Gaylord Phoenix
Edie Fake, writer/artist
Secret Acres, 2010
256 pages
$17.95
Buy it from Secret Acres
Buy it from Amazon.com

Well now, here’s a pleasure: a book that gets steadily better as it goes on, so much so that by the time you finish it it’s as though you’re reading a second, later, better book by the same author. In some sense that’s literally true: Cartoonist Edie Fake serialized the story in the minicomic series of the same name over the course of years, so you’re seeing the work of an older, more experienced artist by book’s end. But his artistic growth isn’t just a “well hey, good for him” situation, it’s a happy complement to the growth of the wandering, questing title character. Watching Fake’s art tighten up — his placement of the characters on the page become more self-assured, his pacing become more controlled, his blank white pages fill up with elaborate psychedelic vistas and bold dot or grid textures and lovely two-tone color — does as much to show us his hero’s maturation as anything the character himself does or says or sees.

Like Kolbeinn Karlsson’s The Troll King, Gaylord Phoenix talks about homosexuality using the narrative language of myths and monsters with a pronounced art-comics accent. We first meet the Gaylord Phoenix (who’s a dome-headed, tube-nosed naked dude and not a phoenix at all) as he is about to be attacked by a crystalline monster; he survives the attack, but the wound he sustains carries within it an infection of aggression that eventually drives him to kill his lover. When the slain man is revived at the behest of a subterranean crocodile emperor, the phoenix returns to claim him, but the lover uses the magic now present inside him to cast the phoenix away. What follows is a journey consisting of encounters with various creatures and beings seeking to use the phoenix for their own ends, leading to sex, violence, enlightenment, and sometimes all three.

Fake is a lateral thinker when it comes to devising ways to depict all these things: The result, whether it’s a crocodile tail inserted through the anus and protruding out the mouth, penises that look like giant macaroni and thus can both penetrate and be penetrated, or a multiplicity of cocks that cover a crotch like the tentacles of a sea anemone, is racy, unexpected, a bit weird, and sometimes even a bit scary, which is pretty much how sex ought to be. But aggression is just as central to the story, a fact that’s unfortunate for the characters but a breath of fresh air in how it reclaims the province of traditional masculinity for homosexuality even while preserving queerness’ outsider identity. The climax (no pun intended) further emphasizes the importance of this synthesis, as the Gaylord Phoenix discovers that everyone he’s met on his journey is now literally a part of him, unleashed in what can only be described as the world’s first solo orgy. “It is all with me now,” he proclaims. “At last I hold my own…and partake of who I am.”

The problem with the book, I suppose, is right there: It’s a bit too neatly allegorical to ever truly soar, and its didactic conclusion left me feeling a little too much like I’d just heard the phrase “And the moral of the story is….” I wish the narrative had the crazy courage of the image-making — Fake’s beautiful block-print lettering, say, or the dark navy-blue-colored series of double splashes that conclude the book, or the way he can fill a page with tiny accumulated circles and waves that buffet and subsume, or the lovely tangerine halftone and clean rounded lines that comprise the phoenix’s final mystical encounter. But the key here all along has been to let the artistic growth on display speak for itself, to do the heavy lifting of the story itself. Actions speak louder than words.

Two Eyes of the Beautiful Part II
Ryan Cecil Smith, writer/artist
self-published, 2010
48 pages
$5
Buy it from Ryan Cecil Smith

Like the previous chapter, this installment in Closed Caption Comics member Ryan Cecil Smith’s adaptation of Kazuo Umezu’s horror manga Blood Baptism achieves something damn close to horror camp. It’s a celebration of the over-the-top nastiness and spectacle of horror manga: Not content to show the killer, a demented ex-actress out to repair her disfigurement by any means necessary, strangle a dog to death, Smith depicts the woman’s hapless daughter stumbling into a room full of dismembered animal corpses and getting buried in a pile of severed cat heads. Even the villain’s hair is larger than life, an enormous bun taller than Marge Simpson’s beehive. This is all the funnier for being drawn in an altcomix-meets-kids’-manga style; it could just as easily be an uglied-up Sailor Moon tribute comic some kid from CCS did. But it’s precisely this idiosyncracy — a member of one of the States’ premiere underground comics collectives doing a respectfully ridiculous cover version of a horror manga about a crazy woman preparing to rip her own daughter’s brain out to achieve eternal youth — that elevates it from cheap irony or schlock. From the expert zipatone shading to an immaculately inked centerfold spread of that room full of dead dogs (it’s all painstakingly delineated grains in the hardwood floor and shiny black puddles of blood), Smith is pouring a very serious amount of effort and craft into what could easily have been just a goof, because to him, it clearly isn’t. Most impressive to me is the way he depicts his little-girl protagonist’s reaction to her discovery of her mother’s true nature. As she panics and tries to escape, Smith crops her word balloons so they cut off the text of her speech so that only half the letters (top, bottom, left, right, whatever) are visible, the rest of each alphabetical character disappearing under the edge of the balloon or panel. Panel borders and balloon edges, the very containers from which comics are comprised, are inadequate to contain the overwhelming horror she feels. That’s a lot of smarts to bring to an arch horror-comedy experiment. It kicks the shit out of Black Swan, that’s for sure.

Let me pick up where I left off with Jeremih and Adele the other day. This is why I find myself reaching for the pop radio stations even more frequently than my iPod when I’m in the car these days: It’s a cavalcade of “Holy shit, did you hear this?” moments. There are absolutely any number of awful boring songs on there, from Bruno Mars’s novelty turd about sleeping late to the mercenary house tracks delivered by Enrique Iglesias and Jennifer Lopez. But in between you have these oddball amusement-park rides/sideshow attractions, like Katy Perry and Kanye West dueting about alien anal probes as a metaphor for strange love; or Britney Spears mounting back-to-back comeback hits with choruses that are a gag from Monty Python’s “Hungarian Phrasebook” sketch and simply the word “oh” repeated respectively; or pop’s slattern-in-chief Ke$ha having the sheer cajones to call a song “Blow,” packing not one not two but three entendres into a single syllable. Yes, I even enjoy Ke$ha now, at least as far as the material from her follow-up EP Cannibal goes: When one of her songs comes on I can listen till the end and know that for better or worse I will never get bored, which is a lot more than I can say for Usher.

If you’re detecting a degree of cultural condescension here…well, you’re probably right. I do not listen to this music exclusively, nor in chunks larger than a single at a time more often than not, and as such I’m going to react to this stuff differently than would someone for whom it’s their entire musical environment. When I get tired of the bombast and spectacle I can retreat to the new Wild Beasts record. Radio pop is certainly not a genre I turn to for subtletly: After all, Lady Gaga’s “Judas” is straightforward enough to be passed off as an outtake from Jesus Christ Superstar, yet compared “Hey Baby (Drop It to the Floor)” it’s goddamn Finnegan’s Wake.

