George W. Bush is a dimwit. There, I just saved you a couple of bucks. Ah, I’m being way too harsh, there–Jim Rugg is a true illustrative talent, and in this minicomic pastiche of the Rambo movies and satire of the Bush Administration and post-9/11 America generally he slips and slides between various alternative-comics styles, from slick and cartoony to editorial-page-y to an almost Frank Santoroish shot of John Rambo viewing Ground Zero, with vigor and ease. The problem is that it’s in service of not much at all, particularly when compared with the surprisingly fecund material in Rugg’s similarly minded mash-up of pop-cult-trash and politics, Afrodisiac. Bush is here presented in a way you’ve seen him a million times before, a moronic, sneering fratboy manchild-of-privilege who’s both bloodthirsty and personally cowardly, and it’s not really any funnier here than it was in all the altweekly political cartoons you remember. Similarly, the portrayal of Rambo is solidly aligned with the Reagan-jingoist interpretation that jibes most closely with the second and third installments of his series, and with the very basic Bush-bashing the comic’s interested in. The complicating weirdness of the first and fourth films–in which Rambo is a victim of American adventurism rather than an exponent of it (the former) and a spiritually crippled killing machine and avatar of Conradian horror (the latter)–is ignored altogether. The comic’s the poorer for this, since I think the country’s blind stumbling rage, which if anything seems worse now than it did then, makes a far more compelling subject for exploration than the easy-target “America, Fuck Yeah”itude found in the umpteenth hyuk-hyuk Bush joke. Here’s hoping Josh Simmons makes Rambo 4.5.
* The crack team of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman are going to turn Stephen King’s Dark Tower series into a movie, then a TV series, then another movie, then another TV series, and presumably so on until it’s all done. As longtime Attentiondeficitdisorderly readers can no doubt guess, I have deeply mixed feelings about this. The idea of The Dark Tower is one of the best things King has ever done; glimpsing it from afar via the various, relatively low-key references and connections to it in his work prior to the mid-’90s was absolutely thrilling; the original version of The Gunslinger is probably his best pure prose; here and there throughout the series he does fallen-world post-apocalyptic science-and-sorcery as well as anyone has ever done it; everything else is 100% pure garbage, the worst things I’ve ever read by him, among the worst things I’ve ever read by anyone, powerfully awful enough to almost destroy my interest in reading anything by him again. Also, y’know, Howard/Godsman. But who knows, maybe the bullshit will get lost in translation and you’ll be left with the fairly compelling genre mash-up weirdness that’s the novels’ skeleton.
* Quote of the day #1 comes from Brigid Alverson: “I would ask them to redesign the original to include Wonder Woman, rather than giving the girls their own logo. But then, if I start thinking about it real hard I’ll start worrying about other causes like pay equity or health care and education for girls in developing countries, and I just get all distracted.”
* Quote of the day #2 comes from Tom Spurgeon: “Every day I grow more suspicious that this particular game hasn’t already been lost, and that the comics industry has completed its transformation into an industry that has given up on every modest means of making money independently for the dubious honor of generating the occasional flash flood of money for others, hundreds of people sustained by the hope, no matter how impractical, that they will be one of the lucky, tiny few allowed to benefit.”
* Quote of the day #3 comes from Josh Marshall, on the Real Life Horror tip: “This is the standard approach of race haters and demagogues. They keep stirring the pot, churning out demonizing rhetoric and hate speech. Then some marginal figure does something nuts and suddenly … oh, wait, I didn’t mean burn Korans. Where’d you get that idea from? We were just saying that Islam is a violent, anti-American religion and that American Muslims should stop building their mosques and focus on apologizing for 9/11 and maybe get out of America. But burn the Koran? No way.”
* More Real Life Horror: Congratulations to President Obama for winning for the United States government the right to kidnap, imprison, torture, and murder people with impunity. Thank goodness he and his relative decorum and presumably shamefaced public silence on these issues will never be replaced by anyone whose party and supporters unapologetically endorse and full-heartedly embrace the use of these powers against anyone deemed an enemy, or else we’d be in real trouble someday!
