* New Azure Ray album in September!!! Three exclamation points, which is three more than the album will use.
* Why don’t let’s take a stroll through Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft with Ken Parille.
* In the latest episode of Zak Smith/Sabbath’s I Hit It with My Axe: Pigs on the wing!* Real-Life Horror: The culture of death.
* The Republican Party’s repeated intimations of militarization have disturbing implications.
Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka
Naoki Urasawa, writer/artist
Takashi Nagasaki, writer
Based on Astro Boy: The Greatest Robot on Earth by Osamu Tezuka
Viz, 2009-2010
Eight volumes
200 pages or so each
$12.99 each
I was over the moon for the first three volumes of Pluto, suspense mangaka Naoki Urasawa’s Watchmen-style reimagining of a classic Astro Boy storyline–and for precisely the same reasons lots of other smart critics weren’t. I love stories about emotionally wounded men (or in this case, robots) crying over the death of puppies and children. I love stories about people paralyzed by grief and loss. I love stories about people who lay it all on the line, and lose it all, to save other people, and then how those other people handle being the reluctant beneficiaries of that sacrifice. In a word, I love melodrama. If it involves robots, so much the better. And in Pluto, I felt for the first time that Urasawa was connecting with something more than mere story.
Ultimately the series fails to fully live up to the magical magisterial melodramatic pomp of that first volume. As I found to be the case with Monster (although certainly not to that extent), Urasawa’s technique of drawing out characters’ climactic realizations and confrontations for page after page eventually dilutes their impact. In this particular case, the murder mystery at the story’s heart ends up being solved in a fashion that’s both disappointingly straightforward in terms of motive and unnecessarily, distractingly complicated in terms of execution. And since this is a super-robot story, the climax must come about through combat, ironically the one thing that Urasawa’s visual vocabulary does not enable him to portray in the most thrilling of all possible ways; particularly given the environment in which the final battle takes place, it’s difficult to get a handle on where you are, what’s going on, or what the consequences for each beat might be. Like the characters whose fate will be determined by the battle’s outcome, you just have to take it on faith that the involved parties know what they’re doing and things will come out in the end.
That said, the robots, and their surreally obtrusive appearances in Urasawa’s meticulous blend of realism and slick cartooniness, never ceased to be a joy to look at and never stopped lodging themselves in my brain. The repeated use of flashbacks to horrible events that haunt the main characters had that same effect on me. I came to care about these people/”people”–well, more like I came to be intrigued by them. I wanted to find out what happened to them to make them the way they are, and for things to work out for them, and I was frequently surprised when things went bad way before I thought they would. And in the end I appreciated the book’s blend of deep, unshakable, even scientific pessimism about human nature with an impassioned insistence that we can reject that programming if we try–in a fashion that’s a lot more convincing than the similar moral throughline in Monster, by the way. It may not stick the landing, but it’s a thing of beauty in flight.
* The new Scott Pilgrim trailer is the best Scott Pilgrim trailer ever!
* Also on Robot 6 today: I love Dennis Culver’s Batman villain drawings. If I could draw them like that, that’s all I’d do.
* Matt Wiegle covers Papercutter‘s lucky thirteenth issue.
* The takeaway from Chris Oliveros’s Chicago Printers Row report: The book collection of Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions will be 650 pages long and hit in 2011.
* Mike Barthel writes about Daniel Clowes’s David Boring in such a way as to suggest he ought to get acquainted with Kevin Huizenga’s post on the comics argument he never wants to hear again.
* Speaking of Huizenga, wanna see a cute comic about his creative process?
* And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM unmasked! Now I know who to slap with my glove for all those smartass comment-thread comments.
* Adam Grano is smurfing the dream.
* Like Rob Bricken, I really thought they Narnia movies were dunzo until I saw a big cardboard cutout promo for one in the movie theater a couple weekends ago and realized it was for a new one.
* Rest in peace, Garry Shider. The Starchild has been called home to the Mothership.
* This interview of Benjamin Marra by GQ’s Alex Pappademas is really fabulous for a variety of reasons, even beyond the fact that it’s an interview with Benjamin Marra in GfuckinQ. First of all, it’s the longest interview with Marra I’ve seen so far. Second, it was done over the phone rather than by email, so you’re getting more or less unadulterated Marra as himself, rather than the more studied “man of art, man of lust” voice you get whenever he sits down in front of a keyboard. Third, because it’s long and because it’s done in real-time, it goes in all sorts of directions–like this part, which may be the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen anyone say about, of all things, True Blood:
I think about that show True Blood, which is this awesome sex and violence soap opera, it’s total cult stuff, and people love it–and that’s done by Alan Ball, who’s done some really arty kinds of things.
Right. American Beauty and stuff. And now he’s doing this show–and I say this positively–that’s complete trash, in a lot of ways.
Yeah! And that’s the reason why I like it so much. It’s not apologetic in any way. It is what it is and it makes no bones about it. It’s really just stripped-down, basic, well-executed entertainment.
I remember talking long, long ago about Invasion U.S.A. and how difficult it would be today to recapture that level of unthinking mayhem without resorting to Shoot ‘Em Up-style ugly self-consciousness. I think the two great arguments that no, this can be done are the Crank series and the comics of Benjamin Marra.
* Much like the Bavarian Illuminati, Kevin Huizenga is spreading his shadowy tentacles throughout the whole Internet: In addition to his regular blog, and his drawing club’s blog, and his recently unearthed Fight or Run blog, and all the goodies he’s got hidden on USSCatastrophe, he also has a blog I hadn’t seen before called New Construction, which focuses on “cartooning practices and concerns.”
