Archive for September 17, 2010

Carnival of souls

September 17, 2010

* I was just talking about this book yesterday and saw the official announcement of it this morning via Tom Spurgeon first: Chester Brown’s memoir of prostitution patronage, Paying for It, due from Drawn & Quarterly in Spring 2011. What do you think: First D&Q book I can get into Maxim? D&Q’s blog has more.

* It’s rare enough for me to see something I wrote approvingly cited to shore up an artist’s aesthetic argument that your’e damn right I’m gonna blog about it: Cartoonist/editor/critic Shaenon Garrity tips her hat to the Dandy Warhols-quoting review I wrote of Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss while talking about a style-minded character in her comic Skin Horse.

* Kitty cats as Marvel characters. Hit that link for Agent M’s tumblr–he’s been posting like four of these per hour since that post went up.

* People in Afghanistan are being killed and injured during protests and riots over Koran-burnings in America. I don’t at all wish to diminish the fact that the people primarily responsible for these deaths and injuries are the people actually perpetrating the violence and the people egging it on. Nor do I wish to diminish the fact that hurting someone because of what happens to a book, any book, or because someone made a drawing, any drawing, is beyond disgusting. But this is what I was talking about when I said that the Koran-burning controversy made me rethink the Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy: People pay for provocations, and those people are almost never the provocateurs or the counter-provocateurs. There are, of course and alas, exceptions.

Comics Time: Incredible Hulks #612-613

September 17, 2010

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Incredible Hulks #612-613

Greg Pak, Scott Reed, writers

Tom Raney, Brian Ching, artists

Marvel, August-September 2010

32 story pages each

$3.99 each

When I talk about how Batman is the only superhero for whom I feel affection outside or beyond the quality of the Batman comic currently in my hand or movie/TV show currently on my TV, that’s not quite true. Years before I got into Batman, my childhood (and I mean young childhood, barely remembered fuzzy pool of memories out of which pops the occasional actual memory) favorites were, thanks to a back-to-back hour of Saturday morning cartoon programming, Spider-Man and the Hulk. But I think my continuing fondness for the Hulk, at least, stems from his being the superhero metaphor to which I most closely relate. First of all, huge green dude punching things is the superhero concept boiled down to its strongman essence. Secondly, mild-mannered smart guy who smashes anything that makes him angry? Sure, I’ll eat it. But best of all, the consequences of that superpower are built right into the concept. He might be able to put it off by becoming ruler of some planet someplace, or forming a surrogate family of super-goons, but ultimately the Hulk will always be an outcast, always unwanted, always on the run. If Spidey’s thing is “with great power comes great responsibility,” the Hulk is a cautionary tale about what happens when great power is used irresponsibly.

So I dig the Hulk. More specifically, I dig a lot of what writer Greg Pak has done with the Hulk. His Planet Hulk saga showed an admirable attention to detail in building the sci-fi space-opera world, aliens, and cultures through which an exiled Hulk cut a swathe on the road to becoming ruler of the planet. His subsequent World War Hulk event took the kind of concept that would make a third-grader say “Awesome!”–the Hulk vs. the Marvel Universe–and tied it to both killer fight scenes for John Romita Jr. to draw and an exploration of whether the ends justify the means and the extremes to which grief and rage will push us. After that, though, the Hulk disappeared from his own title, which became a road movie starring a de-powered Bruce Banner and his alter ego’s barbarian alien son Skaar, and then everything got tied up in a huge multiple-title roundelay of crossovers and spinoff miniseries and so on.

Now, I really liked all the huge gamma-irradiated bruisers suddenly coming out of the woodwork to jump ugly with one another throughout these events–after all, I love the Hulk conceptually, and there’s really not anything that having a million Hulk-type guys and girls running around pounding the shit of each other does to weaken that concept, so by all means let a thousand She-Hulks bloom. But without THE Hulk, without The Strongest One There Is, I decided to tune out until Big Green himself was back. Which is what Incredible Hulks–that’s not me referring to more than one issue of Incredible Hulk,that’s really a plural, it’s really referring to multiple Incredible Hulk characters a la William Safire going to Burger King and ordering five Whoppers Jr.–promises: Bruce Banner can transform back into the Hulk when he gets angry again, and he’s now surrounded by a posse of behemoths. If this is a book that lives up to the promise of a “Giants Walk the Earth” era of Hulks, I’m all for it.

As it turns out, I’m not all for it. On a surface level I think primary artist Tom Raney can pull off one genuinely impressive drawing of some big super-dude for every eight or nine drawings that make them look sort of gawky, so there’s that. But beyond that, you’ve got two problems.

One, I appreciate how hard Pak, aided by co-writer Scott Reed in this case, works at really doing the worldbuilding with regards to the space-opera concepts involved in this book’s co-feature, the story of Hulk’s other alien son Hiro-Kala traveling through space to find and kill his brother Skaar. But it’s almost impossible to get me to care about worldbuilding if the world you’re building don’t house a character I care about to begin with. Thus Planet Hulk works fine, because it’s the Hulk and I like the Hulk, but Hiro-Kala, Son of Hulk’s journey through space with his psychic-planet frenemy doesn’t work, because not only do I know very little about Hiro-Kala, the psychic planet, or anyone on it, but it also lacks the basic conceptual oomph that making him a huge strong awesome-looking brute would give him. He’s just a scrawny bald dude with crazy psychic powers, and the combination doesn’t mesh with the Hulk the way even his usual super-genius-model antagonists like the Leader or MODOK do.

Two, and this is the same problem I had with Incredible Hulk once it shifted to being the Banner & Skaar road movie storyline, I really don’t like stakes-free fighting in superhero comics. In the Banner/Skaar stories, Banner kept duping Skaar into meeting and fighting various heroes and villains with which the Hulk used to memorably spar–Juggernaut, the Thing, Wolverine, etc.–in order to train him to be a better fighter so he could kill off Banner’s alter ego if and when he ever reemerged. In other words, we knew these fights wouldn’t matter, because they were all pointing to some future fight; plus, in half the cases they were with other heroes, and we knew things could get only so ugly. So you just ended up twiddling your thumbs during what should be the most thrilling and visceral part of any supercomic.

In the case of Incredible Hulks #612-613, we know that the Hulk and the Red She-Hulk–the new vicious Hulk alter ego of Bruce’s ex-wife Betty–aren’t going to seriously hurt or kill each other or anyone else. We know it because they’re main characters who were married. We know it because they’re not really fighting for any particular reason–on an emotional level it’s the equivalent of two exes arguing. We know it because all the other characters are treating it with the seriousness of people watching a couple have an ugly spat in the frozen foods aisle of the supermarket. We know it because this is billed as a Hulk Family book and she’s the matriarch and thus she’s not going anywhere. In other words the book works overtime, on every conceivable level, to send the message that this battle doesn’t really matter. So…why have it, then?

Look, I know that part of superhero comics dating back to the Silver Age is having these goofy inconsequential fights where heroes smack each other around for a variety of reasons–mistaken identity, just being in a bad mood, whatever. But that it’s been done is not a good enough reason to keep doing it. If you’re like me, you think that fights in superhero comics are as important as songs are to musical theater. They’re where the real emotion of the story is expressed through spectacle. Granted, on a certain level that’s what’s going on here: Instead of just using harsh language, Hulk and Red She-Hulk punch each other. But the problem is that we know this won’t have any real consequences. They’re gonna make up and the story’s gonna move on. A good fight scene has to have some real, palpable ramifications for the participants–something that shakes up the status quo of the book on some level. As I detailed above, we know this won’t happen here. So keep your powder dry and save the fighting for when it matters.

