND

I take it that “King Night” is to “witch house” what Neon Indian’s “Deadbeat Summer” was to chillwave/glo-fi: the accessible face of an unnecessarily divisive micogenre based on what synthesizers sound like if you have an inner ear infection. From that I shall deduce that witch house is hilarious. The most striking element is the giant, bassy synth sound, portentous even without the ominous choir voices. You can picture black-hooded demons striding straight out of a 1980s backmasked subliminal message. But this is coupled with stuff that wouldn’t sound out of place on the first Prodigy album: rinky-dink little skittering percussion effects, high-pitched semi-hooks, even a cheeky children’s-show sample! And then it turns out that the choir is singing “O Holy Night”! The band name, the song title, the art, even the genre are all goth as fuck, but it’s the arch, tongue-in-cheek goth of Type O Negative writing song cycles about black hair dye or women masturbating to Jesus. Basically, this song is funny. Now, funny songs can be funny in part because they’re also so impressive you’ve gotta laugh–cf. the first time you heard Andrew W.K. or Sleigh Bells–and this isn’t on that level, for me at least. Blame, perhaps, the laconic pace, which I understand is part and parcel of the subgenre but which prevents the bigness and silliness of the song from truly overpowering you. It’s a good goof, all told. A goof isn’t necessarily something I’d yell “stop the press!” over and dub the next big thing, but it can be a fun time.

OTAKON 2010 BOUNTY HUNTER

August 16, 2010

It’s Summertime in Baltimore, for those unfamiliar, the uninitiated, it means time to: get some Natty, get sweaty, and go to OTAKON! For the past two years (2008, 2009) I’ve busted into the second largest anime/manga convention in the nation. You asked me by any means possible to bring it back, you screamed “give it to me dead or alive!” So Now, with out further hesitation, here’s that 2010 bounty you’ve been waiting for, I’ve got that elmo generation, I’ve got that maniac cop, I’ve got that fur on wheels!

Otakon (otaku convention) always gives me the strangest mix of feelings. The atmosphere is initially very exciting and stimulating. Weird people dressed up very strange everywhere. People really going all out. Big weapons, fake blood, bright wigs, fake nails, fake eyes, cardboard robots, taped nipples, plastic metal, cat lady, full-body suit, high heels, cross dress, fur gender. Why?…… It’s all about being the biggest fan, getting the opportunity to be your favorite character, connecting with people that have the same feelings you do, It’s a place where you will be praised for something that is usually not acceptable, a safe haven for the fans!

What I’m trying to get at is (and this may seem very obvious) that the goal of many costumed attendies isn’t to make the most interesting costume, but to most accurately depict their fav character, the goal is realistic imitation, to create this moment of excitement for the other attendies of seeing their favorite characters interacting with each other, you can find many groups of people dressed as the entire cast from an anime all for the purpose of a large fantasy photo shoot. I guess the pleasure derived from dressing up is similar to that of being an actor (which is foreign to me, probably why i don’t completely understand).

OK I’m just going to say it: “Otakon is actually very boring, Everyone is dressed very wild, but they are actually very tame and subservient to the rules, you will never see a fight break out at otakon, you will never see nudity/sex at otakon, you will never see a real metal gun or sword at otakon, you will never see real blood at otakon. It’s like disney world “no one ever dies at otakon.” Everything is for the benefit of the camera, suspending a moment, a photo, that appears out of control and free, but a second later, once the pose is casual, you realize that your favorite character is all surface decoration, they won’t actually pistol whip you for being bad, the excitement fades, there is no real threat of danger. There is no chaos. Don’t confuse this for the natural world because it’s all contained, calculated, and secure. An abundance of effort is spent on this wild/safe world, and it is confusing and unnatural.”

Well that’s enough of an intro, “on with the show,” I’ll try and let the pictures speak…

Everyone was screaming “Big Boy!” at this guy.

Kamen Rider? Pete?

Ahh, Mr. Sweeley, the only person I found that i knew in real life at the con. I sneak up on him and he starts to run.

