The Hurting

2012-01-23T04:00:00.002-05:00

Not the only dust my mother raised.

Miscellaneous T

Are there any more dreaded words in the English language than "B-sides collection"? By definition these are albums composed of the stuff that wasn't good enough to make it onto the regular albums. These are the types of albums designed specifically to appeal to fans - many of whom probably own some of the material already, or who come along later in hopes of catching up on what they missed. How do you judge these things? The fans, because they're fans, will love the material in whatever format it is released; casual fans and critics are usually advised to steer clear. Think back for a minute on just how many B-sides compilations you own that actually reward repeated listenings. I'll give you Incesticide, Black Market Clash - I'm sure you can think of a few others. (Sixties groups don't count, for reasons which should be obvious once you think about it.)

They Might Be Giants maybe aren't quite in the same category as Nirvana or the Clash, but the material from their fertile late eighties / early nineties period nevertheless represents their peak, the point where years of hustling in the New York club scene began to pay enormous dividends in terms of skill and songwriting prowess. If there is one element that has defined the group since very early on and through to the present, it's professionalism: as weird as some of their weirdest material can get, their strangest songs nevertheless sound incredibly solid. Their debut was the closest they ever got to actual "lo-fi" material, and from that point forward the band became increasingly professional. By the time they reached Lincoln even their off-the-cuff song doodles sounded focused and rich. The material released on Miscellaneous T represents a snapshot of the band at the exact moment of its transformation from a pair of strange, ambitious amateurs and into the same well-oiled nerd rock machine that recorded the world's least likely platinum record, 1990's Flood.

Miscellaneous T is a B-sides album of the old school: a compilation of the tracks included on their first four singles, with a couple oddballs like a remix and radio edits. Everything except for the single mix of "(She Was A) Hotel Detective" was eventually reprinted in the 1997 box set Then: The Early Years. This disc is out of print and, really, if you have Then you have everything you need. And yet every time I need to rip a copy of Then onto a new iPod or iTunes, I always take the time to replace the tracks from that box set into their Miscellaneous T play order. I wasn't fortunate enough to actually buy the singles on their initial release - of course not - so this album was my first exposure to these songs. And in my mind, after listening to this album so many times in the early and mid 90s, this is how these songs should be heard. It's not a "real" album, but it's a good album that holds together as a cohesive unit shockingly well given its portmanteau nature.

Make no mistake: this shouldn't be anyone's first They Might Be Giants album. But if your first exposure is Flood or Lincoln, this is a perfectly fine candidate for your second They Might Be Giants album.

Many of these songs are obviously what we would consider B-side material: something like their pseudo-industrial synthesizer cover of Rodgers and Hart's "Lady Is A Tramp" would probably have seemed even weirder in the context of a proper album. "Hello Radio" and "Mr. Klaw" are very brief sketches that wouldn't have been out of place on their debut but wouldn't necessarily have added anything, either. Every TMBG fan has a soft spot for track thirteen, the "untitled" skit produced from a long message accidentally left on their "Dial-A-Song" service in the late 80s. "Who's 'There May Be Giants?'" asks a bemused middle-aged New York matron.

But then once you cut away the fat, you're left with a core of tracks that are every bit as good - and in some cases even better - than most of the material from their first two records. "Hey Mister DJ I Thought You Said We Had A Deal," "Nightgown of the Sullen Moon," "It's Not My Birthday," "We're the Replacements" - some of their very best tracks, sloughed off for B-sides. Gave upon their works, ye mighty, and despair.

Next: The Big Time.

(out of five)

2012-01-16T06:21:00.000-05:00

SIR

Battle Scars #2

I don't read Malcolm Gladwell but I like the fact that he's so good at thinking up pithy little titles to his books about how incredibly complex phenomena can always be boiled down into manageable chunks of middlebrow pop psychology. Sometimes you blink, sometimes you hit the tipping point, sometimes you look like Andrea Fraser. That kind of thing.

Let's see if we can find our way through one of these, it's been a while:

Gladwell's books are the kind of thing you can imagine business travelers ingesting on their way from Dubuque to Miami for a sales conference: pithy, vaguely quirky but never too quirky to be monstrously optimistic about the world. Someday Gladwell needs to think up some sort of magic formula to cover the concept of creatively bankrupt inertia. Because, man, the idea is strong enough and central enough to our current conversation on mainstream comic books that I wish we had some sort of catch-all phrase we could point to at a moment's notice for mutual convenience. Like, how about "drowning not waving"? This is a story of the comic book companies who kept right doing what they were doing until they noticed the water had already come up to their necks, but by the time they realized what the problem was and started to make some noise, the boat was so far away that everyone on deck just started waving back, thinking the tiny bobbing figure on the horizon was having an awesome time.

Marvel comics have looked so much alike for so long that the idea that they ever looked different from how they do now seems like one of those "we've always been at war with Eurasia" moments. All these little things that seemed so unusual at the time have compounded themselves for so long that we don't even blink anymore.

Think back to the early days of Nu-Marvel: it was the Wild West. There were dozens of different things happening all over the place. I do not want to overemphasize or exaggerate just how good the comics produced during this time were, as I've already begun to see here and there over the course of the last few years - but stop and consider for a moment just how hard it is to make a comic in an environment as complicated and fraught as Marvel Comics. Any comic. Most of them are terrible. Even the ones that are good are still terrible - never forget that! Those of us who know better stick around because we don't have anywhere else to go. Seeing the occasional Good Book poke its head up from under those waters seems to be a miracle of downright messianic significance. This is turning into a crappy history lesson, something about which most people reading this either already know or don't give two shits. The point - there is a point - is very simple: the reason why they did so many weird, different things after the turn of the millennium is that things were pretty bad. The company had just been (literally) bankrupted and had suffered the ignominy of seeing its two flagship franchises - the X-Men and Spider--Man - dragged through years of sewer-gargling shit. (Seriously - just go back and look at the types of stories Marvel was publishing around December 1999, if you dare.) Things were bad enough that they were willing to do anything to make them better.

Whenever you feel like dramatizing the creative output of a corporate entity, it's always good to remember that the best stuff almost always occurs when people are either A) desperate or B) not paying attention. So those things that hit the wall and stick? That's what you build your franchises around. And when it works? When it works you stick the saddle on and ride it for dear life, because there is no telling when (if ever!) these things are going to run out of steam, and in any case by the time the gravy trains stop running on time hopefully you'll be far away.

Somewhere along the line the single most important question at issue in Marvel comics became Who Was In Charge of the superheroes. This is really weird: 2005's House of M was Marvel's first line-wide crossover since 2000's Maximum Security (an event so bad it was terrible), and the plot was basically Who Gets To Be In Charge, the Avengers or the X-Men. The winner was, of course, the Avengers, because House of M ended by kneecapping the X-franchise for years to come. But if the jockeying for dominance was metaphorical in House of M it became literal in Civil War: Who Gets To Be In Charge of the superheroes. If superheroes were real obviously they'd be run like any other branch of the federal government, so who gets to be the guy in charge of that agency (The Initiative). And then when that happens what happens when the guy in charge of the agency falls down on the job and lets a bunch of aliens invade (Secret Invasion) meaning that the new guy in charge is the looney ex-con who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to shoot Space Osama in the head (Dark Reign). And then the looney guy in charge goes nuts and leads his branch of the government right over a cliff (Seige) and then it's time for Daddy (AKA Captain America) to step in and take care of things. And from then on out it's all basically a story about all the characters getting in on Daddy's good side, because of course Daddy is the government and we all want Daddy's approval, right?

Because, you know, if there's one thing I always really wanted when I was a kid growing up reading superhero comic books, it was for stories about superheroes working for the government. There is a reason why, for decades, the idea of "government sponsored super-hero time" was usually synonymous with villains. No real hero would take their orders from a bureaucrat. Spider-Man and the X-Men were outlaws, the Fantastic Four were always having trouble with landlords and lawyers, even the Avengers - Earth's Mightiest Heroes! - had adversarial relationships with their government liaisons and the city of New York. That always worked for Marvel because Marvel wasn't Your Dad's superheroes: Marvel was the choice of the New Generation. There is, perhaps, something in the fact that Nick Fury has never been able to maintain a successful solo series not set in the distant past of World War II: guardians of the status quo just don't work in Marvel as headliners. That's the whole point of Captain America, for God's sake: he's not a symbol of the government, he's a symbol of idealism and rebellion, a man who has more than once given up his costume when faced with the government's failure to live up to his ethics. And now he's In Charge, he's the Daddy signing paperwork in the front office making sure all the different Avengers teams fill out their personnel forms by the end of the government's fiscal year.

At some point Marvel started receiving advertising money from the US Army. So here's the big new launch, one of two series spun out of the final pages of the underperforming Fear Itself event, starring a decommissioned Army officer on the run from . . . well, the government, I think, for unknown reasons that have not yet and do not promise to be explained any time soon. And the bulk of the book is this dude - Staff Sergeant Marcus Johnson, fresh off a two-year stint in Afghanistan - running from other dudes with guns and there's another guy with a sword (Taskmaster, pretty much the definition of the kind of villain you use when it really doesn't matter what villain you use just so long as there's someone to fight Captain America in passing) for reasons which - I want to stress again - we don't know. I know what they think they're doing: they've got this great idea for a story and it requires a slow burn, a long roll-out of pertinent information intended to drive the audience into a kind of tizzy over all the wonderful shit that is being withheld from them. It'll be like Christmas and Marvel is Santa Claus and if only we know how awesome Christmas morning was going to be we'd be so thrilled to be reading this book that we'd basically just plotz on the spot from the excitement.

The only problem is no one - and I mean no one is going to care to stick around six months for the resolution of the most boring mystery in the history of comics. WHO IS MARCUS JOHNSON? asks the advertising copy - my answer remains: someone about whom I know nothing 1/3 of the way through a limited series devoted to telling me the answer to precisely this question. It'd be one thing if this was 1981 and this comic cost 50 cents - fuck, scratch that. Even if this whole story cost $3.00, that'd still be too expensive. As it is, one issue of this book costs $2.99 - meaning, in order to get to the very premise of the story, the explanation as to why exactly the reader should have cared about Marcus Johnson this whole time - one must expend $18 basically on faith. On pure faith that the dreamengineers and fantasybuilders at the House of Ideas sure do have a real humdinger hidden up the sleeves of their viridian wizard's robes.

