Archive for July 8, 2011

Comics Time: Our Love Is Real

July 8, 2011

Our Love Is Real
Sam Humphries, writer
Steven Sanders, art
self-published, June 2011
24 pages
$3.99
Buy it at OurLoveIsRealComic.com

In the war to discomfit the reader, science fiction has an extra weapon in its arsenal: It can be set in a society whose underlying assumptions are disturbingly alien from our own. Depending on whether the differences happen to hit your buttons, this can be real put-the-book-down-and-squint-your-eyes-shut stuff in the right hands. The last thing I read to have that effect on me was “The People of Sand and Slag” by Paolo Baciagalupi in Wastelands, an anthology of post-apocalyptic short fiction. Baciagalupi created a world where genetically and biomechanically modified human beings presided over an empire of debris, feeling no pain, virtually indestructible, able to consume junk and rocks…and eminently unqualified to care the few vulnerable living creatures unfortunate enough to cross paths with them. It wasn’t a particularly gory or “disturbing” story, yet something about its protagonists, the fact that they were recognizably human yet utterly devoid of the qualities and vulnerabilities that we think of as characteristic of humanity, literally made me feel sick to my stomach. I still haven’t finished reading the anthology.

Our Love Is Real, it seems to me, is aiming to have the same effect. It’s set “five years after the AIDS vaccine,” in a world policed by hulking brutes in Iron Man/mecha exo-suits and characterized by sexual divisions not between genders or orientations, but between vegisexuals, mineralsexuals, and zoosexuals — people who have sex with custom-grown plants, the auras of crystals, and dogs respectively. But I think that previous sentence contains the problem with the project. The sex stuff that’s the story’s bread and butter is indeed rewardingly bizarre and blackly funny — I mean, look at that propaganda poster on the cover, it’s hilarious. But the world surrounding the sex is standard Dark Horse Legends sf-action material, instantly recognizable to anyone who’s read Hard Boiled or Martha Washington, or who’s seen the way Geof Darrow or Chris Burnham draw faces being smashed to flying splattering pieces. The character designs in particular are deeply indebted to Tony Moore, squarejawed men and snotnosed women who behave basically the way characters rooted in such designs can be expected to behave. When the genre visuals and action are that familiar, it’s tough to see how we get there from here with regards to the stuff that’s much further out. I mean, I get that the zoosexual cops hounding (no pun intended) the vegisexuals and mineralsexuals are analagous to heteronormativity and fag-bashing, but there’s not really an allowance made for the idea that people who have sex with dogs might build a sci-fi society that looks different from all the ones we’ve seen that were built in-story by plain-vanilla straight dudes. Starting with that lacuna, the book’s ideas never really congeal. It winds up feeling more like several neat ideas than one great one. I want it to go further.

But ultimately, the best compliment I could pay Our Love Is Real is that while its weakest points belong to other comics, its strongest points are all its own. The world depicted by Sanders and the characters that inhabit it may be overly familiar, but the climactic fight scene has real oomph and, weirdly, real grace. And while the characters’ behavior is traditional in a way that doesn’t mesh with the book’s bizarre animating ideas, those ideas are quite something, and are presented by Humphries in a way that’s straightforward but not smug self-congratulatory, the way knowingly out-there indie science-fiction comics by smart-and-they-know-it writers can be. Humphries’ is a new voice in a crowded field, saying truly strange and challenging things while speaking the language of mainstream action comics. With any luck that accent will thin, and future stories will have the fluency to forge a new dialect as singular as the ideas they’re designed to express.

Music Time: Interpol – “Pace Is the Trick”

July 8, 2011

Pat as-above-so-below-isms like “the title says it all” normally drive me up the wall, but whaddayagonnado: “Pace Is the Trick” is the best Interpol song because of the rigorous and relentless pace of the guitar. The song itself is a midtempo number and not one of the band’s uptempo post-punk jams, but that distinctively brassy guitar never, ever ceases to be twanged with every eighth note. Like a traditional lead guitar line, each note is distinct, and the purpose is to deliver a melody; at the same time, like rhythm guitar, it’s a rhythmic element that gives the entire song a spine, even as its melody shifts and morphs from section to section. This pulls all the parts together and makes each new section and mood — determined by the varying timbre and intensity of Paul Banks’s vocals, the disappearances and reappearances of Sam Fogarino’s drums and the different beats he plays, and the degree to which the full band is engaged or holding back — feel like an inevitable outgrowth of the previous one. It’s one of those songs that makes me reflexively air-drum along when the loud parts kick in, and it’s that guitar, that literally non-stop “dundundundundundundundundundundundundundundundun,” that pulls me along for the ride. Meanwhile, Banks’s lyrics, delivered in perhaps his most finely struck balance between his laconic-croon and urgent-shout modes, use a variety of metaphors and outright declarations to cast love, or at least lust, as a matter of possession, predation, and destruction. As embodied in the song’s final lines — after ending the final iteration of the chorus (“and now I select you” etc.) by shouting about “the star-swept night,” Banks contributes to the lengthy outro by repeating “You don’t hold a candle” — it’s an enticingly toxic blend of seduction and contempt, tied together by a guitar that never allows any daylight between the two extremes.