Sweeley puts it in high gear, I’m walking fast after him trying to hang out hard, he escapes up the “staff only” elevator, and I’m left to my own devices.

There is an event on Saturday night called “The Masquerade” where costumed attendies can perform skits of their favorite anime/videogame/manga. This is truly bizarre. The performances are usually unmonumental with minimal coreography, and prerecorded vocals (it’s like watching a dubbed movie live, it’s impossible for the actors to synch their lips realistically, it’s a nice other worldly effect). This sounds all fine and all, but the real shocker is that these amateur performances take place in the 1st Mariner Arena, which seats up to 13,000 people, it’s not at sold out capacity full, but there are definitely thousands of people sitting around watching this. There are around 22,000 attendies at Otakon so it could theoretically fill up…

This guy sitting next to me, Charlie, was dressed as a ghostbuster, he literally started crying, breaking down on my shoulder because he said “this is my last con because I’m moving away.” bummer. This was my most intimate interaction at the con. Keep on doing it Charlie! “You know who to call!”

The experience is hard to explain, would be similar to watching a middle school talent show with an audience of 6,000 people. Fans gathering to watch fans. This might be my favorite part of Otakon, it’ll make you feel really weird.

The finale of the show was an acoustic performance by two members of the hard rock japanese band “X Japan.” They played classical versions of two of their songs, and did a short Q/A session. This band is responsible for the genre called “Visual Kei” popular in Japan. according to wiki the term “Visual Kei” came from X Japan’s slogan “Psychedelic violence crime of visual shock.” I’m not to familiar with the band, but i was surprised that they played classical versions of their songs…….(like Metallica?)

Back at the convention center, and what do we have here?

This guy’s costume was my favorite, the skunk mouth moved when he talked! Really pulled me in.

hey there fur baby!

WHAT IS THIS?

You so cute

You fell over

Bye Bye Otakon 2010, til next time…..

Komikusu Taimu!: Kamui Den

August 16, 2010

Kamui Den

Sanpei Shirato, writer/artist

Garo Magazine, published by Shogakukan

21 volumes from 1964-1971

Kamui Den

Hey, I’ve been meaning to post this on my own blog forever, but now that we have appropriated Sean’s huge market power, it’s time I finally review interesting manga that I come across in my daily life in Japan. These are manga that I’d never heard of before I came across them in a shop or in the trash or something, that I find interesting for whatever reason. First I’ll start you off with a really really good one. Let me tell you about Kamui Den, or Legend of Kamui.

Kamui Den is a totally awesome samurai and ninja fighting comic from the sixties written and drawn by Sanpei Shirato. Wikipedia says that it was the first story serialized in Garo, an influential gekiga magazine that printed more serious “art” manga. I found out about Kamui Den when I saw it on the top shelf of a big used manga store near my house. It was wrapped in plastic so I couldn’t see inside but it was a really fat volume with a nice cover design with just a little bit of drawing on it, and it looked good. Boy, damn, when I opened it up, I knew I made a good choice. The drawings are so amazing, full of life and energy, and drawn really wacky but so well. Basically, everything looks really scratchy and hastily done, but it’s really well-rendered, and also somehow very cartoony. Like, the faces are “iconographic,” and the characters are built with a classical drawing sense, and all that happens within natural and architectural backgrounds that are very loose, but they hold together. This is just masterful.

I can’t even read the manga – though I know there are English editions in the United States, so YOU can go and find this – but you don’t need to read the words to know what’s going on, mostly, and that’s a sign of really good cartooning. The stories are good, too. It’s a really long serial about a ronin, from what I gather, but it seems to be made of smaller story arcs about lots of different people. You know this is fun for him to write, because he tells all kinds of different stories. Check this out – there’s a whole big volume that’s mostly (beautiful drawings of) animals living their lives and having drama in the forest, and then the subplot is what’s happening with the humans in the nearby village, and you see their stories reflect each other – alpha males, theft, war, justice, laws of the jungle and stuff like that. Sometimes, on the other hand, he does a lot of historical writing (with some pretty difficult kanji) about feudal lords and stuff. And a lot in between.

