This song is over 40 years old.
Comics Time: Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941
Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941
Greg Sadowski, editor
Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, George E. Brenner, Ken Fitch, Fred Guardineer, Bill Everett, Will Eisner, Lou Fine, Dick Briefer, Jack Kirby, Fletcher Hanks, Irv Novick, Jack Cole, Al Bryant, Ogden Whitney, Gardner Fox, Mart Bailey, Basil Wolverton, Joe Simon, writers/artists
192 pages
$24.99
Looked at strictly as an archival project, this Greg Sadowski-edited and designed anthology of early superhero comics is, like Paul Karasik’s Fletcher Hanks collection and DC’s Jack Kirby omnibuses before it, a real “here’s how it’s done” moment. Entertaining, left-field subject matter; eye-pleasing design; tactile paper stock; color technique and reproduction values that neither hide the material behind the haze of nostalgia nor try to mask its primitive origins with out-of-place high-gloss modernity; manageable length and heft; art presented at a powerful but not brobdingnagian size. The ongoing efforts of the aforementioned editors and publishers, along with the likes of Dan Nadel and Craig Yoe, truly have us living in the Golden Age of Reprints.
But how does the thing read? Well, generally speaking. I have to admit I don’t feel that the book is quite the revelation that, say, Jog argues it to be. Taken as a whole the early superhero comics reproduced here lack both the transcendent artistry and metaphorical/philosophical vision of Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus and the eerie, obsessive-compulsive, barely checked madness of Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! Meanwhile, though the wordy foreword by Jonathan Lethem makes much of how these protean efforts present an array of paths not taken by the more codified superhero stories that followed, those of us who’ve put a lot of time into reading modern superhero comics and nearly as much into arguing on their behalf are used to hunting down fruitfully unusual avenues of expression in that genre from past and present alike. Moreover, for all their occasional flashes of genuine sophistication or bracing weirdness, most of these stories are overwhelmed by their rudimentary plots, wooden dialogue, omnipresent narration, and the sense that for all their high-pitched violence, the actual emotional and physical stakes for the one-dimensional “characters” involved are vanishingly small. Read a couple at a time, the stories are entertainingly zesty; stretched one after the other, you’re gonna need to put the book down.
But even if the book isn’t the “reverse-neutron bomb” Lethem makes it out to be, who said it needed to be one? There’s enough pleasure to be had in recognizing the plug-ugly goons, heavy-lidded dames, and even the earliest traces of Kirbytech in the former Jacob Kurtzberg’s contributions; or seeing just how much sharper was Jack Cole than his contemporaries in terms of comedy and layout. I’ll take any excuse to look at comics by Fletcher Hanks, with his neurotically repeated figures and forms; placing them in close proximity with, say, Al Bryant’s “Fero the Planet Detective” sharpens our appreciation for the latter’s comically capricious violence and memorably hideous villains. Soon to be a star outside the genre, Basil Wolverton crafts a sci-fi adventure with character and costume designs that alternately prefigure the undergrounds and Chris Ware and a comparatively complex story that evokes the macho codes of honor and friendship often found in its pulp-prose forebears. Will Einser and Lou Fine turn in a tremendous, print-it-as-a-poster-and-hang-it-up cover for “Samson,” and give us one of the great simple pleasures in superhero comics–a bold, attractively streamlined costume–in the red-and-yellow person of the Flame.
As you might expect, any number of panels and word balloons are internet-meme-worthy–just flipping through at random I came across one of my favorite, a scene from a Bill Everett “Sub-Zero” comic in which the villain takes the time to fix up some foamy shaving cream, the better to fit the captured hero’s head for the electric chair’s skullcap. But there are moments of weird beauty, too: Eisner and Fine’s Flame standing like a Greek god as he speaks with a beautiful woman; Wolverton’s armored spacemen colliding in battle; Fred Guardineer bringing a statue of George Washington to uncanny life; Kirby’s proto-Roger Dean Martian landscape. And while the variety of approaches on display here may not necessarily blow minds, they should at least open some eyes. In a time when the major superhero companies seem dead-set on creating the most uniform tone possible across their lines–black-ops badasses in spandex at Marvel, a hyperviolent pantheon at DC–evidence that superheroes can behave in any number of ways against any number of threats is indeed liberating, perhaps even necessary. Forget the turgid prose–focus on the weird beauty. That’s what I did.
