The Hurting

X-Cuses, X-Cuses

So, I've got a good pattern going, why mess it up? You know, the whole tease-a-brand-new-series-then-fall-off-the-face-of-the-planet-after-one-installment thing that seems to recur with startling frequency around here. But that's what happens when you A) actually get to go away somewhere for a holiday weekend, which is quite the novelty but puts blogging on the back burner and then B) come home to find your desktop machine infected with some kind of nasty virus, for which the anti-virus program "accidentally" fucks up the TCI/IP stack causing a couple days of cussing and sweating before relenting with a cold reinstall of XP. So - yeah! Fun! (Violet has asked me why I still bother with keeping a Windows desktop in addition to a Mac laptop and, honestly, when I'm knee-deep in DOS trying to get the machine to rebuild its internet protocols I wonder that myself!)

Anyway. We were talking about the X-Men?

I'd like to thank everyone who replied to the first X-Post last week - although I don't think I'll be replying to every comment specifically, it's really good to get a feel for other peoples' thoughts on the matter. Interestingly, most people's comments echoes a few general points, most of which related back to my own ideas in one way or another - to wit, the books got too big, too complex, too expensive, too far removed from their thematic underpinnings. if you scratch a current comics fan chances are you will find, somewhere, an old-school X-Men fan - whether that "old-school" is Dark Phoenix, Inferno, Age of Apocalypse or even Here Comes Tomorrow. The X-Men are simply so big, so central to the last few decades of industry history that most people had some affection for the franchise at some point in its history.

But the common denominator for many peoples' stories is that whatever era of X-Men comics they liked, something happened that made them step away. Of course, this is life: it's relatively rare for someone to like something with the same fevered intensity throughout their entire life. Only in comics and other related nerd-media properties is it ever expected that a devoted customer now become a devoted customer for life. Only in comics and other related nerd-media properties is it ever expected that a popular franchise will remain in constant production for decades on end. (Of course, there are soap operas too, but seeing as how they are basically "nerd-media" - albeit for what is mostly a strikingly different demographic base - I'll lump them in with conventional "nerd-media" for the purposes of this brief discussion.)

And because the X-Men are so central to the idea of mainstream superhero comics - even to this day, when the franchise has fallen off dramatically, the idea of Wolverine and his friends being the ne plus ultra of the spandex set has never been shaken - a loss of interest in the X-Men on the part of casual comics fans has often meant a loss of interest in comics, period. We're getting into the realm of anecdote, and it's hard to say anything hard and fast in a realm where personal experience is the only real measure, but there are more than a few comics blogs whose authors started by stating that they read the X-Men when they were kids and adolescents, gave up "when the books got lame", dismissed comics for a decade or more, and then got lured back by Watchmen / Sandman / Chris Ware / Adrian Tomine / take your pick. For better or for worse, the popularity of the X-Men books has often been a bellweather for the mainstream industry as a whole - not necessarily the good parts of the industry, but in terms of raw sales and public accessibility. If you're a kid getting into comics for the first time, you want the coolest thing on the racks - and for most of the last thirty years that has been the X-Men. And when you're an adolescent or teenager getting out of comics, your apathy is likely to be strengthened by the perceived coolness (or lack thereof) of the "coolest" comic on the racks. If X-Men isn't really measurably more cool than, say, Quasar or Aquaman, what's the point?

Lots of questions! Next time, we might actually start digging our way towards some answers, and we'll begin with a brief look at Justice League: Cry for Justice - obviously not an X-Men book, but such a great example of contemporary story structure that I can't avoid the temptation to compare and contrast. For educational purposes.
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Clorox Lantern

This is hardly rocket science but I am CALLING IT NOW so ALL YOU BITCHES gotta pay respekz when I am proven right:

White is the topmost color on the visible light spectrum (I dunno if "topmost" is the right word but you get my drift): if you put a rainbow through a prism it's come out white, yadda yadda. So the climax of Blackest Night is going to feature Hal Jordan getting his hands on one of every extant power ring (cue the homage to this) and then becoming the all-powerful "White Lantern" with the power to destroy the Black Lanterns just by looking at them funny. And then he'll recite this oath:

In whitest dawn, in purest pale,
No color shall escape my bleach,
Let those who mess with honkies quail,
Beware my stain-fighting power, Clorox Lantern's gonna getcha*.

* This didn't rhyme well.
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"Absolute Beginners" is one of my favorite Bowie songs, and probably one of my favorite songs, period. It is consistently overlooked, which is not to say entirely forgotten - but still, it's a classic and deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as similarly-themed ballads such as "Heroes" and "Time".

If you need to be convinced at this late date about the depth and breadth of Bowie's catalog, remember that this track dropped in the middle of what is generally considered his nadir - 1986, right between the twin supernovas of suck Tonight and Never Let Me Down, and right before the ill-considered Tin Machine period. (Of course, there are still things on both of his mid 80s albums which I quite like, and Tin Machine certainly has its share of admirers.) Regardless: it wasn't even an album cut, but a one-off recorded for the soundtrack to a forgotten adaptation of Colin MacInnes's novel of the same name. Bowie did quite a number of these soundtrack bits in the period, and it's easy to dismiss them en masse because of their abstruse relation to his "proper" discography*. But a track like "Absolute Beginners" is proof that even at his very worst, he was still capable of sloughing off a true gem when the mood struck him.