I read online about how the comic is supposed to be political, about how the upper class has always conspired to suppress poor people, or something like that. The message comes through. It’s kind of sad and fatalistic, but at least the book addresses issues of class conflict, which Japanese people are generally very reluctant to discuss openly. This is a country where 90% of people identify themselves as “middle class.” Weird. Sanpei Shirato isn’t someone who would propagate that idea and that makes this book really smart, on top of being really beautiful. This is one of the best manga I’ve ever found, so if you have a chance to buy it, you should!

Kamui Den

Comics Time: Curio Cabinet

August 16, 2010

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Curio Cabinet

John Brodowski, writer/artist

Secret Acres, April 2010

144 pages

$15

Buy it from Secret Acres

Buy it from Amazon.com

I’ve been writing about the similarity between the horrific and the sublime for (God help me) over a decade now, but its rare for me to come across a comic that makes that connection as frequently and as subtly as John Brodowski’s Curio Cabinet. While reading it I located squarely in the increasingly rich contemporary alt-horror tradition–the deformed figures and soft pencils of Renee French, the heavy-metal/D&D imagery of Lane Milburn, the mostly wordless narratives of (to my delight!) almost too many talented horror cartoonists to list. And yes, there’s even the de rigeur cat-torturing scene. But only in flipping through the book in preparation to write this review did I realize just how many of Brodowski’s short, creepy stories end with their alternately hapless or horrifying protagonists gazing into a vista of vast natural or even cosmic splendor. Two separate characters who have very different nature-based obsessions both end up immersed in the great outdoors, staring off into the distance–as does a lake monster after unleashing its full destructive power on a battlefield. Two other characters–one the victim of a monster-induced car wreck, the other none other than Jason Voorhees–become a part of titanic outer-space tableaux: Jason is cradled by his mother Pieta-style in the sky, the accident victim welcomed into the embrace of a colossal dog-god. Several stand-alone images, most memorably a series of illustrations from the old anti-Semitic myth cycle of the Wandering Jew, take on a similarly ecstatic, transcendental feel. The message is both troubling and comforting: It implies a connection between the individual horrors we experience and the very fabric of existence, yet it also suggests that perhaps an enlightenment is possible whereby this waking nightmare can be appreciated, if never fully understood. More like this, please.

Foreigner Time!: cosmetic massaging

August 15, 2010

Hi everyone, my name is Ryan and I’m a member of Closed Caption Comics and I live in Japan, so I guess today I’ll share with you some pictures of things I saw in a store that are part of a theme of the internet called “Weird Japan.” I think maybe you’ve never seen something quite like these before. It all starts with…

The Face Up Roller

Cosmetic massagingCosmetic massaging

You see, here people say that if you’re cute you have a “small face.” I don’t really get it, I’ve measured my head against various students (cute and not-so-cute) and I don’t get a consistent ratio, but I guess that’s fine. What’s funny is that there are instruments marketed to the public that will shrink their face down to a better size, and even though they’re obviously face massagers, no one seems to let on to that. They insist they are fascinated by their face-shrinking effects. I’m like, “what? that’s like for a massage, for your face,” and they say, “no! no! face small! make face small!” (these are my dopey girl students with so-so English ability)

In the face rollers above, notice the first picture has no Japanese on the box, and the second one has some Japanese but also includes French. The girls I talk to (again, these are 15-year-old dopes, I mean that affectionately but seriously, they’re kind of dopes) are under the impression that these products are really big in America. Facepalm.

Cosmetic massagingCosmetic massaging

Speaking of facepalm, here is something more advanced. They are special masks that you can use for cosmetic purposes. Exhibit A will take the droop out of your chin, Exhibit B will also stretch the wrinkles off of your temples. Do you think this feels like a massage? Actually, hm, I kind of doubt it.

Cosmetic massaging

This next product will turn a (Caucasian?) girl with a gross smile into a girl with a gorgeous smile! This might or might not feel like an inner facial massage.

