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…..

Kamui Den

Sanpei Shirato, writer/artist

Garo Magazine, published by Shogakukan

21 volumes from 1964-1971

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

* 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.

* 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.

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.

* Today on Robot 6:

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

* 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.

* 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.

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.

* 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.)

* You win this round, Cuomo.

* 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.

Cyclone Bill and the Tall Tales

Dan Dougherty, writer/artist

Moonstone, 2006

232 pages

$16.95

Buy it from Moonstone

Buy it from Amazon.com

Fictional comic stories about music are often not just bad, but embarrassingly, infuriatingly bad. I’m not sure why this is, to be honest. I think the answer may be found in noting the tendency of stories about obscure/failed/garage/shitty bands/music (e.g. Jaime Hernandez, Gipi, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Makoto Yukimura) to be much much better than stories about famous/successful/stylish/supercool bands/music (you can probably rattle off the names of several such failed series from the past five years, easy).

First, the roundabout explanation. When you’re tackling music just as a thing people do out of compulsion or enjoyment, independent of external payoff, that’s universal. But when you’re approaching music as something that makes its practitioners that much more awesome than everyone else, you invite your readers to compare your depiction of that awesomeness to what they, personally, find awesome about the music they find awesome. And when that comparison clashes–as it often does, because rock-star hero worship is an enormously personal thing, millions of idiosyncratically intimate relationship established with fantasy figures–it’s throw-the-book-out-the-fucking-window time. The book ends up feeling…like a costume, a disguise, not like an outfit. (Weirdly, I don’t think this rule applies as neatly to movies as it does to comics. Maybe it’s because movies have an inherent glamour to them that comics don’t, so they can address the glamour more naturally, I don’t know. I really like Eddie & the Cruisers, is what I’m saying.)

But a more direct explanation would simply be “show, don’t tell.” In my experience, comics-about-music that pivot off the involved parties’ coolness tend to absolutely bury the reader in LOOK HOW COOL THIS STUFF IS!!!!isms, which is death for coolness in fiction as it is in real life. (Seriously, people who think Geoff Johns lays on the Hal Jordan hero worship too thick in Green Lantern need to get back to me after reading any recent series that invokes the British rock tradition in any way.) You don’t see the flopsweat when reading about the misadventures of Sex Bob-omb or La Llorona–they just do what they do, and that’s why it works.

Cyclone Bill & the Tall Tales falls somewhere in the middle, in large part because of what an odd, odd book it is. I stumbled across one of the single issues while working at Wizard, in a pile of the “well, somebody out there’s readin’ it, I guess”-type comics that tended to accrue here and there. It’s done in a painted, grey-tone black-and-white style that really does have more in common with alternative comics than “indy comics” of the sort you might expect from a publisher whose bread and butter is the randomest bunch of licensed properties you can imagine. (Kolchak the Night Stalker!) Writer/artist Dougherty’s work here is undoubtedly the work of a young cartoonist–it’s stiff at times, unequal to the tasks he sets for himself (like the first-person POV videotape mockumentary storytelling device that recurs throughout) at others–but there’s also much to admire and enjoy, from the attractive character designs to the stark, angular, expressionist overall look.

Moreover, the story boasts gratuitously weird elements galore. The nominal protagonist, documentarian Margarita Bloom, spending what seems like half the book asleep on the couch. Cyclone Bill, the titular guitar god whose untimely onstage murder (yep, it’s that kinda deal) is the center of the story, is a classically trained prodigy from Poland who toured the great halls of Europe before disappearing to become a Catholic priest or something, then reemerging as the second coming of Jimi Hendrix after plucking an undistinguished American bar band out of obscurity and joining them as their lead guitarist. Dougherty even casts himself and his real-world bandmates as main characters–Bill’s band, the Tall Tales. It’s all really quite singular, especially because Dougherty has left this sort of comic behind–he now does a humor strip about a coffee-shop clerk with a web page done in Comic Sans. Then as now, my first thought upon looking at this book is “Where the heck did this thing come from?”