Gossip Girl thoughts

September 16, 2010

* Ben Morse is right: Gossip Girl is off to a good start this season. This is almost completely meaningless since the show basically starts over again every fourth episode, but after an exceptionally juicy season finale, which itself followed a frustratingly repetitive wheel-spinning season, it’s good to see they mean business. What sold me here was that even as I was sitting there feeling smugly superior to the Georgina pregnancy storyline–it’s obviously not his kid, she’s probably not even pregnant, now we’re gonna have to sit here for a couple episodes until they send her packing again–the show had actually already delivered the baby during the break! Thank you for remaining two steps ahead of me, Gossip Girl.

* Thank you also for continuing to portray Blair as almost autistic in her neurotic reliance on markers of social status to make herself feel good relative to other people. I appreciate that the show didn’t even try to make her seem like anything but a horrible snob when she discovered she’d actually be dating a prince’s driver and not a prince, and how this manifested itself as a sort of mental illness in which she could hardly control the Miss Manners horseshit streaming out of her mouth during dinner when confronted with the supposed pauper’s supposed transgressions against Good Classy People. No wonder she and Chuck are destined for each other–who else has the training to deal with crazy people that Batman has?

* Speaking of! I loved that the show saved Chuck for the final segment, like the juicy mythology-revealing part of a Lost episode. I love that they made the storytelling rhythm of his section so different from the rest of the episode, with the flashbacks and jumpcuts and time jumps. I love that he is now Harold Prince, a back-up personality he has unveiled after great stress and torment. The Chuck Bass of Zur-En-Arrh is here.

* I hope Nate’s latest CW-famous guest-girlfriend is a bit more interesting than the last few they’ve saddled him with; using the fact that she lives in a studio apartment and does her own dishes as a signifier of her villainy is a good start. If we can’t use Gossip Girl as a sexy funhouse-mirror version of the class warfare being waged against the poor by the rich over the past year or two, what can we use it for?

* Congratulations to Vanessa for getting the line of the show in re: Geor-GEE-na’s Geor-JI-na; thank you, we won’t be requiring your services for the rest of the season.

* Not one but two “look, I was gonna tell you…” revelations in this episode alone! Oh, Gossip Girl, don’t ever change.

* Needed more lingerie scenes, though, and not from the Rock Band Pussycat Dolls or whoever that was.

Carnival of souls

September 16, 2010

* Jeet Heer offers some thoughts on Daniel Clowes’s Wilson. I particularly like the idea that Wilson represents a synthesis between Clowes’s earlier, shorter, more outwardly funny rant-comics about sports and art school and things like that and his subsequent turn to longer narratives.

* Rob Liefeld says he’s writing a screenplay about Image Comics in the ’90s. Who am I to say he isn’t? Too bad he didn’t finish it before Sorkin wrote his Facebook thing.

* Evil Christopher Hitchens from Speed Racer is now in Game of Thrones. Looking forward to it!

* Kiel Phegley writes more than anyone needed to about the ’90s West Coast Avengers’ x-treme revamp Force Works…and yet it turns out to be exactly the amount of writing about Force Works you needed. It’s also a backdoor analysis of superhero story structures circa today, so give it a shot.

* Somehow I missed the trailer for Marilyn Manson’s long-mooted directorial debut Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, so it was with some surprise that I read today that fan backlash against the trailer may have led to the shuttering of the entire project. So I watched the thing and, well, it’s pretty much what you’d expect a Marilyn Manson movie about Lewis Carroll to look like–perhaps with more exposed labia, but still. Did people think it was gonna look like The Grand Illusion?

* Scott Tobias’s New Cult Canon at the Onion A.V. Club covers Demonlover. I know nothing about this film except that my then-therapist recommended it to me because Connie Nielsen takes her top off in it or something. That’s how my therapist rolled.

Music Time: Ke$ha – “Take It Off”

September 16, 2010

Ke$ha

“Take It Off”

from Animal

RCA, January 2010

Buy it from Amazon.com

I’ve got a theory that a lot of pop music today actually strives to be annoying on purpose. From Drake’s nasal obnoxiousness to Katy Perry’s bullfrog croaking to Lady Gaga’s goofy monosyllabic chants to Nicki Minaj’s Judy Tenuta-like stream of funny voices, it’s something radio commercial jingles have known for decades: If you’re going to be heard primarily in snippets–ringtones, network bumpers, the background of TV shows, flipping around the car radio–then from a sales perspective what really matters isn’t making a great song, it’s getting the song stuck in your head. Quality songcraft and strong vocal performances can do this, sure, but so can simply being irritating, as anyone from the New York City area who’s heard the commercials for “1-877-Kars for Kids” can tell you. The method is inconsequential; the goal is simply to lodge in your brain, by hook or by crook. Of course, some folks are literally hook crooks: As I’m fond of pointing out, two of the past year’s biggest songs, Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK” and Katy Perry’s utterly inescapable “California Gurls,” both swipe the pre-chorus melody of Kylie Minogue’s “Love at First Sight” for their choruses. But what I didn’t know until recently is that the co-writers/producers of “California Gurls” also swiped it from themselves–they’re the co-writers/producers of “TiK ToK” as well. That’s how nakedly mercenary this stuff is: If it ain’t broke, do it again, right down to the “three bars of lyrics, one bar of ‘oh-whoa-oh’s” lyrical structure.

Same as it ever was for pop, of course. And to be fair, it’s possible to dance along the fine line between stupid and clever without falling over: There’s something almost mighty about that “Rah Rah Ah Ah Ah” thing from “Bad Romance,” like you’d been waiting all your life to hear it; Minaj is simply the latest in a long line of fun, funny court-jester MCs, the complicating detail being her vagina; and I’ll admit it, it’s hard for me to resist the pure-dee lyrical idiocy of lines like “Call me Mr. Flintstone–I can make your bed rock” or “I’m trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful” (the latter sung by Akon with hilarious anthemic gravitas, right before a chorus consisting of the words “Damn, you’s a sexy bitch” no less–hey, he said he was trying, not that he’d actually pull it off).

And then there’s Ke$ha, an artist whose entire career–singing style, subject matter, party-slattern image–appears calculated to rub people the wrong way. From the name on down! I’ve seen folks proclaim, apropos of nothing, that they’ll be damned if they’ll ever use that dollar sign when writing it. (We at Attentiondeficitdisorderly have no such qualms.) Ke$ha’s gigantically popular first single, the aforementioned “TiK ToK” (note the MySpace-style capitalization–not an accident!), is notable for vocals that alternate between speak-singing that sounds like (and at certain points throughout the song actually is) a taunt and autotune that sounds still sillier and more strident, all in the service of lyrics in which she brags about being insufferable. The follow-up single refined the strategy by centering on the obnoxious sounds you make when someone is being obnoxious to you: It’s called, and its chorus consists largely of, “Blah Blah Blah.” Even the relatively buoyant and radiant love song “Your Love Is My Drug,” for all its pleasant bounciness and relative sincerity, ends with thirty seconds of deliberately stupid-sounding studio banter, culminating in the non sequitur “I like your beard.”

Where can you go from there? You can base a song on “There’s a Place in France (Where the Naked Ladies Dance)”? Such is “Take It Off.” Songs kids sing on the playground or while jumping rope or whatever have been a source of material for ages; surely it was only a matter of time before someone went for the kind of kids’ song that’d get you in trouble if your first-grade teacher heard you singing it. Personally I hope Ke$ha does a whole series of these; I can hear her hit version of “Milk, Milk, Lemonade” in my head even now.