There was a very big display rack at Tokyu Hands with lots more, here are the best, without more comments, except to assure you that three or four of my students use them and say that they work (the ones for faces that is, we didn’t ever talk about the rest of these). If you are interested in purchasing these products, you can find them at Tokyu Hands, a pretty common big store in any city in Japan, I guess. Or you could use a Japan-product-buying service like this one and he will find it and ship it to you.

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photo 2.jpgphoto 1.jpgCosmetic massaging

photo 3.jpgCosmetic massaging

smeared

August 14, 2010

so it’s saturday, i wasted my morning taking a safety construction class and napping, no one’s answering their phones, and now i can’t take a shit because the exterminator paid a surprise visit to spray the bathroom and tell me i have too many bags under the sink.

why not blog, right?

this is a 2 page comic i made called slime and punishment and it’s for a zine called snakebomb vol. 1, which should be coming out later this month maybe? i don’t know too much about it except that brandon graham is doing the cover and scott pilgrim might have done some artwork. whatever, google it.

ihavetopoopsobadwhyamidoingthis

obviously if things are small you can click em big.

this zine sounds like it’s going to kill so if you read this you should buy it. like i said i don’t know too much info about when/where it’s gonna drop (oh my god i’m shitting my pants) but if you want to keep updated about it or my tattoos then follow my blog too spamspamspamspam: hyperlink

stay gassy

CCC on STC’s ADD, or “Gone fishin'”

August 13, 2010

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I’ll be on vacation for the next week or so, attending the nuptials of my beloved brother (and Lost thoughts comment-thread staple) Ryan. The regularly scheduled Comics Time and Music Time reviews will still go up as usual, but other posting from me will be minimal to nonexistent.

And now for something completely different: The good men and women of Closed Caption Comics, Baltimore’s finest art-comics collective, will be guestblogging all week. Together, Chris Day, Noel Freibert, Mollie Goldstrom, Zach Hazard, Lane Milburn, Andrew Neyer, Molly O’Connell, Pete Razon, Ryan Cecil Smith, Conor Stechschulte, Eric Stiner, and Erin Womack are making some of the comics and objects that get me most excited about the medium–nothing mercenary about it, just sheer love of the game. Who among them will be posting, and what (if anything!) will they post? Your guess is as good as mine–I’m just turning over the keys and splitting–but I’m psyched to find out. Hope you dig ’em.

Comics Time: A God Somewhere

August 13, 2010

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A God Somewhere

John Arcudi, writer

Peter Snejbjerg, artist

DC/WildStorm, June 2010

200 pages

$24.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

As the co-writer and by all accounts driving creative force behind the Hellboy spinoff series B.P.R.D., John Arcudi is responsible for what amounts to the best ongoing superhero series on the stands. A God Somewhere is not on that level. Which, as was the case with Wednesday’s review, is perfectly fine–few things are. Moreover, much of what makes B.P.R.D. so effective is tied into just how long it’s been going on. We’ve had years and years to get acquainted with and grow attached to its characters and the neuroses they bring to their long, losing war with the paranormal–to say nothing of the ever more baroque mythology of that war itself. By contrast, A God Somewhere has to get us to care about its central quartet of characters–brothers Hugh and Eric, their best friend Sam, and Hugh’s wife Alma on whom Sam has long harbored a more-than-crush–and their paranormal plight–Eric mysteriously gains powers that make him the world’s only superhuman, but which very rapidly drive him Doctor Manhattan-style crazy in such a way as to make him the world’s only supervillain–in the space of the equivalent of four issues.

It does this mostly through shorthand. Racial and religious issues are presented in the didactic style of a Law & Order episode (or, well, a superhero comic). Plot drivers are cribbed liberally from universal superhero touchstones like Watchmen or the Incredible Hulk TV show. The creators operate under the assumption that the audience is already familiar enough with once-innovative ideas for the subgenre–Superman as Christ figure; superpowers would “really” drive a normal person into bloodthirsty madness–to take them as read. In short, it can feel rushed, even clumsy–words you’d never associate with the laconic, precision-calibrated existential action-horror-black-comedy of B.P.R.D.