* At the latter, he’s got a great post up on Bushmiller, Nancy, iconicity, and “pure cartooning,” the gist of which is (I think) that it behooves us to divorce value judgments from our descriptions of the relative simplicity or complexity of a cartoonist’s visual style. “Maybe it’s as simple as wanting to keep clear the distinction between description and prescription,” he says. Smart stuff that reminded me of his last push back against the notion of “pure cartooning”, which he brings back up himself.
* And he takes a little time out to call out the default mode of dismissing alternative comics.
* Oh yeah, here’s another blog, where Huizenga and his wife list the books they’ve read.
* Ron Rege Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #15 is a beer. Not even kidding. Could I love him more?
* Do not read this unless you’ve read all the books, but George R.R. Martin’s latest blog post reveals that he wrote a certain chapter in a certain book last even though it wasn’t the last chapter in that book, which makes a lot of sense given what happens in it.
* Why don’t let’s take a stroll through Psycho with Ali Arikan.
* This Sunday sale at Jim Hanley’s Universe in NYC is one of the nuttiest things I’ve ever heard of: You buy a longbox for $25 and can stuff it with as many back issues as it can hold. Frank Santoro, clear your calendar.
Ex Machina Vols. 1-9
Brian K. Vaughan, writer
Tony Harris, artist
with John Paul Leon, Chris Sprouse, artists
DC/WildStorm, 2005-2010
various page counts
$12.99 each
There’s something lovably clunky about Ex Machina. Before we get to the lovably, let’s talk about the clunky, from the ripped-from-NPR political factoids that in some cases all but replace actual dialogue to the silent-movie mugging and gesticulating of Tony Harris’s photoref’d art. In my re-read of the series in three or four sittings prior to its imminent conclusion with issue #50, I was struck by just how clunky it is, particularly at first–much more so than I remember it.
Those first few issues get over largely on the strength of Brian K. Vaughan’s unfuckwithable high concept, the most button-pushing such idea in a career already full of them: Main character Mitchell Hundred is a New York City civil engineer whose contact with a mysterious artifact gives him the ability to communicate with machinery, inspiring him to launch a second career as a masked vigilante which culminates in his diversion of the airplane aimed at the second tower on 9/11 and leads to his election as mayor months later. So strong is that final page of the first issue, with one tower standing next to the light beam used to memorialize the second, that it’s easy to forget how Hundred’s politics are a “both sides make good points” centrist-pragmatist-contrarian hodgepodge that’s both unwieldy and unconvincing. Having the aforementioned both sides shout their points at Mitchell and one another via his various advisors, staffers, and constituents doesn’t help matters, especially because they’re usually concocted in such a way as to smack you over the head with “hey look how ideologically diverse this city is, you can’t pigeonhole anyone, we’re here to challenge your preconceptions, it’s not as simple as Left/Right black/white etc etc.” If you meet a priest, you can bet he’ll also be a boxer who takes the Lord’s name in vain; if a gay couple’s gonna get married, you’re damn straight they consist of one of the city’s, like, eight black firefighters and a Log Cabin Republican. Meanwhile they all point and shrug and flail about like they have some sort of neurological condition. It’s quite silly-sounding and silly-looking at times.
And yet! Just because a choice of how to write or draw something isn’t the choice I would have made doesn’t mean those choices can’t work on their own terms. For example, I always preferred Ex Machina to the other BKV book written in this vein, Y: The Last Man, because of Pia Guerra’s stiff art on the latter–even though I think that stiffness, that neither-fish-nor-fowl not quite naturalistic not quite cartoony look that was Vertigo’s house style for so long, is a big part of what makes that book such a hit with people new to comics: It’s simple and clear, yet not “childish.” Rereading Ex Machina this time around, I had a few flashes of suddenly thinking “Guerra Was Right”: Maybe her simplified, styleless figures are the perfect vehicles for Vaughan’s dialogue in his sociopolitically tinged series, where complex ideas are boiled down into streamlined approximations thereof in much the same way. Maybe Harris’s almost fumetti-like fealty to his models is what makes Vaughan’s Trivial Pursuit: Fiorello LaGuardia Edition dialogue feel so weird here and there.
But you know what Harris does have, in spades? Style, even glamour. Compared with the white glare of that other famous photorealist, Alex Ross, Harris’s art is awash in thick blacks that seem to make his figures both shine and swirl, and their eyes light up the room like Ellen DeGeneres’s when your’e watching American Idol in HD. (Seriously, that woman has unbelievable Lord of the Rings eyes.) Their world of constant grinning and shouting may be one uncanny valley removed from our own, but it’s still a world it seems like it’d be fun to hang out in, argue in, get embroiled in a political crisis or hostage situation in. It’s buoyant, it’s bright, and even the recurring grand-guignol violence feels like some sort of pop-art explosion as much as a series of brutal murders.
And in reading all nine of the currently collected volumes back to back, I discovered so much to enjoy about Vaughan’s writing, or more specifically his plotting. I’d never noticed before that each arc features a masked “villain” of some sort, even if it’s more likely to be someone who stole a fireman’s outfit from the set of Third Watch than a genuine “bad guy.” I also never picked up on the fact that while Hundred and his confidants self-consciously refer to Jack Pherson–a super-powered stalker who gained the ability to communicate with animals in an attempt to crack and duplicate Hundred’s power–as his “arch-enemy,” the book also features a real arch-enemy in the sense of a character plotting behind the scenes to take Hundred down for pretty much the series’ entire duration. In other words, like many heroes, Hundred has a “fighter” arch-enemy and a “thinker” arch-enemy. And by contrast with so many serialized genre entertainments of the past decade, the mythology elements are doled out so judiciously I’d forgotten they even existed. Seriously, you can go for twenty issues at a time before a given reference to the mystery of Hundred’s powers is repeated or followed up on; I can think of at least one very major one from the book’s second arc that still hasn’t been mentioned again. Once you get into it, even the speech becomes easy to enjoy. Vaughan clearly has a blast cussing, for one thing. Moreover, behind the didactic dialogue lurks the satirical concept that the only way to power through the avalanche of ossified bullshit that is politics and government is for a superhero to essentially bully people into it.