* Let’s end things on a cheerier note: Matthew Perpetua’s interview with Greg Milner continues, touching this time on the Loudness War between New York radio stations Z-100 and WPLJ. Many Morning Zoo DJs died to bring us this information.
The strongest moments in A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s songs usually don’t come right away. They tend to emerge at some point deeper into the track at hand–an insistent beat, a plinky-plunky string-instrument hook, a vocal line given sudden luminous solidity after a few minutes of amorphousness. “Drink drank drunk” does it backwards. “When you say I’m alright / this happens all the time / when you stay out all night / without you I’ll just die” is how it begins, the vocals unusually firm and clear as a bell. Then, as a toe-tapping beat kicks in, “When you stop, I’ll stop, okay,” repeated four times, mantra-like, the “‘kay” splitting off into high-pitched harmony each time. And then? Blam! Swirly, buzzy, happy wall-of-sound in the mighty Sunny Day in Glasgow manner, getting progressively more swirly and buzzy and happy for the duration of the song until it sort of tinkles and shudders to a close. The only truly decipherable lyrics after everything kicks in are a semi-triumphant-sounding “Hold my head / I can’t find the keys to my house / I’m never going home again.” If we are to take the song’s conjugated title as a roadmap, that opening section is first a reason to drink, and then a quick four-shot montage sequence of the singer and someone else egging themselves on into inebriation, a state that the rest of the song evokes to a nicety. Which is a rare thing, actually. I’ve heard plenty of music that sounds like being stoned or tripping, but capturing that headlong jovial buzz a night of low-impact yet still purposeful drinking gives you, until you finally stumble into bed and swing out into sleep? That’s quite a feat, and hangover-free.
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* I have not made a secret of my enthusiasm for Stephen Frears’s upcoming film of Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel Tamara Drewe, but wouldja believe that until I saw the new trailer below I hadn’t even noticed that the guy who played Evil Christopher Hitchens in Speed Racer was in it? Something must have been distracting me; I’ve no clue what it could be.
Yep, totally at a loss.
* The Missus and I have done a decent amount of biking near our suburban home recently, and the trip to the bike path usually involves coming or going along a very busy stretch of thoroughfare. This has made us hyper-aware of the difficulty, if not outright danger, posed to non-car travelers along such roads, whether bikers or pedestrians. That’s why this Matthew Yglesias post on ergonomic crosswalks and the need to psychologically recalibrate our conception of who owns the roadway brought a big smile to my face.
* So too is Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, if Milner’s interview with Matthew Perpetua is any indication. Fascinating stuff about the making of the sound of recorded music, from Steely Dan to Steve Albini, Mutt Lange to James Murphy.
* Sexy gothy vampirey stuff generally isn’t my thing–True Blood is sexy, gothy, and vampirey, but rarely all at once–but I stumbled across this piece called “The Turning” by Randis courtesy of my pal Lontra Phoenix and found it to be pretty hot stuff.
* The “deal with it” meme has reached its zenith. Shit, memes in general have reached their zenith. (Via Douglas E. Sherwood.)
* Rest in peace, Glenn Shadix. My wife and I have spent years, literally years, wondering aloud why Glenn Shadix in general and Otho from Beetlejuice in particular aren’t iconic. “I was one of New York’s leading experts in the paranormal…till the bottom dropped out in ’72.”