But the same intelligence and willigness to discomfit that Arcudi brings to that title shows up here, even if it’s forced to fight against the constraints of the shorter format. Flashbacks that enrich our understanding of the characters and their complex quadrangle start and stop with almost Jaime Hernandez-like suddenness, with only a change in panel-border color to differentiate them from the main action, which boasts equally fanfare-free jumps forward through time. The violence is in the over-the-top True Blood-level splatter mode of similar work in Powers and Invincible, but contains enough disturbing detail, largely through the familiar sub/urban setting of some of the worst bloodbaths, to lodge in the brain and curdle in the gut. There’s at least one plot twist so unexpected and awful I didn’t even understand what I was looking at until it was made clear a couple pages later. The degree to which Arcudi is willing to leave what’s going on inside Eric’s head a mystery, allowing him to speak only in transparently faux-profundities like what Sam calls “a crazy, mass-murdering Buddha,” is refreshing and a bit haunting. Peter Snejbjerg’s warm, round character designs–his stuff here reminds me a lot of Richard Corben’s Hulk comic Banner, and not simply because of the shared subject matter–are undermined a bit by uncharacteristically bland, brown-town coloring by Bjarne Hansen, but these are still people it’s pleasant to look at even when what’s going on is super-unpleasant. Is it the landmark that the effusive blurbs from Mike Mignola and Denny O’Neil make it out to be? No, but I would argue that that’s not the intention, either. It feels to me more like an exercise: a bunch of ideas about character and concept that Arcudi wanted to try out. Even if it’s not entirely successful, that exercise was a worthwhile one.

Music Time: Underworld – BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix: Live at Privilege in Ibiza, August 8, 2010

August 12, 2010

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Underworld

BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix: Live at Privilege in Ibiza, August 8, 2010

Listen to it at the BBC

Download it here

No sense even pretending that I’ve listened to anything but this hour-long concert recording since I got my hot little hands on it the other day. Underworld is my favorite band in the world and the best live act I’ve ever seen for precisely the reason on such grand display here: gigantic-sounding body music, able to imbue the intimately personal acts of dancing in a crowdful of strangers or staring out the window of a moving vehicle alike with an epic feel that still doesn’t crowd out their meditative aspects. This particular gig was part of summer Saturday night party thrown by Pete Tong in the party capital of Europe, and thus the set was split neatly in half between the group’s biggest bangers–floor-filling fan favorites “Two Months Off,” “Rez/Cowgirl,” the “I Feel Love”-echoing “King of Snake,” and of course Trainspotting world-destroyer “Born Slippy.NUXX”–and a quartet of new songs done in collaboration with outside producers Mark Knight, D. Ramirez, and High Contrast–“Downpipe,” “Always Loved a Film,” “Scribble,” and “Between Stars.” What struck me is how the newer material, the bulk of which will appear on the band’s next album Barking this fall, held its own against stalwart UW anthems. I suppose it’s not the hugest surprise in the world, given that at least one of them, “Scribble,” itself evolved from the longtime concert-only drum’n’bass highlight “You Do Scribble.” But these songs are among the, well, songiest that the dance-act incarnation of Underworld has ever produced–verse-chorus-verse structures, direct lyrics about love delivered with non-distorted vocals–so I was interested to hear how their fatness, fullness, and brightness went over alongside the big pealing towers of the band’s classics. And it’s no accident that I find myself describing UW’s music in terms of girth, depth, and height, since it’s their music’s dynamics that have always rewarded repeat listenings for me. Consider here the way the big octave swoops that mark the end of “Rez” seem to draw your ears upward, or the chiming arpeggios that weave in and out of the big central riff of “Two Months Off,” or indeed how for all their Floydian sonic soundscapes, the band’s hooks are frequently three-to-five-note ditties you could play on the piano with one hand, enabling them to float above the beat and delight listeners whenever they suddenly appear. Delight’s such a huge part of an Underworld gig anyway, right down to the ebullient presence of singer and lyricist Karl Hyde, who whether he’s doing a “1-2-3-4!” lead-in to the first beat of the evening or telling the crowd “Ibiza! I feel your sweet vibrations!” or singing “Born Slippy” for a triple-digit time always seems like there’s no place on Earth he’d rather be. It’s dance music to explore as much as to dance to.