Carnival of souls
* Heading to the printers this month: Jordan Crane’s Uptight #3! YESSSSSSSSS
* Here’s quite an array of artcomix badassery: Frank Santoro, Lauren Weinstein, Dan Nadel, CF, Yuichi Yokoyama. (Via Comics Comics.)
* A leaked email from Magnolia Pictures reveals the studio’s sentiment regarding the blog-generated kerfuffle over the subtitles for Let the Right One In: STFU. Look, it’s entirely possible that this is much ado about nothing, all the from the side-by-sides I’ve seen the theatrical subtitles seem demonstrably superior. (The email claims the DVD subs are more literal translations; who knows?) But the blogs this email bashes are the same blogs that told all and sundry that Let the Right One In was the best horror movie of the year, if not the best movie period. (Via Jason Adams.)
* Speaking of Jason, he agreed with me about last night’s Lost episode in two particulars: It’s nice for Kate to have a raison d’etre beyond her feelings about someone else, and Kate looks hot in supermarkets. He adds an observation about Jack’s waxed chest, though, which difference is what makes him him and me me.
* And speaking of last night’s Lost, Todd Van Der Werff sums up how I felt about it:
All of this is a lot of rambling preamble to say that “Whatever Happened, Happened,” written by series masterminds Damon Lindelof and Carleton Cuse and directed by Bobby Roth, was another solid hour in what’s shaping up to be a very well-done middle run of episodes for this show’s fifth season. It’s rare to have a show have a creative renaissance this late in its life, but Lost, most likely reinvigorated by knowing where it’s ending and roughly where it’s going, is crackling along like it never has before. Here’s a measure of just how much fun I had with “Whatever Happened, Happened”: Basically nothing HAPPENED in the episode, but I still was completely engaged throughout. And, after all of my complaining about how boring and useless such episodes were earlier this season, this was a KATE (Evangeline Lilly) episode that not only managed to tell a compelling story but also utilized flashbacks to Kate’s off-Island life about as well as they can be used. I haven’t looked into it all that thoroughly, but I daresay this was the best Kate episode of them all. Granted, it’s kind of a low bar, but the show took an awfully big step over that bar.
Stuck in the King Crimson k-hole
Okay, this is actually getting a little weird by now: I’ve been listening to King Crimson more or less nonstop since I put that mix together a couple of weekends ago. This is putting me in a bizarre, intense headspace. So many of Crimso’s songs rely on mechanistic repetition and build that listening to them almost demands repetition itself–I can’t count how many times I’ve listened to “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part II” over the past couple of days, for example–and the overall effect is similar to standing with your face a few inches away from some horrible giant industrial machine that could fly apart at any moment.
I’ve been tapping into YouTube to dig up what live versions I can find, and unfortunately a pretty tremendous Fripp/Belew/Levin/Bruford-era version of “Larks’…Part II” I’d planned on posting got disappeared due to copyright infringement in the time it took me to get home from work last night. However, this gives me an excuse to post this cover version by students from Utah’s Paul Green School of Rock. While the Belew-centric version by KC themselves pushed the song into the crystalline post-punk sound of the band in that time, these kids just go metal on its ass, bringing out the proto-Alice in Chains skronk from the original. What it must be like to be a proud parent in the audience!
Lost thoughts
SPOILER ALERT
* I really enjoyed this episode. It threaded a ton of needles with a slew of loose ends, all rather effortlessly I thought. On the Kate side, you found out what Sawyer whispered and got some movement regarding his ex and his daughter. You found out how and why Kate gave up Aaron. You got some resolution for Claire’s poor grandma/Christian’s poor babymama. And best of all you found out why Kate returned: to find Claire!
* This last part really made me happy because I just tend to like it when shows find a way to make a big deal out of smaller characters. Now one of our core players is on a quest to track down Ms. Stay Away From Me and the Bay-bee Chah-lie. Hopefully this will keep Kate busy enough not to fuck up Sawyer and Juliet and not get dragged into another thing with Jack. It also suggests that Claire’s status is going to become more central to the plot, which I appreciate. I do wonder whether this mean’s Aaron’s all that special after all, whether he’ll be back on the Island at some point or whether he’s just going to stay with Grandma, but hey.