But the problem with “Take It Off,” and Ke$ha in general (“Your Love Is My Drug” excepted, perhaps) is that while obnoxiousness is good enough, it’s not actually good. There’s nothing new or interesting about the “place downtown where the freaks all come around” she’s singing about. The description is half-assed (“lose your clothes in the crowd”–I’ve never been anyplace where that’s happened, and I’ve actually partied naked). The rhymes are either lazy (“when the dark of the night / comes around, that’s the time / that the animal comes alive / lookin’ for somethin’ wild”) or just uninspired doggerel (“it’s a hole in the wall / it’s a dirty free for all”; “where they go hardcore / and there’s glitter on the floor”). The title/chorus is a lowest common denominator catchphrase. The autotuning makes Ke$ha’s already weak vocal instrument even harsher and less pleasant to listen to as it trails down below her register with every other line. The beat and the parts of the melody that aren’t “The Streets of Cairo” are simply inert. For the work of laser-focused pop gunslingers, it’s firing blank after blank.

Like I said above, I’m not objecting to the notion of pop music that blurs the line between catchy like a tune and catchy like a virus. Look, you don’t own multiple Ministry records and not understand the value of being grating now and then. But the irritation is a foot in the door–once the song gets inside the foyer, does it make you feel anything, think anything, want to sing or dance or screw along? If not–and Ke$ha, for me, is “if not”–all the earworms in the world can’t get past that. We deserve better.

Carnival of souls: Special “and speaking of” edition

September 15, 2010

* Congratulations to longtime pal of the blog Craig Thompson for completing Habibi! What the world needs now is a 700-page twee-Islamic fantasy epic, and I mean that sincerely.

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* Whoa–hot on the heels of the triumphant new Fort Thunder-reuniting issue of Monster, PictureBox is releasing a new Mat Brinkman art book called Heads, 44.

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* And speaking of Brinkman, he has an art show called Phatansmatgoria opening at The Hole in NYC on Saturday, September 18–New York Comic Con weekend, if you’re in town and not too busy. (Via the indispensable Monster Brains.)

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* And speaking of NYC art show openings, the Adam Baumgold Gallery is holding one for Chris Ware and The ACME Novelty Library #20 tomorrow! Razzafrazzin’ short notice… (Via Peggy Burns.)

* And speaking of art shows generally, I’m catching a pleasantly Barkerian vibe from these Jess Fink pieces for an art show called Monsterbation.

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* And speaking of art still more generally, Mishka NYC is selling a boatload of reasonably priced Johnny Ryan art. Love the Ground Zero Bossk.

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* Jeffrey Brown’s new cat book, Cats Are Weird, is out! Exclamation point merited, as I really liked the last one.

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* This morning when the new Hark, a Vagrant! strips popped up in my Google Reader I looked at them and thought to myself “Wow, Kate Beaton has really turned some kind of corner with her inking, this stuff looks sick.” But it turns out it was actually Rebecca Clements drawing in the style of Kate Beaton. Ladies, this was a worthwhile experiment.

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* These teasers for the upcoming “No Way Out” storyline in The Walking Dead make it look like the story will be about exactly what I wanted it to be about.

* Matt Seneca reviews the latest issue of retailer Desert Island’s house anthology Smoke Signals, of which I have shamefully seen not a single issue.

* Filing this away for when I finally catch the season premiere (there was a DVR mishap): 11 Reasons Why Ben Morse Loves Gossip Girl Right Now.

* This is strangely fascinating to me: Paranormal Activity is spawning a direct-to-Japan(!) sequel called Paranormal Activity: Tokyo Night. I mean, why not, A, and B, does this sort of thing happen often and I just haven’t noticed it before?

Comics Time: Batman and Robin #14

September 15, 2010

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Batman and Robin #14

Grant Morrison, writer

Frazer Irving, artist

DC, September 2010

24 story pages

$2.99

Despite liking this issue more than any other single-issue Batman comic I’ve ever read–short version: shuddery stylish Lynchian atmosphere with genuinely horrifying villains, cool action sequences, killer art, and a sense that it’s fun to be a Batman comic–I didn’t want to review it, simply because I’ve reviewed like a billion Grant Morrison Bat-books. But a quick check of my left-hand sidebar reveals that I’ve run only five such reviews; that’s a tie for third place in the Attentiondeficitdisorderly Review Sweepstakes with Big Questions, compared to eight separate reviews for MOME and a whopping eleven for King Shit of Comics Time Mountain, Cold Heat. (It’s Frank Santoro’s world–we just live in it.)

So what the hey, let’s talk about artist Frazer Irving and artist Frazer Irving only. Irving emerges here as Morrison’s single best collaborator, I think. This is something of a surprise, not only because of the existence of Frank Quitely, but because this pair’s previous Bat-collabo, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #2, was a murky, hard-to-follow mess, owing largely to Irving’s failure to properly differentiate his Puritan-garbed Bruce Wayne from his similarly attired antagonist. (This has its in-story reasons, as it turns out, but still.) This issue, however, is the kind of thing where you could just go page by page enumerating all the visual high points and let that make your argument for you. To wit!

* Page one: The steely blue color of abandoned Wayne Manor

* Page two: The Joker cowering on the floor, turning to face us only after he’s revealed he’s been in control all along

* Page three: The Joker’s awkward positioning of his hands, closed eyes, off-balance body language, and big grin conveying how he’s flailing around without a care in the world, so confident is he that he’ll best his tiny, deadly opponent Robin; the barely visible splash of blood when the Joker scratches Robin’s face with his poisoned fingernails

* Page four: The emergence of aquamarine against he ugly brown background as Robin begins hallucinating; depicting Robin’s spasms by showing him against the floor, propped up only by his heels and the back of his head–his whole body an inverted rictus

* Page five: The sudden shift from blue-green to bright orange as the explosion hits–the door has already been blown clear across the hallway and knocked the cop off his feet, as though we blinked and missed a panel

* Page six: What do you even say about this image of Professor Pyg hanging upside-down, held up by barbed wire, in the womb of his monument to his imaginary mother? It’s an absolute killer, but I will add that the belly-fat rolls are a nice touch.

* Page seven: The choreography of the Senator’s recoiling away from Doctor Hurt’s gunshot; the tangent linking the vomit bucket to the pumpkin with teeth in it (yes, it’s that kind of comic)

* Page eight: The fact that this action sequence is colored pink; the motion of Gordon’s body and trenchcoat in panel three

* Page nine: The color palette’s shift to orange with every gunshot; the cantered frames

* Page ten: The way Batman’s body seems to spin with each panel

* Page eleven: The final three panels leaning forward into one another, pushing Batman and the viewer along to the inevitable explosion

* Page twelve: That top-most silhouetted body flung into the air by the explosion, limbs dangling backwards

* Page thirteen: Professor Pyg’s proclamatory pointer-finger gesture as he announces “Je suis showbiz!”; the quasi-fisheye view of Hurt, Pyg, and their minions walking down the hall, as though they’ll breeze right past us in another second

* Page fourteen: The musculature of Dick Grayson’s bare back

* Page fifteen: The light from the doorway as Batman runs to the Batcopter

* Page sixteen: Conveying Commissioner Gordon’s disorientation when he awakes by drawing the panel upside-down, but in such a way that we can only tell for sure that it is upside-down if we flip it upside-down ourselves

* Page seventeen: The way panel three is lit from below and to the left; the consistency of the profile of Pyg’s mask in panels five and six

* Page eighteen: Pyg’s gut sticking out when he suspects he’s being made fun of for his weight problem