Carnival of souls

August 11, 2010

* The entire Scott Pilgrim series is available on the iPad and iPhone. That oughta do pretty well.

* Well, this is certainly a different direction for Tom Neely.

* Speaking of Tom, let him, Sam Costello, and Frank Santoro crush your dreams of making anything close to a living from following your bliss in comics.

* Dustin Harbin elaborates on his tweets from yesterday regarding the costs and administration of small-press comic cons.

* Tom Spurgeon was somewhat less fond of Michael DeForge’s Peter’s Muscle than I was.

* Becky Cloonan gives good goth.

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* Congratulations to my pal Ryan “Agent M” Penagos on being crowned The Most Powerful Person on Twitter. May tacos everywhere cower.

* 6. World peace 7. Jetpacks 8. Ponies

* This made me laugh. Sorry, Josh.

* That book’s subtitle says it all, Tom.

* I’m having a blast digging up reference art for Zak Smith’s upcoming mutant-animal-future RPG, like this piece from Patricia Piccinini.

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Comics Time: Fandancer

August 11, 2010

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Fandancer

Geoff Grogan, writer/artist

self-published, August 2010

36 big-ass pages

$20

Buy it from Geoff Grogan

This isn’t quite the knockout blow that was writer/artist Geoff Grogan’s last full-length mixed-media comic, Look Out!! Monsters. And believe me, that’s totally fine–without that out-of-nowhere book’s shock-of-the-new impact, its follow-up, Fandancer, was never gonna hit that hard. But from that stunning cover, perhaps my favorite of the year, on down, it’s definitely a hit. A sort of feminine yin to LO!!M‘s Frankenstein-by-way-of-Jack-Kirby masculine yang, Fandancer (loosely) tells the story of a superheroine we join mid-plummet from an exploding plane, harried by her Bizarro-style nemesis until she hits the water below. Then we appear to be transported backwards, first to the womb and then to some dawn-of-time confrontation between a nude woman and a male interloper who reveals himself as a goat-headed devil before stealing the suddenly very pregnant woman’s embryo/glowing-life-force-thing, eating it, and then restoring her to life as an afterthought. Then (I think) the superheroine whose (I think) origin story we’ve just seen comes to in the water, and through a series of collages involving vintage comic and advertising art, outer-space vistas, and hysterical dialogue cribbed alternately from romance and superhero comics, we trace (I think) her journey into the underworld lair of her male bedeviler, whom she subsequently defeats in cartooned combat. The book ends with a close-up of her face, the life-force back in her possession.

Or maybe not, I don’t know. The story, to the extent that there is one–and in the cut-up/collage section, who the hell really knows–isn’t important. What is important is the dazzling art from Grogan, in a variety of styles: primary-color Kirby pastiche, loose and gorgeous red-and-gold-and-blue crayon, the startlingly effective reappropriated collage material which appears to be tweaking all the usual suspects in that arena, from Lichtenstein to Spiegelman to Glamourpuss-era Sim. No matter the style, man oh man does all of it work hella well on the oversized pages Grogan’s working with here, with really stellar paper stock production values to boot–each flip of the page is an eye-popping pleasure. And as in Look Out!! Monsters, what emerges most clearly from the deliberately elliptical and allusive storytelling is a sense of struggle, of great inner beauty under traumatic assault from great inner ugliness. (Don’t get it twisted, there’s some funny stuff in here, too–I’m pretty sure one collage page is actually a sex scene, and figuring that out made me laugh out loud.) My sincerest hope is that Grogan keeps putting out a book like this every couple years, Ignatz Series-style. (The format’s very similar, if that helps you picture what’s going on here.) I’ll be back for all of ’em.