* Meanwhile, on the Dharma/Others/Island end of things, you obviously see how and why Ben survives Sayid’s assassination attempt. You get another callback to the Temple and whatever the hell goes on in there, presumably some supernatural brainwashing process like what Rousseau believed the monster did to her crew. You find out that not only did Ben not remember Sayid, but you also find out why that’s the case–I assumed that he did remember but just hid it.
* And finally, of course, you get the big payoff moment between Ben and Locke. The look of panic on Ben’s face was almost as priceless as the look of confidence on Locke’s. Payback’s a bitch, I hope!
* When you think of the sheer number of balls this episode kept in the air, the sheer number of other episodes it referred back to, it’s really flabbergasting. Sawyer’s whisper, Sawyer’s conned ex-girlfriend, the surgery storyline from the part of Season Three that everyone but me hated, Ben’s first meeting with Richard, his mother’s death in childbirth, the oft-seen scene where Ben tells them they all need to go back, the Christian/Claire/Aaron lineage, the red herring with Mrs. Littleton and Ben’s lawyer, presumably Juliet’s history with Ben and that “you look just like her” line from the woman whose husband Juliet was schtupping, all the time-travel meta-discussion between Hurley and Miles, some mentions of Ellie and Charles running the show for the Others, Claire giving birth to Aaron, Claire disappearing, the big lie about 815, the fame of the Oceanic Six–if they’d somehow worked in Boone and Shannon, or Eko and Yemi, or the Adam & Eve skeletons and their black and white stones, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
* Heck, they even gave us a visual reference to that episode where Kate was married to the Joss Whedon guy by putting her back in a supermarket. Between those two episodes, I don’t know what it is about the lighting in grocery stores, but hubba hubba, Kate should go shopping more often.
* They’re also answering questions a lot faster than they used to, now that they know that they can. So we find out what happened to Kate and Aaron just a handful of episodes after that first became an issue, just like we learned how Sayid got arrested by big-haired lady, just like I presume we’ll find out how Hurley ended up on the plane before the season’s out too. But where I felt this the most was when they showed Richard walking into the Temple with Ben, where a couple of seasons ago he’d have just walked off and we’d be left wondering where he took him and what he did with him. I’ve always enjoyed the show no matter how long they left various mysteries out there, but this new economy of storytelling is pretty satisfying.
* Given the amount of superhero comics I read, this business about whether or not it’s right to kill Young Ben/let Young Ben die is the kind of thing I’ve thought about and talked about more than is perhaps healthy. Yet the show doesn’t dwell on it all that much–we’re clearly supposed to feel Jack is a dick for washing his hands of the affair, and we’re clearly supposed to think Sawyer, Juliet, and Kate are doing the right thing by trying to save his life, even if that means he’s going to make their lives a living hell 30 years later and murder dozens of people some time before that. The thing that’s tricky about this sort of story is that while the normal, real-world concept of preemptive strikes involves a degree of uncertainty, time-travelers or clairvoyants or whatever actually know what will happen if they don’t make their move. Sure, it’s cold-blooded to shoot a 12-year-old or leave him to die on an operating table, but it’s also cold-blooded to condemn a bunch of hippie scientists in jumpsuits to an agonizing death by chemical weapons–not to mention Ana-Lucia, Libby, the redshirts, everyone on the freighter, etc. When I hear commercials for that Wanted movie say “Kill one, save one thousand” I want to kill myself, but here it’s a more ethically dicey situation.
* Do you think we’ll ever see that stewardess who joined the Others again? Or the kids? That was kind of a big deal, wasn’t it? That image of the Others dragging the teddy bear along?
* I liked it when they cut to commercial on the tableau of everyone in the house after Jack refused to help Young Ben the same way I liked it when they cut to commercial on Sawyer’s smiling face after Juliet helped Amy give birth to Aaron: It was something different in terms of what they cut to commercial on. Usually you get a close-up on someone who just said or did (usually said) something shocking, or a close-up on the shocked face of someone who just heard or saw (usually heard) the other person say or do (usually say) something shocking. In the case of the Sawyer Smiles cut, he was reacting to good news, which almost no one ever gets on this show. In the case of this tableau, it was a group reacting, in long shot, to the shocking statement. It just makes me happy when you get a little difference like that–it shows that the people who make the show are still alert and kicking.
Gossip Girl thoughts
SPOILER WARNING
* First things first: April 20th? Way to schedule, CW!
* I think the Missus put it best when it comes to Vanessa-Chuck: “This is what Vanessa needed. Finally, she’s interesting! All it took was the magic of Chuck.”