Remember back when I said that Marvel was buying advertisements from the US Army? I don't suppose on the face of it there's anything particularly wrong with that, per se - that's not on me to criticize children's' entertainment for idolizing men with guns, after all. But what is this? When I went to college - the first time - I roomed with a guy who was obsessed with ROTC, and with the idea of being an Airborne Ranger. Never mind the fact that he was rail-thin and kind of on the short side, he was still COMMITTED to the idea in a way I could only admire, albeit from a carefully-calculated ironic distance. Reading Battle Scars is a bit like having to play an AD&D campaign with that guy, dealing with his rationalizations about why his well-trained special forces character armed only with a Ka-Bar could take down the biggest Orcs in Darkwind Forest because the US Army is the best trained fighting force on the planet. So of course we get plenty of stuff that goes along the lines of "These men may be SHIELD agents, but I'm US ARMY" - not an exact quote, but Jesus who's counting. What little respect I have for this comic would be instantly trebled if they just had the balls to come out and have a page where Johnson rips off his clothes and reveals a giant phallus with the US flag tattooed on the glistening head while screaming "I AM GOING TO FUCK YOU WITH THE POWER OF THE ARMY, TEN HUT TEN HUT BITCHEZZZ." Because that's about the size of things, ahem.

The problem is that at some point Marvel's current approach to making comics became so powerfully calcified that it became impossible for the people involved to realize that they had long since reached the point of terminally diminishing returns. Because there are many worse things than bad comic books: if you like mainstream books at all, you know full well that a bad comic book is better than a boring comic book. A boring comic book is simply a sin. How do you take something with all the raw potential of brightly-colored superheroes bashing into each other for 22 pages with huge sound effects and make it boring? Oh, I know: let's take the superheroes out of the book and replace them with identically uniformed government employees, and instead of having them fight about weird symbolic adolescent displacement, let's have them fight about mishuffled paperwork and redacted government reports. Because you know what kids love? The Pentagon Papers. That right there is exactly what we need to create. Having superheroes talk about their position vis a vis the government worked well for a few years there, I'm sure people will never get tired of them having this conversation.

I just have to wonder about the mindset of the people working at Marvel who can read this book - who can approve this script, see the pencilled pages, see the inked pages, see the coloring, the lettering, see the book at every step of its creation - and not, never once, say, you know, this is boring. This is a comic about generic people in brown civilian clothes running around and fighting about things they don't know and we don't know. There's no discernible villain, the conflict is poorly defined (sure, this guy's running from the government, but why?), characters we do know (Captain America) are acting in inexplicable ways . . . for a big new character launch coming out of last year's major crossover event, this is simply an abortion.

Somewhere along the line the company lost the ability to see that comics like this were terrible. Because it essentially apes the surface qualities of hundreds of other similar comics that were not quite so terrible, it's probably hard to tell the difference at this point. But just because they were "not quite so terrible" doesn't mean they still weren't terrible, and that this whole well of vaguely paramilitary, pseudo-espionage superheroics didn't pass its expiration date a long time ago. To the people involved in making this comic: is this what you want to do with your lives? Is this the kind of story you wanted to tell when you grew up and fell in love with superheroes? All those wonderful stories of brightly-colored gods and men flying between planets and fighting all the metaphorical embodiments of existential fears and anxieties, living larger-than-life soap-opera lives and making out with all the hottest babes on the printed page - this is what you wanted to do? This is garbage - unimaginative, derivative, so purely, unabashedly tasteless as to be complete drivel. If you were involved in any way with the production of this comic book for any reason other than that you needed money to pay your rent, you really need to take a hard look at your life and question your priorities. Is this a story you needed to tell? If that is the case might a suggest that you shouldn't be a storyteller, because this is not a story. It's a hook on which a publisher has hung its logo, a logo which has come to be recognized as synonymous with tired.

The worst part is that I'm almost certain that this isn't a story anyone needed to tell. This is what Marvel does now: makes stories meant to be read on iPads by business travelers on their ways from Dubuque to Miami. Tom Clancy for illiterates. It took three people to come up with the "story" here, another of those three to actually write the "script," before it was passed off to a disinterested penciler who has produced much better work in his time. There were fully five editors involved in the making of this book, to say nothing of a Chief Creative Officer, Publisher and Executive Producer. I'm guessing most of the people involved in the making of this comic book did so because it was their job to do so: in which case, that's perfectly fine, I begrudge no one their right to make a living. But whomever involved in the making of this comic actually thought up the idea for this comic - whichever of you gentlemen (I'm trying to avoid using names here because there's no need to get personal) actually though this story up, you need to maybe have one of those late night / early morning walks along the beach that usually accompany mid-life epiphanies. Because if you can read this comic and not realize that you've wasted your life, you haven't looked hard enough. Drowning not waving.

2012-01-11T01:04:00.000-05:00

. . . Bringing Up the Rear II

4. Cut Copy - Zonoscope

I know In Ghost Colours was their breakthrough, but that album never really caught on with me despite repeated exposure. This album, however, immediately appealed. Maybe if I went back to their previous material I'd be more receptive now. All I can say for certain, however, is that I really like Zonoscope. It's a strong album that only gets better with repeated exposure. A lot of dance bands - and I think Cut Copy are still a dance band despite the fact that they write pop songs - seem to think you don't necessarily need to have good songs if you can have a good rhythm section. Cut Copy, however, have plenty good songs. Very good songs. Although they are definitely still working within the confines of an established genre (80s-inflected faux-glam disco pop, a rich vein these past five or so years), they never let obeisance to their source material dominate their better instincts as songwriters. This is the kind of album that makes you think, y'know, these guys could be one of those bands to whom we're still paying attention in ten or fifteen years.

3. Yacht - Shangri-La

Although 2009's See Mystery Lights was actually YACHT's fourth album, it might as well have been their first in terms of people actually paying attention. The reason for this is dreadfully simple: on that album the full membership expanded to a duo with the addition of singer Claire Evans. Suddenly the band had a distinctive, very sexy voice to sing its very catchy songs. However, See Mystery Lights didn't fully utilize Evans' voice the way Shangri-La does. She's the singer and - in the most hoary, time-tested formula known to man - a group with good songs and a boring dude singer will always be trumped by a group with good sings and an appealing girl singer. That's life. Pop music without charisma is a dead letter.

Considering how tempting it must have been to stretch this album out to Herculean proportions - it's a concept dance album about political utopias and atheist spirituality - it's really quite a blessing that they managed to keep it reigned in to only 43 minutes. The concision works quite well. There are even a few instances where you find yourself wishing they would actually ease up on the clutch and let some of these grooves expand - this is a DFA album, after all, and if this were James Murphy 2/3 of these songs would clock in over eight minutes. But no, the restraint succeeds because the album never wears out its welcome. Ten tracks, 43 minutes, and when it's over you wish it had been longer. Isn't that how they all should be?

2. Destroyer - Kaputt

This was a front-runner for Album of the Year from almost the moment of its release, so it might almost seem like something of an anti-climax to once again ratify its greatness. But no: it's still good. Dan Bejar has been bubbling up just beneath the surface of a breakthrough for years, putting out a pile of well-regarded solo albums in addition to his work with the New Pornographers. This album, however, seems to have been the tipping point in terms of transforming Bejar from someone to whom you should be listening and into someone to whom you actually do listen.

It helps that, for all the eighties nostalgia that has dominated indie pop music for these past however many years, Bejar found a relatively untapped vein: the soft-focus glam rock (not the same as "yacht rock") of later Roxy Music and solo Lindsey Buckingham. On paper it seems as if it would be a particularly hard style to adapt - the reason why (for instance) "Avalon" sounds the way it does is that it is the result of painstakingly long hours of exacting technical recording filtered through the studied appearance of languorous disinterest. It's not the kind of sound just any schmuck with ProTools can successfully ape, in other words. But the sound made for an uncanny match with Bejar's own studiously facetious personality, and the result was - strangely enough - the most sincere-sounding record of Bejar's assiduously ironic career. Bejar is enough of a stylistic chameleon that it would be hard to imagine him sticking with this sound for another full album - if anything, it would probably just become a gimmick. Here, though, what should have been a gimmick is merely just a surprisingly powerful and affective pastiche, an exercise in consummate craftsmanship that never descends into mere formal nostalgia.

1. tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l

I know w h o k i l l was Merrill Garbus' second album, but it is still essentially correct to say that she came out of nowhere this year. I still remember the first time I heard tUnE-yArDs, on a tinny YouTube video on my laptop screen: usually not the most auspicious first exposure to a promising new band. And yet there was something so strong and confident in Garbus' voice (the track was "Bizness", as you might have guessed) that it completely surpassed the limitations of medium and lodged itself firmly in my brain. I went out and bought the album the very next day and the rest was history.

There's something about Garbus' songs that almost make me feel uncomfortable listening to them. They're highly personal, but not really in any kind of queasy, autobiographical way - they're personal in that she is really putting herself out there, belting out strange and eccentric lyrics with the authority of someone who has lived every nonsense syllable and scat-rhyme. It seems almost as if we're hearing something we shouldn't be - it's not as if she's saying anything particularly private (most of the time!), but the way she says it seems so intimate, so unguarded and wild, that hearing it seems like a terrible imposition. But we're not talking about some lonely piano dirges or solo sad-girl acoustic guitar music: this is bold, brassy, full-band funk, complete with a horn section and pounding percussion. This is music with muscle in addition to nerve, highly kinetic while never losing sight of its unabashedly emotive core.

I had the privilege of seeing tUnE-yArDs in performance this past May. It was just a few weeks after w h o k i l l had been released, at the very beginning of her tour. She hadn't been on national TV, she hadn't played huge festivals or posted near the top of critics lists. It was a small - a tiny venue - a community arts center in Easthampton, Massachusetts, standing room only, the type of place you usually see local singers or crafts fairs. She's from New England, went to Smith, so it was very much a hometown crowd, filled with friends and family, definitely a quiet moment before the real business of touring and promoting got underway. She ate dinner in the front row of the space during lead-up to the opening act, not four feet away from me while she ate rice from a take-out container. That's an odd sensation: it wasn't a big crowd crowd and there's not a lot to do while you're waiting for the music to start, and wow there's the star you paid to see eating and chatting with old friends right in front of you. That's the type of show it was - so you'll understand me when I say it was an intense performance, joyous and enthusiastic throughout.

I don't go to very many shows but I'm very happy I went to that one. I don't think she'll be able to play many shows like that in the future. No more tiny community arts spaces - she's been on national TV, scored #7 on Pitchfork's end of the year list, basically become a star. And it's hard not to think we won't be hearing much, much more along those lines.

2012-01-10T05:27:00.001-05:00

Bringing Up the Rear

Back in December I promised that when I had more time I would write more about the top-ten album list I submitted to this year's Pazz & Jop poll. (I'm so completely out of the loop that I didn't even bother submitting a singles list this time around.) Before we get too much farther into 2012, I should go about doing that.