Like most of his 80s work, there's no "persona" in play here, no conceptual baggage (aside from the film connection) as in his peak 70s or 90s resurgence material. Just a simple love song, almost a silly thing, with a slight doo-wop vamp and some orchestral flourishes. For any other artist this would be a career-defining hit, the type of thing that gets played at high school proms from here to eternity (cf. Seal's "Kiss From A Rose"), but for Bowie, because of his critical reputation as a "serious" songwriter, a track like this is seen as a fluke. I'm hardly a fan of contemporary pop balladry but Bowie pulls it off because, you know, this is the guy who sang one of the greatest doomed love songs ever written, this is the guy who had a huge chart hit with a song called "Modern Love" which wasn't actually about love but about anxiety and social conformity (set to a great New Wave beat so you could still dance to it, 'natch).

So yeah, if he wants to sing an actual, honest-to-God love song, complete with a sweeping chorus and saxophone solo? Well, hell, let's give it a go.

As long as you're still smiling,
There's nothing more I need.
I absolutely love you,
But we're absolute beginners;
But if my love is your love,
We're certain to succeed.

Simple words, simple sentiment, but never simplistic: it's just a simple, beautiful song, consistently forgotten and underrated. One of these days someone is going to latch onto this song and make it a huge hit - could be some up-and-coming indie chanteuse, a jittery British punk band, or even an American Idol finalist. It's a good enough song that you can easily see it surviving the transposition into any number of other idioms. It's underperformed even by Bowie, never covered, highly obscure: ripe for rediscovery.

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* For the life of me I'll never understand the affection for "This Is Not America", which commits the twin cardinal sins of pop music by being both boring and pretentious.

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Part One, Two
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X Marks the Spot

So, I've been thinking a bit about the X-Men lately. This is perhaps my favorite new blog, and is I think of some interest even to folks who have little actual interest in the X-Men themselves. Recapping every mainline X-Men title from the 90s, and many of the spin-offs and associated books, highlights two things primarily: 1) the books were by and large incredibly repetitive and 2) they were also overwhelmingly bad.

Now, let's think about that for a minute. The X-Men were the #1 franchise in comics for two decades, only falling off in recent years due to the unexpected resurgence of the Avengers line. The X-Men as individual characters and as a general concept is popular enough that it was able to survive not just the loss of its founding father, Chris Claremont, in 1991; not just the loss in 1992 of some of the most popular artists in mainstream comics history - creators whose popularity had enabled them to reorient the entire line to suit their whims in the early 90s, a reorientation that included getting rid of Claremont in a Soviet-style putsch; but the books were able to thrive as the #1 franchise even though the books themselves floundered through a seemingly endless succession of meaningless, ill-received events and useless spin-offs. Sure, people have fond memories of the Age of Apocalypse - and it was pretty good, as these things go. But, you know, that's one storyline, and when weighed against, say, Onslaught, The Phalanx Covenant, Operation: Zero Tolerance, The Twelve . . . well, you see, it starts to add up after a while.

It seems as if every 12-18 months back in the mid-to-late 90s you'd have a big new relaunch with new creators who'd do a gushing Q&A in Wizard bragging about how they were going to "shake things up" and get fans excited again. Mark Waid, Joe Kelly & Steven T. Seagle, Alan Davis . . . all of them started big but soon fell down the rabbit hole of forgotten or truncated storylines, lost plot threads, obvious editorial interference, and increasing irrelevance. And yet one thing remained constant: it always sold. Always. Even when the rest of the comics industry was struggling to survive, the X-Men always sold - even when competition was fierce in the height of the early 90s crossover & Image armageddon, the X-Men always sold. People bought the comics no matter what.

Although the X-Axis website is no more, Paul O'Brien continues to read just about every new X-Men book as it is released and review it for his current website. O'Brien is one of the best writers on mainstream comics currently active, and that is primarily due to the fact that he manages to be both a canny industry observer and an unrepentant fanboy - a neat trick considering that the two goals are not usually complementary. In recent months O'Brien has focused increasingly on the fact that the books are violently floundering. The flagship books are still popular, but the franchise isn't #1, it hasn't been #1 for long enough that the tumble can't be perceived as a temporary fluke, and despite the fact that Marvel still thinks the franchise is capable of supporting many more books than seem healthy in the current retail climate, no one is interested in secondary and tertiary X-books anymore. When sales were up and it didn't matter what they put in the books so long as they shipped, they could keep the illusion of momentum going strictly on the strength of sheer popularity. With that automatic popularity having dwindled, it's hard to hide the lack of momentum and the chronic wheel-spinning that characterizes even the most well-received modern X-books.

So, I'd like to talk some about why this is, because as one of the most popular franchises in the history of comics I think there is some significance to be found in their current dire straits. So I'll throw this one out there: based on the above preliminary thoughts, what is your perception of the current state of the X-Men? That's a pretty wide question, so let's see where that takes us.
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News You Can Use

I haven't done a lot of music writing for other venues recently - truth be told, after four or five years of writing music reviews and doing music journalism, it started to get really repetitive and I burnt out. Plus, with everything else that's been going on, I haven't had a lot of time to devote to non-academic writing - to which this blog's spotty publication history will attest. However, I have been easing my way back into it lately, and I contrited a handful of entries to Popmatters' big 10th Anniversary feature, spotlighting the most memorable and important (which does not necessarily mean "good") discs from 1999. I love the music of the 90s - not to sound like a grumpy old fart, but dammit, in many respects this current decade was a big come-down from the last one. If you're under 25 maybe you'll have reason to disagree, but it's been kind of a bleh decade for music.

Anyway, I wrote some of these you might be interested in. Scroll down the page for the appropriate bits:

The Chemical Brothers - Surrender
Leftfield - Rhythm & Stealth
Le Tigre - S/T
Basement Jaxx - Remedy

A couple of them are rush jobs and I had no idea how they'd end up reading, but none of them are terribly embarrassing. (OK, maybe the Leftfield one.)
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You Have To Watch Them In Order To Get The Full Effect




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