* I think I can get behind the Nate-Blair rematch, too. Better than Nate-Vanessa, that’s for sure, and you’ve got to have a good reason to put off Chuck-Blair.
* I only just realized that Poppy Lipton wasn’t some real-life NYC socialite making a cameo like Jay McInerney or something. Instead she was just another underbaked Gossip Girl bit part. I don’t know why they keep introducing characters just to not use them or develop them.
* Serena’s getting a bit annoying. This party story was kind of lackluster and lame for her. However, I did enjoy her getting her comeuppance via Jenny’s kegger pals. I can’t imagine her getting married in Spain is going to improve things.
* “We’re not in need?” “It’s all relative.” Indeed, Humphreys. Indeed.
* Dan getting a fan letter from his believed-dead half-brother is a bit of a coinkydink even for a show where people routinely bump into their friends while walking around Manhattan.
* I liked the introduction of another Polish servant. That’s definitely what Gossip Girl was missing.
* How about an Eric-Jonathan make-out session? Or any kind of physical intimacy whatsoever?
* I feel like I’m complaining a lot but I actually enjoyed this episode. I think it’s just that I’m writing this in the middle of America’s Next Top Model, which is so bad it has me grumpy about everything.
Carnival of souls
* Is any holiday more tedious than April Fools Day?
* This Onion story about President Obama’s post-Battlestar Galactica depression isn’t as funny as it could have been because a) most BSG fans have Lost to fall back on, and b) love it or hate it, “depression” isn’t an emotion engendered by the BSG finale.
* My pal Alex Segura is now DC Comics’ official blogger.
* My pal Rickey Purdin is showing off his Shelf Porn. It’s even more impressive in person–everywhere you turn in that apartment, there’s a bookshelf crammed to the gills.
* My pal Kiel Phegley reviews Evan Dorkin & Sarah Dyer’s Biff Bam Pow! #1. In so doing he explains the process by which indie/alt comics got covered at Wizard, bemoans the dearth of genuine action scenes in modern comics (as opposed to just splash-page fight scenes), acknowledges the sad reality of all-ages comics, recalls how his Wizard interview with Dorkin became one of the ones that got away, and touches on various other topics of interest.
* My pal Tom Spurgeon’s list of noteworthy webcomics seems like a very useful feature to me.
* My pal Curt Purcell reviews Cameron Stewart’s mystery webcomic Sin Titulo. I’m really enjoying Curt’s emergence as what we Comics Blogosphere OGs used to call a semi-comics blogger.
Comics Time: Dragon Head Vols. 1-5
Dragon Head Vols. 1-5
Minetaro Mochizuki, writer/artist
Tokyopop, 2005-2007
232-248 pages each
$9.99 each
Originally written on February 21, 2007 for publication in The Comics Journal
First, an admission: If it’s the post-apocalypse, I’ll eat it.
Second, an assertion: Even discounting my bias, Dragon Head is one of the most compulsively readable manga to reach an appreciable non-otaku audience (or at least this member thereof) in quite some time.
I found this somewhat surprising given DH‘s shaky start. Its first two volumes focus on an overbaked, if gut-level-gripping, high concept: Three high-school students are the sole survivors of a catastrophic train wreck in a collapsed tunnel deep underground. At this early stage the characters come out of Battle Royale central casting: Older boy Teru tries to do the right thing despite his mounting panic, younger nerd Nobuo bugs out and start doing things with knives and dead bodies, damsel in distress Ako is disarmingly wounded and pretty and ultimately more sensible than her two male companions combined, that sort of thing. Nobuo in particular is played to the cheap seats, going from zero to Lord of the Flies in the space of the first volume. Smart, detail-driven moment, like Ako awakening from a two-day coma to discover she’d gotten her period while she was unconscious and nearly going to pieces because her tampons were lost in the rubble, are few and far between.
By contrast, Mochizuki’s cartooning is vivid, memorable, even sensual, and seems to be where he’s deriving most of his pleasure here. However weak the psychological underpinnings of Nobuo’s freakout may be, Mochizuki renders its end result, the demonic face and body markings the kid gives himself using dead girls’ makeup, with graphic glee. Nearly wordless sequences throughout the second volume in which he chases Ako and later strips and paints her unconscious body utilize predatory pacing and intelligent image choices (a sharply turned head, a hand on a breast) to portray adolescent pre-sexuality gone vicious and sour. Mochizuki also evokes the impenetrable with evident relish, be it the walls of stone that hem the survivors in, the darkness that the kids are always trying to stave off with flashlights, lighters, and torched bottles of booze, or the mass of upturned seats, broken glass, torn-up backpacks and mangled limbs that fills the wreckage of the train.