* Page nineteen: Pyg and Hurt, the Diabolical Duo

* Page twenty: Batman’s whirling-dervish fight choreography

* Page twenty-one: The look on Batman’s face as he lands the punch in panel four; Pyg’s pose when he tells Batman “I can’t blame you for finding me attractive”

* Page twenty-two: Batman’s flat boot-sole connecting with Pyg’s flat pig-nose; the fountain-like silhouette of Batman’s cape as he lands

* Page twenty-three: The ungainly way Batman whips around to see who’s behind him, when it turns out it’s no one and he was being tricked by Gordon–the pose conveys that he’s been duped

* Page twenty-four: Joker in the Batcave at last; the smiley face painted on the bound-and-gagged Robin; the final three images of Batman, the Joker, and Doctor Hurt

I’ve read a lot of superhero comics, and this sort of attention to detail is all but nonexistent. To rely this much on subtle shifts of figurework and coloring to convey both vital plot information and to enhance our understanding and appreciation of the physical combat that is superhero comics’ bread and butter, to have the chops to pull it off and the confidence to even try…well, it’s pretty much unheard of outside of some really titanic stuff, Dave Gibbons on Watchmen/Frank Quitely on All Star Superman-type stuff. And while Irving shares with Quitely a genuine, contemporary sense of style and art that allows for neon-bright colors to really pop, his work (perhaps because he does all the color and texture himself) feels fuller. Flipping through the book again before writing this sentence I realized that Irving will drop backgrounds just as often as Quitely does, but with his billowing puffs and swirls giving every panel depth, you’d never know it from memory. Irving took a comic it was apparently a struggle to convince people who needed to be convinced he should even be involved in and handed in the best-drawn superhero comic of the year, and honestly one of the best-drawn comics of the year period. Bravo.

Housekeeping note

September 15, 2010

The issue that has made my blog even more of a pain to load than usual for the past week or so has been fixed. If your attempts to visit the main page have been greeted with ten minutes of browser-crushing load-time, your troubles are over–things ought to have gone from “unbearable” back down to “merely unpleasant” now. (Comments are still the usual disaster area. Just be patient and let it do its thing for a few minutes and I assure you that the comment you just wrote that looked like it didn’t get posted did, in fact, get posted.)

Again, I hate metablogging, but I wanted to let anyone who’s stayed away for the past few days know that it’s safe to come back, and to repeat my promise that concrete steps are being taken to greatly improve the Attentiondeficitdisorderly experience. Thank you for your support.

Carnival of souls

September 14, 2010

* Today sees the release of the new album Barking from my favorite band, Underworld. To celebrate, why not watch the “haha, that’s a great idea”-inducing video for the album’s highlight, “Always Loved a Film,” and then buy the whole thing for a measly $3.99 by entering the code PICKDEAL? (Via Andy Khouri.)

* Today on Robot 6: Read a new Dave Kiersh comic for free, then buy it for eight bucks. Kiersh is your undiscovered favorite cartoonist. He’s like the emotional content of an M83 single in comics form.

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* The annual Small Press Expo was held in Bethesda, Maryland this past weekend; it’s one of my favorite comic cons, I tend to like it more every year, but this year I was kept from attending by entirely pleasant exigent circumstances so I’m jonesing for good in-depth con reports. So far the best of the bunch comes from Barry and Leon at Secret Acres; it features a game of “guess the prominent critic” that had me laughing out loud. I also enjoyed this effusive, personal report from Rob McMonigal. Unfortunately it sounds like my much hoped for Critics Roundtable Smackdown never materialized. If and when I’m able to participate in one of these again I promise you I’ll son everyone else so hard they’ll call it Father’s Day. (Not true)

* Jeepers creepers, comics sales flatlined in August. In the comment thread Marc-Oliver Frisch points out that basically all of DC Comics’ heavy hitters missed the month entirely, but even still; and that’s its own problem right there, too.

* Tom Spurgeon points out that you can buy a boatload of great individual-issue comic books via Drawn & Quarterly’s big sale. Every year I’m tempted anew to run the table on Chester Brown’s Underwater and every year I wimp out for one reason or another.

* Here’s a really solid, really focused, process- and influence-oriented interview of the great cartoonist Jason by Tim O’Shea.

* Do you want to read William S. Burroughs writing about Led Zeppelin and interviewing, in his own unique way, Jimmy Page? Of course you do. As with everything Burroughs wrote it’s even better when you imagine him saying it in that rustling-mausoleum-door voice of his:

The Led Zeppelin show depends heavily on volume, repetition and drums. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose–that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco, musicians are also magicians. Gnaoua music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Joujouka evokes the God Pan, Pan God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts–music, painting and writing–is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.

That is like porn to me.

* The Mindless Ones’ review thereof reminds me: I’ve been meaning to say that Batman & Robin #14 from Grant Morrison and Frazer Irving is the single best Batman issue I’ve ever read. I mean, this thing simply could not be more of what I’m looking for from Batman comics.

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* Nitsuh Abebe’s review of the new self-titled Interpol album for Pitchfork makes for a useful counterpoint to my own in that we basically agree on everything except whether or not it all works.

* Damn–now that’s how you pan a comic book.

* Real Life Horror #1: I don’t think I realized the extent to which other countries are pursuing legal action against the United States’ torture policies. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Real Life Horror #2: The government may do the kindness of filing criminal charges against American citizen/probable terrorist fuckwit Anwar al-Awlaki before assassinating him, or it may not. Who knows? This element of edge-of-your-seat suspense is part of the fun of living in America today.

* Real Life Horror #3: Discover Blog del Narco, a ground-level no-nonsense chronicler of the prohibition- and human-depravity-fueled drug war currently ravaging Mexico. The picture that accompanies this post made my heart crumple; not safe for people who have a really hard time with cruelty. (Via Spencer Ackerman.)

* More Silver Surfer art from Frank Santoro.

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* I’m straight-up impressed by the design of this Bryan Hitch Spider-Man cover. Swirly!

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* I’m digging the oddly ethereal kaiju art of Sean Edward. (Via Monster Brains.)

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* I have no brief with Robert Rodriguez’s Machete–the trailers look fun, most Rodriguez movies have struck me as inert collections of things that work better as pullquotes from your description of the movie to your friends than as parts of a movie proper, I’ll see it if and when I work through the long list of other more interesting movies I’ve negelected–but this promotional photograph of star Michelle Rodriguez nonetheless felt like something I needed to bring to your attention.

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Music Time: Interpol – Interpol

September 14, 2010

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Interpol

Interpol

Matador, September 7, 2010

Buy it from Matador

Buy it from Amazon.com

One of my favorite parts of my favorite Martin Scorsese movie Casino is this tremendous line reading from Sharon Stone. DeNiro, playing her casino-boss husband, just had her lowlife pimp ex-boyfriend beat up in front of her and she’s completely devastated, as well as fucked up on painkillers. She murmurs something DeNiro doesn’t catch, and when she repeats it she starts by saying “I said…” But God, the way she says it!

Those two words are so fraught with sadness and contempt that it’s like she can barely hold the parts of her mouth and throat necessary to say them together long enough to get them out. If you’ve ever gotten really, really, really low when someone you love has caused you unbearable pain or vice versa, maybe you’ve heard that sound before. Here, hear it again:

Man oh man how I love how Interpol’s Paul Banks delivers the first line of this song, the lead single from his band’s fourth, self-titled album. He plays with the vibrato in the last word of the phrase “All that I see” as self-consciously as anyone this side of Bryan Ferry, but instead of arch artifice it’s a sound of despair and disgust. This makes it a fitting metonymy for the whole record, a veritable concept album about how Interpol hates Interpol even more than you probably do. Unlike a lot of folks I’m unhesitatingly happy with this approach and pleased with the result.