I think that’s the problem it’s faced on the charts, more than Gaga fatigue or faux-controversy backlash or annoyance with that herky-jerky beat or the feeling we’ve been here before but better with “Bad Romance”: It’s not 100% clear, in completely idiot-proof fashion, what she’s singing about. Most songs on pop radio today are about wanting to dance or wanting to fuck, and they come right out and say it. “C’mon get me on the floor, DJ what’cha waitin’ for?” “Sex in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it.” The booming subgenre of affirmation pop is just as blunt: we are who we are, the show goes on, I’m on the right track, etc. To the extent that pop has employed metaphor at all over the past several years, it’s usually done so with all the complexity of a Madlib: people are fireworks or extraterrestrials, they wear halos, their love is an umbrella. Gaga’s not really doing much more than that in “Judas”‘s love triangle — she’s just using proper nouns instead of regular nouns. But because she casts Jesus, Judas, and Mary Magdalene in the leading roles, suddenly it seems like you’ve got some kind of Da Vinci Code to crack. Does she mean the real Judas? Hand to God, I heard a DJ ponder this aloud. And thus she breaks radio pop’s current custom: In a dance song, you sing about dancing. In a love song, you sing about love. In a sexy song, you sing about sex. In an empowering song, you sing about empowerment. In a break-up song, you sing about breaking up. This leaves very little room for kings with no crowns or “in the conjugal sense, I am beyond repentance.”

Lose #3
Michael DeForge, writer/artist
Koyama Press, May 2011
pages
$5
Buy it from Michael DeForge

It’s one thing to take a Chris Ware/Daniel Clowes middle-aged sad-sack comedy of discomfort and plop it into a slime-encrusted anthropomorphized-mutant-animal-inhabited post-apocalyptic hellscape that looks like Jon Vermilyea staging a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles revival in the middle of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s quite another thing to do this well. And it’s still another thing to do it so well that while the whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts, the parts work all on their own, too. That’s the achievement of Lose #3, the latest installment in Michael DeForge’s old-school one-man alternative comic series.

In past issues, as well as in his minis and anthology contributions, DeForge has proven adept at crafting razor-sharp embodiments/lampoons of what have been termed “first world problems” and placing them in the mouths of fantastical, outlandishly designed and drawn creatures and monsters and superheroes and giant mecha and what have you. (“I feel like things have been weird between us lately,” reads the image of the shaggy faceless beast rolling around on the ground — that sort of thing.) And he does that here, too, to cringingly devastating effect: The text for the opening one-pager is a letter from a fresh-faced intern high on his first trip to NYC to his mother back home (“I asked if there were any paid positions opening at the magazine in the fall. They said things were still up in the air for now. Fingers crossed, I suppose!”), juxtaposed against the images of a naked man riding a spotted deer through a debris-strewn wasteland in order to pour the coffee he purchases at a still-standing chain coffee house into the maw of the creature that lives in his cave. Toward the end of the collection, ants wax pessimistic about life in these weird, dark times (“But, like — why do we live this way? It’s — it’s nuts that this is the ‘norm’ for us,” says an ant about the potential for human beings to burn them with magnifying glasses) and debate whether or not to move the dead body of a friend when its pheromones start attracting a crowd (“Just leave it. It’s a party”) Even in the main story, there’s a bit where the two teenage sons of our divorced protagonist talk about The Wire that nails the clichés of that particular conversation so accurately even without mentioning it by name (“The show introduces a new part of the city at the beginning of each season, so it’s always, like, BOOM! Bigger picture! BOOM! Bigger picture! You know?”) that I wanted to delete my old blog entries about the show.

The innovation of “Dog 2070,” Lose #3’s centerpiece story, is, well, that it’s a story, a look at a very shitty month in the life of a middle-aged flying-dog-man-thing. He concern-trolls his ex-wife over her current husband, his attempts to connect with his teenage and twentysomething kids are rebuffed with casual cruelty, he fixates on his own problems to the pint where he can’t empathize with cancer patients, his neurosis leaves him equally unable to spend his time at the computer productively writing or unproductively masturbating, he drunkenly confronts his middle-school son’s ex-girlfriend after a cyberbullying website the kid made about her nearly gets him expelled from school, he ends up in the hospital after a freak gliding accident. It’s easy to focus on the yuks here, which are abundant in the same way they are in Wilson or Lint — the sudden reveal of our hero Stephen’s inebriation when talking to his kid’s ex is impeccably timed to elicit an “Oh, Jesus” guffaw, and DeForge nearly always chooses dead-on details to illustrate the guy’s creepy self-absorption, from giving his ex-in-laws gifts on Thanksgiving just to stay in their lives to interrupting a conversation about a co-workers chemo to announce he’s begun therapy as research for his screenplay. (The flying scene, in which a soaring Stephen sums it all up by saying “Sometimes it’s as if I forget we’re able to glide!,” then crashes into a bird, is a bit on the nose, though.) But DeForge reveals the true emotional stakes in a pair of dream sequences as recounted by Stephen to his therapist. In the first, we watch the flesh slowly slough off his daughter, who recently attempted suicide, before she fades away from view; in the second, he and his former family, reduced to four-legged animalistic versions of their anthropomorphized selves, fight over a scrap of meat. “I just feel so ashamed I don’t know why. I’m watching it and I just feel awful.” This, of all the notes he hits, is the one he chooses to leave us with, a nightmare representation of a failing man’s worst fears and shames, to which he has no adequate response and to which no adequate response is provided. That’s when you realize that these emotional stakes have been present all along, hiding in plain sight: In the omnipresent beads of sweat oozing down Stephen’s fleshy body, in the debris-strewn streets and burned-out buildings that form a backdrop for the story, in the walls that seem to sweat and drip and bleed themselves. Something is wrong, the art says, even as the narrative chronicles the banal travails of a relatively normal guy. DeForge doesn’t need to come right out and say it himself. Lose #3 isn’t the bolt-from-the-blue paradigm-shifter I’ve seen some people describe it as, but it’s a confident enough comic that it doesn’t need to be, pushing its author out of his comfort zone only to discover he’s perfectly comfortable here, too.

I first heard Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” on the local alt-rock station. This is a testament to the radio station (101.9 FM in New York — listen to it for half an hour and chances are you’ll hear something rad, like “Down in It” or the full album version of “Personal Jesus” or Luka Bloom’s cover of “I Need Love” or the by-god lead single from King of Limbs) as much as it is to the song, but it’s the song I’m focusing on here. And despite its being a reasonably big hit on the pop-dance stations, where I’ve also heard it played, you can see how it fits in with the rock narrative: A woman sings her guts out about heartache over live minor-key instrumentation, with a reasonably cryptic metaphor (“rolling in the deep” isn’t as one-to-one the standard “our love is like” formulation) and a sharp edge or two (those chanted high-pitched backing vocals during the chorus, to me the weirdest and therefore best part of the song). The first time I heard it on pop powerhouse Z100 I felt like I should mark the date down in my diary, so unlike everything else on Top 40 stations it was, even the nominally rock- or country-influenced stuff, most of which could conceivably be covered in a “Disney Princesses Live!” stage show. “You gotta hear that Adele song!” I gushed to my wife. “It’s the real deal.”

So I thought until I gave it a second or third front-to-back listen. Then I realized that it was something else besides dark and unique in the landscape and impeccably sung: kinda boring. Verse, bridge, and chorus all basically take a single melodic line and repeat it, revealing nothing new about those notes with each new iteration, and leaving nothing to discover in repeat listens. Adele’s got a terrific blue-eyed soul voice, but in much the same way the Walkmen’s world-weary last-call schtick gets old when that’s all they do, singing every line with voice-cracking intensity leaves the listener with nowhere to go, no emotional arc to follow either upward or downward. You’re just stuck in that same old familiar spot, and you know what familiarity breeds.