Indeed, Mochizuki’s zeal for colossal depictions of the man-versus-nature conflict (a surprisingly rare sight in comics, for some reason) gives rise to a fairly major problem with Tokyopop’s translation work: In a world where so much action is the result of massive, indistinguishable walls of steam, stone, water, flame, earth, mud, and/or ash threatening to consume our protagonists, would it really be too much to ask for the publisher to translate the damn sound effects? They don’t even have to replace the Japanese characters–just run an English translation in smaller print alongside them and you’d be good to go. As it stands, without a telltale “RRRRUMBLE” or “HISSSSSSSSSSS” or “FWOOOOOSH,” the book’s many otherwise-silent sequences of natural disaster are extremely difficult to parse. Is that an ominous groan or an imminent collapse we’re hearing? Are Ako and Teru being overwhelmed by water or smoke or heat or their own overactive imaginations? All too frequently, if you don’t understand the kanji, your guess is as good as mine.
But all is forgiven once the inevitable showdown between sanity and face-painting, darkness-worshipping lunacy is over and the surviving kids finally make it to the surface world. We’re not entirely safe from wonky mental breakdowns yet; both Ako and Teru will, at varying points throughout the remaining volumes, weave in and out of catatonia or psychosis without much rhyme or reason. But as soon as they discover that whatever happened to their train tunnel happened to pretty much the entire rest of the world, the backdrop of their story expands exponentially, and their characters feel similarly enlarged. Their existential horror upon realizing that the atmosphere is full of enough soot to choke out the midday sun, their subsequent dazed, fumbling search for food, water, and news of the world, and Mochizuki’s you-can-taste-the-ash-in-your-mouth art for the sequence, are just the first signs that the book’s comparatively shallow action-thriller days are behind it. Had the book continued in that vein you might have expected the pair to become a cutesy, thrown-together-by-circumstance couple; instead their bond seems deeper and truer, driven by an instinctual need to survive and see that the other survives as well.
Sure enough, the greatest obstacle to their mutual survival turns out to be other people. Once again this could have been a minefield of cliche, but Teru and Ako’s dreamily horrifying journey among the human detritus of their dead world is where the book really takes off. A group of similar kids appears friendly, if slightly off, only for our heroes to discover that they blithely worship the “demon” they blame for the apocalypse they’ve experienced in a hard-to-shake ceremony involving gas masks and fireworks. A middle-aged woman in a motorcycle helmet takes them in, carving out a quiet, stately interlude for characters and reader alike in a refreshingly un-motherly way. Even the inevitable soldiers gone feral largely steer clear of the same old poses–granted, that’s how they start out, but soon a pair of them are joined with Ako and Teru more or less as equals, behaving and interacting as unpredictably as one suspects people in the real world would.
Through it all, the spectre of Nobuo hangs over Teru in particular, sometimes all but subliminally (one tremendous four-panel sequence shows Teru lying unconscious in the distance of identical shots of a rubble-filled scene, changing only in the fourth panel when Nobuo appears out of nowhere, mockingly squatting beside the body of his rival). He’s far more convincing and frightening an enemy when he’s treated as a source of guilt (why couldn’t Teru get his act together and save the poor kid, he wonders) than as a source of law-of-the-jungle fear. Mochizuki’s attention to detail regarding the headgear of the characters whom Teru and Ako stumble across later (they always seem to be sporting earphones or gas masks or baseball caps or motorcycle helmets or something) echoes Nobuo’s self-transformed skull and hints at whatever the title may really mean (by the end of Vol. 5, the only explicit reference is in the mutterings of an apparent lobotomy victim).
The overall effect is a nightmarish picaresque, like a cross between Children of Men and Apocalypse Now. With each volume better than the one before it, the perambulating structure pays off in spades. Get through the tunnel and you’ll want to see where the journey ends up.
Carnival of souls
* The new Bat for Lashes album, Two Suns, is really something special, I think. It strikes me as a cross between OK Computer and Boys for Pele, and I’ve been listening to it in its entirety once or twice a day. The whole thing is now streaming online, so if you think it might be your cup of tea, give it a listen. (Via Pitchfork.)