Interpol has always been very good at sonically conjuring up huge spaces. On this album and its divisive, derided (even by the band itself, it seems) predecessor, the (understandably!) underrated Our Love to Admire, they then take the defiant/ill-conceived (take yer pick) step of making these spaces unpleasant to inhabit. So you get that Ennio Morricone by way of Joy Division reverbed guitar from Daniel Kessler echoing out in all directions, bouncing off the walls provided by drummer Sam Fogarino and bassist Carlos D–but then Paul Banks comes in with his strident vocals and those short, repetitive, harsh riffs that sound like missing sections of that car-alarm sequence we all have memorized. In the past this trick often took a back seat to the more traditionally pleasant-sounding and hooky post-punk instrumentation and melodies of their single-ready up-tempo songs, your “Evil”s and “Slow Hands”es and “PDA”s and even “The Heinrich Maneuver”s and what have you. (Frankly, in the context of the more readily appealing material on the band’s debut Turn on the Bright Lights, for example, songs that didn’t take off in that way–“Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down,” even the revered “Obstacle 1”–had a tendency to get on my nerves after a while.)

Here, however, the peppiest track is also arguably the most strident of the bunch: “Barricade” uses that trademark klaxon-like guitar sound to literally evoke the authorities walling off an area, and Banks shouts about it at the vocal-cord-straining top of his register. “Try It On” is maybe the one cathartic moment on the record–that is, it would be, if it weren’t these uncertain falsetto voices repeating the title phrase over and over, which then degenerate into hoarse shouting of same. And structurally, the song’s basically a long verse followed by a long chorus and then that’s it, like some Franz Kafka version of “Don’t Stop Believin’.” There’s nothing to get behind here like the anthems of their first two records. The good times done rolled away.

There’s something deceptive about calling out individual tracks on this album–as with Our Love to Admire I think it’s best experienced as an album, an extended stay in a place inhabited by people who at first made music that reflected unhappiness and increasingly came to embody it, specifically unhappiness with themselves. Indeed it’s tough to talk about Interpol without calling back to Banks’s excoriating This Is Hardcore-like self-satire of his own excesses on Our Love, like “No I in Threesome” and “Rest My Chemistry” and so on. That’s the context needed to understand why the lyrics that appear like briefly solid ghosts amid this album’s sonic tomb–“I’m a good guy,” “The winter will be wonderful,” “Always thought you had great style, and style is worthwhile”–ring so horribly false.

But this is not to say that individual songs don’t contain memorable stylistic flourishes. I was really struck by the guitar curlicue/drum groove of “Safe Without,” echoed by a similarly structured piano-and-percussion loop on “Try It On,” which then shows up again in “All of the Ways.” “Lights,” the hands-down standout, makes the band’s best use yet of that low, ominous piano, and adds a relative rarity, high sustained guitar notes, into the mix as well. Throughout the record there’s an increased presence of backing vocals–I don’t wanna say “harmonies”–and a tendency to record Fogarino like he’s drumming for a completely different band you can hear from a radio playing down the hall. And you’re gonna remember album closer “The Undoing,” which flirts with major-key uplift before drifting off into something like a morose incantation, and which when coupled with the cover art and the departure of iconic bassist Carlos D following the recording of this record is a pretty clear summation of Interpol‘s theme. I don’t think you’d wanna live here, but it’s a fascinating place to visit, especially in light of how easily the band could have jumped from second-album songs like “Evil” and “Not Even Jail” into making arena-filling crowdpleasers for the rest of its existence. These songs could fill an arena, but they’d make it feel empty and lonely even if it were packed to the rafters.

Carnival of souls: Special “Like half a dozen great things to read at the end of the post” edition

September 13, 2010

* Today on Robot 6: Both Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly, two of the best publishers in comics, are having massive, and I mean in some cases quite ridiculous, sales right now. You should take advantage of this.

* Also, please let Tom Brevoort know what you think of Marvel’s current event-comics strategy, whereby the company publishers miniature events/crossovers for individual families of titles/franchises rather than one massive line-wide thing. Personally, there’s an attraction to me in linewide crossovers, for all their faults, that the smaller things lack. I mean, I remember franchise-specific crossovers from the bad old days, and it’s hard to get all that excited about them now; by contrast, the sheer chutzpah it takes to make all of your comic books about Green Goblin, Secretary of Defense feels like it’s taking advantage of the shared-universe and serialized-publication models inherent to Marvel and DC in a way that the umpteenth X-over doesn’t.

* Finally, let me entice you to look at some of Frank Santoro’s stupid-gorgeous Silver Surfer art for Strange Tales II.

* HBO aired two previews for their upcoming series adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, Game of Thrones. One’s your basic teasey early trailer deal, and one’s a quick behind-the-scenes thing. Neither says all that much about what we can expect, I don’t think, beyond the fact that Martin is very excited and Gregor Clegane is very well cast. (Seriously, if you’ve read the books you’ll know him when you see him, he’s a beast.) The trailers are at the links or below, and there’s a still of Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen below that. Also I guess they’re doing some sort of production blog at the show’s homepage.

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* Tim and Eric Awesome Tour, Great Job! Plus an hour-long holiday special on December 5th. Nice. Bullseye.

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* Ron Rege Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #3 is up on What Things Do. Pretty different from what you might be used to from Rege.

* Jordan Crane draws Dario Argento’s Deep Red. Wow, that’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d be writing today.

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* Anders Nilsen covers The Great Gatsby.

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* I thought this little portrait of mostly video-era horror icons was fun and admirably thorough; there are a couple on there even I’m not sure I recognize. I wish I knew who drew it; here’s where I found it.

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* Curt Purcell reviews the circus comics of Josh Simmons. It’s great to have Curt back in the game, and this stuff’s right in his wheelhouse.

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* I hadn’t heard of In a Glass Cage before Jason Adams reviewed it; not sure how I feel about the fact that this has changed.

* I don’t know how I missed this–I think it’s one of those things I was vaguely aware of but didn’t ever actively consider the fact of its existence, sort of like when someone tries to talk to me when I’m watching that Geico commercial with the little piggy who goes wee-wee-wee all the way home–but Eve Tushnet has an infrequently updated blog on which she mostly offers spoilery thoughts on mostly geeky entertainments. Here she is on X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Watchmen, Night of the Living Dead, The Descent, Iron Man 2, and Battlestar Galactica.

* Here’s a fine, lengthy essay by Eric Harvey on the rise of the washed-out Polaroid/Instamatic aesthetic on the cover of indie rock records. I’d probably have just said “Because they look nostalgic and pretty,” but he takes it a lot farther than that for our edification and enrichment.

* This piece on how J.R.R. Tolkien used maps simply to document what he’d already written rather to suggest the existence of a world beyond that was a real lightbulb-over-the-head moment for me. I’d never thought of it this way before: “His maps were always just organizers: they only echoed the text, they never extended it.” I think the fervor with which fandom has seized upon lesser-detailed (both visually and textually) areas to the South and East of the books’ territory is evidence of how much more juice Tolkien could have wrung from those maps.