By contrast, Jeremih is working with a dramatically inferior instrument. But in his goofball “please grind against me and/or give me oral sex” anthem “Down On Me,” he and his producers work that much harder to keep things interesting. Establishing the basic template for the vocals, a follow-the-bouncing-ball monotone of staccato eighth notes, they quickly work against expectations: Jeremih stops short, letting the final syllable of several lines drop from his mouth like that cigarette that got stuck to Ackroyd’s lip in Ghostbusters. Then they distort his vocals, pitchshifting him way downwards for a repetitive nonsense non sequitur: “BANG BANG BANG BANG.” Then he marvels at his would-be conquest’s body with a weirdly specific comparison (“What, you work at Bally’s? Look at your physique”) delivered in a sleepy mushmouth. Then he heads upward in both energy and register for the autotuned chorus, affecting a weird pseudo-South Asian accent of all things, as anonymous hip-hop “HEY!”s echo in the background. Then 50 Cent returns after a brief cameo in the intro for a verse that returns to the earlier ratatat vocal rhythm before dipping into distortion a couple times to hide cusswords or emphasize how he’s not going to put shit on blast. Then he does exactly that, slowing way down to deliver a few lines about how he’s going to stuff his oversized penis into her potentially too-tight vagina (I am not kidding) as an overdubbed choir of Jeremihs sings “Daaaaaamn….oh-oh-oh aw daaaaaaamn.” Then it’s back to the chorus, only this time it ends with the title phrase done in a chipmunk voice. Then there’s a third verse that sounds more like a middle eight, one that repeats an oddly respectful characterization of the girl’s personality: “Say you independent / get it from your mama.” All the while the music bubbles and tinkles and whizzes along, the beat dropping in and out like someone you momentarily lose sight of at a club only to lock onto again. It is a thoroughly, thoroughly weird song, and as cheesy and gross as its message and mien are, it’s not just an earworm but something I can listen to over and over again and find new things to geek out over. It makes Adele’s respectable pleasure feel shallow indeed.

Garden
Yuichi Yokoyama, writer/artist
PictureBox, May 2011
320 pages
$24.95
Buy it from PictureBox
Buy it from Amazon.com

Meet the non-narrative pageturner. Garden is Yuichi Yokoyama’s third English-language release from PictureBox, and his most viscerally thrilling work to date. It’s the clearest demonstration yet of the innovation that is his masterstroke: fusing visually and thematically abstract material with the breakneck forward momentum, eye-popping spectacle, and pulse-pounding sense of stakes of the rawest plot-driven action storytelling.

Garden has no story to tell, of course, not as such: It simply depicts a large group of sightseers who break into a vast manmade “garden” of enormous natural features combined with artificial and mechanical objects, wander around, and describe and inquire after what they see. With their matter-of-fact pronouncements (“There are many ponds. This one is jagged. There is a giant ball floating in this one. This one is made of stainless steel. We have now arrived at a significantly larger pond.”) doing the heavy lifting of parsing exactly what we’re looking at for us, we’re freed to simply go along for the ride, marveling at each new environment Yokoyama dreams up. As a feat of sheer bizarre imagination it’s tough to top: I can easily picture standing around with other readers comparing favorites — “I liked the hall of bubbles!” “I liked the stack of boats!” “I liked the river of balls!” “I liked the giant book!” “I liked the polaroid carpet-bombing!” “I liked the monkey bars!” Imagine if everything in Walt Disney World were as alien and strange as the giant golfball Spaceship Earth and you’re almost there. Nearly every new area and attraction practically demands to be stolen and used for a setpiece in someone’s weird alt-SFF webcomic. And with a “narrative” through-line that’s 100% pure exploration — lots of little guys walking and climbing and sliding and crawling through doorways and scaling mountains made of glass and so on — echoes of their tactile, discovery-driven adventure can’t help but hit us and excite us as we race along with them to their eventual destination.

In essence, Garden teaches you how to read it. It immerses you in its perambulations and presents you with a new amazing thing with each turn of the page, engrossing you to the point where you hardly even notice that it’s a book-length exploration on Yokoyama’s part of geometric shapes, of the clean line, of costume design (all the little people wear headgear and outfits that make them look like a cross between Jason Voorhees and Carmen Miranda), of his own fascination with the way the natural world and the manmade world shape one another. I felt at the end of the book like I do at the end of a great theme-park vacation: Exhausted, invigorated, and already planning my return.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* It’s a mug’s game for people who’ve read the books to try to figure out what people who haven’t read them think of the show, but I’ll tell you what, this episode made me wish I were in their shoes more than any so far. Not even for the bigger developments necessarily, but for…well, the bit I keep coming back to is Gregor Clegane grabbing his sword and decapitating his own horse with a single blow. What would a tyro make of that, I wonder? I think I’d have done a comical spit-take with the beer I was drinking.

* And this episode was laden with visual hooks of that sort. The Eyrie: its high-fantasy layout, its mad ruler and her breastfed boy, its three-walled sky cells. Theon Greyjoy’s wiener. Renly and Loras’s foreplay-by-way-of-barbering. Tyrion bashing that tribesman’s face in. The enormous dragon skull. Jory’s knife in the eye. In positing it as the best of the series so far, much of the writing I’ve seen about this episode focuses on either the increased action quotient or the fine new scenes added by the writers, as well they should, but these visual moments of “whoa” were what stuck with me as I went to sleep.

* Moreover, both Gregor’s Godfather impression and the whole Eyrie sequence went a long way to rectifying my main complaint about last week’s otherwise excellent episode, the way completely understandable constraints stripped the spectacle from settings like Vaes Dothrak or the Hand’s tourney. Clearly the Eyrie of the books, with its multiple ascending fortresses connected by precarious stairways and winches and leading to a mountaintop stronghold it takes a full day to reach, wasn’t going to work with the time and the budget available to a television show. But unlike Vaes Dothrak, where the art department realized it couldn’t portray an ad hoc assembly of pillaged architecture and artifacts from all over the world but didn’t do anything to compensate and just saddled us (no pun intended) with a bunch of tents, the Eyrie is different but still suitably spectacular, with its towering arches and soaring dome construction and gorgeous weirwood throne. The tournament, meanwhile, still feels way smaller than the Westerosi Super Bowl it ought to be, but having a giant chop his own horse’s head off after losing to a dude with the most ornate armor you’ve ever seen, then duel with his burned brother nearly to the death, goes a long way toward making the event as memorable to viewers as it’s supposed to be to the in-story spectators.

* The new scenes were well worthwhile. Robert and Cersei’s conversation did the necessary work of simply demonstrating how their marriage works and why hasn’t had the other killed yet, but for my money the best of the bunch was Littlefinger and Varys’s duel of words/dick-measuring contest in the throne room. Just a pleasure to watch Aiden Gillen and Conleth Hill be sleazy with an undercurrent of genuine danger.

* After the stagey Dothraki wedding fight, the battle with the hill tribe, the Clegane duel, and the Stark/Lannister massacre went a long way toward reassuring me that the show can handle action properly. It’s worth noting, too, that both of the major battles ended with shots of the survivors standing (or kneeling) amid a pile of bodies. Action’s a bloody, murderous business in this world, or at least it should be, and those shots reinforce the way swordplay is depicted as people swinging huge sharp chunks of metal at each other in the hope that they’ll cut something off of their opponent.

* This episode once again used the show’s penchant for rapid-fire scene transitions to illustrate just how byzantine the court intrigue can be. In back to back scenes, Varys meets with Ned to warn him that the king is in danger and keep him on the trail of the Lannisters; Varys meets with Illyrio to warn him that the Starks and Lannisters are fighting and that Ned will soon discover Jon Arryn’s secret, complicating their ostensible shared goal of overthrowing Robert with the Targaryens at their own pace; Varys meets with Littlefinger to talk shit and maneuver against one another; a few scenes later, Varys sits in the Small Council, encouraging Robert to have the Targaryens murdered. We don’t have any more of a prayer of untangling the Spider’s web than Ned does.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from All Leather Must Be Boiled.