But it’s important to note that Vaughan in no way thinks this is a good idea. Indeed, the real secret to Ex Machina‘s success for me is that Vaughan announces, from the first page (set after Hundred’s term ends; everything that follows is a glorified flashback), that the story is a tragedy. Hundred’s personal heroism and political maverickiness will all end in unspecified disaster, perhaps for him, perhaps for the whole city–and as the issues go by, it seems possible that it’ll end in disaster for the whole world. All the characters who argue and chuckle and backslap their way through this whole NYC morality play have no idea what kind of story they’re actually in, but we do. Some rough beast is slouching toward Gracie Mansion, and the tension between the zesty surface gestures and the dark heart beneath is what will ultimately make these ten volumes worth returning to.
* From the moment I saw it, there was no doubt in my mind that this wonderfully violent red-band trailer for Neil Marshall’s Centurion would be today’s lead item. Two words: General McNulty.
* This hidden cache of scanned comics by everyone from Crockett Johnson to Dave Kiersh on Kevin Huizenga’s website is like the find of the year for me. Sadly, my attempt on Robot 6 to drum up other such treasure troves was mostly a bust.
* Ali Arkan’s piece on Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch makes me think that movie was even blacker than I rememeber. Arkan’s fast becoming one of my “sure, I’ll eat it” film critics.
* Here’s a fine tribute to five books published by Buenaventura Press from Matt Seneca. This panel-by-panel look at Frank Quitely’s work in Batman #700 is worth your time too.
* Very cool map of the Lost island by Jonah Adkins. I remember loving the hell out of the last Lost map this guy did. Click to enlarge. (Via Jason Adams and io9.)
* Today on Robot 6 I asked Johnny Ryan, Matt Furie, Lisa Hanawalt, Eric Reynolds, Brett Warnock, and Chris Pitzer for their reaction to the closure of Buenaventura Press. I also rounded up online commentary from Ted May, Tom Spurgeon, Heidi MacDonald, Jason Leivian, Frank Santoro, Tim Hensley,Tom Neely, and Chris Butcher, whose post on the matter deserves a link all its own.
* Yesterday HBO aired a teaser for Game of Thrones (note the absence of the indefinite article), its upcoming series based on the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, as well as a still of Sean Bean as Boromir Eddard Stark. I am over the goddamn moon for these books, so I’m quite excited about this.
(Initial news via Winter Is Coming. Embed via Show Tracker. Still via Westeros.)
* In addition, Martin has declared his blog a spoiler-free zone, so now you ought to be able to read it if your’e interested in the TV series but haven’t read the books.
* Ian McKellen says The Hobbit is in good shape: the sets and script are ready, the movie’s casting this month, and he expects shooting to begin by the end of 2010. So that’s good news.
* Also on Robot 6 today: DC is working on a live-action Blue Beetle series.
* Kevin Huizenga has a Fight or Run blog! So far it doesn’t seem to be as exciting as you probably think it is, but I have high hopes. (Via Douglas Wolk.)
* I’m starting to thing willfully misreading an argument and then making mincemeat out of it is just what the rump Comics Journal does. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)
* Zak Smith asks “What’s the Matter with Unicorns?”
* Johnny Ryan is getting blacker and blacker.
* So is Josh Simmons. I’m not even posting that one here.
* Patrick Rosenkranz visits the R. Crumb Genesis exhibit in Portland.
* Scott Pilgrim videogame trailer! To quote me sainted mother, Holy Moses Gaboses. Of course I will never play it because it’s not on the Wii, but still, this is hitting Double Dragon nostalgia buttons I didn’t know I had.
* I love Batman. I’d have included the horseback shot or that shot of him jumping out of the Bat-Tank to fight the Mutant Leader, though.
* Good stuff from Noel Freibert, as per usual.
* I’m normally not the sort of person who gets all excited when a zombie thing releases a picture of one of its zombie for promotional purposes, since the least you should expect from a zombie thing is impressive zombies, but this is some pretty strong work from Greg Nicotero for AMC’s The Walking Dead, sure.
* Real-Life Horror: “Congratulations to the U.S. for winning the right to wrongfully abduct people and send them to their torture with total impunity.”
* The loyal opposition. The Republican Party’s repeated intimations of militarization have disturbing implications.
* My chum Matthew Perpetua reviews the self-titled EP by Trent Reznor’s new band How to Destroy Angels for Pitchfork. Having listened to the EP again this afternoon I think I’d have been harder on it than Matthew; aside from the first song, “The Space In Between” (which is truncated in such a way as to reward listens on repeat), the rest is pretty much in one ear, out the other. But everything about the record, up to including Reznor’s comments about it, screams “transitional project,” so we’ll see where things go from here.
* Finally, the majesty of Diamondhead.
Studio Visit
James McShane, writer/artist
self-published, April 2010
48 pages
I don’t know how much it costs
Contact James McShane, I bet he can hook you up with a copy
Like his excellent minicomic Archaeology, James McShane’s Studio Visit explores the intersection of memory and environment. And like the cleverly conceived but ultimately more interesting in practice than in theory log-comic from Kramers Ergot and Ivan Brunetti’s Yale Anthology of Graphic Fiction, it explores the Heisenbergian interaction of lived experience and the recording thereof. It’s not as successful a comic as the former, nor as flat a comic as the latter. What it is is gestural, I think–McShane’s minimal lines, both of art and narration, get across a day in the life, from aspects of his daily routine to memories of past experiences evoked by objects he comes across in his house to his thoughts on process and his past works. That last bit’s maybe the most interesting–I was fascinated to hear that Archaeology was assembled in an almost Burroughsian cut-up fashion, and I also appreciated the quiet confidence in his explanation of how his very formal methods make him a better observer of what’s worth drawing. I think his…taste, maybe? gets away from here a bit–the memories he recounts of fun adventures in nature with friends are a bit on the twee side, the balletic image he chooses to represent “presenting the mundane with elan” is knowingly cheesy but cheesy nonetheless, and his vision of “growing” a story is depicted with too-literal gardening imagery. But the book isn’t intended to be anything more than what the title implies: a visit to the space, mental and physical, McShane inhabits when he works. This is where he was working on that particular day. It’s the recording of a step on a path, not of a destination reached.