* As a former writer/editor for A&F Quarterly and thus one of the people partially responsible for Abercrombie & Fitch’s holistic approach to lifestyle branding, I couldn’t have enjoyed Molly Young’s essay on Hollister for The Believer. The part about marijuana was more or less revelatory:

Weed was another great equalizer. It is hard to overstate the importance of weed as a determining factor in the lives of West Coast teenagers. Weed was the reason girls selected clothes based on fuzziness, the reason boys sounded dumb, the reason we inflected every sentence as a question and used like and you know as phatic communications. In an era of T9 input, text messages begun with I would automatically fill in mstoned. Anyone familiar with the dim and spray-scented bedrooms of a weedy adolescence will recognize in Hollister’s decor an environmental proxy of the average Friday night. Weed may not be for sale at Hollister, but its exigencies are everywhere.

It gets better from there. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Comics folk, Geoff Grogan’s piece on the hard truth about small-press conventions is an eye-opening, spirit-deflating must-read. In all fairness, however, I don’t know that alternative comics has that many cliques you can’t infiltrate simply by throwing some elbows and barging in. Comics types respond to Type A personalities like a bichon frise responds to the Dog Whisperer.

Comics Time: Bound & Gagged

September 13, 2010

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Bound & Gagged

Andrice Arp, Marc Bell, Elijah J. Brubaker, Shawn Cheng, Chris C. Cilla, Michael DeForge, Kim Deitch, J. T. Dockery, Theo Ellsworth, Austin English, Eamon Espey, Robert Goodin, Julia Gfrorer, Levon Jihanian, Juliacks, Kaz, David King, Tom Neely, Anders Nilsen, Scot Nobles, Jason Overby, John Porcellino, Jesse Reklaw, Tim Root, Zak Sally, Gabby Schulz, Josh Simmons, Ryan Standfest, Kaz Strzepek, Matthew Thurber, Noah Van Sciver, Dylan Williams, Chris Wright, writers/artists

Tom Neely, editor

I Will Destroy You, September 2010

72 pages

$10

Buy it from I Will Destroy You

“What happens when you ask a bunch of cartoonists, artists, and assorted weirdos to do one panel gag comics? Comedy! Horror! Navel gazing! Abstraction! And more!!!” So reads the back cover of this collection of gag comics by a galaxy of alt/underground comix stars, and it’s pretty accurate as far as it goes. And as anyone familiar with the history of altcomix one-panel gags from Ivan Brunetti on down, the horror, comedy, and navel gazing can get pretty inextricable from one another. As such it’s the cartoons that make me say “Jeeeeeez” as well as “hahahaha” that click the hardest for me here. Josh Simmons takes top honors, as he is wont to do, with a drawing of burning, skinned cattle corpses floating down a river to a caption that reads “Uncle Daddy’s home.” The piece distills into a single panel the near-psychotic level of horror and rage that has absolutely seethed from Simmons’s every work for the past several years. Though nothing else really comes close to that level of nihilistic uncomedy, there’s something almost as soul-damaging in Tim Root’s lushly colored, presumably drawn-from-life portrait of an old woman in line in front of him at a convenience store whose wig has become infested with ants. Austin English hands in a page darkened with pencil to the point of near illegibility, accompanied by an incongruously sunny “Hello!” Perhaps the single most indelible image in the whole collection is Levon Jihanian’s reappropriation of the little girl from The Family Circus, here rendered as a mercilessly crosshatched shadow-person with white voids for eyes and bearing the legend “There is only one road that does not lead to death; and that is the road to hell.” I know, this thing’s a laff riot!

Actually, I laughed at all of those cartoons. The rest? Oh, you know, it’s a mixed bag, as you’d expect from anything with that many contributors. Tom Neely and Anders Nilsen’s contributions are poetic in gorgeous in the respectively lush and minimal way that Neel and Nilsen cartoons are poetic and gorgeous generally, but none are really gag comics. Andrice Arp gets a few yuks out of incongruous scenes drawn from her dreams, Julia Gforer at the expense of Wolverine, Marc Bell by doing his usual warped children’s television aesthetic thing, Theo Ellsworth by actually writing actual jokes that dovetail with his hyperdetailed cartooning, Kaz Strzepek by cracking a couple of mildly off-color jokes about fantasy creatures of the sort you might find on a D&D website, Eamon Espey by creating a Boschian tableau of defecating, murdering demons captioned with the phrase “Time to make the donuts.” The rest I suppose I could take or leave. It’s an exercise, geared more to the participants than the audience.

9.11.10

September 11, 2010

God bless America
Land that I love
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above
From the mountains
To the prairies
To the oceans
White with foam
God bless America
My home sweet home

—–
As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problems. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names…the faces…

Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.

All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.

“A season of rest,” he repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.

Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death–they’re flashburns and radiation sickness, and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please…please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.

“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.

“What, Stuart?”

“Do you think…do you think people ever learn anything?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:

I don’t know.

–Stephen King, The Stand

Alan Moore

September 10, 2010

Enough people have written to me about Alan Moore’s recent interview at a prominent comics site–mostly because I guess I’m known for taking issue with what he says such interviews, specifically the parts where Moore takes swipes at “comics” or “Hollywood” in one breath while admitting he doesn’t actually have any recent experience with them in the next–that I feel I ought to say something about it. I was hesitant to bring it up at all (and I’m not linking to it; you can find it if you really want to) because I think that in general I’m done with rewarding Moore-baiting of this sort. He’s a fascinating man and a prodigious talent, and there are surely more interesting topics that could be explored than the fact that he doesn’t like the process by which movies have been made of his works and doesn’t like the companies that have facilitated this. But needs must, so…

I’m glad he used the phrase “mainstream comics industry” in his dismissal thereof, even if only once, because it makes his wave-of-the-hand dismissal of comics a lot easier to understand. I see where Moore’s coming from: Burned by his experiences with the “mainstream” comics industry (I hate using the term “mainstream” to refer to the mostly-superhero publishers, but okay, I know what he means), he’s walking away, flipping the bird as he goes. Even if I think (say) Grant Morrison is a “top-flight talent,” I’m totally okay with Alan Moore not thinking any such talent exists in the biz and not caring to find out otherwise, even if it’s based on no actual experience with Morrison’s or anyone else’s recent work. Is it unfortunate that Alan Moore will never know the joys of All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder? Sure, but if you did a Google search for unfortunate things, that would be on the 1 billionth page of results.

So yeah, the one-time emergence of this distinction makes this all a lot less depressing than the idea that Alan Moore (Alan Moore!) adamantly refuses to acknowledge the existence of Kevin Huizenga or whoever. That’s what frustrates me: His bad experiences with comics have pushed him away from the medium entirely, even the good, smart stuff. He’s said as much to friends of mine. But you know, that’s fine too in the long run, I understand how things like that happen. I walked away from majoring in theater because I thought the theater kids were pretentious douchebags to the point, where film studies was the LESS pretentious choice. What has always bothered me in the past is that Moore rarely if ever tempers his big sweeping public statements about comics to allow for any of this. “I’ve had so many bad experiences that I don’t read comics anymore” seems like a less objectionable, more true thing for him to say than “I don’t read comics anymore because the comics industry has nothing worth reading.”

I think there are three reasons why he says it the way he says it. First, he’s angry at the deal DC doled him, and anger impedes accuracy. Second, he is indeed Alan Moore, an artist who enjoys making sweeping pronouncements about everything from superheroes to Freemasonry, so it makes sense comics would get that same treatment. Finally, I think he prefers to present his departure from comics in a way that makes him seem more in charge of his choice than “I’m so angry and hurt by the behavior of my colleagues that I’m walking away from the whole megillah” does. Add it all up and you get the get-off-my-lawn shit-talking formulation that pisses people off.