Again with the brown for the cover, but alright, fine, I’m clearly on the losing end of this aesthetic battle with D&Q and I accept that. What’s far more interesting here, and it’s a shame if the drab cover (not to mention the choice of grayscale for the interiors) obscure this, is the story of Kaspar itself. Or rather himself–Obomsawin here traces through contemporaneous accounts the life of one Kaspar Hauser, who for five years around 1830 intrigued and baffled European society with his amazing story of spending his first 16 years kept in total isolation with no human contact whatsoever before being taught some rudimentary language and handwriting by a mysterious man in black who then left him in Nuremberg to fend for himself. Kaspar’s story is one of a kind of cruelty my mind and soul virtually invert themselves to avoid having to deal with–I’m reminded of the story my wife told me from one of her psych courses, about a 19th-century experiment that used loud noises to condition a baby to be so afraid of bunnies that eventually he couldn’t even see a cotton ball without screaming. There’s something so unspeakably awful about human beings harming the human beinghood of a child right from the start that when I came across lines from Kaspar like “There is straw on the ground where I sit and sleep–it never occurs to me to want to stand up,” or the idea that he doesn’t know there even is anything else but himself, the bread and water he’s brought while sleeping, and the toy horse he’s locked up with, part of me just wants to run and hide. The trick of the book upon Hauser’s Chauncey Gardiner-like entrance into high society is using his literal inability to fathom the cruelty done to him (how can he–until now he had no context for what he was missing) and his appreciation for simple things like the color red or the concept of distance as a proxy for our own rejection of such monstrousness and a way to awaken our own lust for life respectively.
Of course, a visit to Wikipedia reveals that Hauser was almost certainly a peerless goldbricker, something his various patrons almost all cottoned to eventually, and from which the mysterious accidents and “assaults” that repeatedly befell and eventually killed him were likely self-inflicted to distract. Obomsawin’s choices to tell the story from Kaspar’s first-person perspective and to draw it in a simplistic, childlike, unadorned fashion we naturally scan as a direct outgrowth of Kaspar’s naivete–not to mention her one-page direct-address strip at the end, detailing her research for us, her “dear readers”–are a conscious effort to put aside the controversy and tease metaphorical meaning out of a story that’s too good to check. But if you’re like me, your mind already scrambled its way to “oh, this has gotta be a hoax, he must have been putting them on” long before you closed the book and opened up Google, and so the whole time you’re reading you’re wondering not just what Kaspar’s suffering, his reaction to society, and society’s reaction to him say to us–you’re wondering what the fact that someone could fake all that stuff says to us as well. I’m still wondering. In a way, the need in someone who’d do that is every bit as deep and devastating as the need in someone who was like that for real.
* Also, for a few hours I had all the videos from my 80 Great Tracks from the 1990s list behind a jump, until I discovered that you can’t actually access the “after the jump” part of the post anymore. Sigh. Back into the main body they go; my apologies if this has the same deleterious effect on your browsing as it does on mine. I don’t like to metablog, but I want to assure my long-suffering readers and commenters that steps are being taken to drastically improve your Attentiondeficitdisorderly experience.
* Hey look, it’s a website and teaser trailer for Dash Shaw’s next animation project, The Ruined Cast. Shaw’s collaborators on this one include John Cameron Mitchell and Frank Santoro. For real. (Via Eric Reynolds.)
* Even though I have no brief with either of the two films it’s nominally about, I love this Matt Zoller Seitz piece on why we need more “adult” movies–movies that can’t be fully understood or enjoyed by children or the childish, as he puts it; “movies that let you spend time with morally compromised characters and that sort of hang back a bit directorially, letting the scenes and situations breathe, and mostly resisting the urge to tell you what the movie thinks of anyone, preferring instead to simply present the characters and let you feel however you want to feel.” I have to say, between this and his earlier, infamous “superheroes suck!” piece (Peter David notwithstanding), becoming a bit of an aesthetic scold is a good look for Seitz, much more so than it’s been for Roger Ebert, say. (Ebert’s been there for decades, of course.) I feel like there’s a connection to be made here between the mainstreaming of nerd culture and subsequent militant embrace of its most simplistic and bankrupt aspects and the way the recent acceptance of genre by comics’ smart set seems to have severely curtailed the discussion of non-genre work, but that’s probably poorly thought-through overreach and I know several smart people who tell me I’m just plain wrong about that anyway.
* These long weekends have been bizarrely link-rich as of late, so rather than make this evening’s regularly scheduled Carnival more like a Disney Theme Park, I figured I’d throw an A.M. edition together. Great day in the morning!
* Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle: Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree, the…thematic sequel, I guess? to his ’70s horror masterpiece The Wicker Man, is actually happening, and this teaser trailer is the proof. Nearly impossible to say for sure with a few lines of dialogue and five seconds of footage, but dare I say it actually seems good? (Via Bloody Disgusting.)
* whoa: “Right Thing the Wrong Way: The Story of Highwater Books”, an art show based on Tom Devlin’s late great publishing imprint and featuring work by Jeff Zekaj, Megan Kelso, Brian Ralph, Ron Rege Jr., Marc Bell, Greg Cook, Jordan Crane, and Kurt Wolfgang, coming soon to Boston’s Fourth Wall Project. I’m actually tempted to drive up there for this.
* Chris Arrant talks to Paul Pope about THB and Battling Boy–one thing I like a lot about Paul is how candid he is regarding behind-the-scenes goings-on;
*and Chris Arrant also notes delays in Grant Morrison’s work for DC. It has to be a concern for the publisher that, for all intents and purposes, two guys drive their entire line. I’d be more worried about any hiccups in Geoff Johns’s schedule, given just how much of the line he holds down singlehandedly, how much the rest of the line revolves around the stories and events he cooks up, and the fact that he just got a major desk-job promotion that surely takes time away from his comics writing.
* Ben Morse of The Cool Kids Table takes a whack at my personal comics pinata: ’90s mutatnts with vague energy powers. I don’t think I realized just how vague they got–like, to the point of going for a year or two without even being introduced or explained–until I read Ben’s piece. “[Cable’s] powers would be incorporated into the character in a major way as time went on, but if you had said he was a super-fast typer or something, it wouldn’t have changed his first two dozen appearances.”
* I’ve been watching The Young & the Restless lately, and I’m so hugely thrilled by the density and byzantine complexity of the relationship drama on that show I can hardly tell you. To me it’s delivering in practice what serialized comic books are supposed to be delivering in theory. With that in mind I endorse Douglas Wolk’s call for more weekly comics, but without a lot of optimism. Of the bonafide weekly comics we’ve seen over the past several years, two have been among the worst comics I’ve ever read, and moreover I just don’t know if they’ll ever contain anything nearly as entertaining as Victor Newman.
* Over the weekend I saw several people on Tumblr lose they shit over this four-part essay on 28 Days Later and the allegorical difference between slow zombies and fast zombies by Christian Thorne. Longtime readers of this blog will be unsurprised to learn that I wasn’t quite as impressed, given how ruthlessly allegorical all readings of horror movies by non-aficionados have become and how inured (if not actively hostile) I am to them. Like most such readings, Thorne’s overreaches in some areas and elides complicating details in others. Meanwhile, the prestige of his trick here, in terms of the complexity of 28 Days Later, is sort of no-duh stuff if you ask me–certainly if you’ve ever seen any of the countless films well and truly referenced by the ending of that film, not to mention the similar audience-sympathy shenanigans of The Wicker Man. But I still think it’s worth your time, if only because, for me at least, the fast zombie is the enduring stuff of nightmares. Seriously, I had one this weekend! The more information I can get on why they bother me so much, the better, even if I’m reasonably sure it has nothing to do with a craving for the Strong Leader. (Given my history you don’t need to look as far afield as my affection for Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake for evidence of that!) (Via Mike Barthel, among others.)
* Andy Khouri has been creating cool little grids of album art for various astutely art-directed artists’ complete works. Here’s New Order, and here’s Bjork, and I’m told there are more to come. I saw this done with the Smiths and Morrissey once; talk about a guy with a well-formed aesthetic.
* Finally, Rob McMonigal reviews seven Matt Wiegle minicomics, including my own collaboration with Matt (and Matt Rota and Josiah Leighton), Murder. He says nice things, which will help me get through the day.