* David Cronenberg is working on a sequel to Eastern Promises. I totally sympathize with the folks who want Dave to go back to gonzo body-horror, but it turns out he’s a terrific director of crackling, grim, violent (comparatively straightforward) thrillers who also seems intent on providing Viggo Mortensen with material that’s his equal, so I’m not complaining. (Hey Hollywood: If you must remake The Long Good Friday, there are better choices out there than Paul W.S. Anderson.)
* Tom Neely’s prepping a new edition of Brilliantly Ham-fisted, a collection of his comic-strip poems which I rather liked.
* Curt Purcell was stunned by Geoff Grogan’s Look Out!! Monsters. It’s a not uncommon reaction.
* CRwM reviews Let the Right One In, focusing on the truth behind Eli and Oskar’s relationship.
* When it comes to the trailer for Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, I’m with Carles.
* Douglas Wolk prophesies the coming of the Celestial Jukebox, the “any song, in any order, available instantly anywhere” online music repository of our collective dreams–he says it’s inevitable, that its constituent parts are already here, and the question is simply whether it will be legal or not.
* The Hall of Cliche Super Heroes is a pretty great idea period, let alone a pretty great idea for a T-shirt. (Via JK Parkin.)
I am a 25 year old married man, college graduate, eventual grad school student. Got a good/stable job working with my father, active in my Church and all around nice guy. I also enjoy marijuana in moderation. It does not make me lazy. I do not have to have it. I only do it on one or two nights a week. But I enjoy it. It makes the nights I do it all the more enjoyable. It adds zest to life. I am a lover of film and music and it makes my viewing/listening all the more life affirming.
My husband and I often muse, while smoking pot, that the only thing we are doing wrong is breaking the law. If that is the only wrong you are committing it seems clear that it’s not your behavior that needs to be re-evaluated, but the law itself.
* Quote of the day #3:
“Let’s start with a premise that I don’t think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have five percent of the world’s population; we have 25 percent of the world’s known prison population. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice.”
I wrote some stuff for some other sites
Does making fun of geek culture make you more or less of a geek yourself? I think the answer is pretty obviously “more.” The following two projects of mine that went live over the past 24 hours are ample evidence.
First up, here’s the official, giant-sized debut episode of Marvel Superheroes: What The–?!, Marvel.com’s new stop-motion animated action-figure comedy series, which I co-wrote. It’s loaded with friends and former co-workers of mine: Animator and head writer Alex Kropinak, co-writer Jon Gutierrez, voice actors Ben Morse and Ryan Penagos. Also, MODOK throws up. (Spoiler alert!)
Next, over at Topless Robot I did another list feature about music from nerdy movies: 11 More Awesome Songs from Geek-Movie Soundtracks. I like to think this is one case of the sequel being every bit as strong as the original.
Lost thoughts extra: Ben time
SPOILERS GALORE
I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s happening on Lost these days. You can’t know for sure until the show wraps up, but right now it seems like the actions of the characters–Sayid shooting Young Ben, for example, or Daniel’s disappearance, or the presence of Horace “I built Jacob’s cabin” Goodspeed–are edging closer and closer toward impacting the show’s central mysteries–the nature of the power struggle between the Hostiles/Others and the Dharma Initiative, the nature of the time fluctuations, the role of Jacob and so on. That’s gotten me in more of a theorizing mentality than I’ve been with the show in years. Actually, “theorizing” is too strong a word–speculating is more like it.
Anyway, my brother Ryan and I recently had a brief exchange about the show along these lines, and we thought people might get something out of it. We also continue making fun of Sayid, which is always a good time.
King Crimson – Walking on Air
Have you ever wanted to hear Talking Heads do a “Jealous Guy”/”Don’t Let Me Down” mash-up for a laser Floyd show? Well, now you can.
Carnival of souls
* Holy shit: Luba, Gilbert Hernandez, 600 page hardcover, coming soon.
* The great Josiah Leighton close-reads the opening sequence of Paul Pope’s Batman Year 100, one of the best action comics of the decade.
* This career-spanning interview with Daniel Clowes is pretty great, especially since you don’t see that many interviews with Daniel Clowes, much less of the career-spanning variety. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)
* He had some weed, so they shot him. (Via Ta-Nehisi Coates.)