This is not to say that the story doesn’t traffic heavily in traditional signifiers of cool, because it does. It’s the sort of comic in which a recreation of the famous photo in which Johnny Cash flips off the camera is used as a major plot point, if that helps. But in the main, it’s trafficking in such a hoary, out-of-fashion brand of rock and roll coolness that it’s practically gone all the way around to uncool again. Robert Johnson at the crossroads, Elvis Presley still haunting the highways of the Great American Nowhere, sinister significant others in the Yoko Ono role, a slogan-spouting punk as the antagonist, deals with the Devil in which souls are sold for rock ‘n’ roll, a celestial gathering of dead rock stars…this is your father’s musical mythmaking. Yeah, I cringed a little when Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, and Elvis Presely teamed up to kick Satan’s ass around Graceland, but not as much as I’d have done had Jarvis Cocker been involved, you know? It’s far enough away from where I am not to clash so violently.

No, it’s not the Velvet Goldmine of comics I’ve long hoped for–a story that’s both reality-warpingly personal in its approach to the musical icons it’s dealing with, but also accessible enough to people who aren’t the creator to reveal something about the music and musicians involved, and entertaining enough for that not even to matter. But it is Doughterty laying it all on the line in terms of his love for a certain rock and roll tradition, fashion be damned, and that’s admirable in its own way. It’s a fictional comic about music that didn’t make me want to light it or myself on fire by the end, which is an achievement in and of itself.

In college, some friends introduced me, under circumstances you can probably imagine, to the concept of “the Cosmic Groove”–the funk into which all bands seek to tap, but which aside from a few fleeing moments remains elusive. It wasn’t until I heard Phelps “Catfish” Collins’s guitar solo on “Very Yes” with Bootsy’s Rubber Band live in Lousiville 1978 that I understood what they meant. That guitar is like the Ghostbusters crossing the streams, and when the horns come back in, that’s the dimensional crossrip. This is the sound of the cosmic groove–it’s like My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon” in that I’ve wanted so badly to find another song that does what this does as well as it does it but have never found it and probably never will. Rest in peace, Catfish.

The Witness

Hob, writer/artist

self-published, 2008

24 pages

$3

Buy it from Hob

Buy it from Global Hobo

Comics about death, even good comics about death, are a dime a dozen.. Comics about death where the character that dies is biologically incapable of understanding what has happened to it? And in which the entire world dies, completely and irrevocably, taking all hope of future life with it? Rarer, and thank goodness, because I don’t know how many comics like this one I could take without cracking. This is not to say that the artist otherwise known as Eli Bishop’s “ghost story” about a dinosaur whose spirit lingers on Earth, occasionally interacting with its inhabitants (both alive and dead) until the solar system’s destruction billions of years from now by the expanding sun, is morbid or grim beyond the needs of the subject. Something about his airy, elegant line–able to convey the weightlessness of the dino-ghost and to accrue background detail without bogging the image down–prevents The Witness from ever feeling dreary or didactic. But that’s just it: This casual acceptance of the death of all things, a post-life eternity that just spirals on and on and on and on and on and on without ending, ended up being much more chilling to me than most stories about shuffling off this mortal coil. I’ve thought about my eventual expiration enough that doing so is like meeting a familiar friend. But death without the possibility of thought, by you, by anyone or anything else? That’s a stranger at the door and I’m afraid to let him in.

* Dunno how the heck I missed this, but Mike Mignola will be drawing Hellboy again following the conclusion of the current six-part-total arc with Duncan Fegredo.

* Ben Jones has a blog at PictureBox’s site now? When did this happen? (Via Flog.)

* Good golly Miss Molly, look at this drawing of Galactus by James Stokoe. Click here to make it bigger than your brain can handle.

* Gabrielle Bell is now on Jordan Crane’s webcomics site What Things Do, with maybe the first of her strips I feel like I’ve “gotten.”