Buenaventura Press is no more, completely shut down as of this past January. I talked to Alvin this afternoon and he told me it all comes down to a single problem that is legal in nature. Beyond that, he’s keeping his powder dry for now.
This is a real loss for comics. From keeping the pamphlet-style altcomic alive to publishing the seminal, indispensable Kramers Ergot to creating high-quality prints to just generally being a reliable friend of the best cartoonists around, Alvin and Buenaventura are and were the real deal. I hope this works out.
New Painting and Drawing
Ben Jones, writer/artist
PictureBox, 2008
32 pages, hardcover
$20
See a preview at BenjaminQJones.com
You can’t understand New Painting and Drawing until you have it in your hands. It shimmers, as though the Platonic ideal of the color Orange just gave birth to a bouncing baby book. I actually think the Platonic ideal is a good concept to keep in mind when looking at Paper Rad honcho Ben Jones’s stuff. It’s like, “So be it–if I must draw a dog, then let it be the best of all possible dogs!” So you get a dog that is as wide-eyed and jolly as any dog you’ve ever petted, but he’s also bright orange and pink and yellow and aqua and another shade of orange, and he looks like he just stepped out of some sort of electronic animal shelter run by Shigeru Miyamoto, and he’s placed against a background of white-and-gold diagonal stripes, the better to pop him off the page and into your eyeballs. You get religious-iconography pastiche, but the icon is like Jesus and Mary and a Greek Orthodox saint all rolled into one, and he’s wearing Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat and a Ring Pop, and he’s got a mustache and is pointing almost like Buddy Christ, and he’s placed against a sky that looks like Apocalypse Tron. Jones’s obsessive use of patterns, stripes, brick fields and so on, each tier done in as bright a neon as you please, serves to foreground everything, backgrounding nothing. Every part of every drawing is designed to be as exciting as possible. It is such a thrill looking at this book.
* Jeeeeeesus, look at what Matt Rota’s been drawing lately.
* Scott Tobias tackles Paul Verhoeven’s masterpiece, Starship Troopers, for the Onion AV Club’s New Cult Canon series. Man, I still remember what a eureka moment it was when I watched a making-of feature in which someone described the movie as one the Troopers’ society would make about themselves. I’d obviously grokked that it wasn’t the mindless idiocy it was cracked up to be before then, but that was when it all clicked.
* Today on Robot 6: Tom Brevoort trash-talks Titans titles;
* and John Porcellino’s awesome distribution/capsule-review blog.
* Congratulations to Frank Santoro on receiving that first Spidey check.
* Here’s an excellent review of the Cure’s flawless Disintegration from Nitsuh Abebe for Pitchfork. I like that Abebe foregrounds the emotionally provocative nature of the music, both to immiserate and to comfort.
* Wow, kudos to The Actors for discovering glo-fi/chillwave’s mitochondrial Eve. (Cf. this, this.) (Via Marc Hogan.)
* The decision to include the (SPOILERY AS HELL) information that will apparently be featured in a DVD-only epilogue to Lost in, well, a DVD-only epilogue instead of in a scene in the series finale is super-freaking-bizarre to me, but whatever, I’ll still be happy to see it and that’s how the show’s going to be experienced for the rest of forever. (Via Jason Adams.)
* The six words you’ve been waiting to hear: Benjamin Marra’s “Lingerie Models, Secret Assassins.”
* Go, look: Anders Nilsen’s “This Is Not the World and How to See It: A Short Idiosyncratic History of Visual Culture in 10,000 Small Round Shiny Fragments.” It’s an installation made of 10,000 buttons containing fragments of everything from Botticelli to Jack Kirby.
* LOL: Jon Abrams’s Covered contribution may be the funniest yet.
* Pretty stuff from Blaise Larmee for the Giant Robot Post-It show.
* Tom Spurgeon notes that it would never have occurred to him that Al Columbia’s disclosure of mental illness in his Comics Comics interview might be a hoax. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if someone else hadn’t done so first, but the thought did cross my mind (though only briefly and with much less conviction than it did for Patrick Ford, apparently). I see that one or two people seem to think that thinking this might be the case is some kind of slam of or insult to Columbia, so I wanted to explain what was going on there, at least for me. I think for a lot of people reading that interview, it was literally the first glimpse into Al Columbia that you’ve gotten outside of his comics. It certainly was for me; I wasn’t around when Columbia was more of a fixture on the scene. So I for one had no idea whether he was more likely to be a puckish prankster fabulist in the Tony Millionaire mode than someone who really was repeatedly hospitalized for violent hallucinations. Wondering if the former was more likely than the latter wasn’t an insult to Columbia, as some of the people in that CC thread suggested. It was a way of choosing the interpretation that was more common in terms of outsized comics personalities, and the interpretation that pointed toward a much less horrifying and terrible situation for Columbia himself.