* Weed is illegal, so they destroyed Mexico over it. (Jay Ackroyd.)
Comics Time: Jin & Jam #1
Jin & Jam #1
Hellen Jo, writer/artist
Sparkplug Comic Books, 2008
36 pages
$5
The first thing I thought during my initial flip-through of Jin & Jam was “Boy, this person sure likes Taiyo Matsumoto.” Then I started reading from the beginning and the first thing I saw was an epigraph from Black & White, aka Tekkon Kinkreet, by Taiyo Matsumoto. So it’s not like Hellen Jo is trying to hide the influence, which emerges not just in the wiry art and leering character designs but in the plot itself, involving various paired-off tweenage characters gettin’ in trouble and stickin’ it to the man. But we’re not in Matsumoto’s sprawling dystopian future cityscape, we’re in a cramped, just-left-of-normal version of San Jose, California. And that’s where I start to detect another, subtler influence: Jaime Hernandez and the Locas of Love & Rockets. As we watch Jam, Hank, Jin, Ting, and Terng do the shiftless-layabout teenage-wasteland thing, we observe little details about their California culture: the junk-food diets, the bike-riding cops with bike helmets and short-shorts, the angry Korean Presbyterian preachers and so on. Meanwhile, the fact that the title of the book is Jin & Jam even though when we meet Jam she’s already paired off with Hank indicates that there will be some kind of emotional shift taking place, breaking up or truncating one friendship as another blossoms. We even start to see it happen by the end of the book: As Jin and Jam take a fantastical ride on a swing set under the stars, the faces of their “friends” literally vanish, leaving Jin & Jam as the only real people in the book’s final splash page. Is this Tekkon Kinkreet or Wigwam Bam or just a jack of both trades but master of neither? Too soon to tell, but are you not entertained regardless?
Seanmix – Favorite Cities: The Best of Azure Ray
Sleep / Displaced / Rise / November / For the Sake of the Song / No Sings of Pain / Trees Keep Growing / Favorite Cities / The Drinks We Drank Last Night / Just a Faint Line / These White Lights Will Bend to Make Blue / Raining in Athens / Rest Your Eyes / Hold On Love / Other Than This World
Azure Ray are/were one of my all-time favorite bands. Among artists who were still a going concern this decade they actually are my favorite, them and Underworld. Azure Ray is/was singers/songwriters Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink, with production assists by Andy LeMaster. Taylor and Fink split up a few years back to pursue solo projects that I’d also recommend and songs from which I nearly included in this mix; happily, they recently announced that they’re writing and playing together again in hopes of putting the group back together, so if you like what you hear here and exhaust their four releases–Azure Ray, Burn and Shiver, November, and Hold On Love–there will hopefully be more in store.
When my love for a particular band is very intense it gets difficult for me to describe exactly what it is I love so much about it. That’s not the case for movies or comics or anything else, just music. I can say that Azure Ray play largely acoustic music with an electronic veneer, kind of folk-y, lots of delicate girl-girl harmonies, a touch of Southern gothic, lyrics about memory and longing. I think the best way to put it is that if I were a glass and Azure Ray were a tuning fork, the frequency of their emotional content would shatter me.
Carnival of souls
* I haven’t talked about this yet I don’t think, but over the past little while a lot of my friends at Wizard lost their jobs. This includes the whole staff of Anime Insider, and over at the Wiz proper it includes David Paggi and Rachel Molino, the two remaining altcomix-interested staffers. This is all a bummer for various obvious reasons. My pal Rob Bricken has a nice eulogy for AI. On a similar note, I liked Douglas Wolk’s post on Blender, which was canceled the same day as Anime Insider.
* Tim O’Neil concludes his review-of-Kingdom-Come-by-way-of-a-bunch-of-different-posts by explaining “momentism” as a school of superhero writing. This is pretty goddamn dead on. During my years at Wizard, the search for iconic/badass/jaw-dropping moments in superhero comics, splash pages or action beats or lines of dialogue that functioned not just in getting across something necessary to the story but also in encapsulating just what makes Superhero So-and-So so cool/tragic/scary/inspiring/whatever, was absolutely paramount for writers and readers alike.
* Here are some more Caprica clips, replacing the set that was apparently yanked earlier last week. I’m still not watching them.
* Tom Kaczynski discusses Watchmen the comic and Watchmen the movie in terms of cool and hot media.