All that being said, this is all such small beer compared to the issue of his treatment by DC. You could say that it’s a shame for him to let business and rights disputes get in the way of his relationships with friends and colleagues he’s had for decades. But by the same token I think he has a reasonable expectation for his friends of decades not to do the same in the opposite direction. What I worry about regarding my repeated statements that Alan Moore has a typical old-fart get-off-my-lawn mentality with regards to vital pop-culture industries with which he has admitted not actually engaging is that people lose sight of the fact that he has been dealt with shoddily, multiple times over the course of over two decades, by a company for which he a) made a fortune, and b) created their single most acclaimed work and several other Top 10 all-timers. In the grand scheme of things, the inability of a major publisher to deal with their historically most important creator in anything close to a mutually satisfactory fashion is a lot more baffling and upsetting to me than Alan Moore pissing on the work of Brian Bendis and Geoff Johns sight unseen or believing friends dealing with family illnesses are being squeezed to get back at him.

For more on this, see Tom Spurgeon and Chris Butcher.

Carnival of souls

September 10, 2010

* I’m very happy with my interview with Frank Santoro about his Silver Surfer strip for Strange Tales II over at Marvel.com. I think he says some surprising things.

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* Some kind of preview for Game of Thrones will air before this Sunday’s True Blood season finale. Keep your eyes peeled.

* Brigid Alverson argues that shoujo manga’s generic tropes, not the gender of its audience or creators, are the reason it’s not taken more seriously. Veterans of the Twilight and Taylor Swift Wars, take note.

* Hahaha, no more Heroes.

* It’s really funny to me that Nerd Nation sees Julie Taymor as the weak link in the Spider-Man musical, and not late-period Bono and the Edge. Maybe this’ll get them to reconsider.

* Abner Dean was a monster.

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* Martin Scorsese runs down his favorite pre-1970 gangster movies. In addition to the educational value of these choices, I just want to say how comforting I find the way Marty refers to movies as “pictures.”

* Finally, I find the current shitstorm surrounding this dumb fuck in Florida who wants to light a pile of Korans on fire illuminating regarding another, more comics-centric such debacle, the Danish Muhammad cartoons. You might recall that for just about as long as he’s been covering it, the issue’s most indefatigable chronicler Tom Spurgeon has argued that even while he’d always defend the cartoonists’ right to draw whatever they want and the publisher’s right to publish whatever they want, and even while he’d decry the notion that anything they did in that regard justified intimidation, violence, or murder by anyone against them or anyone else, the actual act of publication of the cartoons was less some brave act of artists speaking truth to power than a politically minded provocation cum publicity stunt. This can be a bitter pill to swallow for a free speech absolutist like myself, one who moreover is temperamentally inclined toward supporting the smashing of religious taboos as a public good. (Andres Serrano could urinate for fifty years straight and still not produce enough piss in which to dunk everything about the world’s major religions I’d like to see good and submerged.) And this is to say nothing about my feelings regarding violent Islamic extremists in particular. (My feelings: Let me show you them!)

But by removing the act of provocation from any artistic context, this dumb fuck in Florida clarifies the underlying act a bit. I don’t mean to diminish the fact that there was an artistic component to the Danish cartoons while the would-be Koran burning is just an out-and-out act of religious and race hate, and a classically fascist one to boot, by some shitkicking faith healer. But I think what made it all come together for me the most was this post by antiwar blogger Thoreau:

I’m proud to live in a country where even the most odious speech is protected along with our right to criticize that odious speech.  I am dubious that there will be any blood spilled in response to his stunt if he does it (I mean, it’s not like the insurgents in Afghanistan were originally planning to lay down their weapons before  some dumbass in Florida decided to pull a stunt), but if there is, well, this is America.  Free speech is one American thing that genuinely is worth dying for, as civil rights protestors and revolutionaries and soldiers and numerous other patriots can attest.  We spill lots of blood over things that are far less worthy than free speech, so if this jackass’s stunt does cause somebody else to attack us, well, this ink doesn’t run.  (And that’s about as jingoistic as I can get.)

The thing that the Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy taught us, though, is that in the main it wasn’t the cartoonists or the editors or the publishers or even just Danish nationals who suffered (admittedly not through lack of trying on the part of bloody-minded fundamentalist fucks around the world), as if any of that would have been okay. No, mostly it was random people caught up in riots and violence, incited by people who not only knew better but actually made things worse by lying about the cartoons and including even more offensive ones in the mix. Like Thoreau, I doubt any Americans really would die if this dumb fuck in Florida burns his Korans, certainly no Americans who wouldn’t have been at grave risk in Afghanistan or Iraq anyway. But some people would die, that I don’t doubt at all. That’s the common thread that links the two situations.

Now, you can’t live your life to please the sorts of people who murder people over a book or a cartoon. Moreover I think there is value in pissing off the right people; the dumb fuck in Florida, being the right sort of person to piss off himself, removes this aspect from the equation as well as the artistic one. But perhaps more importantly than all of that, you also oughtn’t risk the lives of other people simply to express how much something irritates you. I guess after all these years I’m sick of bravely arguing for my rights from behind the safety of my laptop, while people I will never meet die for the argument.

Comics Time: Rambo 3.5

September 10, 2010

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Rambo 3.5

Jim Rugg, writer/artist

self-published, April 2010

32 pages

$2

Buy it from any of these fine distributors, publishers, and retailers

Read it for free via Jim Rugg’s blog

George W. Bush is a dimwit. There, I just saved you a couple of bucks. Ah, I’m being way too harsh, there–Jim Rugg is a true illustrative talent, and in this minicomic pastiche of the Rambo movies and satire of the Bush Administration and post-9/11 America generally he slips and slides between various alternative-comics styles, from slick and cartoony to editorial-page-y to an almost Frank Santoroish shot of John Rambo viewing Ground Zero, with vigor and ease. The problem is that it’s in service of not much at all, particularly when compared with the surprisingly fecund material in Rugg’s similarly minded mash-up of pop-cult-trash and politics, Afrodisiac. Bush is here presented in a way you’ve seen him a million times before, a moronic, sneering fratboy manchild-of-privilege who’s both bloodthirsty and personally cowardly, and it’s not really any funnier here than it was in all the altweekly political cartoons you remember. Similarly, the portrayal of Rambo is solidly aligned with the Reagan-jingoist interpretation that jibes most closely with the second and third installments of his series, and with the very basic Bush-bashing the comic’s interested in. The complicating weirdness of the first and fourth films–in which Rambo is a victim of American adventurism rather than an exponent of it (the former) and a spiritually crippled killing machine and avatar of Conradian horror (the latter)–is ignored altogether. The comic’s the poorer for this, since I think the country’s blind stumbling rage, which if anything seems worse now than it did then, makes a far more compelling subject for exploration than the easy-target “America, Fuck Yeah”itude found in the umpteenth hyuk-hyuk Bush joke. Here’s hoping Josh Simmons makes Rambo 4.5.

Carnival of souls

September 9, 2010

* Fantagraphics has acquired William S. Burroughs’s long-lost graphic novel Ah Pook Is Here, a collaboration with artist Malcolm McNeil. I think I speak for everyone when I say SMASH THE CONTROL IMAGES SMASH THE CONTROL MACHINE

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* Also on Robot 6 today: Mint Lisa Hanawalt SPX badges;

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* Mint Marvel Minimates cosplay;

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* and, regardless of whatever else about the project is mint or not, mint Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark set design.