I’m struck once again by how Game of Thrones: The Show is establishing its aesthetic identity by what it does, for want of a better word, “wrong.” Episode Three’s breakneck scene transitions felt off versus what we’re accustomed to from television, yet complimented the byzantine complexity of this world’s alliances and rivalries. This week’s episode was one long violation of “show, don’t tell,” with character after character telling other characters lengthy stories about the past or filling them in on information about the present. Yet the conversations never felt boring or superfluous, because they told us so much not just about their ostensible topics, but about how this world works. The society of the Seven Kingdoms is held together by the stories its people, particularly people in positions of influence and power, tell each other. The victories and defeats of the past, the valor and ignominy of the competing Houses, the traditions that dictate the positions of men relative to women and the highborn relative to the smallfolk and knights relative to men at arms — in the absence of widespread literacy and with political power a precarious held-at-swordpoint thing, these stories are the glue that binds everything. Telling the right story at the right time can move the world in the storyteller’s desired direction.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

—

* This was my favorite of the three episodes, and before this I preferred the second episode to the first. I could certainly get used to the series getting better and better with each episode.

* The funny thing is that it was the best episode yet not despite the rapid-fire scene-to-scene transitions and abundance of new character introductions, but because of it. The swiftness with which the episode bounced from place to place and character to character and moment to moment could easily have gotten disorienting or obnoxious; instead it felt like the show finding its aesthetic voice as television art — an editing choice that served to underscore the can’t-tell-the-players-without-a-scorecard complexity of the show’s world and the byzantine plots and counterplots, alliances and conspiracies and doublecrosses that drive the narrative. It felt like its own thing rather than an illustrated version of the book, perhaps for the first time.

* In many cases it actually was its own thing, since so many of the scenes were brand-new material invented by the writers. And now I’m starting to understand why so many critics who saw episodes in advance said that the new scenes were probably their favorites: They were the first time I could just sorta sit back, relax, and enjoy the show, rather than comparing each moment to its prose counterpart. For some reason GoT is much, much harder for me to deal with in this regard than my other much-beloved epic-fantasy adaptation, The Lord of the Rings — perhaps because so much more of GoT‘s story arises from intrigue and character development than the grandeur/danger/action/spectacle of LotR, so it demands more attention to detail? But in the new scenes, we move away from the familiar material and swivel around to see existing relationships from a new angle, and the freshness of it makes it much easier to simply enjoy. It helped that the scenes were good, of course, and character-revealing to boot: Benjen ladling on the Stark self-righteousness to Tyrion, who could be the best friend the Watch has; both Robert and Ned hectoring Jaime, demonstrating that others have a hand in constructing his insufferable persona; Robert making himself more or less unbearable, to either the visible dismay or studiously cultivated indifference of his underlings.

* And as with Episode One, there were new characters galore: Renly, Viserys, Littlefinger, Grandmaester Pycelle, Barristan the Bold (never named, unless I’m mistaken), Lancel Lannister, Syrio Forel, Old Nan, Rakharo, Lord Commander Mormont, Maester Aemon, Ser Alliser Thorne (also never named), Yoren, Pyp and Green and all the other members of Jon’s class at the Wall. Yet because we were coming to these newbies through the eyes of characters we already knew, it never took on that stop-and-start, receiving-line feel that Episode One was a bit bogged down by.

* You say “mayster,” I say “meister,” let’s call the whole thing off!

* Arya’s first dancing lesson was a balancing act in itself. For quite some time it was “Swordfighting is exotic! Swordfighting is fun!” Then along comes Ned and his aural flashback, and we’re reminded that swordfighting is fucking awful. It’s gutsy of the show to take a big wish-fulfillment moment like plucky tomboy Arya’s chance to follow her dream and root it back in the nightmarish reality of dead butcher’s boys and green young men shitting themselves after having their ribs cracked by a warhammer.

* The moment when Cat stuck her head out the brothel window and yelled “Ned!” was endearingly goofy, almost Britcommy. A little comic relief stemming from the outlandishness of some of these situations — a bug-up-their-ass lord and lady being reunited in a brothel, for example — could go a long way toward leavening the grimness, ultraviolence, and nudity.

* Impressive effects shots at the Wall. I know it probably shouldn’t, but it gives me hope for future effects-heavy moments.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from All Leather Must Be Boiled.

—

* Better, I thought.

* The first episode’s biggest problem, it seems in retrospect, wasn’t exposition so much as introductions. I mean, the two go hand in hand to an extent, yeah, but it was simply the need to name each new face that bogged down the dialogue and gave the proceedings an unpolished feel from time to time. Here — with the exception of goggle-eyed mute executioner Sir Ilyn Payne in a scene where stopping everything to tell another character who he was made perfect dramatic sense — that need was gone. Instead of meeting the characters, you’re living with them now, and unsurprisingly the show benefits from familiarity.

* This episode also saw the pilot’s brief flashes of delight blossom into more sustained ones from time to time. Tyrion’s conversation with/interrogation of/lecture to Jon Snow is the strongest example: a self-consciously showy yet controlled performance from Peter Dinklage of a character using his bitterly earned smarts to dismantle another character. I actually laughed out loud in sheer enjoyment, the sort of thing I associate with the great HBO revisionist-genre dramas of yore. Fingers crossed for more of that.

* On the other hand, I think last week I was too easy on Michelle Fairley as Catelyn, if anything. The way the character was rewritten is still the major problem — the fact that she started out as the concerned mama bear makes her post-Bran behavior feel less like the nervous breakdown from which she desperately needed to recover that it was and more like par for the course — but I think there’s still enough wiggle room in there for an actor to do something, anything we wouldn’t see coming. Fairley just alternately tears up and crackles her voice or stiffens up and sounds clipped and posh. Actually, I’m not sure “predictability” is the right rubric here; after all, Sean Bean is playing Ned Stark exactly the way everyone, the show’s creators included, pictured Sean Bean playing Ned Stark ever since the idea first crossed their minds, and he’s a blast to watch. You can see him coming, but beneath that I feel like there’s a big chasm of thought and emotion and conflict. With Fairley’s Catelyn, it’s all on the surface. I was happy to see the savagery of her response to the assassination attempt, it felt like a glimpse of a new, more vital Catelyn, but then bam, back to noble, protective, boring Catelyn, now with Hardy Boys investigation action. Bleh.

* The Dothraki…man, the Dothraki. I wonder if the filmmakers’ idea is that the Dothraki “race” is an assemblage of conquered and assimilated. I’m struggling to come up with any other explanation for the United Colors of Vaes Dothrak casting decision besides laziness. I mean, they have to know that we can see that there’s a bunch of white people and black people and brown people ruled by a Hawaiian — it’s not like they’re trying to sneak it past us. Right?

* The Daenerys/Drogo relationship is not going to get any less problematic for viewers who had a problem with it in the pilot, that’s for sure, whether their objections were based on sexism or Orientalism or both. Even if Dany’s making-the-best-of-a-bad-situation approach is a perfectly realistic way for a young woman sold into a marriage as a form of slavery to deal with her plight, it’s going to be hard for people to get on board with the progression from rape to sex-as-power-play to genuine enjoyment to actual love. In response, for example, USA Today’s Whitney Matheson’s pilot-episode indignation has evolved into condescending sarcasm. As always it bums me out to see people, especially professional-critic people, mistake the depiction of a thing for an endorsement or celebration of that thing, but on the scale of cosmic injustice, “being unnecessarily concerned with potential misogyny/racism in pop culture” doesn’t even register. We’ll all live.