Carnival of souls

August 10, 2010

* Today on Robot 6:

* Drawn & Quarterly announces a deluxe hardcover of Brian Ralph’s Daybreak!;

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* Veteran con organizer Dustin Harbin vs. small-press comic cons;

* and Scott Pilgrim’s Bryan Lee O’Malley draws Emma Frost plotting to she-bop.

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* I absolutely want to see an army of Batmen. I make no apologies for this. Anyway, Grant Morrison talks to the LA Times’ Geoff Boucher about Batman Inc., the upcoming series in which Morrison will create that very thing. “The Mutants are DEAD. The Mutants are HISTORY. Gotham City belongs to the BATMAN.” (Via The Source.)

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Matt Fraction and Carmine Di Giandomenico’s Invincible Iron Man Annual #1, and Marvel’s creative climate in general.

Music Time: Kylie Minogue – Aphrodite

August 10, 2010

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Kylie Minogue

Aphrodite

Capitol, July 2010

Buy it from Amazon.com

“Nice. Nice. Not thrilling…but nice.”–Emperor Nero, History of the World Part I

Right around the turn of the millennium, I learned to love pop. David Bowie started it: If there’s one thing I learned from my sudden fixation on his chameleonic career, with its endless cycle of absorbing influences, incorporating them into his work, and confidently putting them aside for the latest thing that fascinates him, it’s never to feel guilty about pleasure. Electroclash continued it: Now I was learning that the New Wave sounds my Bowie fandom eventually led me to reevaluate and love could still be explored, exploited, and expanded upon by contemporary acts. And when I picked up my copy of Kylie’s breakthrough record Fever–the first full-fledged, no-bull pop record I’d gotten since middle school, after years spent reflexively defining myself against the mainstream–my journey was complete.

To be fair, Kylie made it very, very easy. The music she was making on that album really wasn’t a world away from either the electroclash that was its contemporary or the “electronica” I’d spent the previous half-decade-plus immersed in. But now all those icy electro elements and thumpy beats were being funneled into pure sexy joyful hookmongering of the most irresistible sort. To call Fever‘s two astonishing singles “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” and “Love at First Sight” Kylie’s “One More Time” and “Digital Love” is to pay Daft Punk a compliment as much as the other way around. Perhaps the greatest testament to the strength of Kylie and her collaborators’ songcraft on that record is that the two most ubiquitous pop songs of 2010, Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK” and Katy Perry’s “California Gurls,” both crib the pre-chorus melody from “Love at First Sight” for their choruses. Strategically singing “And everything went from wrong to right…” etc. etc. at the appropriate moments in each song is probably the only thing that’s kept me from tearing my car radio out with my bare hands over the past couple months.

Since then Kylie’s reign as the queen of the sexy, tiny blonde pop princesses to whom rock nerds like me turn when they wanna get down has gone on more or less uninterrupted, cancer, double-live/remix albums, and Robyn notwithstanding. It certainly helped that Fever‘s follow-up, 2003’s Body Language, was arguably even better. A little bit slower, a little bit funkier, a lot more textured, and at times downright odd–I still don’t know how to describe the weird, wonderful in-and-out hook of “Still Standing,” while I’m reasonably sure “Sweet Music” is a love song about Michael Hutchence’s ghost–it shimmered and twitched its way across a variety of pop subgenres but still felt like the unified product of an artist determined to make everything sound interesting. 2007’s X wasn’t as much of a knockout as its predecessors: You could blame maybe its opening track/lead single, the lackluster Goldfrapp cabaret pastiche “Two Hearts,” or maybe the flagrant diminished return to the “Love at First Sight” well that was “Wow,” or maybe even the weird sequencing that threw things off toward the end of the record with the Britneyish “Nu-Di-Ty.” But even so, there’s some real balls-to-the-wall electro-disco going down on there, from the roller-rink glide of “Speakerphone” to the Moroderisms of “The One,” and it certainly works as an anthology of ear-catching individual songs.