Top Ten of 2012

(With the previous caveat that there was still a lot of stuff I hadn't heard as of the moment when the list was due.)

10. Bill Callahan - Apocalypse

In a year that was partially dominated by bearded men with guitars making over-produced albums of gloopy soft-rock schlock, there was room for counter-programming in the form of a man with a guitar singing sparse, starkly minimal guitar ballads about the death of America. There isn't a single moment of this record that doesn't feel exquisitely crafted, and yet the result is never overstated or affected - it simply sounds perfect, thoughtful and quiet in equal measures, without ever quite devolving into mere tastefulness. I didn't think much of it the first few times i heard it, but a few months after the album came out I started hearing tracks from Apocalypse popping up on the local college radio station. I was struck by the serenity of these songs in a way that hadn't necessarily been evident on first exposure, and it's a sensation that has only grown with subsequent listenings. Given time to breathe the music grew on me immensely.

9. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

Here's where you get to snicker at me for being a predictable old dude just plugging his list with SPIN magazine's top artists of 1996. Yeah, we can all admit that her last couple albums were weak and / or strange (not to say that they don't have their admirers), but that's OK now because a few years in the wilderness making weird harpichord music gave her the confidence to make another album of frightening potency, the kind of album you could never have predicted she'd have the guts or the chops to make based on her career trajectory some twenty years' gone. All artists firmly into their third decades of continuous recording should be so ambitious: an album that is simultaneously lovely and horrifying at the same time, a "concept album" with neither useless narrative or unnecessary pomp. This is some very pretty music that nonetheless cuts right to the bone.

8. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Belong

I cannot for the life of me understand why this album has been so systematically ignored by most of the other critics' lists. I had to double check to make sure this was actually released in 2011 - sure enough it was, but for whatever reason all the hype from the first quarter of the year had entirely dissipated when it came time for people to hash out their preferences. I listened to this album pretty much exclusively for a couple weeks back in the Spring - it's strong from beginning to end and sounds like a dream. Nostalgia only gets you so far without the tunes to back it up: any group who can write a track like this does not deserve to be so casually dismissed. If you find yourself wondering why they don't make more music that sounds like Psychocandy spiked with bits of the Psychedelic Furs and New Order, the answer is that they still do and it's fantastic.

7. The Rapture - In the Grace of Your Love

I don't think I could improve on what Marty had to say here. Leave it merely to be said that I'm basically a DFA fanboy who buys any record with the lightning bolt logo on sight - and I've got the Prinzhorn Dance School CD to prove it. So maybe my opinion is suspect: I'm genetically preconditioned to want to like the Rapture. But like it I do nonetheless. The actual, sincere revelation at the core of many of the songs only adds to the appeal, a reminder that there is a world and history of dance music outside the province of nervous white kids with skinny jeans.

6. They Might Be Giants - Join Us

I've spent enough time talking about these guys recently, but again for emphasis: this is a complete return to form, with their strongest batch of songs in fifteen years.

5. Low - C'mon

Sometimes I feel like the last Low fan in the world. I love these guys: there's something about their quiet intensity that never seems to get old for me regardless of how dated an idea "slowcore" might seem at this day and date. I think Mimi Parker has a gorgeous voice, and they know how to write songs that spotlight that instrument wonderfully. Isn't that enough?

Next: the final four.

2012-01-09T04:41:00.000-05:00

. . . And we're back.

After a computer-less month, ladies and gentlemen we are once again floating in space.

The really bizarre part is how, before I even did anything on my new computer, I was able to plug my old hard drive in and upload every single file from my previous computer onto the new. So when the new computer started for the first time, everything was exactly the same as it had been on the dead machine - only, it was a lot faster. It even restarted Firefox with the exact same pages that had been open when the computer died.

The one brown spot on the whole experience was the fact that my old Microsoft Office suite, which I had used since I got the old machine in 2008, no longer worked on the new laptop: apparently the old program ran on something called Power PC that the new OS Lion does not support. Which seems odd, because the result of this was that Apple made me go out and pay $100 for a new Microsoft program: seems like strange and (almost?) certainly unintentional collusion. I mean, seriously, they don't actually expect me to use whatever type of janky bullshit word processor Mac is hawking, do they?

And as an aside, I even managed to get an iPhone despite myself. Let me explain: as a belated Christmas gift I bought Violet a new iPhone 4GS - she is basically addicted to her iPhone and her old 3G was getting more and more decrepit as the weeks passed. So, fine, we go into the AT&T store with the intention of getting her the new phone. And then during checkout the clerk asks if I want an iPhone. I say that no, I don't want an iPhone. She says that the old 3Gs have gone down to $30, and that putting a new phone on Violet's plan would be only $15 or so more a month to her bill. Well, so I got a smartphone . . . I'm still not entirely sold on the idea. I am against smartphones on principle. I didn't actually get a cell phone of any kind until 2008, at which point I got a $20 pay-as-you-go number that lasted three years until the battery started to go. At which point i went out and bought another $20 cheap phone. But now I've got an iPhone. Honestly, it's fun and all, but so far I haven't really done anything but customize a ringtone and set a background picture. I don't see myself becoming as dependent on the phone as some people are . . . I just hate looking down at the tiny screen and trying to read a webpage or my e-mail. But not every situation is such that I can whip out my laptop and surf the internet at will, either.

Within two days, therefore, I joined the 21st century.

So, back to the old grind. Next week is the eighth anniversary of this blog - slightly less impressive than, say, Mike's eight anniversary, seeing as how he posts every day and I barely post at all. And yet, it's worth pointing out that whereas most blogs at some point slow their rate of posting and eventually just peter out altogether - usually the old "boy, it's been a long time since I posted!" post is the death knell - The Hurting somehow always manages to survive and return from even the most protracted malaise, like a particularly indolent and occasionally sarcastic cockroach. I'm going to keep slouching 'til the wheels fall off.

2011-12-22T21:51:00.001-05:00

Not Dead Yet

For those of you who don't check my Twitter feed with religious regularity, the dearth of posting lately has been caused by the fact that I spilled a bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper on the keyboard of my laptop. The good news is that I was able to salvage the old hard drive with no problems, and currently have it installed in an external drive kit I can plug into any available Mac machine. The bad news is that, yes, I am sans computer, save for Violet's laptop of which she so very graciously allows me the use for basic tasks such as the checking of e-mail and schoolwork. So, all the awesome posting I had planned for Christmas break - ka-blooey!

Anyway, one of the unfortunate effects of the accident is that I have had to put together my year-end top-ten list for the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop as something of an afterthought. Usually in December I have plenty of time to catch up on all the music I missed over the previous eleven months, a process that involves discovering stuff I hadn't known about as well as reconsidering stuff I had dismissed. This year, because I didn't have a computer available for regular use, I had to put this together in a few spare minutes based almost solely on memory, my Last.fm charts and a quick look over the Pitchfork and SPIN lists to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything obvious. This is hardly the most adventurous list you'll read this year, and it's fairly predictable in many respects, but I've got a deadline and this is what stuck out at me.

I should point out, once I sat down to compose the list my #1 and #2 were obvious, but the rest was a bloodbath.

There's a lot of stuff I haven't heard that could conceivably have made the list but of which I can't in good conscience be any judge: the Field, the Roots, Zomby, Tom Waits, SBTRKT all spring to mind, all albums on my shopping list for the next time I go record shopping. And of course when I have the time, I need to do the usual go-through of all the other year-end lists to see the stuff I didn't know I was missing.

Albums that disappointed: Bon Iver (how the hell is such a mediocre album Pitchfork's #1?), St. Vincent, Hercules & Love Affair, Panda Bear.

Albums that didn't necessarily disappoint but didn't set the world on fire: Stephen Malkmus, REM, GaGa, Wild Flag (I'm as shocked as you), Wilco (better than Sky Blue Sky, some signs of life, but no home run), Mirah & Thao, Nicholas Jaar, Tim Hecker, Tyler the Creator (and wow am I surprised to see this left off so many Best-Of lists - or am I?), .

Albums that were shit: Fleet Foxes, Girls (considering how much I loved his debut it pains me to say that this new albums was a sleeping pill), Fleet Foxes, James Blake (this is supposed to be "good"?), Fleet Foxes. Did I mention Fleet Foxes?

Honorable mention: Boston Spaceships (nice appetizer for new GBV!), Gang Gang Dance (if the whole album had been as good as "Glass Jar" they would have been a shoe-in), Mates of State (don't judge me!), Fucked Up (kind of obvious, but still good), Atlas Sound.

Top Ten of 2011 as of 12/22/12 -

10. Bill Callahan - Apocalypse
9. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
8. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Belong
7. The Rapture - In the Grace of Your Love
6. They Might Be Giants - Join Us
5. Low - C'mon
4. Cut Copy - Zonoscope
3. Yacht - Shangri-La
2. Destroyer - Kaputt
1. tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l

If I can find some time over the next couple days I would like to write at least a few words on each of these albums. In the meantime, tell me your ideas of anything you think I missed or underrated.

2011-12-14T06:08:00.001-05:00

He ended up really, really, really sad.

Lincoln

Within the first few seconds of the first song ("Ana Ng") the listener is aware that something is different. Everything that had been present on They Might Be Giants can still be accounted for, but perhaps it would be better to say that everything which was present had been amplified and strengthened. Whereas their first album had been occasionally sparse, intentionally discordant in places, and doggedly lo-fi, everything on Lincoln was arranged with absolute precision. The jagged guitar riff and stomping kick drum that open the album are perfectly compressed for maximum impact: the song hits like a hammer and never lets up for the space of three-and-a-half minutes. To say that "Ana Ng" is one of the duo's best songs is something of an understatement: the development and maturation of their songwriting and recording skills in the two years between their debut and their sophomore album - even 23 years later - is simply astounding.

They had a lot to prove with this record. They were a novelty act who had probably already outlived the most generous career expectations: a song on MTV and heavy rotation on college radio, all riding atop an album of strange synthesizer noises and a few classically formalist pop songs. They obviously had an idea of what kind of sound they wanted to produce but their first album was too scattered to fully realize this ambition. Lincoln was a bolt from the clear blue sky, a mature and disciplined statement dedicated to (seemingly) immature thoughts and random ideas. In the space between their first and second albums, They Might Be Giants discovered focus, and this was the key: you can get away with doing anything you so desire as long as you have the chops and the discipline. Lincoln is a forty-minute long laser beam, 18 songs in 40 minutes, a murderers' row of one catchy, complex, and deceptively melancholy ditty after another, marching in perfect military time. They Might Be Giants were essentially a hardcore group with a drum machine, and song-for-song I'd put Lincoln toe-to-toe with Double Nickles on the Dime any day of the week.