* Moreover, maybe it’s the show’s fault after all. I don’t like to purport to speak for people who haven’t read the books — I’m not a mindreader — but I think Adam Serwer may be right that whatever the nature of the sex/gender (or racial) stuff in the book, and whatever the intentions of the filmmakers, the end result just isn’t getting across to viewers who are new to the story. It’s much tougher for the television show, with its limited screen time and inability to access interior monologues and lengthy ruminations on history and culture, to convey that (say) the Dothraki’s idiosyncracies really aren’t any more or less “civilized” than those of the Westerosi, or that the treatment of women is essentially a war atrocity rather than some grab-your-nuts-and-grunt-like-Tim-Allen, John-Norman-Gor-novel pandering to slavering fanboyism. On HBO itself, shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood have directly addressed the misogyny of their protagonists and the society in which they live without being read by very many people as misogynist themselves. If Game of Thrones, based on a series that upon my current re-reading strikes me as being in large part about misogyny and gender inequality’s detrimental effect on everyone involved, can’t get this across, perhaps it’s on the show, not the viewers. I have enough faith in the strength of the original material to believe that eventually the real point of it all will be hard to miss for everyone who either isn’t dopey or doesn’t have their mind totally made up about the show, but that eventually’s a killer.

* This is less about the show than it is about talking about the show, but I’m really bummed out by Douglas Wolk’s recaps so far. Douglas is one of my favorite critics, because even when he’s writing about something with which I’m totally unfamiliar (this happens frequently with his music criticism) or articulating tastes that diverge dramatically from mine (this happens frequently with his comics criticism), I still feel as though he’s speaking to me in a language I can understand — he roots his writing in clear points of reference within the work being discussed, and thus you can get something out of his criticism even when you disagree with his conclusions or, literally, don’t know what he’s talking about. In both cases, that’s an exceedingly rare gift. And that’s why it’s so disappointing to watch him crack half-hearted jokes and pour snark all over a show that it’s pretty clear he’d be perfectly happy to never watch again, rather than either really engage it for all its faults or simply write about something else. I find myself wondering who the target audience is for this sort of thing: Fans of the show will be turned off by the rimshots in lieu of analysis, while detractors have probably stopped watching and thus have no need to keep reading. I understand that the hit counts must be kept up, but I feel like there’s probably a better way for everyone involved to spend their time and resources. To be fair, it’s not all played for the yuks: The comparison between Joffrey Baratheon and Ziggy Sobotka was fun, and calling Dany and Drogo’s sex life “the quintessence of Orientalist camp” is a perfectly legit critique. But the piece ends with an invitation to finish a dirty limerick rhyming “Targaryen” and “barbarian.” Y’know? And even some of his actual analysis goes astray in really obvious ways: It’s not a function of the fantasy genre’s supposedly inherent elitism that makes Lady’s death more affecting than that of the butcher’s boy, it’s a function of how every human being on earth reacts to the death of animals in fiction.

* Anyway, back to the show. In the books, the Hound comes across instantly as probably the scariest dude going, no matter how bad Sansa’s POV chapter says Sir Ilyn freaks her out. But in the show, we first “meet” him in long shot as he engages in some good-natured ribbing of Tyrion; next he comes across as the slightly less scary mass murderer compared to Sir Ilyn; and even his murder of the butcher’s boy is presented as an awful but all-business act, rather than the act of a guy who kills children and laughs about it. As with Cersei, the Hound got hisself humanized.

* Mark Addy is enjoyably “predictable” in the same way that Sean Bean is: He’s what you thought Robert would be, right down to the flash of ugly, sneering might-makes-right savagery when he mocks Ned for his compunctions about having Daenerys killed.

* I want Iain Glen to read me a bedtime story. So soothing!

* Do you think the final shot is enough of a cliffhanger for people? Do you think people understand what it means?

Alright, fuck it, this is for people who haven’t read the books, or at least haven’t finished reading them.

I realized that with minimal tweaking, the post I wrote for my dedicated A Song of Ice and Fire blog could just as easily appear over here. Since perhaps there are people who haven’t read the whole series but would like to discuss the show over here, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Keep in mind that by “NON-SPOILERY” I mean “this review will spoil nothing that takes place after the events depicted in the pilot.” It will, of course, be SPOILERY for the pilot itself. I’d like this to remain true for the comments, please — stick only to the events of this episode.

So if all you’ve seen or read of all this is what aired last night, here you go!

—–

* Quibbles up front! And yes, they’re pretty much just quibbles.

* I think my biggest problem with the pilot episode, and given how much of that problem arises from changes the filmmakers made to the material from the book we can perhaps extrapolate that to the series in general, is Michelle Fairley’s Catelyn Stark. There’s nothing wrong with her performance, I suppose; she’s just doing what she must with the material, and there’s the rub. The combination of aging all the characters up and changing her motivation in this early part of the story — in the book, she wanted Ned to take the job as the King’s Hand, thinking his increase in power and prestige would make the family much safer than they’d be if he had the stones to turn his friend down — makes Cat’s character a lot less interesting. As a woman in her mid-thirties who was married off during a time of war and basically got right to work bearing her teen husband some heirs, and who then advocates for her husband to take an influential, potentially dangerous gig in the capital rather than risk the equally potentially dangerous dimunition of prestige and power that not taking the job would entail, and who worries after a brood of children none of whom are older than sophomores in high school, Book-Catelyn feels a lot more vital and interesting and difficult to predict, and her plight less familiar, than her middle-aged mama-bear TV-Catelyn counterpart. It’s very early yet, and things may change, but nothing Fairley has been given in the pilot or in any of the previews I’ve seen have enabled her to complicate the character or do much more than play the warm but concerned and stern protective mother and loving wife. She’s a dramatically inert character, far too easy to get a handle on versus pretty much all of the other major players, and that’s no good, because her relationship with her family is the emotional heart of this volume, and we need to find her interesting so that we find that relationship interesting as well.

* The aging-up bothered me more across the board than I thought it would, actually. In re-reading the series, I’ve found that everyone’s relative youth makes their plights so much more powerful. Book-Ned is supposed to be, what, 35? My wife’s 35, and we just had our first child, who’s still negative two weeks old; imagining the two of us with five children, two of whom are teenagers, is one of the book’s most rewarding frissons for me. So too is Book-Bran’s young age—thrown out the window at what, eight? And Book-Robb, who’d be the Lord of Winterfell if Ned takes the job, is what, 15? And so on and so forth. I miss all of that.

* And I miss the subtle message that this medieval lifestyle forces you to do a whole lot of living before you live very long, too. For a long time my mind had a hard time wrapping around the idea of the Targaryen’s as this storied dynasty given that they were only around for 300 years; I was used to Tokien’s millennial timeframes. But when girls are married off the moment they get their first period, and when the cream of your soldiery is 17 years old or so, and when people are considered very, very old at 65, 300 years is an awful long time.

* The critics were right—there was a lot of exposition in this episode. Fewer long stories and explanations of relationships than I anticipated however. For the most part it came in the form of ADR dialogue like “That’s Jaime Lannister, the Queen’s brother!” So it was more clumsy than boring.

* The Dothraki were a bit ad-hoc, no? Perhaps the intention was to avoid any stereotyping of a specific ethnic group, so they cast people from many different ones and combined them. This is what Peter Jackson did with the scary natives in King Kong, if I recall correctly. And in that sense, okay, fine, but when so much care is given to the details of the Westerosi societies, the Dothraki look a bit too much like a casting call for tan-skinned actors.