So what does it say that I had to listen to Aphrodite three, four, five times before it made enough of an impression on me for me to feel up to writing about it at all? Once again you can blame a below-par opening track/lead single, in this case the blandly four-on-the-floor anthem-by-numbers “All the Lovers.” The difference here is that that’s pretty much the vein the rest of the album proceeds in, even on the level of song titles alone–like, if someone every made a Spinal Tap-style mockumentary about a pop star, you could slip “Put Your Hands Up (If You Feel Love)” into the “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” slot pretty neatly. The beats just sort of plod, rather than bend and twist and bounce, the lyrics are paeans to dancing and loving and loving to dance that feel not universal but merely cliched, the hooks are “Gentleman’s C”-level material instead of the A-plus-plus stuff that made past Kylie records an ongoing process of discovery and delight upon first listen. Gone is what always felt to me like a desire to surprise–what you get here, you can see coming. It feels placid in a way that perhaps befits the love-goddess conceit of the title, but which runs counter to the Kylie who used to take the lead even within the confines and constraints of good-time dance music.

Of course, Minogue has too much taste and talent to produce something completely undistinguished. Every once in a while something interesting will shimmer to the surface–the kinkily Bowie-esque line “You see me with him and it’s turning you on” in the refreshingly manic “Get Outta My Way”; brief flashes of “Since U Been Gone”-style guitar strumming and a sudden, epic onslaught of floor-to-ceiling afternoon-sun synths in “Cupid Boy”; the “sounds like they’re having a good party down the block” quality to the central keyboard hook in “Can’t Beat the Feeling.” And overall, y’know, it’s a Kylie Minogue album–like pizza, sex, and Shakespeare, even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. But for the first time in a long time…well, I’ll leave the “the music she was playin’ didn’t blow my mind”/”it’s not love at first listen”/”I can get her out of my head” business to you. I’m too bummed to pun.

Carnival of souls

August 9, 2010

* Tom Spurgeon enjoyed the San Diego Comic-Con as a comics show after all. “[T]he comics programming was solid to superb, [and there] was a ton of publishing news to report if you actually reported that news instead of writing another article about lack of coverage.” Hahahaha!

* Today on Robot 6: Tom Brevoort shittalks Robert Kirkman.

* Every page of Ron Rege Jr.’s masterpiece Skibber Bee-Bye is now available for purchase. (Via Jordan Crane.)

* Here’s a fine piece on Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day by Timothy Sun at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

* No one wants to pay for art anymore.

* Marvel characters as Mega Man characters? Sure, I’ll eat it. Click here for full size. (Via Ryan Penagos.)

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* You win this round, Cuomo.

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* I’m saving this for last because that’s how much I love it: You ever read a sentence where you can actually feel it opening a door of perception in your head once you hit the final punctuation mark? Like, you involuntarily picture a door swinging open inside your brain and everything? That’s what the final sentence of this Zak Smith post on Bronze Age comics and fantastical fiction did for me. On the way to that sentence there are plenty of gems like this one:

If you are a good person, you, too, hate the following thing:



There’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland or At The Mountains of Madness or some other piece of inspired mania. And then there’s some fuck. This fuck is an academic–and the fuck takes it and explains what it is about and that it is not really about shrinking mushrooms or secrets beyond human ken buried in the Antarctic but is actually about sexism, racism, classism, where the author’s mom touched him/her, the political situation in the english-speaking world when the thing was written, et cetera.



Now readers of this blog will know I have no problem with a little deconstruction here and there between friends–what I mean here is the wholesale reduction of everything in the work to just a mask for some other and more easily understood drama that sets what one of my teachers used to call the “demon of allegory” loose to drain it all of its enigma and poetry and lunatic majesty.

I think I speak on behalf of everyone who’s ever read a complimentary review of a horror movie by a mainstream-media movie critic when I say, “Afuckingmen.” But I promise you don’t know where the post is going from that quote alone.