I enjoyed Pitchfork’s list of the Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s. The decision to limit the list to one song per artist opened things up to tons of songs, probably even whole genres, that would have been excluded if folks like Bjork and Beck and Radiohead each had five songs a piece or what have you; moreover it started a whole different set of discussions than “‘Let Down’ should have been ranked higher than ‘Creep,'” which is probably what you’d have gotten otherwise. Still, as with any exercise of this sort, there are bound to be lacunae, oversights, goofs, choices you’d have made differently, artists you’d have better represented, and of course outright crimes against all that is holy. LOL srsly the closest thing I have to a substantive philosophical criticism of the list is that in the end, the voters admittedly went with comfort for their #1; given that the list has frequently been positioned as a statement about indie music today, read into that what you will. In my case, seeing the #1 vote-getter (no spoilers here!) simply reminded me that my 1990s were different from those of a lot of other critics–less “indie rock,” more “alternative,” electronic, heavy, and industrial.
So in the interest of showing my ’90s off a bit, here, in alphabetical order by artist, are 80 wonderful songs from that wonderful decade for music that didn’t make Pitchfork’s cut. I applied three rules in making this list:
1) Like Pitchfork, I limited myself to one song per artist.
2) If an artist made Pitchfork’s Top 200 list, I couldn’t use them–in other words, I wasn’t adjudicating whether “Donkey Rhubarb” would have been a better pick than “Windowlicker.” (Although it is.)
3) Pitchfork very helpfully and very smartly included two or three “see also” suggestions with every entry, in order to give relevant sounds/scenes/artists that much more props. I didn’t let this rule out artists who were thus listed, but I did let it rule out the individual songs that were cited. As a practical matter this meant that several songs which all things being equal I’d have included on any Top Whatever List didn’t end up making it in, because the song Pitchfork had suggested as a “see also” was so clearly the right choice–“Stars” by Hum, “Gett Off” by Prince, “Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check” by Busta Rhymes, “Jump Around” by House of Pain, and “Unsung” by Helmet all come to mind. But more often than not I had the leeway I wanted.
So there you have it. There was a lot of great music made in the days of my youth; here’s some of it, in convenient video form. I hope you enjoy!
Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before, but I don’t get dreary brown book covers like this one–especially this one, given that the art inside is done in comparatively cheery hues of red and green as well as brown. This time around, however, the content is just as baffling to me as the package. Robel tells a fairy-tale-like story about a little man named Barnabe who lives in a Central Park-type oasis in the big city but is haunted by nightmares in which he becomes a giant and can’t help but leave a trail of destruction wherever he goes. One day an actual giant appears and magically conjures up three giant beautiful women, with whom Barnabe falls in love. When two of them spurn his advances, he either tries and fails to commit suicide Groundhog Day-style or just contemplates it, I’m not exactly sure. But then the third woman feels fond of him after all and starts looking for him, but by then it’s too late–he’s built Icarus-style wings for himself and taken a header off a cliff. Once he lands he snuggles with the woman, and there’s some narration about how he hadn’t noticed that his isolated life had changed, and then he lives in the city all of a sudden. Robel is using the dream logic of fairy-tale storytelling, obviously, but the symbols and rhythms and analogues make little sense either on their own terms or in terms of extrapolating them to a real-world moral, especially given the frequent disconnect between the narration and the events of the story. (I suppose it could be thinly veiled autobio, but in that case it never transcends the personal.) Robel has a memorably jagged take on the cute, round-headed little characters that populate many alternative comics of this sort, one that’s clearly of a piece with his hand-lettering, but it’s not so attractive or unusual that it overcomes the book’s other shortcomings by, say, creating cohesive and inviting environments, or even simply being really pretty to look at. Shrug.
* Bon chance to altcomix lifer Rebecca Rosen as she departs Drawn & Quarterly for the amazingly even tonier comic-book confines of Le Dernier Cri and Delcourt. Always a welcome, welcoming face at shows!
* Geoff Grogan made a video for his excellent comic Fandancer.