The problem with Lincoln is that all the copious skill on display only made it that much easier to underplay and undersell the actual content of the songs themselves. Because, yeah, the album is partially defined by a handful of purely silly nonsense songs, tracks like "Cowtown" and "Pencil Rain" that resist all but the most annoyingly abstruse allegorical reading. They're goofy songs built around tongue-twisters. If anyone wanted an example of They Might Be Giants as a joke band, a gimmick band of no real consequence who produce stupid ditties for the clever kids in the back of math class, well, those are the tracks to which one would go first.

But if there's one thing about which I am convinced after having lived with this album as a fixture of my life for over twenty years, it's that there's something real and haunting behind the glib facade. If you listen to the album without really listening to the album you might hear a procession of clever tunes built around puns and wry humor. You might think that some of the jokes are corny and some of the jokes are witty, and you might think that some of the attempts at pathos feel strangely hollow. But it would be a terrible mistake to hear the album as anything other than a holistic unit. It hangs together remarkably well as a unit because on Lincoln the Johns mastered the trick that would essentially make their careers: making deceptively happy songs that were, in fact and on closer examination, remarkably sad.

Listen to the album the first time and you might hear a remarkable assortment of tongue-in-cheek ditties, some great sarcastic pastiches and high-energy larks. Listen again in a different frame of mind and the whole thing takes on a decidedly darker pallor that becomes altogether harder to shake. You could dismiss one sad song, you could dismiss two sad songs, but a whole album comprised of (with only a few exceptions) unremittingly depressing, anxious, heartbroken, jaded, exhausted, and downright bleak songs? That's something that not everyone seems to get. There's real panic behind the mania.

Take a look for yourself:

Everything sticks until it goes away /
And the truth is, we don't know anything.

Somebody's reading your mind /
Damned if you know who it is /
they're digging through all of your files /
Stealing back your best ideas.

Should you worry when the skullhead is in front of you /
Or is it worse because it's always waiting where your eyes don't go?

A woman's voice on the radio can convince you you're in love /
A woman's voice on the telephone can convince you you're alone.

I know you deceived me, couldn't sleep last night /
Now my tear stains on the wall reflect an ugly sight.

I'm going to die if you touch me one more time /
Well I guess that I'm going to die no matter what.

It must be raining because a man ain't supposed to cry /
But I look up and I don't see a cloud.

Don't call me at work again no no the boss still hates me /
I'm just tired and I don't love you anymore.

What's the sense in ever thinking about the tomb /
When you're much too busy returning to the womb?

I love the world and if I have to sue for custody /
I will sue for custody.

If it wasn't for disappointment /
I wouldn't have any appointments.

Now you're the only one here who can tell me if it's true /
That you love me and I love me.

The reason Lincoln is their masterpiece, why this is the one They Might Be Giants album more than any other that exemplifies why they are such great and gifted songwriters, is that this is the album on which the line between energy and anxiety was most neatly effaced. They're not singing jerky, fast jingles because they're having a great time: no, they're actually quite miserable, desperately unhappy, and it's only by going so fast that they lose their breath that they can actually begin to express the deep discontent lying underneath the happy exterior.

The last third of the album (from the final breather of "You'll Miss Me") is one long sled ride down the hill from paranoia through despair right on to delusion. The album's climactic track, "Kiss Me, Son of God," is perhaps the single most demented kiss-off ever written by someone who wasn't actually in a padded room. It's They Might Be Giants's version of slamming the mic on the ground and walking offstage after delivering a ferocious "fuck you" to everyone who ever kicked their shins in gym class. The only ways you could possibly follow-up the end of Lincoln would be to hang yourself from the rafters or sign a major-label deal. You know the score, but anyone coming to Lincoln fresh might legitimately worry for the mental health of the men who wrote it.

Some "scamp" took down the album version, so here's an OK live version.

All of which might well be summed up as supremely conceited and self-satisfied . . . and you'd be 100% correct in doing so. That's the point: one of the reasons - perhaps the main reason - why They Might Be Giants took off the way they did was that the spoke to the dramatic self-absorption and feigned martyrdom of the American teenage nerd in a way that no other musical group or cultural phenomenon had ever quite done before. This is something that no one under a certain age - say, 25 at the youngest - can really understand without having to be told: until very recently, nerd media was mass media, and it only stuck with nerds because they were too stupid to realize that sci-fi TV shows and fantasy books were not things that grown men (and women, but let's be frank, the Android's Dungeon was a boys club for decades) should care about. It was all well and good for normal people to love Star Wars, but to keep caring about it long after you left the theater - and to obsess about it long past grade school - that took a special kind of willful suspension of disbelief in the way life was "supposed" to be lived. And the people who went to sci-fi conventions and traded VHS tapes of dubbed anime and played AD&D and listened to Tarkus long after anyone else cared about ELP - they did so because they needed something else to fill the void in their lives, because all the things that "normal" people were supposed to care about in the industrialized west just weren't cutting it.

Is the image of the self-hating nerd a cliche? Is there any truth to the stereotype of the basement-dwelling troll with Cheeto-stained fingers and a soiled "I GROK SPOCK" T-shirt, awkwardly fumbling through gym class and desperately ashamed of the fact that he can't really complete any aspects of the President's Physical Fitness Test to satisfaction? Perhaps in its most extreme forms this is an exaggeration, but there's no doubt whatsoever that until very recently - as in, within the last decade and change - nerds were decidedly off the mainstream. And they - hell, who am I kidding? we - were self-righteous about the fact that we had been excluded from the mainstream. Even if the only people who had excluded us were us. We had our reasons, or at least we believed that we did.

And this is what They Might Be Giants got. Being young and brilliant also sometimes means being a self-absorbed asshole. Sometimes, being stuck on a loop in your own head can be a fate worse than death. When I was younger I thought that the best track on Lincoln was "They'll Need A Crane," and while I still think that's a fantastic song, as I get older I see that the album's real masterstroke is "Snowball in Hell." It's a great song about growing up and being desperately unhappy with your life, a sentiment that can best be summed up in the phrase "money's all broke, and food's going hungry." It's a song about unhappy adulthood that somehow sounds wistful without seeming maudlin, and defiantly chipper despite increasingly dire circumstances. It's a better song than it has any right to be, considering just how unlikely They Might Be Giants ever were.

Anyone who cared to pay attention past the goofs and the weirdness was rewarded with a shimmering gem of a pop song: but in order to pay attention you had to have the patience, and in order to have the patience you had to care. Being able to care about something as nerdy and unimportant as a weird indie rock album was definitely a sign of deep commitment, and once They Might Be Giants found a way to broadcast directly to those fans with a heavy investment in being deeply committed . . . well, the rest was history.

(out of five)

2011-11-21T09:19:00.003-05:00

When they kick down your front door, how you gonna come? /
With your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun?

Longtime readers of this blog know that I'm poor. Before I went back to school in 2007 I spent much of the previous decade shuffling around a handful of low-paying, dead-end jobs, getting some degree of satisfaction from working part time as a freelance writer but generally dissatisfied with the shape and direction of my life. In hindsight it's obvious that I had no one to blame for this state of affairs but myself - I made a few precipitous decisions in my early twenties that had great, far-reaching unpleasant consequences. Usually this is the part where someone says, "I made some mistakes but I don't regret anything!" That's bullshit: although I have learned to regard my past with something resembling a sanguine wistfulness (for the necessity of my own fragile mental health, if nothing else), that doesn't mean I don't live every day with a sensation of definite regret hovering somewhere in the vicinity of my conscious thoughts.

That's not a bad thing. Regret is a strong motivating force. Everyone makes mistakes: it is how you react to these mistakes that defines your character.

Being poor tends to clarify and focus your thoughts. I actually read a really great article about this recently in the most unlikely of places: Cracked.com posted a funny list earlier this year of the "5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor." Oddly enough for a humor site like Cracked.com, this is actually one of the best, most astute and completely unvarnished examination of working poverty in America that I've ever seen. One of the reasons it's such an effective article is that it doesn't flinch from showing just how "funny" so many of the daily humiliations of the Poverty Grind actually are. Being poor means your life is essentially a long string of ironic Catch-22s, one after another forever and ever. You get some money from a tax refund? Guess what, your car needs a new timing belt. You want to go back to school? Guess what, the only way to qualify for substantive student aid is to live far below the poverty line. Gallows humor comes with the territory.

So you go back to school and work hard. Even though everything else in the world appears to be crumbling, you still wholeheartedly embrace the belief that education and hard work will allow you to rise up from poverty and to enjoy the fruits of a moderate middle-class life - the fruits of which amount, in this case, to simply living a comfortable life that doesn't require the constant counting of pennies in order to be able to eat lunch. Because we all know that there's no such thing as social mobility anymore. If you're born poor you're likely to remain poor, and if you're born rich it is almost impossible to not remain rich. Growing up we were never destitute in terms of complete abject poverty, but I think it's fair to characterize my upbringing as definitively poor, in money if not in spirit. There were fat times and lean times. We never went without essentials and we always had food to eat, but despite what the Heritage Foundation might want you to believe, being poor in America doesn't mean being perpetually hungry (although that can be a part of it - I've been hungry in my time), and it doesn't mean not owning a color TV. It does mean having to constantly scramble, and knowing full well at all moments that if your next paycheck (or pension check or SSI Disability check) doesn't materialize for whatever reason, you are screwed in a very real, concrete, and non-abstract fashion. I always like to say: some days you get the spider, and some days the spider gets you.

As might be expected from the above, being poor also means being frightened all the time. Being poor means that the police aren't your friends. I've often wondered what it must be like to live a life without constant fear of the police as a real and valid threat. I should mention that I'm perhaps the most law abiding person I know. I feel guilty about going even just two or three miles over the speed limit on the freeway - even when everyone around me is going 10-15 miles above - not just because I'm deathly afraid of getting a ticket I can't pay and having my preciously low car insurance rate raised, but because I've been in severe car accidents and I don't want to die behind the wheel of an eight-year-old Subaru station wagon. I don't declare deductions on my taxes above the bare-bones household deduction, in the interest of keeping my tax profile as simple and unobtrusive as possible. I know from firsthand family experience that once you fall under the government's purview, it's almost impossible to extricate yourself without falling into a bureaucratic sinkhole of the kind that the phrase "Kafka-esque" was specifically designed to describe. Being poor means living in constant fear of falling on the wrong side of the government: we don't get to have lawyers on retainer or even lawyers, period.