Gags and Sloe Black
Michael DeForge, writer/artist
self-published
Gags – 18 pages, 2007; Sloe Black – 12 pages, 2008
Read them at DeForge’s website
These are sort of more what I anticipated when I got a package full of Michael DeForge comics in the mail–arty, xeroxy, at times consciously illegible transmissions from an alien design aesthetic. That’s almost all there is to Sloe Black, a small zine showcasing a series of vaguely humanoid shapes constructed with twisting, dripping, rope-like lines, and triangles and dots repeated with an almost schizophrenic intensity. These aren’t comics or narrative images, not by a longshot–they’re a visual braindump, they’re what you sort of imagined abstract painting was supposed to be about. It’s sort of like getting a sense of what DeForge’s “sound” is before you hear it applied to a song structure.
You get more of that sort of thing in Gags. Though the art is slightly less far out, it’s still drawing on that same basic melty, drippy, metal-illustration-influenced visual vocabulary, with a series of portraits of monstrous, faceless figures made of goo and teeth. But they’re juxtaposed with a series of well-chosen non sequiturs from everyday dude-life. “You don’t understand–playing drums is my life” reads the all-caps caption for a beast with a mouth growing out the side of its head and a knife with which he’s exposing his own ribcage; “Fuckin’ Carlos man–dude scares off so much pussy” says a beast whose body sits atop its head rather than the other way around. Besides having a flair for the zine-culture grotesque, DeForge has a great comedic ear for what happens in the company of bros.
* Quote of the day:
One would have to assume that because of the overwhelming popularity of the iPad Marvel App, there are people who have it who may never have ventured into a comic shop or perhaps lost interest in comics many years ago and are curious as to what’s been happening in our fantastic universe. The hope is that we capitalize on that and the high profile of Iron Man, get readers interested in this single story and from there, if they want to purchase more or purchase that issue, they are directed to comic shops. So it’s a sales and marketing test and just one of a few we have coming up.
—Joe Quesada, CCO and EIC of Marvel Comics, on day-and-date digital releases. ‘Nuff said?
* I thought it boded ill that the Jonathan Hickman/Dale Eaglesham run on Fantastic Four was so quickly reduced to the just-plain Jonathan Hickman run on Fantastic Four, but now I see Captain America‘s Steve Epting will be the new regular FF artist and all is forgiven.
* Curt Purcell bids bon voyage to Blackest Night with his final post on the event.
* Real-Life Horror: “Obama is not only protecting repugnant crimes and the criminals who committed them, but also ensuring that they will occur again.”
* Gorgeous dance music, glass half full edition: “Scribble” (album version), by Underworld feat. High Contrast. Pure joy.
* Gorgeous dance music, glass half empty edition: “Dancing on My Own” live, by Robyn. Man is she magnetic, man does she sell the longing. America, if La Roux can get onto Top 40 radio, if Katy Perry and Ke$ha can have big hits by crassly recycling the years-old melodic progression of “Love at First Sight” by Kylie Minogue, then surely we can make this a hit. The middle-school girls of America are waiting to be knocked on their asses by this song when their summer crushes spurn them for someone else. Let’s make this happen.
* Good God, Nicole Rudick’s interview with Al Columbia for Comics Comics is such a monster. I’ll admit that I wondered if it’s a put-on, that’s what a mind-melter it is. I mean, goddamn:
[Al Columbia:] My dad, for some reason, didn’t have the sense that a child shouldn’t see horror movies. He took me to see a lot of horror movies when I was a kid, or I’d get to see them on TV or HBO. He didn’t seem to have that filter: “Oh yeah, maybe he shouldn’t watch that. It could be disturbing.” So I was exposed to a lot of very disturbing images at a young age, which later in life came back in a strange way to haunt me, which I would never have expected.
[Nicole Rudick:] In what way did they haunt you?
Intrusive thoughts of a violent nature haunted me, made me pretty sick, actually, for a few years. I couldn’t get them out of my head.
Images from those films?
I believe they had to have been, or the movies had to have influenced something. They were unwanted images. They weren’t fantasies but constant terrifyingly violent images or ideas piercing into my everyday life. I’d be watching TV and the next thing you know the newscaster . . . I would imagine, without warning, something bad happening to the people on TV or to somebody I knew. I couldn’t really look at someone without them immediately becoming dismembered or in some way murdered in my head.
Does that still happen?
No, not anymore. But it happened for a good three-year period, about three or four years ago, where I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work on anything. I almost couldn’t function properly in everyday life. I never knew when it would happen. Not only were they scary images, but there was a spiritual quality to it that made me feel like something was in jeopardy, something wasn’t right with me.
That’s certainly how Pim & Francie felt. Anyway, like I said on Robot 6 one of the most striking things about the rest of the interview is how drawing comics only makes things worse for Columbia. This reminds me a lot of what Josh Cotter said about what was going on behind Driven by Lemons. My two favorite comics of 2009 were both the products of mental illnesses that were exacerbated rather than ameliorated by their creation. Jeez.
* Day-and-date digital-comics update: Brigid Alverson surveys the comics-commentariat landscape that existed before Marvel’s announcement of the same-day release of Invincible Iron Man Annual in print and via the Marvel Comics app. Heidi MacDonald surveys the post-announcement landscape. Tom Spurgeon wonders how digital publishing will affect the financial health of creators, something he thinks should be a lot closer to the front of any discussion about digital publishing.
* Related: A while back, I said I thought we’d see moves toward same-day digital release of comics sometime this year, Dirk Deppey said no we wouldn’t, last week we did, and so…Dirk was right? JK LOL ROTFLMAO! We hash things out in the comments a bit, which is a fun read if you’re the sort of person who’d like to see a scene in the Hall of Progress dedicated to what it was like to discuss comics in the Comics Blogosphere of 2003.
* Today on Robot 6: Ian Sattler works for the green skins…and helped out the pink skins…and done considerable for the blue skins…only there’re skins he never bothered with–!