* Jeez, the Sharkticons. I barely remember Transformers: The Movie at all–my memory of unsuccessfully trying to go see it after some Sunday-afternoon soccer game is clearer than my memory of the movie itself, whenever the heck it was I actually did see it–but what stands out is the incandescent creepiness of the Sharkticons and those three-headed floaty guys and killing off the lead characters and all that stuff. Children’s entertainment did strange things to its audience back then.
* Mondo Tees is having a 30% off sale this weekend. They’re the people who have that series of shirts that combine metal-band logos with director names–Herzog/Danzig, Ingmar Bergman/Iron Maiden, De Palma/Def Leppard, etc. If you’ve ever wanted one, now’s the time!
Let’s get two visual elements out of the way: 1) This is one of D&Q’s many, many little brown books, and I don’t understand the attraction to that ugly color; it makes books look like galleys to me. 2) Pascal Girard’s loose, messy minimalism is so close to Jeffrey Brown’s in appearance and effect, particularly in terms of character design, that this is practically a J.B. tribute album; not at all surprising to see Brown show up in the thank-yous. That said? Oof, this is a little gut-punch of a book. It’s a very minimal memoir dealing with the death of writer/artist Pascal Girard’s little brother Nicolas when both brothers were little boys, and how that loss has affected Girard’s life ever since. Starting it off with a three page section called “BEFORE” featuring the two boys playing Ghostbusters together, then abruptly transitioning to “AFTER” with a shot of Pascal sitting there alone is just one example of how pointed and to-the-point this book gets. I’m particularly struck by the decision (a very un-Brownian decision at that) to eschew panel borders and backgrounds entirely and rarely if ever telegraph temporal or spatial transitions. Each page contains two images, almost more doodled than drawn, floating atop the white paper, like the sudden flash of isolated, painful childhood memories to the surface of your otherwise formless and featureless sea of memory. Some sequences are almost too difficult to bear–Pascal clutching his pillow with increasing intensity, his eyes welling with black tears like stormclouds, as his parents finally tell him the story of Nicolas’s final hours; the final flashback, ending with an almost manic number of HA HA HA HA HAs as the two brothers, oblivious as to what is to come, laugh together. Somehow that laughter is an indication of a pain that will never go away.
* Peerless contemporary choral composer/heartthrob Eric Whitacre talks about assembling his own private choir and recording his upcoming collection Light and Gold. One thing I love about Whitacre besides the fact that he’s handsome for a man is that he talks about his music the same way I talk about his music–like its beauty is almost something to be endured.
* I wonder how many people will fall in the pop-cultural Venn diagram overlap of caring that guitarist Wilko Johnson from UK pub-rock progenitors Dr. Feelgood has been cast as the executioner in Game of Thrones.
This right here is almost everything Jane’s Addiction did well: a gooey Eric Avery bassline, a huge Zeppelin Over Sunset power-chord onslaught, Stephen Perkins’s super-produced pounding, and Perry Farrell’s otherworldly wailing, equal parts vulnerable and Valhalla, introduced by that perfectly intimate intake of breath. Atop this, Dave Navarro (who was the best starfighter pilot in the galaxy before he turned to evil) constructs these gargantuan spires of guitar, effortless edifices that majestically tower into the atmosphere and cascade back down into the surf. The funny thing is that the lyrics simply say “Here we go now–home,” but there’s nothing homey about this music at all–it’s music of epic adventure and grandiose, self-consciously exotic beauty. The only conclusion that we’re left to draw is that this is home for Jane’s Addiction, a whole new concept of home constructed by Perry and company through sheer willingness to be weird outsiders and artists and hedonists. This song isn’t a day at the beach at all, it’s them welcoming you to their place and saying “Here, let me give you the grand tour.”
Arrant: Becky Cloonan has stated that after doing an OGN, she liked doing serialized stories more because she gets more feedback and can talk about things longer. Have you thought about doing any serialized work?
Larson: I haven’t seriously considered it, no. I’m not too interested in anyone’s feedback except for my editor’s; I’m not doing comics by committee. When I was involved with the Flight anthology that was very much the atmosphere, and it didn’t much appeal to me. I tend to think that the more sources you solicit feedback from, the blander your end product will be.