If the system was working properly, education would be the means by which individuals could lift themselves out of lowered circumstances through hard work and perseverance. As it stands, university education has become the bare-minimum prerequisite for most people to be able to qualify for middle class jobs and incomes, and those very same university educations that are necessary in order to produce an economically productive citizenry carry with them the near-certainty of prohibitive debt. You need to go to school in order to be qualified for the jobs that will enable you to pay off the student loans you accrued in order to pay for school. Setting aside the more intangible cultural consequences of forcing the large majority of college graduates to view university education as glorified job-training, there is the basic fact that any institution responsible for saddling society's most potentially productive demographic with immense debt right out of the starting gate will act as a monstrous drag on economic growth for the foreseeable future.

Spiraling debt is one of the symptoms of a capitalist system in terminal decline. Governments, companies, and people are (often literally) mortgaging present circumstances on future dividends - ignorant or in denial of the fact that the negative effects of debt are compounded with time. If capitalism was able to function the way it "should," the way the economic apologists on the faculties of almost every major public and private university in the United States would have us believe, reasonable debt levels would be easily erased by periodic upturns. In reality, contemporary debt levels across all levels of society are untenable and simply cannot be repaid. As we have seen in Greece (and France and Italy and England, et al.), countrywide austerity programs necessarily inflict unacceptable collateral injuries across society. On the most basic level, governments establish legitimacy through the maintenance of order. As soon as recognized social protections begin to fall away, society erupts from the bottom up. Law enforcement practices become harsher and more repressive as income disparity rises - by necessity, since economic disparity creates unrest. There is no amount of police repression capable of suppressing dissent in a representational democracy. Every attempt to suppress dissent creates an environment of harsher repression which in turns inspires an increasingly vociferous dissent movement. There's no way to stop the cycle without abandoning any pretense of political liberty and instituting a police state - and oops, sometimes that happens anyway when you're not even paying attention.

Most people in the United States (and dare I say the rest of the world) possess an express desire to live quiet lives unaffected by political turmoil. Protest movements are historically unpopular in this country because anything that threatens to overturn social and political stability on the national stage is unavoidably seen as a potential threat to local stability. So there is a very real possibility that the Occupy movement will have a deleterious effect on the short-term prospects of liberal politics on the retail level. That makes perfect sense: the Tea Party, inasmuch as it was a "real" populist protest movement, was still essentially contiguous with the values and goals of the mainstream Republican party. The Occupy movement, however, rejects the Democratic party, and even those Democrats seemingly most amenable to aligning themselves with the goals of the Occupy movement, such as the very liberal Democratic senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, are still essentially corporatist technocrats dedicated to preserving the economic status quo through smarter regulation. The Occupy movement is far beyond the reach of the Democratic party. One of the country's most historically liberal politicians, Jerry Brown, is once again governor of California, and his complete silence in the face of increased radicalization across the University of California system has been deafening. (It is worth noting that our Governor during the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s was Ronald Reagan, and his unambiguously hostile reaction to the protests in Berkeley during that decade was a crucial factor in helping Reagan gain credibility with national conservatives in the years leading up to 1980.) There is no way any politician on the national stage can possibly align themselves with the Occupy movement on anything other than the most vague and equivocal basis, because the whole point of the Occupy movement is that capitalism is failing in stark and unambiguous terms.

I'm not going to bother reiterating the facts regarding skyrocketing tuition - they're on the public record for anyone to see. But I think it is worth looking out for a moment from the specific circumstances of the moment and towards other aspects of the same problem.

If you have not already done so it is worth your attention to set aside the time to read Taylor Branch's recent article, "The Shame of College Sports," published in last month's issue of The Atlantic. It's a long and extremely interesting article, and so any attempt to summarize it would be necessarily reductive. But at the risk of doing violence to Branch's central thesis, the article lays out the case against college athletics and the NCAA in extremely methodical and unmistakeable terms. College athletics - particularly basketball and football - are such a remunerative enterprise that successful athletic programs effectively take over the schools to which they are attached. In the process they commit a variety of tacitly accepted crimes against the players who participate in college ball in the hopes of using it as a means of reaching the brass ring of a fat paycheck with professional sports. The way money circulates in the NCAA system distorts the educational mission of public and private universities to such a degree that any arguments regarding the economic benefits of college athletics are mooted ten times over by the deleterious effect of college sports on the reputation, educational quality, and dignity of the institutions in question. Many are already calling for the NCAA to be either dissolved or cut free entirely from the university system to which it already seems a pressingly terrible fit.

For any proof of the potential negative consequences of college athletics - consequences that go far beyond even vastly important questions concerning the ethical treatment of college athletes and the parasitic relationship between large athletic departments and large research universities - you merely need to look at the crisis at Penn State over the last month after it was discovered that a long-serving assistant coach for Penn State's storied football team had allegedly raped multiple children over the course of many years. The behavior was known and a cover-up of indeterminate dimensions in place for a long time. If you want to understand why and how such behavior could be allowed to continue on any basis, it is best to ask the most basic question: cui bono? Who benefits? Follow the money.

In the weeks leading up to the current campus crises, all graduate students, postdoc researchers and faculty in the UC system received a new patent contract. (I got the same patent contract myself since I'm a graduate student, even though the humanities obviously don't produce much in the way of patents.) Universities count on revenues from industrial patents to produce a surprisingly large percentage of their income. Current patent law apparently was such that existing contracts were not proof against loopholes, so new contracts were drawn up to clarify the University's ownership relation to all intellectual property created under its auspices. For those of you paying attention at home: scientists and engineers working for research universities are employed on a work-for-hire basis. Money gained from research income - be it in the form of patent revenues or industrial grants - is increasingly not funneled back into further research or education. It "disappears" into the administrative budget.

The problem is that there's no quick fix. The problem is that "the problem" is systematic and ultimately points to the most basic questions of how our society functions and how people pay their rent. The problem is that for an increasingly large percentage of the population, society isn't functioning quite so well, and a lot of people are having trouble paying that rent. President Obama was only ever going to be a centrist conservative Democrat: anyone who ever believed differently hadn't done even the most basic research required to read this excoriating New Yorker profile from 2007. There's no hope of redress at the highest levels of government, and so the dissatisfaction will continue to seep outwards and upwards.

It doesn't take a lot to radicalize leftist humanities students at public universities. When you actually get the scientists to pay attention to issues of social justice, you're working overtime to make enemies. There is no good reason why college athletes shouldn't be protesting for the exact same reasons that professors, graduate students (who teach and research) and undergraduates (who pay steep tuition) are: we make a lot of money for this university, cui bono? Why is tuition so high? Why are citizens of the wealthiest nation on the planet being asked to pay so much for an education that is an essential prerequisite to being an economically productive citizen? If people stopped sending their kids to college in high enough numbers, the economy would suffer for lack of educated workers to staff non-manual positions.

The only way this situation makes sense in the long term is if you accept that the logic of capitalism is self-defeating: debt begets debt, and a society burdened with debt will collapse because excessive debt makes growth impossible. The moment capitalism stops growing, when economic systems stagnate and contract, it enters a spiral of quickly diminishing returns from which it cannot extricate itself. Government regulation could probably temporarily arrest or slow the decline if the legislative will was present, but no one can acknowledge the existence of the problem, much less propose economic solutions predicated on the understanding that capitalism can't sustain itself indefinitely with a minimum of regulation. Eventually someone, somewhere, will simply stand up and refuse to pay their debts: it's already happening in Greece, and we have seen the consequences of even just one small-ish, relatively unimportant economy refusing to play by the rules. Any larger default would existentially imperil the entire financial system. When that happens, all bets are off, and all of our lives will be immeasurably worse for the duration of the crisis.

All of which brings us back to the photo at the top of the post, of a helmeted police officer hosing down nonviolent protesters with pepper spray. I walk along that pathway every day on my way from the bus stop in the Student Union to my office in Voorhies. I know those people, some of them at least: one of the men in the foreground who I recognize was seated across a conference table from me in class not three hours before the photo in question was taken. I know from class he looked exhausted: he'd been involved in many of the protests both on campus at Davis and ninety minutes away at Berkeley. I went home that afternoon after class and took a nap: it had been a long week with minimal sleep (that's graduate school!) and I knew going into the weekend that the next week, right before the Thanksgiving holiday, was going to be fairly intense. My Chaucer students have a term paper due in twelve days for which I can't help worrying they are woefully unprepared: I'm most concerned right now in being able to plan effective paper-writing workshops in the very busy week after we return from holiday. I slept all afternoon and woke up to find that Something Had Happened.

It's a bit weird to wake up and realize that you've been placed in a fishbowl. Suddenly a campus protest movement which had previously appeared vaguely desultory was the flashpoint for international attention: it hit Reuters, it hit the AP, it hit the BBC. The pictures and video of the pepper spray incident have shot around the world. Why was this such a revelation, when things like this had happened just a few days earlier in Berkeley? And this was happening in Oakland? Why was this happening here, in a college town to which I had moved with the specific understanding that it would be a quiet place to burrow down for a few years of extremely taxing intellectual labor?

I would never describe myself as an active member of the protest community: that would be doing a great disservice to those people who are extremely active and important in the organization and implementation of dissent on campus and in the community. But I'm a member of a Graduate Student Assembly that is responsible for formulating official responses to these events, I'm represented by a union that stands in solidarity with political activism, and I'm an individual surrounded by good friends who are deeply involved on every level of the process. We stand united and we roll deep.

But as an individual I'm frightened, terrified. I look at the pictures and watch the videos and hear the slogans and I know that things have reached a fever pitch: the demonstrations are going to get bigger and the political ramifications, at least for those living under the UC system as it stands now, are potentially massive. It's one thing to see these things played out on a TV screen from hundreds or thousands of miles away, but another thing entirely to see images taken in what is essentially your home being broadcast across the world as symbols of political repression. There's that old creeping fear of law enforcement which my parents instilled in me. My mom worked for the police as an emergency dispatcher and (when she couldn't possibly get out of it) a jail warden. She was exposed to policemen at their best and their worse - as first-responders to accidents and incidents of domestic abuse, as people who worked hard to catch violent criminals and support their community, but also as people who could be bigoted, sexist, violent, and abusive, who exploited the authority of their badge and their position of trust in every conceivable fashion. After working with the police for ten years she told me in no uncertain terms: avoid the police. There are two types of people who become police: good people who want to accomplish the good things associated with police work, and people who become corrupted and compromised by the very real ethical dangers of a career in law enforcement. When you're being pulled over for a busted taillight you can't know which type of cop your getting, or what kind of day that cop had, or any number of other variables.

(An aside: one of the best days of my life was the day a cop actually apologized to me for pulling me over without a reason. He ran my plates on his computer when he was driving behind me on a country road and his computer told him I didn't have a drivers' license. He pulled me over and I showed him my valid license. He looked at it, handed it back and apologized for stopping me.)