* Jason Overby visits the Ben Jones exhibit at the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth. The comments are worth a read too, for a discussion of artists who fall out of comics and for whom the medium is not a necessary component of their artistic project.
* Matthew Perpetua on the Voltron cartoon and toy relaunch: “This is good news for little boys, and bad news for anyone hoping for a very serious hard sci-fi film about a giant robot made out of mechanical lions.”
* My blog chum and former classmate Eve Tushnet has been profiled by The New York Times! Eve and I have a lot of pop-cultural overlap but virtually zero sociopolitical overlap. Haha–to cope with our mutual freshman year, she became a Catholic, while I started drinking.
* Real-Life Horror: Megadittos to Atrios and Andrew Sullivan on the installation of torture as a Republican Party platform plank.
* Related: The Bush Administration torture program as human medical experimentation.
* Mike Barthel on “the retro valley.” Thank you for coming up with the perfect phrase for the exact musical phenomenon my wife and I were discussing not 24 hours ago.
Lose #1-2
Michael DeForge, writer/artist
Koyama, 2009-2010
24 pages each
$5 each
You could be forgiven for thinking Michael DeForge’s solo anthology series would be, and I’m using this word in its value-neutral sense, a mess. In terms of the vibe DeForge’s work gives off in single illustrative images, or in his dense and frequently deliberately illegible all-font/logo-design installment in Frank Santoro’s Cold Heat Special series, or in his xeroxed minicomics, or even on the covers of these very comics, the operative word is “noise.” And it’s a sort of noise that owes more to both the toner-smeared world of zine culture and the fine-arty fine-lined zaniness of Canadian art-toonists like Marc Bell or Keith Jones, than to the chunky, punky, living, breathing environments of the Fort Thunderites. Throw in those noxious, acidic greens on the slick covers, and it might present the kind of surface your eye would bounce right off and move on.
Don’t let it! Because as it turns out, DeForge’s actual comics, as contained in these two issues, are straightforward, funny, and sharp as a knife. Inside, he wields a precise line to create character designs that read like a slightly more avant-garde version of what you might see on a post-millennial Nickelodeon cartoon. The storytelling and punchlines are always crystal-clear even as the material bounces back and forth between long-form, surreal horror stories and laser-precise gag strips. In the latter category, which mostly crops up in the first issue, DeForge uses anthropomorphized dogs and the superheroes of the Justice League to skewer the foibles of college students and their immediately post-graduation counterparts with laser precision. (Dog #1: “Lately, I don’t even know if I enjoy walks.” Dog #2: “You’re overthinking it. Did you finish The Wire yet?”; Green Lantern: “Things have been crazy for me lately”. Batman: “Is that why we’re spending League money on art school?!” Green Lantern: “We all voted on that, Bruce! We all voted!“)
The longer stories fruitfully work that horror-comedy sweet spot a lot of young cartoonists are mining these days, a great thrill to me because the comedy tends to actually be funny, and the horror black as midnight. In issue #1, a cartoon conscience rebels against God after being sent to dissuade yet another comics artist from suicide, only to be sentenced to a Hell inhabited by cartoon characters and their creators. What starts as a lampoon of art-comics culture every bit as successful as the college stuff veers into nightmarish action-horror territory as our hero narrowly, and I mean very narrowly, escapes evisceration and ritual sacrifice at the hands of two former funny-animal characters whose appearances have devolved into monstrous deformation and shadow. In issue #2, virtually all the page space is devoted to a long and no-fucking-around nasty horror story about a little kid who manages to domesticate a large spider whose brethren are simultaneously ushering in a quite lethal and disgusting plague-style demise for his uncaring family and abusive classmates. Imagine Skyscrapers of the Midwest weaponized and you’re almost there.
With these two issues–cogent in conception, confident in execution, and surely just an early step in a promising stylistic evolution–DeForge has landed himself on my must-watch list. Give ’em a shot, see if he lands on yours.
Iron Man 2 entertained me from beginning to end. Who knew that what I was looking for in a superhero movie was wall-to-wall banter, occasionally interrupted by games of Rock’em Sock’em Robots?
To me it was a fine second act that picked up where the first film left off in the sense that it presupposed you were fond of these characters and the Iron Man concept. That way, it could have Tony and Pepper and Rhodey take their BFF chops-busting patter just a little too far, make it a little too manic, as their collective situation took a turn for the worse. It could make Tony’s cockiness, like at the Senate hearing, seem like it clearly has the potential to be destructive for him, even if in the moment you enjoy his triumph over his rivals. It could make the quest of rogue nations and unscrupulous scientists to produce Iron Men of their own feel totally logical, difficult to pull off but dangerous should they succeed, not just to the country but to Stark personally.
With that foundation, you just trot out a suite of funny performances from actors who make their every appearance on screen feel like a pissing contest with the other characters, an attempt to impress them with their intelligence and wit and charm, even though the situation is such that that usually doesn’t cut it. Robert Downey Jr. pulled off pushing Stark’s charm offensive into purely offensive territory, and then dialing it back down in a way where you’d forgive him. Sam Rockwell played Justin Hammer like the scrapped pilot episode of Tony Startk, before it was recast and recut and became a huge hit; I enjoyed how he was always nervously projecting alpha-male vibes even though he was constantly two steps behind of everyone he dealt with. Don Cheadle has Terrence Howard’s easy familiarity with Tony built in, but I bought the way he was constantly on the lookout for a way both to take care of his friend and best him in some way or other–a friendly rivalry where both the friendship and the rivalry were intact. I’d actually forgotten how effective and adorable Gwyneth Paltrow is in the girl friday role, and thought it was funny that she brought that same skill set of quietly but firmly dismissing idiocy in favor of getting the job done to her new role as CEO. Mickey Rourke was scary and convincingly single-minded–I dug how he mostly avoided giving a Hannibal Lecture and never deviated from a simple goal of revenge, which as we learn was sort of justified to boot. The two iffiest performances are the proto-Avengers turns from Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson, but in both cases what you might see as weaknesses I ended up digging: Nick Fury feels like he dropped in from a whole ‘nother movie, which I guess is how the world’s top spy would feel in a superhero world like this one, and even if it wasn’t intentional, maybe emotionless and dead behind the eyes is precisely how an experienced double-agent spy-assassin like the Black Widow would be.