* Jog reviews a trio of recent comics of note: Jim and Jam, Sleazy Slice, and Rumbling.
* Renee French: still creepy.
* Jim Rugg has a blog! And he drew Klaus Nomi!
* I’ll never not be a sucker for nice compact drawings of Batman and his rogues gallery like this one from Doc Shaner (via Johnny Bacardi). Heck, that’s why I got Lego Batman last week.
* Torture is useless at producing actionable intelligence. One has to wonder what, then, the point of torture is.
King Crimson – Indiscipline
Adrian Belew, ladies and gentlemen, one of the great unsung heroes of the last three decades of music.
Comics Time: First Time
First Time
Sibylline, writer
Alfred, Capucine, Jerome d’Aviau, Virginie Augustin, Vince, Rica, Olivier Vatine, Cyril Pedrosa, Dominique Bertail, Dave McKean, artists
NBM/Eurotica, 2009
108 pages, hardcover
$19.95
Gloria Leonard said that the difference between pornography and erotica is lighting; it stands to reason that in comics, the difference between pornography and erotica is linework. First Time, then, is definitely erotica. This collection of sexually graphic vignettes features high-class, high-quality European artists whose styles will be instantly familiar to readers of alt/art/lit comics here in the States, even if the artists themselves (most of them pseudonymous, I think) are not. But best of all, a couple of them are familiar. Yep, “Cyril Pedrosa” is indeed Three Shadows Cyril Pedrosa! And Dave McKean is indeed “Neil Gaiman” Dave McKean! Maybe it’s just me, but I think seeing cartoonists whose mainstream work you know and admire get smutty is one of life’s simple pleasures, like discovering the lovely but respectable actor you’re crushing on did an extensive nude scene back when everything was at its youngest and most pert.
Indeed, the reclamation of the erotic as something respectable comics creators can depict and respectable comics readers can discuss is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. Shouldn’t sex be something we tackle at least as often and as directly and with at least as much sophistication as we deal with violence and misery? Heck, shouldn’t it be something we tackle independently from violence in misery? This is a pretty terrific step in all those directions. In addition to bonafide critics’ darlings Pedrosa and McKean, every artist looks like they could have stepped out of a Petit Livre from Drawn & Quarterly or one of Fantagraphics’ Blab! storybooks or MOME guest spots.
Writer Sibylline seems to have either tailored the material to her collaborators or picked them to suit the material. “First Time,” a sweet story of a girl’s deflowering that comes with a funny twist ending, has an appropriately Top Shelf-ish vibe courtesy of the angular cartooning of artist Alfred, while the more self-indulgent topic matter of “Sex Shop” and “Fantasy” earn the more voluptuous, outwardly sexy curved lines of Capucine and Jerome d’Aviau respectively. “1+1″‘s story of a first-time girl-on-girl hook-up and the subsequent disappointment it engenders in one of its participants gets an animated look from artist Virginie Augustin, which nicely supports its initial whimsy and free-spiritedness and eventual heartbreak. “2+1”, with its tangle of bodies in a cramped apartment, slowly evolves from Tim Sale to Aeon Flux courtesy of artist Vince. Rica’s “Nobody,” the most Robin Bougie-ish of the stories what with its sex-doll subject matter, also boasts the most Robin Bougie-ish art, while Olivier Vatine’s “Club,” appropriately enough, reminds me of that New X-Men issue where Chris Bachalo helped reimagine the Hellfire Club as a strip joint in a tip of the hat to its NYC namesake. For those who’ve read the sweet, sensitive Three Paradoxes, Pedrosa’s aptly titled “Submission” may come as a shock, what with all the deep-throating and spanking and following orders to go look in the mirror with a mouth full of semen, but then again I think it was clear from that graphic novel’s bold visuals that Pedrosa could pull off pretty much anything. Dominique Bertail’s “Sodomy” has the most traditional sex comix look, I think, but its gender-reversal subject matter is strong enough that matter-of-factness is an apt stylilstic choice. Finally, McKean’s “X-Rated” combines manipulated film stills with cubist kama-sutra positioning for something that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a deleted Arkham Asylum scene where the Joker watched Batman get it on with Poison Ivy over the closed-circuit cameras. The whole project is a bit undercut by slightly wooden translation work from Joe Johnson, but only a bit. Overall it made me wish that more work like this was being produced. If you like your smut smart and your art sexy, seek this out.