* If you’re going to call them the White Walkers exclusively, doesn’t that increase your obligation to actually make them white? Don’t get me wrong, they were creepy as heck, but it’s still a bit odd. (In the books, they were mostly called the Others, which I guess the show felt it couldn’t do due to Lost.)

* Finally on the quibble front, Ramin Djawadi’s score was about half-very good (the spooky scenes, the opening credits) and half-“you’re kidding, right?” The “heroic” music when the King’s party enters Winterfell…I was hoping a few of them would be clip-clopping along with coconut shells.

* That said, well done overall.

* Obviously the big critical question raised by nearly everyone who’d seen the pilot early is whether or not newcomers to the material could follow it. It feels weird to be able not to address this central issue, but since I’m not a newcomer, I really can’t. It seemed easy enough to follow to me; yes, there are a lot of characters, but surely serialized television has taught us it’s okay not to have everyone straight by the end of the first episode. But I’m not going to stake my take on the episode on a yay or nay proclamation on this score.

* With that removed from the equation, I can focus more on what I liked best about it: the acting. It’s as though both the filmmakers and the cast realized how hard their task was in this first episode, and went out of their way (Cat excepted) to give everyone little bits of business to separate them out from fantasy cliches. I loved the “shaving Jon, Theon, and Robb” scene with its weird forced intimacy between three very different kinds of “sons” to Eddard Stark and the jokey, casual, but fraught with tension locker-room relationship that’s evolved between the three of them. I loved Daenerys’s dead-eyed stare as she endured first her brother’s inspection and then the scalding water of her bath—these are eyes that have seen too much and prefer to look inward. I loved Viserys’s foppish trot and alarmed exclamation as Drogo rode away without a word. I loved the opening shot of the ill-fated Night’s Watch trio, waiting for the gates to open, already playing the roles they’ve selected—smug, grim, hyper-alert—to help them survive in this world. I loved Tyrion’s unique, booze-seasoned combination of arrogance and self-loathing in his conversation with Jon. I loved Jaime’s “I heard you the first time” to Cersei at the end, already knowing what she wants him to do, trying in vain to put it off, coming to grips with knowing that he’ll do it anyway. There’s enough of all that sort of thing to give me a lot of confidence about the rest of the season. When the exposition and introductions die down, the material will have more room to breathe, and if the cast and crew keep filling the space with these idiosyncratic moments, we’re in good shape.

If you have read all four volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, I invite you to read my thoughts about last night’s premiere episode over at my ASoIaF blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled. As always, the post contains some spoilers for the books if you haven’t read them, so please beware.

Paying For It
Chester Brown, writer/artist
Drawn & Quarterly, April 2011
292 pages, hardcover
$24.95
Buy it from D&Q
Buy it from Amazon.com

My publishers wanted this book to be called PAYING FOR IT. I don’t like the title — there’s an implied double-meaning. It suggests that not only am I paying for sex but I’m also paying for being a john in some non-monetary way. Many would think that there’s an emotional cost — that johns are sad and lonely. There’s a potential health cost if one contracts a sexually transmitted disease. There’s a legal cost if one is arrested. If one is “outed,” then one could lose one’s job and also suffer the social cost of losing one’s friends and family. I haven’t been “paying for it” in any of those ways. I’m very far from being sad or lonely, I haven’t caught an S-T-D, I haven’t been arrested, I haven’t lost my c areer, and my friends and family haven’t rejected me (although I should admit that I still haven’t told my step-mom.

So far, I’ve been paying in only the one sense. (Since this is a memoir, “so far” is all that’s relevant.)

But let me be clear that my publishers did not force the title on me. I chose to give in to what they wanted. If I had insisted, they would have allowed me to put whatever words I wanted on the cover. I love and respect Chris and Peggy and realize that this is a difficult book to market.

–Chester Brown, in the entry pertaining to the Cover in the “Notes” section of Paying For It

“Difficult book to market”? Get outta town, Chet! When a review copy arrived at my house unexpectedly this Saturday, I tweeted, and quite seriously meant it when I did so, that having an infant in the neonatal intensive care unit was literally the only thing stopping me from dropping everything and reading this book right then and there. A parametric memoir from Chester Brown, the parameters of which were one of the great North American cartoonist’s experiences with prostitution? Appointment reading! Maybe it’s tough to market to the great unwashed, but you’d have to pry this thing out of my hands to keep me away.

As it turns out, Brown is right about the title his publishers selected. With its punning double meaning and slightly censorious elision of what, exactly, is being paid for, it’s all wrong for this straightfaced, blunt, even didactic sexual autobiography/soapbox lecture. “Paying for Sex” would be far more appropriate. Drop the cap from the “For” to make the phrase less idiomatic, insert the actual act back into the proceedings, and be as matter-of-fact and up-front as possible about what’s going on — which quality, not at all coincidentally, is a big part of why prostitution appeals so much to Brown in the first place. The social cues he seems unable to pick up on, the rituals he is congenitally incapable of performing, the years and decades of accrued guilt and sense of failure he built up from missing out on potential romantic or sexual relationships, the elaborate and to-him draining emotional quid pro quo of sex within the context of the few relationships he was able to enter into and maintain (that’s the context in which he really “paid for it”)…all of that disappeared the moment he told his first whore “Uh, I’d…like to have vaginal intercourse with you.” (“Yes, that’s what I really said,” he assures us helpfully in the “Notes” section.) It seems a shame to add a level of kabuki to the title of a book so fixated on taking it away.

This is not to say that humor has no place in the book. On the contrary, this thing is fucking hilarious. Much of this stems directly from how Brown draws what he draws. His Harold Gray tribute from Louis Riel has been abandoned (with the exception of Brown’s brother Gordon, who’s drawn like a Riel refugee). In its place are rigorous, unyielding two-column eight-panel grids filled with tiny, tiny people drawn in as smooth a line as you’re likely to see anywhere; “painstaking” is the word that comes to mind. Foremost among these tiny people is Brown himself; his self-caricature is gaunt to the point of skeletal, an impression enhanced by the pupil-hiding blank voids of his everpresent eyeglasses. (One of the “Notes” reveals that by a certain point in the narrative he’d begun wearing contact lenses, particularly when patronizing prostitutes, but he didn’t want to confuse the issue.) Seeing his eyeless face in three-quarter profile over and over and over and over and over again, page after page after page, is bizarrely hysterical after a while. It is the least sexy self-portrait possible — not just unsexy, but almost devoid of the energy one would think would be required to have sex at all. In the many scenes where Brown is accompanied by his best friends and fellow cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt, the portraiture gets funnier still. Watching the three bespectacled men — Brown balding and sullen, Matt babyfaced and effusive, Seth impossibly dapper and never without his suit, fedora, and cigarette — walk in lockstep down the city streets like some sort of morose urban Three Amigos is one of the unexpected comedic highlights of my comic-book year so far.

I know, I know: What about the fucking? Pretty funny too. Throughout the book Brown uses a sort of dilation effect to center one’s attention in each panel, tending to shade in the periphery of the panels with a circle of black, like an old silent movie. This is barely even noticeable until you hit the sex scenes, which tend to show a bareassed Brown silently thrusting away at the crotches of the whores in question, usually with several different physical configurations per encounter (which is to say per chapter, since each experience with a prostitute gets its own chapter). Before long Brown’s mid-coitus interior monologue features him calmly assessing the pros and cons of each prostitute — he thinks about how she stacks up against previous women he’s been with, whether or not to patronize them again, what kind of review he’ll give them on a website for clients of Toronto escorts, and so on. It’s so deadpan he might as well be in the produce aisle squeezing melons.