Comics Time: SF Supplementary File #1

July 7, 2011

SF Supplementary File #1
Ryan Cecil Smith, writer/artist
Closed Caption Comics, June 2011
12 pages
Read it for free at RyanCecilSmith.com
Buy it for $2 from Ryan Cecil Smith

What if ’80s SFF action-figure franchises really took on the central role in our collective mythmaking and storytelling that their hardcore devotees (myself included, let’s be honest) seem to think they deserve? The children’s books, fairy tales, and fables such a would would create for itself might look a lot like SF Supplementary File #1, a spinoff from Ryan Cecil Smith’s fine alt-genre actioner SF that provides the origin story for one of the Space Fleet Scientific Foundation Special Forces’ memorable members, Gorum. In his “once upon a time”-style story of hidden paradises and pillaged resources, mad royalty and noble scientists, slain parents and vowed vengeance, I hear echoes of everything from Superman and Batman to Eternia and Shangri-La to freaking Spaceballs, shot through with a childlike funneling of nuclear anxiety directly into terror over the potential loss of Mommy and Daddy. Smith’s art here is winningly crude, as befits drawings that can be captioned with sentences like “Gorum attacked every ship going IN or OUT of the Planet of Dunes with VOLCANO CANNONS” — yet it’s flexible, equally able to pull off sophisticated visual tricks like juxtaposing the explosions that destroy a world, the ship that escapes that destruction, and multiple representations of the teary eyes of that ship’s pilot as he views the horror like some kind of Futurist Axe Cop. It’s fun to see something so lightweight be so solid.

Carnival of souls: Dwarves on film, Our Love Is Real, San Diego Diary, more

July 7, 2011

* My excitement about Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit (that is still a nice thing to be able to say, given what could have been) mounts with each new official photo the production releases. Dig Nori, Ori, and Dori, for example — that’s an unexpected and welcome direction for the Dwarves to go, visually. I wonder if each grouping of brothers in Thorin’s party will have their own sartorial style.

* Keep your eyes peeled for Sam Humphries and Steven Sanders’s strange sci-fi sex comic Our Love Is Real, now available digitally and otherwise. I’m still working out what the hell I think of it, which I suppose is mission-accomplished territory. Something about it reminds me of Paolo Baciagalupi’s supremely troubling SF short story “The People of Sand and Slag,” to give you some idea of where its head is at — not necessarily that it’s that effective, but that it’s proceeding from a similar place of positing an uncomfortably unfamiliar future humanity.

* This ought to be a popular item at your better comic conventions: Uncivilized Books is releasing a collection of Gabrielle Bell’s San Diego Diary strips, recounting her outsider’s experience at last year’s Comic-Con.

* An ultra-limited-edition full-color Yuichi Yokoyama book from PictureBox called Color Engineering? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Michael DeForge’s Spider-Man nightmare “Peter’s Muscle” is now up for your reading pleasure at What Things Do. I liked this comic a lot.

* Over at Robot 6 I talked a bit more about Dave Kiersh’s Amazons and its depiction of fantasy femininity.

* Today’s Comics Grid must-read: Tony Venezia on Jaime Hernandez’s Ghost of Hoppers and the Freudian uncanny. Wow, the only way that sentence could be more up my alley is if David Bowie read it aloud.

* The great Josh Simmons has a schmancy new webstore.

* You know, normally, while I think Jonny Negron’s drawings of women are a blast, they don’t “do it” for me. But there are exceptions to every rule.