* Real Life Horror: Here’s a fascinating, if scantly supported, article on the prevalence of serial killers in Africa, enabled by the combination of weak law enforcement and ritual traditions that countenance violence. (Via CRwM.)

Wild Beasts

Two Dancers

Domino, September 2009

Buy it from Domino

Buy it from Amazon.com

Co-lead singers Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming represent the meticulously struck balance of Wild Beasts’ second album of sumptuous, occasionally shocking art-rock Two Dancers as well as anything else. Like Bryan Ferry subjected to some sort of Silver Age DC Comics bifurcation beam, Thorpe sings in a foppish falsetto, Fleming in a rich mahogany baritone. Each vocal approach enhances different aspects of the band’s music: Thorpe’s swoops and screeches twirl effortlessly atop and around the keening guitar of Ben Little, while Fleming’s warmth and fullness echoes the rock-solid foundation laid down by his basslines and Chris Talbot’s surefooted drumming.

Yet at the same time, each undercuts and complicates the lyrics they sing, lyrics that treat male desire and anger with often alarming openness. Thorpe can deliver kiss-offs to a former lover like “This is a booty call–my boot up your asshole” (“The Fun Powder Plot”) or proclaim his penchant for hooliganism by announcing “We’re just brutes, looking for shops to loot” (“Hooting & Howling”) and get away with it, his dandyish, defiantly artificial voice stripping the words of tough-guy posturing and exposing the awkwardly animalistic sentiments beneath. For his part, Fleming can flat-out sing about his id, as he does in “All the King’s Men”–“Baby, turns out I’m evil / In all my dreams, girls who’ll clothe me, girls who’ll feed me, girls who want me, girls who need me”–but the Guinness-like depth and complexity of his tone conveys far more self-awareness and self-effacement than self-congratulation. The lyrics’ repeated references to the body parts involved in sundry acts of rage and lust and gluttony further emphasize the degree to which these men, for all their erudition, are at the mercy of meatspace. I count fully 46 mentions of everything from bones and teeth to hearts and lungs to ankles and assholes in the lyric sheet; tellingly, the eyes, the window to the soul, are only mentioned once.

Given this, it’s no surprise that the group assigns the album’s sexiest song–the churning “When I’m Sleepy…,” its lyrics consisting solely of the phrase “When I’m sleepy, needing supper, you’re the lips for me to pucker”–to the more feminine vocalist, while the baritone is responsible for the harrowing semi-title track “Two Dancers (i)” and its seemingly and sympathetically feminine perspective on sexual assault and the death of and abandonment by children. Simply the phrases selected to convey these ideas–“His hairy hands, his falling fists, his dancing cock down by his knees”; “Our son was dying and we could hardly eat”–form a devastating j’accuse when issued from the bass clef.

The music seems similarly obsessed with the possibilities of duality represented by both singers and album title. The title track is split in two, for one thing, with “Two Dancers (ii)” representing a quieter, colder response to the fiery demands of its immediate predecessor; the pair is itself prefigured by the introduction of its central melodic hook at the very end of “Hooting & Howling” several songs earlier. The album features two short interlude-type songs: The first is the aforementioned sizzler “When I’m Sleepy…”, while the second, the far quieter “Underbelly,” is as much about lifelong consequences for the seven deadlies as the earlier song is about their immediate gratification. But my favorite pairing is the opening track, “The Fun Powder Plot,” with the late-album centerpiece “This Is Our Lot.” To take things back to the Silver Age, they’re each the Bizarro version of the other. With the same gently twirling mechanical beat and even the same key, “This Is Our Lot” inverts the earlier song, allowing the bass to provide the melody and the guitar to provide the rhythm–a switch paralleled by Thorpe, who here sings toward the bottom of his register. The overall shift is one from hysterical outrage to wry resignation, “The mock” and “the shock” of “The Fun Powder Plot” replaced by the shrugged-shoulder admission “This is our lot: We hold each other up heavy with hops.”