I also don’t think there’s an acceptable vehicle to serialize the kind of work I do. The Internet’s great if you’re willing to hustle, but I’m not. And floppies…Well, what publisher would be willing to publish a YA girl story in a monthly or bi-monthly format? On top of that, the editorial relationship I want isn’t possible if I’m not working on large chunks of story at a time. For me, short-form serialization — anything under 100 pages or so — seems like a lose-lose situation.
That’s a refreshing lack of fell-goody prevaricating right there.
* I think maybe my single greatest achievement as a comics collector is owning every issue of Acme Novelty Library, especially since I came late to the game (1999 or so) and the early issues are so hard to find and I had no idea just how worth owning they all were when I started getting them. Point is that even if you own Jimmy Corrigan, you wanna get one of the 20 copies of the out-of-print Acme Novelty Library #12 that Fantagraphics just found, if you can.
* Matthew Perpetua explains the methodology behind Pitchfork’s Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s list. Very interesting, especially the fact that the decision to limit every artist to one song apiece came after the voting. I imagine I’d have voted a lot differently if that parameter were in place from the jump, or at least from after the compilation of the shortlist from which participants could select their songs.
Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.
I think there’s something on the verge of being really, really good here. Forsman’s wispy, hesitant line and Segar and Gray by way of Chester Brown and Sammy Harkham character designs can at times feel a bit unmoored against his backgroundless panels–I never quite buy their physicality. But it’s a lovely style, one that makes his characters instantly sympathetic, particularly the hefty, good-natured title character with his wilted mohawk and Sears uniform, but also even the abrasive, adenoidal types with whom he interacts. And that in turn is key to making the umpteenth “’80s ennui among the Great American Nowhere’s lower middle class” comic you’ve read feel, if not fresh, then at least deeply felt rather than a report from a rear-view mirror. Several of the moments Forsman selects to highlight in this day in the life are really astutely observed and wincingly sad, recognizable to anyone who’s overstayed their welcome in suburbia with shit jobs, fast food, small-hours onanism, and well-meaning reprimands from the family with whom he’s saddled himself. (Take that either way you want.) The ending in particular killed me, and I could return to the page where Wolf eats a burger and fries by himself over and over. Forsman clearly has enough control over line, pacing, and story that this is the sort of comic you read as much for the promise of future ones as for this one itself. I look forward to that future.
* Tom Neely presents Bound & Gagged, 72 pages of one-panel gag comics by Andrice Arp, Marc Bell, Elijah J. Brubaker, Shawn Cheng, Chris C. Cilla, Michael DeForge, Kim Deitch, J. T. Dockery, Theo Ellsworth, Austin English, Eamon Espey, Robert Goodin, Julia Gfrörer, Levon Jihanian, Juliacks, Kaz, David King, Tom Neely, Anders Nilsen, Scot Nobles, Jason Overby, John Porcellino, Jesse Reklaw, Tim Root, Zak Sally, Gabby Schulz, Josh Simmons, Ryan Standfest, Kaz Strzepek, Matthew Thurber, Noah Van Sciver, Dylan Williams, Chris Wright and more. Jeepers creepers!
It takes some truly breathtaking chutzpah to recast Stevie Wonder’s epic, epochal social-awareness scorcher “Living for the City” as the “Kashmir”-style hook for a song in which the singer hectors a groupie into fucking another woman for his viewing pleasure. Even a guy like me, who’s self-published his opinions on everything on a near-daily basis for the better part of a decade, can only glimpse that kind of ego from where I’m standing with the help of a Hubble-level telescope. Fortunately, Usher Raymond is just the creep for the job. The dour, diminutive man who would be King of Pop has no compunction tarting up that “la la la la” hook with exotica strings and deploying it as the backing track for a paean to fauxbianism that repeatedly features the phrase “You let her put her hands in your pants.” The second it dawned on me that yes, that’s what he’s doing, I laughed out loud at its gloriously bad taste and thought “Oh, I’m downloading this, alright.” Sacrelicious!