Which is the point. In the lengthy, handwritten prose section that ends the book — first a series of polemical Appendices detailing Brown’s exact position on the decriminalization (not legalization! keep the government out of it!) of prostitution and his responses to arguments against the profession, then a response from Seth to his depiction as a character in the book (“The truth is, Chester seems to have a very limited emotional range compared to most people. There does seem to be something wrong with him.”), then another series of Notes on various points of interest in the book — Brown advances an admittedly quixotic vision of a world where paying for sex is an utter commonplace, a practice so pervasive that the need for professional prostitutes is lessened because you or I would have no problem exchanging money for sex with our attractive friends and acquaintances and vice versa, the same way we might go to movies together or send a friendly email. The important thing to Brown isn’t just decriminalizing the supposed offense of giving or receiving money for sex, it’s deflating the romanticized aura of the act itself.

As you’ll learn at great length from Brown, both in monlogues within the comic and in the prose material appended to it, the book isn’t so much about prostitution in and of itself as it is about the way Brown has rejiggered his life in order to avoid the “evil” of romantic love, or “possessive monogamy” as he comes to exclusively put it. Unlike familial or friendship love, romantic love in its idealized form is exclusive — you love one person, that one person loves you, and neither of you is allowed to feel the feelings you have for one another or have the sex you have with one another with anyone else. This leads to jealousy, an emotion Brown views as immature and immensely destructive. The solution? Separate sex from its romantic context entirely. Have close friends and companions from whom you get all the benefits of friendship love, which is superior to romantic love anyway, and then have sex with people of whom your contractual obligation to whom ensures that you will have no further expectations, nor they of you. Sex is sacred, Brown argues — so it should be made available without stigma or shame to as many people as possible. What better way to accomplish this than cash?

So that’s the platform here. Brown wants to do away with romantic love, and prostitution has enabled him to do this.

Except for one jaw-dropping revelation he sneaks into the final eight pages’ worth of comics: UPDATE: Actual revelation redacted, but suffice it to say it calls into question, if not outright undermines, all the Big Ideas he’s been advancing all along. This is the key to the whole fucking thing, and he shoves it away in a single chapter! If this is the way life is to be lived in Brown World, then don’t we need to see how it’s lived if the entire project is to have any value? That’s where the rubber hits the road! So to speak!

And once you realize that Brown has pulled the knockout punch, so many other things you’d been willing to overlook due to his overall breathtaking candor and craft become harder to excuse. Every prostitute we meet, for example, is depicted as a faceless brunette. Now, it’s abundantly clear why he wouldn’t want to actually draw these women true to life even without his notes explaining this decision, but noting that he did in fact see prostitutes who weren’t pale brunettes doesn’t change the fact that that’s how he drew all of them — nor does it make the fact that he drew their naked bodies as accurately as possible but left them a faceless raven-haired horde otherwise any less unwittingly (?) revealing.

Then there’s the chapter where he has sex with a very young-looking, foreign-born prostitute who gasps in pain throughout intercourse: “That she seems to be in pain is kind of a turn-on for me, but I also feel bad for her. I’m gonna cut this short and cum quickly.” What a gentleman! In the Notes he reveals he was astonishingly naive — credulity-stretchingly so, to be honest, for someone who appears to be so well-educated in every other aspect of the literature of prostitution — about the existence of sex slaves, whom he continuously talks about as though kidnapping by force were the preferred method of harvesting them, as opposed to false-pretense illegal-immigrant indentured-servitude. “Was ‘Arlene’ a sex slave? She didn’t seem like one,” he shrugs in the Notes about this painful encounter, before quoting someone on how “outcall” prostitutes (those who come to your apartment) are unlikely to be sex slaves since they could always go for help instead. Anyone who’s watched a single episode of Law & Order: SVU or Dateline NBC could shoot this whole element of things so full of holes you could use it as a colander.

The thing is, like Brown, I don’t think the existence of sex slaves necessitates the continued illegality of prostitution, any more than the existence of labor slaves meant we should ban the harvesting of cotton or the performance of housework. He’s quite right to say that were prostitution decriminalized, law enforcement could focus on forced prostitution that much more readily. It’s the “forced” that matters, not the “prostitution.” But for a guy who’s so willing to extrapolate universal principles from his personal experiences — his mother’s disastrous, effectively lethal course of treatment for schizophrenia means schizophrenia doesn’t exist; his unhappy experiences with romantic relationships mean that romantic relationships are a categorical evil — he sure doesn’t mind leaping right the fuck past any personal experience, or those of anyone else, that might cause those principles harm. And, you know, hey, that’s how almost all of us live, to one extent or another (most of us not to the extent that we need to wonder whether or not a given sex partner is a sex slave, but to some extent at least). That’s human, and we forgive each other for it in life. In art? Art explicitly dedicated to the advancement of some philosophical and political truth? Then that’s the sort of thing you gotta pay for.

I couldn’t tell you when it happened — maybe it was when I heard this chorus…

Kiss me
K-k-kiss me
Infect me with your loving
Fill me with your poison
Take me
T-t-take me
Wanna be your victim
Ready for abduction

…or when I heard this bit of Kanye West’s cameo…

I’m’a disrobe you
Then I’m’a probe you
See, I abducted you
So I tell you what to do

…or maybe it was the glossily futuristic minor-key stomp of the music, or the overall “lover as alien invader” metaphor—but at some point while listening to “E.T.” on one of the local pop radio stations in the car, I realized that if it had shown up on a mid-to-late-’90s album by KMFDM or Lords of Acid, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. The science-fictional lyrics, the conflation of love, death, and violence, the brinksmanship with nonconsensuality as turn-on, the notion that great sex is so scary you could lose your agency and identity to it, the shiny sleazy heaviness of the sound…it all sounds awfully familiar! Listen to “You Belong to Me” by Lords of Acid and “A Hole in the Wall” by KMFDM and tell me I’m wrong…
(more…)

R.I.P.: Best of 1985-2004
Thomas Ott, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, March 2011
192 pages, hardcover
$28.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

I love this song because it’s very stupid, but it’s also sweet and fun and has a message I can get behind (Friday is a nice day of the week), whereas every day I hear things on the radio that are just about as stupid as that, but that are made by legions of mercenaries with the intention of being hugely successful, as opposed to some girl’s sweet 16 present or whatever this was. I’ve been listening to the radio a lot in the car on the way to and from the hospital a couple times a day, and even before I heard of this song I was like “Wow, being stupid really is the way to pop success today.” “Friday”‘s just an exaggerated version of the many many idiotic sounds you can hear on the radio over the past couple of years: Ke$ha doing a song based on “there’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance,” Lady Gaga’s ridiculous “You’re Lebanese, you’re Orient” “Vogue” rap in “Born This Way,” the existence of “Forget You,” that song T-Pain did with Pitbull that goes “Hey baby GIRL” with the most strident autotuning he’s ever done, Britney doing a song based on the kind of pick-up line Larry would use on someone in the Regal Beagle in Three’s Company, Drake’s cameo in “What’s My Name” featuring the middle-school sex joke “the square root of 69 is ate-something,” the goofy singing in “Down On Me,” the powerfully and enjoyably dumb “Like a G6,” the car-alarm cadence of “Black and Yellow,” that part in “We R Who We R” where they make Ke$ha say “DJ turn it up tup tup tup tup tup” like a robot someone poured water on, Snoop’s cameo on “California Gurls,” Ludacris’s cameo in “Baby”, the entirety of “Bedrock”…”Friday” is the equivalent of the kind of sci-fi movie they’d watch on Mystery Science Theater 3000, not the really dreary soul-crushing ones but the exuberantly and energetically bad ones, the ones where you know they set out to make something that felt like Star Wars or whatever but had no taste or judgment and thus got certain things went waaaaaayyyyyy out of control, only in this case things were already out of control, and she/they just takes it that much further and makes it that much less sophisticated. At least Rebecca Black has an adorable smile and is singing about something I can RELATE TO.