I know, I know: I'm not saying anything here that any black or hispanic citizen wouldn't be able to tell you. Here I am, "free, white and twenty-one," whining about the existential threat posed by police violence against middle-class graduate students at a well-esteemed public research university in the richest country in the world. But the fact remains: if you're poor, you know (or should know) that the police can do a lot more than ruin your day. They're dangerous. They represent the potential for unchecked and completely arbitrary exercise of dangerous power. So if they put a handful of police officers on indefinite leave, good for them - that's a start. But (and this shouldn't be taken in any way as an absolution for those individual officers responsible for the event at every step of the chain of command) the problem is not a few bad apples, but a system that has been designed with the express purpose of being abused. Urban police forces across the country have been militarized for decades, as a direct result of the never-ending stream of bad consequences resulting from our ruinous "War on Drugs." Cops dress like Navy Seals to cross the streets: when you give someone an assault rifle and body armor of course they're going to walk the beat like they're grinding a tactical sim on their Playstation.

I'm afraid of the fact that I can't decide to just "opt-out" of capitalism at my convenience, because somewhere on the other end of these decisions is a man with a badge and a gun who has been specifically deputized to protect the rights of private property. I have made decisions in my life with an eye towards monetizing the few skills I have in order to lift myself out of an indefinite future of grinding poverty and towards something resembling a comfortable middle class existence. I'm afraid of losing this chance, and that is exactly what the system takes for granted: when it becomes almost impossible to pick yourself up after falling down, the negative consequences of tripping over your own feet become inconceivably grim. I'm old enough that I'm fully aware of just how much I have to lose. I look at the pictures of my friends being assaulted not fifty yards from the cafeteria where I eat pizza on Thursdays and I can't help thinking of exactly what is at stake: this is a systematic breakdown. This is not an isolated case of police abuse or a small group of disaffected agents provocateurs inciting violence. This specific incident may eventually fade from immediate memory and the specific provocations may be swept under the rug, but the only way for the problem to go away is for the systematic inequalities that form the bedrock of our country's economic system to go away. And that's not going to happen, not without a lot more turmoil and possibly more bloodshed. It's only going to get worse before it gets better, because the problems are only going to keep getting worse for so long as people lack the political will to step up en masse and change the system with their own bare hands.

When you've been poor for a long time you pay a lot of attention to issues of class. You can look around and get a pretty good read for issues of wealth and poverty, just from how people carry themselves, the type of clothes they wear, the attitude they adopt. Poor people know how much money they have in their bank accounts at all time. People who haven't lived like that can't understand just how much energy goes into keeping yourself afloat when you don't have the confidence of being able to fall back on wealthy relations or substantial savings. When you're poor you realize just how much you have to lose because you know exactly how much you have. Those who have the least have paradoxically the most to lose. I feel like I have a lot to lose, and I'm frightened to see the system fraying in front of my eyes. I wish I could say I didn't see it coming, but you don't need to be a Marxist to have seen just how badly things have gotten. (Although, if you've read Capital, you have a pretty good idea of how it happened. More than a few mainstream economists have been circling around Marx's ideas for the last few years, unable to bring themselves to actually utter the name of the man who, whatever some of the specific faults of his analysis might have been, was able to predict many prominent features of our present moment with startling accuracy.) I'm scared for myself but I'm also scared for my parents who are dependent on the government for their retirement income, my friends who receive their paychecks from the government, and anyone who needs to pay bills with money backed by the full faith and trust of the increasingly repressive and completely unresponsive United States government. You know, everyone.

At the most very basic level, we have to ask a simple question: does capitalism work? For a long time capitalism worked well for an impressively large number of people, a large enough number that you could probably ignore the seepage around the edges if you so desired. But it has now ceased to work for an increasingly large number of people. The reflexive response from both sides of the mainstream political dualism has been that localized problems should not be confused with systematic problems: if you fail, it's your fault and not that of the system. The system works. Both major political parties seem to differ only in the degree to which they posit government action as a remedy for the localized shortcomings of capitalism. The American political system as it is presently conceived is simply unable to process the possibility that current problems are not localized, and that they may very well be systematic and progressively degenerative. Right now I believe it is safe to say that, despite whatever economic problems they may be experiencing in their own lives, the mass of middle America has not been sufficiently radicalized to be able to see any continuity between pictures like the one above and the circumstances of not being able to pay their bills and feed their children. People remain isolated and aloof for so long as they feel afraid, and a lot of people feel very afraid right now. They're more afraid, however, of not being able to pay their bills than they are of the government. All that needs to happen in order for that to change is for the government and its representatives to keep on doing what they did last Friday.

I'm saddened and shocked to see these things happening in my own back yard, but it had to start somewhere. Might as well be here.

2011-11-14T03:37:00.002-05:00

Everything Right Is Wrong Again

They Might Be Giants

Anyone listening to They Might Be Giants' self-titled debut album without any knowledge of the duo's later career may have been justified in the belief that there was no way in hell these guys should ever have been allowed to make a second album. To say that They Might Be Giants is a weird album is an understatement considering how often the word "weird" is abused and misused: there's something downright scary about this album in a way that can't entirely be dismissed by recourse to ironic distance. For all the chirpy energy and mutant power pop songwriting chops on display, this isn't even remotely happy music. These are murder ballads disguised as bubblegum synthpop, telegrams of self-loathing broadcast from the interior of a strange subterranean prison. If this juxtaposition does not perhaps seem quite as strange now as it did in 1986, it is to They Might Be Giants' credit that they have effectively created this subgenre unto themselves.

I am consistently surprised by Robert Christgau's longstanding affection for TMBG: to put it mildly, they don't particularly seem like his type of thing. And yet love them he does. He's actually more kind to their debut album than I am inclined to be:

Two catchy weirdos, eighteen songs, and the hits just keep on coming in an exuberantly annoying show of creative superabundance. Their secret is that as unmediated pop postmodernists they can be themselves stealing from anywhere, modulating without strain or personal commitment from hick to nut to nerd. Like the cross-eyed bear in the regretful but not altogether kind "Hide Away Folk Family," their "shoes are laced with irony," but that doesn't doom them to art-school cleverness or never meaning what they say. Their great subject is the information overload that lends these songs their form. They live in a world where "Everything Right Is Wrong Again" and "Youth Culture Killed My Dog."

Where I think Christgau gets it precisely right is the statement that "their great subject is the information overload that lends these songs their form." At a certain point, after having listened to this album enough times, the sheer profusion of different styles and attitudes threatens to overwhelm the understanding or enjoyment of any individual song. Track for track, this is one of the weakest albums from their early period. But taken as a whole the confusing multiplicity of styles and genres - to say nothing of the anomalous un-musicality of truly bizarre tracks like "Chess Piece Face" and "Boat of Car" - makes the album seem better as a composite whole than as the sum of its parts. Like Marshall McLuhan, They Might Be Giants (unintentionally) foresaw the negative consequences of information overload in a fractured and infinitely refracted society. You're not supposed to be able to focus on any one object: the best way is simply to absorb everything all at once and hope for the best.

The difference between They Might Be Giants and a group like Negativland, however, comes from the Johns' steadfast removal to engage with the world beyond their own horizons. There aren't many overtly political songs in the band's discography; one of them, the weak "Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head," is the second song here. They seem more or less constitutionally unable to discuss politics with conviction. (One of the better songs on their next album, "Purple Toupee," addresses this problem in explicit terms.) So immediately we're trapped within the confines of a narrow, hermetically-sealed universe populated by strange characters defined by varying degrees of depression and psychosis. I believe this was actually a brilliant decision on their part: as opposed to someone like "Weird Al" who has alway been tied to explicit parody as his primary subject matter, TMBG don't really engage with the outside world. Devo by their very nature were extremely political: they were (and are, since they're amazingly still a going concern) persistently hyper-critical of contemporary life. They Might Be Giants are certainly persistently critical and overtly parodic, but not of society or or pop culture or other musicians. Their metier, the inescapable target of their relentless criticism, is themselves. There's a reason why mind control, hypnosis, and delusion are the most consistent subject matters in their oeuvre: nothing makes sense for these guys outside the realm of their own heads. For better or for worse, They Might Be Giants are extremely narcissistic songwriters. That does however not mean that they aren't at all times completely willing to abase or humiliate themselves.

To put it another way: They Might Be Giants became successful because they created their own world, and each album was an exercise in fantasy world-building that differed from the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd not in kind but in quality. This wasn't about power fantasy, this was about routine powerlessness inflated to ritual proportions. The trials and tribulations of everyday banality were reflected and distorted to funhouse-mirror proportions: take another look at "Absolutely Bill's Mood" and "Alienation's For the Rich," and you might perhaps be able to discern a spiritual resemblance to the work of Harold Pinter. Some of the best songs from their early albums actually resemble one-act plays or character sketches, brief expository passages intended to illuminate the lives of people trapped by the circumstances of their own misfortune. Even "upbeat" songs like "Everything Right is Wrong Again" and "Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes" are, on closer examination, abrasive acts of self-mortification.

All the people are so happy now, their heads are caving in,
I'm glad they are a snowman with protective rubber skin,
But every little thing's a domino that falls on different dots,
And crashes into everything that tries to make it stop.

There's a reason why these guys became so popular with nerds: they appeal to young nerds' inflated sense of self-importance, the irrefutable conviction that everything going on inside their heads is far more important than whatever might be going on outside. Attempts to communicate are most likely doomed by the subject's inability to look beyond the frame of their own neurosis in order to acknowledge another person as more than an appendage ("Don't Let's Start"). The most genuinely affecting song on the album - "She's An Angel" - is less sincere than it might appear on first blush, inasmuch as it is built around the lyrical conceit of taking a commonplace romantic compliment and weaving it into a sci-fi fable. They Might Be Giants would have very little material if it weren't for their nigh-autistic ability to literalize familiar idioms in a clever, albeit occasionally maddening fashion.

When you're following an angel
Does it mean you have to throw your body off a building?
Somewhere they're meeting on a pinhead
Calling you an angel, calling you the nicest things.
I heard they had a space program,
When they sing you can't hear, there's no air.
Sometimes I think I kind of like that and
Other times I think I'm already there.