Normally I’d argue that as with any superhero story, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is the fight sequences. In this case, the movie is so much more a battle of wits than a battle of emotion that I think that’s actually less true than it usually is, but as it turns out the fights were fun and as well choreographed as you’re likely to see in a superhero movie. They took advantage of their environments, they utilized the unique capabilities of the armor suits involved, and with the exception of the flying chase (which was way too darkly lit, probably to hide the CGI work) their stages and stakes were easy to understand. I mean, you have to hand it to a fight scene where a key beat is having your limo driver run a dude over and pin him to a chainlink fence.
Most importantly, I never felt like my intelligence was being insulted, and trust me, after going to see freaking Clash of the Titans in the freaking theater, I definitely needed that from my summer action blockbuster. If anything, I felt like the stupidity of the cool-guy trappings Stark surrounds himself with was being winked at–that gloriously tasteless AC/DC stripperobics routine at the beginning, for example, felt like the movie was Steely Danning the G4 generation. And the addition of characters never felt like superhero-sequelitis to me; the various combinations of players moved the plot forward rather than weighing it down or making it scatterbrained. A delight! I hope you enjoy it if you see it.
* Gamechanger: Marvel is releasing Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 digitally via their iPad app the same day it hits stores in print format. Day-and-date digital release has finally come to the Big Two–albeit in what strikes me as a judicious fashion. To wit:
* It’s only one book right now. It’s a major movie character people will recognize, and it comes from a run of comics that’s both quite good and seems appealing to fans of those movies. It’s going onto the very zeitgeisty iPad, Dirk Deppey be damned. And of course it can bask in the awestruck adulation that’s always generated whenever DC or Marvel is the first to do a particular thing–y’know, like kicking off your link roundup with words like “gamechanger.”
* More importantly, if you buy the comic for the iPad in its three chapter-long chunks for $2 a pop, it ends up costing you $1 more than the $4.99 print version. In other words, it’s a way to get people who don’t want or can’t go to a comic shop, or to whom the very idea of buying print comics at a comic shop is totally irrelevant, to buy the book without incentivizing the people who do go to the shops every Wednesday to pick up the print version to ditch the shop and buy it online instead. That’s a pretty neat way to square the circle. It doesn’t answer how they’ll competitively but not destructively price a book that doesn’t contain 66 story pages, and it certainly doesn’t mitigate against the already overpriced monthly pamphlet format in the first place, but still, it seems smart.
* Anyway, if you wanna get a picture of what’s at stake with the dawn of day-and-date digital release, here are some recent pieces to read:
* Me, and Dirk and Brian in the comments
* Finally, to reiterate something I allude to above, Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man run has been really good, and it makes me happy to be able to fully get behind a comic that will be making a big popcultural splash again–just like I was able to do when Ed Brubaker’s Death of Captain America storyline hit big.
* I have a half-day of work so I’m G’ing TFO of the city, but if you’re in Brooklyn, why not go see an exhibition of work by the talented (and extraordinarily friendly!) Brian Chippendale?
* Hope Larson has finished a 398-page draft of her A Wrinkle in Time adaptation! This’ll be something to see.
* Tom Spurgeon talks to the great retailer, convention organizer, and too-infrequent-these-days blogger Chris Butcher about various and sundry things. One thing I’ve always meant to say about Chris is that he and I tussled now and then in the earlier days of the comics blogosphere, but a couple years back I bumped into him in the Chicago airport as we both waited to transfer onto the same flight to San Diego, and he simply could not have been friendlier during the time we talked and ate lunch together, especially considering he was with a few people and I was all alone. Chris is an opinionated guy, and any opinionated person who puts his opinions on public display over the course of years is going to get in arguments with other opinionated people from time to time, by the very definition of being opinionated. But it’s the opinions that matter to a fellow like Chris, not scoring cool points on his own behalf nor kicking other people in the teeth, and I think that’s a good indicator of why his TCAF show is the success that it is. Dude cares about good comics.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (and said it long before The Sopranos, because that’s how fucking awesome I am): Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” is basically Joy Division’s “Transmission” in terms of structure and sentiment, and both are incredible songs.
* My big problem with M.I.A. in that infamous Lynn Hirschberg profile, in terms of the thing that made me think less of her as a person, didn’t involve saying provocative and simplistic things about politics, which is par for the pop-star course a lot of the time, nor whether she did or didn’t order or eat fancy french fries, which I think anyone who either has enough money or is being taken out to lunch on the New York Times’ expense account might want to do–it was the part where she called Lady Gaga ugly. That’s just straight-up middle-school Mean Girls nastiness. Moreover, I think it comes from M.I.A.’s envy of Gaga’s career as the superstar arty weirdo of pop, which Gaga carved out for herself through talent and ambition and which M.I.A. has only been able to come within shouting distance of thanks to the commercials for Pineapple Express. I listen to a lot of musicians who have behaved abominably toward people–David Bowie’s entire career is littered with close friends and collaborators who suddenly found themselves summarily cut off–so it’s not a dealbreaker, but I think it’s a lot more revealing about M.I.A.’s personality and maturity than all the stuff about the Tamil Tigers and truffle fries.
* Check out “Mario’s Ladder,” a little video about Mario by Cory Godbey. Henry Benjamin Kammer’s piano arrangements of the Super Mario Bros. theme music and Star music sound gorgeous in this video, which also captures the sort of transcendent feeling that the Mario games have increasingly and delightfully tapped into now and then.