The Cardboard Valise
Ben Katchor, writer/artist
Pantheon, March 2011
128 pages, hardcover
$25.95
Buy it for damn near 50% off right now at Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please see the all-new website for The Comics Journal, to which I am happy to be a contributor.

Radiohead released their latest album, The King of Limbs, the other day. I don’t think I see much value in viewing it through the lens of “Radiohead’s weakest album” as does my friend Matthew Perpetua. I get what he’s saying about it being a relatively minor work in their catalog, but to me that’s not because it’s a failed experiment, but on the contrary, because it’s so firmly in the vein of some of their previous work, Amnesiac most especially — which really was an experimental break from their great strength through Kid A, which was melodic catharsis — and also Thom Yorke’s solo album The Eraser and some of the In Rainbows songs. Personally I locate it on a spectrum of lush minimalism (that’s a thing, right?) that also includes Yorke’s album and also recent records by James Blake, the xx, and a couple of Spoon tracks — songs where melody is suggested with such instrumental restraint that they almost feel unfinished, or like the fingers can’t quite push the keys all the way down or strum the strings the whole way. (I also hear the skewed ghost soul of How to Dress Well, but I think that’s because I accidentally left the “Vocal Booster” equalizer on my iPod from when I listened to the Inkstuds Al Columbia interview, so the high notes and loud parts were clipping during my first few listens before I figured out what was up.) It’s also quite a showcase for Phil Selway’s crisp, thumpless drums. I like it, and even before it came out I realized that my nearest point of comparison to Radiohead, in terms of a band that audibly grew from record to record (even though there were some stops and starts and misfires here and there) and yet maintained this consistent a discography across its career, is Led Zeppelin, the second-best band of all time. So good for Radiohead for being really really good.

Angel
L. Nichols, writer/artist
self-published on the web, September 2009-August 2010
129 pages
Read it at DirtBetweenMyToes.com

I worry that I over rely on comparing comics to still other comics when reviewing them, but once this comparison occurred to me there was no way I wasn’t gonna use it: L. Nichols’ Angel is like Benjamin Marra’s Night Business crossed with Megan Kelso’s Artichoke Tales. Like the former, it’s a straight-faced homage to the trash aesthetic of late-’70s/early-’80s black-and-white genre comics and grindhouse/straight-to-video movies — this time it’s not erotic urban slasher thrillers being saluted, but post-apocalyptic gang-warfare stories. And like the latter, it’s using a somewhat disreputable genre as a filter for a story about violent conflict’s disruptive effects on friendships, love, and sex — Angel‘s funneling of queer sexuality through an idiosyncratically Brooklynite (lots of bike-riders!) Warriors-scape replaces Kelso’s multi-generational saga of lovers tossed around an epic anthropomorphized-artichoke fantasy framework by the winds of war

To be sure, it’s not quite as accomplished as either of those works. In a way, the seriousness of the emotional stuff Nichols is working with undercuts one of the great strengths of Marra’s comparable comics, which is how hard he can make you laugh at the sheer go-for-the-gusto-ness of it all. Where Marra’s sex and violence is garish, gaudy, and over-the-top, Nichols’s is a bit subdued and somber, and ironically that makes the pulpy prose (see page one above) harder to swallow. At the same time, though, the romantic entanglements, however far afield they roam in terms of the gender and sexuality of the participants, are much more firmly in the straightforwardly star-crossed lovers mold of traditional genre comics and movies than Kelso’s richly imagined couples and families. Moreover, the action sequences tend to be pretty much one beat per panel, making it difficult to get a sense of where characters are in relation to one another or what the consequences of any given shot or swing or explosion really are. The climactic battle sequence builds up an impressive momentum with its page after page of isolated action incidents, but in smaller doses, this method of pacing can be frustrating.

But that pacing is hers. That’s the important thing here, I think. And that melancholy combination of over-the-top ’80s-action cheese and bodice-ripping (or strap-on-wielding) romantic intensity is hers. Like the best alt-genre/”new action”/fusion comics, Angel isn’t an artist molding her ideas into a preexisting template, it’s her using her ideas as the template, and pouring bits and pieces of the genre art she loves into the mix to fill it up. When it works, it’s really exciting: Those staccato panels, which hardly ever show two people in the same frame and frequently don’t even show entire faces, create a real sense of paranoia and insecurity in that post-apocalyptic landscape. And the romantic material is affectingly personal despite its clichés. It’s not an action comic with heart, it’s a heart comic with an action, if that makes any sense. It’s not intended to be rad or stylish or awesome or sexy or cool or now, it’s intended to be exactly the combination of personal preoccupations and obsessions that it is. If I could say that about all alt-genre comics, whatever their other flaws, I could read them all damn day and still feel like I wasn’t cheating myself of the unfettered personal expression the best of the “alt” side of that equation can offer.

“His Face All Red”
Emily Carroll, writer/artist
self-published on the web, October 2010
Read it at EmCarroll.com

I’ve said a lot of complimentary things about this comic in the months since it was first posted, but it occurred to me I never actually sat down and reviewed it. So the other night I loaded it up for re-reading with the express purpose of writing a review in mind. And despite having looked at it however many times since it went up on Halloween, I still found myself dreading, literally dreading, the final image. Familiarity bred fear. From the striking title to the matter-of-fact opening line to the final page turn, Emily Carroll’s “His Face All Red” is an engrossing, quietly terrifying horror comic. You could be forgiven for thinking it might not be, by the way. Carroll’s slick-sexy-cute illustration style is very popular on the Internet, the kind of stuff that gets endlessly reblogged and Tumblrd and LJd; it’s easy to picture her earning plaudits for doing realistically cute redesigns of Supergirl’s costume, or a killer suite of Scott Pilgrim or Harry Potter portraits, or a drawing of Mal Reynolds and The Tenth Doctor reenacting Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V-J Day in Times Square,” or whatever. So yeah, I could stand to see it de-prettified in the future. But here she applies that readily appealing craft in ways above and beyond what she could have easily gotten away with doing. Her use of the web to control pacing is really masterful: She uses the long vertical scroll to create an almost hypnotic feeling of inevitable descent as we watch our narrator explain why and how he killed his brother, and try to figure out why and how someone who looks and acts just like him appeared the next day, acting like nothing had happened; she then breaks this flow in jarring fashion with a pair of pages that contain but a single indelible image, one after the other. All this against a pitch-black background, further enhancing the immersiveness of the story. And that final turn of the page! Really pitch-perfect cartooning and pitch-perfect horror pacing, showing us just enough to let us know that something truly terrible is before us. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I found that in the weeks since I last saw it, my mind had added details to the image — they weren’t really present there, but the tone of utter shattering of reality’s norms conjured them nonetheless. Enormously effective and affecting work, as close to delivering a jump-scare as any comic I’ve read. Shudder.