What saves them from their own worst impulses - and what will alway save them - is their skill as songwriters. This album appears at times to have been conjured up out of thin air: it's lo-fi and doggedly minimal, using energy and enthusiasm to cover the fact that the whole album was recorded with no more instruments than two people could carry on the subway. My patience for odd vignettes like "Chess Piece Face" and "Rabid Child" was never particularly strong, and the many weird interludes that dot this album do not seems to have grown less annoying with age. But at the same time the effect of these interludes is countered by the handful of truly great pop songs that dot the album. They Might Be Giants are and have been almost from their inception gifted songwriters in the great tradition of formalist power pop. There's a reason why "Don't Let's Start" made it onto rotation on MTV despite the fact that it was a terrible video by a no-name indie band with a weird name: it's a catchy song constructed with exacting precision. Everything is exactly where it should be: the intro, the chorus, the middle eight, the way it seems to go a little bit faster for the final chorus - this is how you write a pop song, this is how you build a tiny ladder to transcendence on a 4/4 scaffold. Even when their subject matter betrayed them their skill saw them through. If on their first album this skill is occasionally obscured and diffused by a surfeit of ambition, their second album would see the duo tighten their songwriting focus with the methodical precision of a laser.

(out of five)

2011-11-09T15:23:00.003-05:00

Money's All Broke, and Food's Going Hungry

For a long time I had managed to convince myself that I had outgrown They Might Be Giants. There wasn't necessarily a conscious decision on my part to distance myself from the group. It was as simple as noticing that, as I grew older, I wasn't listening to them nearly as often. I never completely abjured them: Lincoln and John Henry, in particular, always managed to sneak back onto the playlist at periodic intervals. But there was a growing recognition on my part of the fact that they just weren't as important to me as they once were.

And then, as they say, a funny thing happened. I moved over the summer, which you might recall me mentioning. Moving is always an ordeal, and never fails to put a person into an odd headspace. This was compounded by the length of the move (3,000 miles), and the fact that there was a new job waiting for me on the other side of the country. After the move was over and I settled into my new situation I became fascinated by a group to which I had never before paid the slightest bit of attention: the Dismemberment Plan, and specifically their 1999 masterpiece Emergency & I.

I listened to that album in near-constant rotation for at least a good month. I never really cared much for post-hardcore - hardcore never appealed to me, so post-hardcore seemed like something best avoided. Of course I mainly based these unformed opinions on bare thumbnail sketches of genre stereotypes, the truth about which I knew nothing and, furthermore, just wasn't that interested in exploring. And yet: long after the age when most people go through their DIschord faze, I found myself really digging Fugazi and poking my toes ever so tentatively into the DC scene. Although it took me a few listens to really get the feel for the album, Emergency & I finally appeared to me as a kind of revelation: here was an album with a depth of field to rival OK Computer or Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, a precise and exacting whole that nevertheless managed to seem spontaneous and raw. It's not hard to see how this band and this album in particular have exerted such a massive influence on the later evolution of post-hardcore into poppier forms such as emo in the early 2000s. But then again: there's a cerebral quality that places the group apart from lesser contemporaries and followers, and a mordant sense of truly mature melancholy (not to mention a sense of humor!) that removes them from the immediate company of the more obnoxiously heart-on-hand varieties of post-punk and pop-punk.

But a funny thing happened as I was getting into the Dismemberment Plan. I began to notice something strange. It was subtle, at first, more of a general association than a specific connection. But the more I listened, the more I saw previously-hidden connections. There was something about the precise combination of intense playing and nervous energy, a sense of tweaked urgency that came across like someone having wound the clock too tight. Travis Morrison's vocals in particular seem just slightly too high to be singing the songs he's singing, nervy and anxious and completely emasculated. The band gets pegged as "math rock," and I suppose I can see the connection: the drums are sharp and the rhythms complex, marked by off-beat syncopations and persistent, unexpected lunges in odd directions.

I don't know and can't say whether or not the Dismemberment Plan were consciously influenced by They Might Be Giants, but listening to the former I was struck by their incredible similarity to the latter. Lyrically, the D-Plan seem to share a preoccupation with tongue-twisters and speculative fiction metaphors as a means of moving past bathetic cliche. TMBG play with the kind of exacting precision that could only come from spending the first decade of your career playing catch-up to drum machines and pre-programmed synthesizer tracks. The D-Plan take the energy and propulsion of punk and filter it through a sparse, disciplined asceticism that owes as much to Television as anything else in the punk canon. If they weren't specifically influenced by TMBG, they were playing within a certain segment of the rock vocabulary that simply hadn't existed before TMBG.

Listening to the Dismemberment Plan awakened a sudden, fresh desire to revisit some old friends. By chance, this coincided with the release of the Johns' latest album, Join Us. One of the reasons why I had moved away from the group was the fact that they released a couple not-so-good albums in the first part of the last decade. Mink Car and especially The Spine seemed to be thin on my first exposure and have not grown in succeeding years. The Else was stronger and it sounded good thanks to the participation of the Dust Brothers, but it never quite made it into my permanent shuffle. Unfortunately, considering how much I loved the group in years past, They Might Be Giants had dropped off my radar entirely. I've never felt so much as the slightest interest in their kids albums: although I can't begrudge their success, it always seemed to me to be the exact wrong move for the group to make, a doubling-down of precisely those traits that I found least endearing in their sound as I grew older. They were always silly, but their best moments (to my mind) came when they could work through silly and wacky towards something more authentically anxious on the other side. Much of their catalog, at least their older material, is actually quite dark. Of their classic period, Flood has always been my least favorite album, while I cling to the profoundly misanthropic and dyspeptic John Henry as the underrated masterpiece of their oeuvre. There didn't seem to be a lot in their kids' records to hold my interest.

Given my ambivalence towards their last decade's worth of output, imagine my surprise to fine in Join Us that rarest of rarities: a true, honest-to-God return to classic form from a band who I had written off years ago. None of these songs would have seemed out of place on any of their Elektra records. And so after a few a listens to Join Us I felt a sudden, familiar urge: let's listen to They Might Be Giants. Let's really listen, closely, for the first time in a long time. What I found was that, after having been away for many years, coming back to records with which I once had such an intimate familiarity elicited a strange but not unpleasant sensation. At the risk of sliding into the realm of pure nostalgia, it felt like coming home.

2011-11-07T03:53:00.000-05:00

I See Smoke Signals Coming From Them

On 4 November 1986, They Might Be Giants released their eponymous full-length debut studio album. Although I didn't buy the album on its release, I do remember seeing the video of "Don't Let's Start" a few times on MTV. It wasn't until a few years later that I actually purchased my first TMBG album - still, by the time their mainstream breakthrough Flood was released in January of 1990, their discography already numbered two full-length albums and another album of B-sides and rarities.

They Might Be Giants occupy a unique position in rock music history. They are simultaneously one of the last true "college rock" bands to emerge out of the underground independent music scene of the early and mid 1980s, as well as one of the first true "alternative" bands to rise to prominence at the outset of the 1990s. Their career trajectory was almost a textbook example of how rock & roll careerism worked in the years between R.E.M. and Nirvana respectively broke: a hard-working and fiercely talented group rises up from years of steady gigging in a supportive local music scene (in their case, Brooklyn, NY), builds a national presence on the underground level through relentless touring and a commitment to proactive DIY promotion, before finally "graduating" to a recording contract at a major label.

The only difference between TMBG and the aforementioned R.E.M. - not to mention the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, the Pixies, et al - is that TMBG were and remain doggedly strange in a way that never quite mapped onto existing notions of rock's stylistic hierarchy. Even a band like the Flaming Lips - perhaps their closest analogue, even down to the fact that both bands were signed to appendages of Warner Music - still at least somewhat corresponded to preexisting ideas of what rock music was "supposed" to sounds like. The Lips, especially back in 1990 at the time of the release of In A Priest Driven Ambulance, were very weird but they were weird in a recognizable fashion: noise-rocking acid casualties who were cool because they didn't give a shit. TMBG was two nervous-looking vaguely Judaic white guys who wore button-down shirts and played the accordion over breakneck drum machine loops. They weren't "through being cool," they had never been cool, and proud of it. While there are certainly stylistic forebears - you can see bits and bobs of "nerd rock" predecessors such as the Feelies, the B52s, Devo and a few British synth-rock acts - TMBG were unique, a cult act that should never have been able to achieve three top-twenty hits on the US Modern Rock chart, let alone a Platinum plaque and a handful of Grammys.

It might be difficult to explain, at this late date, the ubiquitous significance of TMBG to nerds and recovering nerds of a certain age. One of the problems is that, in the 25 years since the band began their recording career, what we consider "nerd culture" has changed drastically. When They Might Be Giants and Lincoln hit, nerds were still nerds in the most pejorative sense possible. Comic book stores, gaming groups, and sci-fi conventions were still fringe activities, and the collective force of societal disapprobation that accompanied these phenomena was significant enough to imbue a monstrously strong sense of entitled defensiveness on multiple generations of kids who grew up ostracized and isolated. The reasons for this ostracism were many and varied, but there is truth in the notion that whatever problems a kid growing up in the United States may have had - precocious intellect, acne, obesity, social incompetence, poverty, disability, mental illness - burgeoning nerd culture represented a welcome and essential respite from the problems of the "real" world. They Might Be Giants was for decades the house band at the Android's Dungeon, and perhaps the purest example of nerd-culture F.U.B.U. - For Us, By Us, outsiders need not apply.

But that's not the world we live in anymore, or at least, not entirely. I see sorority sisters with their Greek-branded pink sweatshirts and Ugg boots reading George R. R. Martin paperbacks on the bus. It's long become cultural conventional wisdom that for all the trials of youth and public schooling, people who look like They Might Be Giants often end up running the show when they grow up. Porn stars play AD&D. All of this is not to say that suddenly high-school bullying is over and social misfits slide through life with the greatest of ease. The continuing success of a show like Glee attests to the universality of social ostracism in primary and secondary school - despite the fact that only in Hollywood would these people not be considered immensely attractive and successful individuals.

The point, however, remains: it doesn't mean the same thing to be a nerd in 2011 as it did in 1986 or even 1996. Now almost all of the most remunerative entertainment franchises in the world are essentially nerd properties. J.R.R. Tolkien no longer belongs to nerds. Batman, Spider-Man and the X-Men no longer belong to the nerds. Harry Potter never belonged to the nerds. The biggest comic book conventions belong to Hollywood. People who actually play sports and date real girls continue to play video games after middle school - which is something that I still can't wrap my head around. A man who became famous from publishing a black & white independent comic book about zombies appeared on an American talk show with Barbara Walters and Elisabeth Hasselback. Even good old "Weird Al" Yankovic is still going strong. It's a strange world for anyone who grew up having to hide comic books from their friends or was socially shunned for reading sci-fi paperbacks on the school bus. The underlying conditions remain - weird kids still get picked on and seek out divergent subcultures in order to find places they can "fit in" - but the collective nerd media apparatus has evolved to the point where it no longer really belongs to us anymore. In many crucial ways, nerd media is the media.

Where exactly do They Might Be Giants fit into this brave new world? What does Dr. Spock's Backup Band do when Dr. Spock is a sex symbol? That's a good question.