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* The crack team of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman are going to turn Stephen King’s Dark Tower series into a movie, then a TV series, then another movie, then another TV series, and presumably so on until it’s all done. As longtime Attentiondeficitdisorderly readers can no doubt guess, I have deeply mixed feelings about this. The idea of The Dark Tower is one of the best things King has ever done; glimpsing it from afar via the various, relatively low-key references and connections to it in his work prior to the mid-’90s was absolutely thrilling; the original version of The Gunslinger is probably his best pure prose; here and there throughout the series he does fallen-world post-apocalyptic science-and-sorcery as well as anyone has ever done it; everything else is 100% pure garbage, the worst things I’ve ever read by him, among the worst things I’ve ever read by anyone, powerfully awful enough to almost destroy my interest in reading anything by him again. Also, y’know, Howard/Godsman. But who knows, maybe the bullshit will get lost in translation and you’ll be left with the fairly compelling genre mash-up weirdness that’s the novels’ skeleton.

* Quote of the day #1 comes from Brigid Alverson: “I would ask them to redesign the original to include Wonder Woman, rather than giving the girls their own logo. But then, if I start thinking about it real hard I’ll start worrying about other causes like pay equity or health care and education for girls in developing countries, and I just get all distracted.”

* Quote of the day #2 comes from Tom Spurgeon: “Every day I grow more suspicious that this particular game hasn’t already been lost, and that the comics industry has completed its transformation into an industry that has given up on every modest means of making money independently for the dubious honor of generating the occasional flash flood of money for others, hundreds of people sustained by the hope, no matter how impractical, that they will be one of the lucky, tiny few allowed to benefit.”

* Quote of the day #3 comes from Josh Marshall, on the Real Life Horror tip: “This is the standard approach of race haters and demagogues. They keep stirring the pot, churning out demonizing rhetoric and hate speech. Then some marginal figure does something nuts and suddenly … oh, wait, I didn’t mean burn Korans. Where’d you get that idea from? We were just saying that Islam is a violent, anti-American religion and that American Muslims should stop building their mosques and focus on apologizing for 9/11 and maybe get out of America. But burn the Koran? No way.”

* More Real Life Horror: Congratulations to President Obama for winning for the United States government the right to kidnap, imprison, torture, and murder people with impunity. Thank goodness he and his relative decorum and presumably shamefaced public silence on these issues will never be replaced by anyone whose party and supporters unapologetically endorse and full-heartedly embrace the use of these powers against anyone deemed an enemy, or else we’d be in real trouble someday!

* Let’s end things on a cheerier note: Matthew Perpetua’s interview with Greg Milner continues, touching this time on the Loudness War between New York radio stations Z-100 and WPLJ. Many Morning Zoo DJs died to bring us this information.

Music Time: A Sunny Day in Glasgow – “Drink drank drunk”

September 9, 2010

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A Sunny Day in Glasgow

“Drink drank drunk”

from Autumn, again

self-released, August 20, 2010

Download the song here

Download the album when it comes out on October 19 here

The strongest moments in A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s songs usually don’t come right away. They tend to emerge at some point deeper into the track at hand–an insistent beat, a plinky-plunky string-instrument hook, a vocal line given sudden luminous solidity after a few minutes of amorphousness. “Drink drank drunk” does it backwards. “When you say I’m alright / this happens all the time / when you stay out all night / without you I’ll just die” is how it begins, the vocals unusually firm and clear as a bell. Then, as a toe-tapping beat kicks in, “When you stop, I’ll stop, okay,” repeated four times, mantra-like, the “‘kay” splitting off into high-pitched harmony each time. And then? Blam! Swirly, buzzy, happy wall-of-sound in the mighty Sunny Day in Glasgow manner, getting progressively more swirly and buzzy and happy for the duration of the song until it sort of tinkles and shudders to a close. The only truly decipherable lyrics after everything kicks in are a semi-triumphant-sounding “Hold my head / I can’t find the keys to my house / I’m never going home again.” If we are to take the song’s conjugated title as a roadmap, that opening section is first a reason to drink, and then a quick four-shot montage sequence of the singer and someone else egging themselves on into inebriation, a state that the rest of the song evokes to a nicety. Which is a rare thing, actually. I’ve heard plenty of music that sounds like being stoned or tripping, but capturing that headlong jovial buzz a night of low-impact yet still purposeful drinking gives you, until you finally stumble into bed and swing out into sleep? That’s quite a feat, and hangover-free.

’90s pop quiz: X-Men character or UK music act?

September 9, 2010

Can you tell which is which? Note: In some cases this may be a trick question!

Aphex Twin

Archive

Arclight

Ash

Autechre

Bastion

Bishop

Blink

Blur

Boom Boom

Boyzone

Cable

Caliban

Cannonball

Chamber

Edwyn Collins

Graham Coxon

Graydon Creed

Curve

Cyber

Damask

Dark Beast

Domino

Donald Pierce

Dubstar

Elastica

Electronic

EMF

Empirion

Fatboy Slim

Fluke

Gambit

Gamesmaster

Gay Dad

Gene

Goldie

Cameron Hodge

Husk

Idlewild

KLF

Leftfield

Legion

Lush

Mansun

Massive Attack

Menswear

MLF

Nasty Boys

Oasis

Orbital

Pale Riders

Phalanx

Photek

Pipeline

Placebo

Prodigy

Pulp

Radiohead

Rictor

Ride

Senser

Shamen

Shatterstar

Skin

Sleeper

Space

Squarepusher

Strong Guy

Stryfe

Suede

Sugar Man

Tricky

Underworld

Verve

Westlife

Wild Child

(additional nerdery courtesy of Matthew Perpetua)

Carnival of souls

September 8, 2010

* You bastards who are going to SPX this year will have dibs on the debut of ACME Novelty Library #20. Choke on it.

* I have not made a secret of my enthusiasm for Stephen Frears’s upcoming film of Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel Tamara Drewe, but wouldja believe that until I saw the new trailer below I hadn’t even noticed that the guy who played Evil Christopher Hitchens in Speed Racer was in it? Something must have been distracting me; I’ve no clue what it could be.

Yep, totally at a loss.

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* The Missus and I have done a decent amount of biking near our suburban home recently, and the trip to the bike path usually involves coming or going along a very busy stretch of thoroughfare. This has made us hyper-aware of the difficulty, if not outright danger, posed to non-car travelers along such roads, whether bikers or pedestrians. That’s why this Matthew Yglesias post on ergonomic crosswalks and the need to psychologically recalibrate our conception of who owns the roadway brought a big smile to my face.

* The Economist profiles Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget. I still haven’t read the damn thing, but as I’ve said before, a cursory flipthrough delivered at least one mental paradigm shift for me, so it’s on the list. (Via Marc Hogan.)

* So too is Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, if Milner’s interview with Matthew Perpetua is any indication. Fascinating stuff about the making of the sound of recorded music, from Steely Dan to Steve Albini, Mutt Lange to James Murphy.

* Sexy gothy vampirey stuff generally isn’t my thing–True Blood is sexy, gothy, and vampirey, but rarely all at once–but I stumbled across this piece called “The Turning” by Randis courtesy of my pal Lontra Phoenix and found it to be pretty hot stuff.

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* The “deal with it” meme has reached its zenith. Shit, memes in general have reached their zenith. (Via Douglas E. Sherwood.)

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* Rest in peace, Glenn Shadix. My wife and I have spent years, literally years, wondering aloud why Glenn Shadix in general and Otho from Beetlejuice in particular aren’t iconic. “I was one of New York’s leading experts in the paranormal…till the bottom dropped out in ’72.”

* Finally, take the time to soak in the despair of “Instructions for visiting the American Wilderness” by Thomas Blair over at the Awl. If you’ve ever had the suspicion that abandoned, for-sale, uncompleted exurban architecture and infrastructure are the telltale black buboes on the American body politic, this is basically “bring out your dead.” (Via Maura Johnston.)