“Lil Freak” really has three selling points to overcome Usher’s sunglasses-at-night anti-charisma. One, that huge, absurd hook in the chorus. Two, the subtle, atmospheric pulsing tone that by the second verse is pretty much the only instrumentation besides percussion–it’s got this weird subterranean-lair vibe to it that suits Usher’s sexual supervillain persona in the song. Third, guest rapper Nicki Minaj, the aptly named (I don’t think I’d gotten the pun of her last name before just now) Harley Quinn to Usher’s unsmiling Frank Miller Joker. I don’t think Usher has any idea how ridiculous what he’s up to with this song is, but Minaj certainly does–how else to explain a verse in which she lists all eight of Santa’s reindeer, uses the phrase “tig ol’ bitties,” and barks “EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND!” in praise of her host singer with all the comical ferocity of that guy who refers to the Lord Humungus as “the Ayatollah of Rock ‘n’ Rollah” in The Road Warrior? Let this song put its hands in your pants.
* This oughta be fun: Pitchfork counts down the Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s. Only one song per artist, which makes it something different than a real Top 200 Tracks countdown, but different doesn’t necessarily mean “worse.”
* Ron Rege Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #1: Now appearing in its entirety at What Things Do. What a treasure that site’s turning out to be.
* I’m quite pleased that the time differential between the release of a new Jason comic in Europe and the States is now on the order of two months.
* My friend Zach Oat loved Neil Marshall’s Centurion, which now that I’ve seen Scott Pilgrim and The Expendables is solidly on top of my to-do list. (Sorry, Inception.)
* Robyn covering Bjork’s “Hyperballad.” Oh my goodness. (Via The Missus.)
* I’m quite late to this party I know, but you certainly want to watch director John Hillcoat’s video for the Nick Cave outfit Grinderman’s “Heathen Child.” It’s the sort of video where when the chorus kicks in, the tits come out. It’s like, wait, the people who made this crazy thing, which looks like the work of people who’ve watched nothing but True Blood and Tim and Eric for the past three years, made that tedious, polite adaptation of The Road and recorded its generic-Oscar-bait score? Can we swap out that version of them for this version of them and try again?
It’s an odd little notion, the idea that you’ve lived a better, fuller life for having killed people. That’s probably a somewhat unfair aspect of Drew Weing’s good-natured, lushly drawn storybook (that’s the term the comic practically demands I use) Set to Sea–a tale of a big lummox of a poet whose lackluster verses about life on the open sea are given new verve when he’s shanghai’d into service on an actual ship–for me to seize on. After all, Weing’s bigfooted style and inviting rather than intimidating illustrative chops place him squarely in the adventure-comics tradition of Carl Barks and Jeff Smith. Why be churlish and begrudge its central character’s baptism by fire? Well, because it really is the central, transformative moment in his story. Before the pirate raid that he ends up beating back pretty much singlehandedly by slaughtering dozens of buccaneers and beating their captain to death in a rage, he’s miserable aboard his new home–complaining about the work and the rations, literally tossing his notebook full of unfinished poems into the ocean. Afterwards, he’s accepted by his shipmates, elected third mate, introduced to a world of beauty and adventure around the globe, and filled with enough genuine insight into the sailor’s life to become a hugely popular poet back on the mainland. At first I was impressed by how wordlessly nasty that central fight got, how Weing was unwilling to neuter the violence of this world. But by the time we get to the end of the book, with the now-respected poet/sailor, bearded and eyepatched, reclining by the fire of the pub from which he was once forcibly ejected, thinking back on a life well lived…well, this isn’t like Bilbo Baggins, forever trying to recapture his combat high, or Frodo Baggins, forever damaged by the horrors he witnessed and endured. It’s a dude kicking back saying “Yeah, it was all worth it.” I wish Weing had examined that assumption a little more closely.