Music Time: Drake – “Marvin’s Room”

July 5, 2011

When last I checked in with Drake he was sounding like Everything But the Girl. In “Marvin’s Room” he’s sounding even more like Everything But the Girl — specifically “Single,” in which Tracey Thorn engages her ex in a bit of extraordinarily bitter concern-trolling over a hotel phone, accompanied a shuffling beat and ghostly synths. Voila, I’ve just described “Marvin’s Room” as well. But what Drake lacks in Thorn’s luscious vocal instrument he more than makes up for in a level of lyrical candor that is either really exquisite artistry or the complete lack thereof. This is a guy who’ll lilt “Fuck that nigga that you love so bad” like it’s the most romantic thing in the world, who’ll say “After a while, girl, they all seem the same / I’ve had sex four times this week — I’ll explain” in a song whose sketch of a chorus revolves around chiding his ex “I’m just sayin’ you could do better.” I have no idea if he knows what a leap it is to expose his assholishness to the world like this and is consciously making that leap, or if he’s simply so fascinated by himself that he’s sharing this information because he’s his own muse. In the end I’m not sure it matters if it makes for sad, lovely, disturbing music like this. Bonus points for repeating the ex’s incredulous “Are you drunk right now?” like it’s one of those Houston-to-Apollo transmissions from The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.

Carnival of souls: Tom Neely, Mat Brown, Dave Kiersh, Frank Miller, more

July 5, 2011

* I’m very excited to direct you to my interview with Tom Neely about his new graphic novel The Wolf, which includes a selection of preview pages. The book is Tom’s best, and one of the best of the year.

* When was the last time you were truly amazed by an artist you’d just seen for the first time? For me it was my discovery via Monster Brains of Mat Brown. This stuff is incredible — like the Sistine Chapel painted by an Alien facehugger attached to Geof Darrow. Click through to see it at full size.

I mean, seriously.

* Whoa: Dave Kiersh has an entire blog dedicated to posting his early minicomics in their entirety. My favorites so far are 1998-99’s Quaaludes, 1999’s Young Adult, and 2003’s Amazons, none of which I’ve seen before despite being a fairly dedicated Dave K. fan. It’s amazing to think he hit his teenage-heartbreak sweet spot when he pretty much was a teenager.

* Mmmm, hot licks from Holy Terror by Frank Miller.

* George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire occupies four of the top ten New York Times paperback best sellers right now, including #1. Don’t click the list unless you want the shit spoiled out of books three and four, though.

* Is it just me, or are the Harvey Award nominees better than the Eisner Award nominees this year? Like, insofar as they actually nominated Acme Novelty Library #20 and Love & Rockets: New Stories #3?

* Gabrielle Bell will be posting a diary comic every day for the month of July. Good news for people who like to see new Bell.

* The Comics Grid’s Kathleen Dunley takes a close look at the overabundance of information in the truly horrifying torture sequence from Brian Chippendale’s Ninja. I’d forgotten how difficult that page was to take.

* I’m actually not nuts about the posts in practice — they feel a bit underbaked, a bit too dependent on the reader sharing certain assumptions about and impressions of any given song — but in theory, the music blog One Week One Band spending seven days talking about David Bowie’s 1990s work (with writer Ian McDuffie) is an exciting prospect to me, since that’s the first David Bowie I knew. Like Tori Amos, Aphex Twin, Pantera, Pink Floyd, Marilyn Manson, Gary Numan, and Joy Division, I got into David Bowie because Trent Reznor was into David Bowie. Earthling was my first Bowie record, and it’s still one of my favorites. It’s so loud!

* Better in practice is Matt Zoller Seitz’s list of The 10 Loudest Movies Ever!! It’s basically seven films that are varying degrees of wonderful and then three piles of shit.

* Uno Moralez’s random
image/gif gallery posts
are really the best bang for your internet buck. Please click the link — if you haven’t seen one of these things, you can’t understand.

* This is almost anticlimactic after the earlier Mat Brown link, but Monster Brains’ Charles James Folkard gallery is lovely as well. Aeron Alfrey’s really been on a hot streak at that site lately.

* Tom Brevoort gives good interview.

Nostalgia is powerful and potent, and it’s one of the things, particularly for the longtime audience, that makes things go. If you can drop in a reference or do a twist or bounce some story point off a comic we fondly remember, we as an audience like it. It works for us. It rewards the investment in the material and the time spent, and it creates a larger sense of involvement than is typically possible in a single TV show or a movie or a novel. It’s one of the things that comics can do with their serial storytelling style that many other forms of entertainment can’t. The danger there is that if you rely on it too much, you’re telling stories only for people who have been reading for 30 years or who are willing to put in the hard work to understand whatever it is you’re talking about – the particular language you’re speaking. That’s the balancing act.

* It’s hard out here for a cartoonist: Theo Ellsworth edition.

* Best of luck to my old Wizard coworker Rick Marshall as he departs MTV’s Splash Page blog.

* Film and culture historian Robert Sklar has died, rather tragically. A part of me will always be a Film Studies student, and that part is very saddened by this.