The end result? Masculinity without machismo. Sexuality without sexism. Elegance without arrogance. Wild Beasts set a very tricky lyrical and stylistic course for themselves here, but their rare combination of ambition and sophistication sees them arrive not just safely but spectacularly.

I would like to move my blog to a new, dedicated site. I need someone to help me do this–namely to design the new site and port my Movable Type archives into it. I have some other more ambitious wishlist items too, but those are the main things. I will pay this hypothetical person for doing this. Are you this person? Please email me (the address is in the left-hand sidebar of this blog) and let me know.

* Your quote of the day comes from Tom Spurgeon:

Mostly, though, I’m kind of baffled why retailers meet anything I write that’s critical of any facet of the Direct Market with such forceful, blanket and frankly not always very convincing rebuttals….what’s up with the defensive crouch? How on earth is a critical article tantamount to taking a position of “all doom and gloom?” Do you have a self-critical apparatus? Is ComicsPRO simply a booster organization that does things like impugn others’ motives and make empty proclamations that things are “rock solid”? If asked, could you name five specific areas at which the Direct Market should improve, things at which you and your fellow retailers have outright failed, not somebody else? I could do that for this site specifically and comics journalism generally, and have talked about those factors here at the site on multiple occasions. Why can’t you guys? It’s one thing that outright confuses me about comics 16 years in, retail and elsewhere. What is it about comics people that we’re afraid to release real sales or (when it’s appropriate) income figures, where publishing moves that seem to under-perform disastrously by the estimates we do have are met with a “that’s right what we expected/you don’t know anything about the business” harangues, where it’s the comics event itself that conspires to keep the journalists from covering it with greater vigor? Why can’t we be self-critical?

Read the whole thing, including the jaw-dropping letter to which he’s responding.

* Mike Baehr notes in the comments downblog and on the Fantagraphics blog that Fanta/Eros isn’t republishing Hans Rickheit’s Chloe, just distributing it to the Direct Market for, amazingly, the first time. Really can’t say enough good things about that book, though I’ve got a funny feeling I’ll be trying to over the next week or so.

* Jeet Heer’s piece on Harvey Pekar for Comics Comics contains a pretty egregious misreading of the Lee/Kirby working relationship, of all things, but is well worth your time anyway for its emphasis on the salutary impact Pekar had on Crumb rather than the other way around, and how Pekar’s preference for realistic writing may have skewed his taste in artists in an unfortunate way.

* Somehow the RSS feed for Sammy Harkham’s Family store blog disappeared from my Google Reader or something, but thanks to Spurge I’m tuned back in in time to catch Sammy’s salute to Richard McGuire, perhaps the only person of whom it can be said that they created one of the greatest comics and greatest basslines of all time.

* Harkham also posted some more pics of the ice cream truck Ben Jones designed for Adult Swim’s San Diego presence. Would you let your kids get a froggy pop from this truck?

* John Lingan’s piece on Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s remake The Thing is odd in that it posits a world in which the former has the better critical reputation, a world I’m pretty sure the rest of us don’t live in, but hey, I’m always up to read about The Thing. Nice analysis of the purpose of the spectacular gore, for example.

* Frank Santoro sez don’t forget that your comics page needs a center. This came up in his Inkstuds roundtable from the other day as well. I’m still processing it.

* Filing this away for future reference: Chris Mautner reviews Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

* Speaking of Scott Pilgrim, here’s a fun, frivolous report on an in-store appearance by Edgar Wright, Michael Cera, Anna Kendrick, and Jason Schwartzman by my chum Jason Adams.

* And speaking of Jason, he says that this is what Lamberto Bava’s Demons 2 looks like, which probably means I need to see Lamberto Bava’s Demons 2.

* Clive Barker Halloween costumes! Yep, that’s about right. How I love this raspy-voiced loon. (Via Monster Brains.)

* Real Life Horror: The Journal of American Medicine on the damage done by CIA doctors and psychiatrists who tortured people for the Bush Administration.

* So epic. When my teenage self first saw this image, a rip in the spacetime continuum opened up and John Williams’s “Duel of the Fates” started playing.