“bit and run” — Mario’s Ladder from Cory Godbey on Vimeo.
* I love Steely Dan.
Bodhisattva / Black Cow / Rikki Don’t Lose That Number / Reelin’ In the Years / Hey Nineteen / Black Friday / The Caves of Altamira / Any Major Dude Will Tell You / Sign In Stranger / Pretzel Logic / I Got the News / Bad Sneakers / My Old School / Babylon Sisters / Your Gold Teeth / Peg / Josie
Steely Dan were simultaneously the apotheosis of the smooth, slick ’70s radio sound now known as yacht rock and the most vicious satirists of the sorts of people who listened to and made it–themselves included! Has there ever been another act like that? Maybe if LCD Soundsystem had found a way to make an entire career out of songs as scathing as “Losing My Edge”? Anyway, that’s just one of the ironic contrasts that makes the Dan so compelling and compulsively listenable to me. You’ve also got the fact that songwriters and core (and by the end, only) bandmembers Donald Fagen and Walter Becker created a “jazz-rock” sound wherein the improvisatory, beauty-from-mistakes heart of jazz was entirely replaced by obsessive studio tinkering. You’ve got them recruiting an army of ace session guys and genuine virtuosos, from Skunk Baxter to Michael McDonald to Wayne Shorter, to support one of the most sardonic singing voices in rock history. You’ve got them devolving into precisely the sort of coked-up abusive solipsistic rich California bohemian assholes they made a career out of skewering. There’s a lot going on–but if you want to just kick back and enjoy the wordplay, the absurd musical proficiency, the summertime grooves, and the sick licks, go right ahead.
This is a collection of some, but by no means all, of my favorite Steely Dan songs from their initial 1972-1980 run. Believe me, it was a bitch to cut it down this far–“Any World (That I’m Welcome To),” “Throw Back the Little Ones,” “Parker’s Band,” and “Deacon Blues” were all in the playlist at one point, and I could just as easily have included “Home at Last,” “Aja” (so yes, basically the entirety of Aja), “Doctor Wu,” “Do It Again,” “Dirty Work,” “Midnite Cruiser,” “Kings,” “Show Biz Kids,” “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” “Night by Night,” “Kid Charlemagne,” “The Royal Scam”…really, these guys wrote just a ton of solid, hook-laden songs about their proto-hipster demimonde and the criminal underworld with which it occasionally intertwined. Enjoy.
Wally Gropius
Tim Hensley, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, May 2010
64 pages, hardcover
$18.99
Wally Gropius is more than just the main character of Tim Hensley’s elaborate and arch parody of ’60s teen-comedy and child-billionaire comics–he’s more like the language it’s told in, or better yet the font it uses. Hensley arranges him in poses whose pantomime exaggeration recall the primary mode of body language in any given Archie comic, but always in some bizarrely off-model and angular variation thereof. His pipe-like arms and legs, his clasping, grasping, pointing hands, even his squinting eyes and trapjawed mouth and flattened cranium (his hair color says “Archie Andrews” but his skull says “Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein”) all conspire to make him as much a pictogram as a person. Watching him and his equally gangly, geometric cohorts stretch and sprint and smash their way across Hensley’s brighly colored backgrounds and block-lettered sound effects is like reading your favorite poem–or even, as we see in a panel that became my Rosetta Stone for the book, Wally Gropius itself–as translated into a language with a totally different alphabet. What you know is in there, somewhere, but to use a frequently repeated line from the book, you just can’t quite put your finger on it.
Hensley pulls off a similar switcheroo with the writing itself. Instead of the instantly dated “hip” slang used by the middle-aged men who wrote the comics that Wally Gropius uses as a springboard, he subs in a nonsense patter that apes the self-assured argot of the plutocracy. Whether it’s Wally’s oblique strategies for his beloved Jillian Banks’s recording session (“You really almost had it there, but it’s still kind of teal. Can you sing it with a bit more cadmium?”), Wally and Thaddeus’s simultaneously ratcheted-up and abstracted fight over dating (“But, Dad, I wanna be a lothario speedwagon. Troubadours don’t submit to picture brides. They engage in felching with awestruck camel toe.” “Again with the CAMEL TOE! My own son!”), or the frequent direct references to finance and industry (“Petroleum is the seat of the soul,” “What good is Mammon if one can’t purchase reliable athmosphereic conditions?” “Wally, will you please clean your room? There are far too many denominations about.”), I can’t help but hear echoes of the ouroborosian discourse, cocksure and utterly divorced from reality, that led the economy off a cliff.
And wonder of wonders, the book finds its own way to be really funny amid all these highfalutin hijinks, and often in a direct, even lowbrow way. Obviously anyone who’s read this stuff has gotten a kick out of the sound effects, from the slamming bank-vault door that goes “TRUMP!” to Wally vomiting up a bellyful of money with a “HEAR$T!” The thing is filled with eyeball kicks like that, my favorites being the library bookshelf filled top to bottom with Tom Clancy, the baseball-stadium jumbotron sponsored by Summer’s Eve, and the Buddhist monk lighting himself on fire next to a placard that reads “U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA.” There’s a diarrhea joke, there’s a cameo from an ’80s pop-culture icon, and there’s an incest sequence that is one of the most shocking, hilarious, perfectly paced things you’ll read all year.
“Well, Mom, what does it say?” asks Wally over a memorable shot of a disemboweled bird from whose entrails his mother hopes to divine the future. (Of course, we never get the answer.) I think you can figure out what Wally Gropius is saying, provided you keep in mind the combination of confidence and impenetrability that Hensley hits on so memorably in both writing and art. The tale’s in the telling.