2011-10-31T03:00:00.001-04:00

SIR

DC Universe Presents: Deadman #2

I am very much sensitive to possible accusations of needless cynicism and negativity. That the large majority of the Nu52 books are either deeply mediocre or reprehensible, and that they almost all represent precisely calculated attempts to pander to set demographic niches should, at this late date, go without saying. But that is not to say that there are not a handful of good books in the lot. It's even probable, if we're simply speaking in terms of raw percentage, the proportion of good titles produced under the auspices of the new regime may well surpass that of the decent titles produced under the old remit. This should not pass without some acknowledgement from those of us who respect and admire well-crafted serial escapism, and all the moreso considering its relative rarity.

Case in point: Paul Jenkins and Bernard Chang's Deadman serial currently running in DC Universe Presents. (I have no idea whether or not he is intended to be the full-time feature or, pending the book's survival past half a year, whether other characters might potentially appear in the lead slot.) This isn't a book that I've seen anyone talking about in any sustained fashion. The second issue successfully builds upon the positive impression of the first to such a degree that I am tempted to say it may just be the best book of the bunch that no one has yet noticed. That means that it will probably be canceled before it has the chance to make good on its potential.

But for now it is enough to mention that Deadman has, from almost the moment of his conception, been a character defined by nothing so much as perpetually untapped potential. In theory, Deadman's premise is almost completely open - but in practice, the character hasn't been able to sustain an ongoing series since the 1960s, and has depended on the kindness of sympathetic creators who have kept him from ever fading into obscurity. More than any other superhero character, he has counter-intuitively thrived as a result of appearing almost exclusively in cameo and guest-starring roles throughout the last four decades. People like it when he shows up in Batman, but no one ever bothers to show up when the periodic attempt it made to transfer his recognizability into headline status.

Given his prominence through the Blackest Night / Brightest Day crossover cycle, it's not surprising that DC would see this as a perfect opportunity to give Deadman another attempt at solo success. Surprisingly, this new serial does not seem to be picking up any loose threads from those stories. (Although, it should be noted that Deadman is also appearing as a supporting cast member of the new Hawk & Dove series, picking up the subplot of Deadman and Dove's love affair from Brightest Day.) But this is good: the series picks up almost from the begin, offering another version of Deadman's origin that is premised on the idea of exploring discrepancies between Boston Brand's post-life experiences and Rama Kushna's stated goals in having consigned him to an eternal half-life as an ostensibly benevolent revenant spirit. This is not virgin territory: problematic questions concerning Deadman's origin have been fair-game almost since the character's creation. But as with most things involving superhero comics, what matters most is execution. What sets this apart from most of its peers in the Nu52 is that this is simply a well-built, sturdy and very attractive comic book on every level.

Jenkins' writing has become increasingly spotty over the last few years, with a few terrible, jumbled projects appearing for every interesting idea. This series would seem to be playing to his strengths: a strongly defined central character put through the paces of an increasingly bizarre set of circumstances while remaining grounded in a keen understanding of actual lived emotions. (Cf. his Hellblazer and Hulk.) He understands Boston Brand very well: Deadman is a formerly callow and selfish person who has learned over the course of a long afterlife to be good, and to devote himself completely to selfless acts of benevolent intervention. His mission is to help people. The question presented by Jenkins of whether or not his beneficence has been guided by not-so-pure motivations is well framed, and the gradual unfolding of these ethical conflicts holds the potential to be very interesting.

I've always been a fan of Bernard Chang and am delighted to see (after a career largely defined by a few somewhat questionable choices) that he finally appears to be working on material more appropriate for his talents. He's got an incredibly smooth line and smart sense of page design, and the (sadly rare) ability to excel at drawing more than one face and body type. I could, in a word, read this book from this creative team for many years: meanwhile, we're left hoping (against hope?) that it makes it past six months.

Batman #2

Giving a strong recommendation to a Batman comic book seems almost like raving about a new McDonalds burger: how good can it really be, especially since everyone reading this has most likely read more Batman comic books than they can count? How many issues of Batman does anyone really need to read in order to have lived a sufficiently happy life?

I am still not entirely convinced that Scott Snyder's scripts would be anything special without Greg Capullo's pencils, but the fact is that the result is strong enough to make me not care.

Could there be a more bog-standard sequence in the history of comics than Commissioner Gordon talking to a medical examiner over a cold corpse? And yet just take a second to look at exactly how much loving detail has been paid to every component of the scene. The first panel, a particularly gruesome outward shot from the perspective of the corpse's gaping chest wound, looks out on Gordon and the examiner. The second panel reverses the perspective 180 degrees by showing the reader the opposite image: looking backwards towards the corpse and over Gordon's head. Look at how precisely the gimmick is executed. Gordon, the examiner and the ceiling lamp remain in precisely the same relation with one another from both perspectives. Capullo put a lot of thought into exactly what the dimensions of this crowded room actually were and how the shape of the room (claustrophobic, dark) would dictate the way the scene was told.

Then look at this page from later on in the issue, featuring a strange encounter between Bruce Wayne and Lincoln March, a candidate for Mayor of Gotham (who probably has something dastardly up his sleeve, which is how these things work):

This sequence lasts three entire pages but it doesn't get boring. Capullo knows how to make a conversation between two powerful men look exciting. He frames the conversation almost as a seduction, with March appealing to Wayne on the basis of similarly traumatic childhood experiences that both shaped their commitment to philanthropy. There are a number of subtle threads throughout the sequence: for one, March is clearly one or two inches taller than Wayne, someone who we (the readers) know is already an imposing figure. Look at how March is slumping in that first panel, before very slightly straightening his posture to loom over Wayne in an attitude of - what? A threat? a come-on? Both? Why do we linger on the way March touches Wayne's shoulder like that? The use of medium-distance top-down shots almost renders the reader into a kind of voyeur, peeking in on a scene to which he or she should not be privy.

You could certainly accuse Snyder's plot of a lack of imagination, if you so desired. There's a new ancient conspiracy in Gotham targeting the sons of wealth and privilege - etc etc. I don't particularly care for this iteration of Batman, either: it's very much the movie-indebted (and Frank Miller influenced) paramilitary Batman, a violent, hulking figure in cumbersome body armor. This isn't a graceful creature of the night nor a spry, athletic swashbuckler - but then, both of those interpretations have been on the wane for a long time now. This is very much Batman in his "where does he got those wonderful toys?" mode, flitting around with the most fanciful gadgetry - again, not particularly my favorite mode of Batman comics. So, yeah, not perfect by any stretch, and hardly something destined to become a classic of contemporary graphic fiction, but without a doubt the best Batman comic I've read in years. Take of that what you will.

2011-10-26T02:57:00.000-04:00

Random Notes

This isn't an essay as much as a series of accumulated observations on the subject of music criticism. Many of these statements are offered as unsubstantiated assertions, and can be easily disputed / disregarded as you desire.

The bulk of rock music criticism is defined by the unproductive conflict of two diametrically opposed schools of thought. On the one hand, we inherit the prejudices of an imposing generation of critics who came of age at the dawn of the rock era (>cough< Greil Marcus >cough<) and who exercise a strict definition of rock music that excludes anything recorded after approximately 1972 from the canon. Under this model, every subsequent development is dismissed as errata or apocrypha, the musical equivalent of fan fiction. Additionally, most rock music can be judged on its relationship to a very parochial idea of American roots music, or the very early British interpolation thereof.

On the other, we have the current bleeding-edge model of music as fashion, a mode that persists in the process of constantly colonizing new sounds and leaving behind each successive development before they can be allowed to reach maturation. Bands are allowed perhaps ten minutes in which to appear, crystallize, and whither into dust.

Both of these generalizations are essentially unfalsifiable stereotypes, but few people would dispute the existence of these types in some iteration.

No art form is more defined by its relation to affect and emotional response than pop music. Even professional music criticism as often as not falls back on symptomatic descriptions of emotional response.

The alternative to this brand of affective reaction is to regard music almost exclusively through the dimension of performance, a model that necessarily underemphasizes the formal aspects of music. This does not necessarily have to exist in opposition to affective readings, and indeed, in practice this type of performative rhetoric often depends on an active engagement with the affective vocabulary as well.

Most - but not all - pop music criticism operates from a position of almost no familiarity with conventional music theory. Pop music criticism that does incorporate theory seems oppressively wonky in a way that technical critiques of classical or jazz usually do not.

It is very likely that we will live to see the death of rock music as a popular genre. This does not mean that rock & roll will die, but that it will undergo the same transformation that jazz experienced during the early years of rock. It will become the province of older, mostly white, mostly well-off aesthetes who have the time and inclination to keep a boutique genre alive through active curatorial interest.

I am not convinced that this is a bad idea. It has already begun, for the most part: widely popular rock bands are increasingly rare, and most of the movement in interesting and critically-acclaimed rock music already occurs at a significant remove from the pop market. Aficionados of "good" rock music are already likely as not to be economically well-off and educated: when music becomes fashion, only the fashionable will be inclined to follow.

The embrace of rock music as an affection of hipster culture has done as much as anything to drive the music away from popular audiences. The success of the Strokes in the early years of the preceding decade was the first concrete indication that music culture was changing: the widespread popularity of a group seemingly custom-designed to be appreciated exclusively either by educated rock critics or fashion-forward twenty-somethings was a harbinger of the decadence that defined the decade's music culture.

The decadent movement of the aughts reiterated the sincerity of previous forms of pop expression through a lens of ironic distance. Irony as an adjective is often misused and even more often misunderstood. It is not necessary that irony be smirking or satirical, merely reflexively self-referential. The prophylactic distance implied by irony does not necessarily imply a pejorative value judgment, and is often unintentional. It is simply a function of a musical culture built almost entirely on appropriation. Rock is built on theft, and the earliest rock & rollers all understood the irony of their positions. It was only after the sixties that irony was lost, however temporarily, eventually to be reconquered by the punks.

Hip-hop is built atop successive layers of irony in the same way a brick building is built on layers of masonry.

The color-line tension that engulfed blues and jazz as these forms made the transition from popular art forms to curatorial art forms seems to be replicating itself in contemporary rock as well, albeit in a strangely mutated form. The further removed from the mass audience rock recedes, the more anxiety surfaces over the genre's ambiguous relationship to contemporary black culture. (See: any piece of writing by Sasha Frere-Jones.)

Eventually, when rock enters its terminal decline as a popular form and begins its afterlife as a curatorial genre, the form will have to recreate its own theoretical discourse. Again, as with blues and jazz, the decline of popularity will bring with it inversely proportional attention from predominantly white academics and historians.

There is always the possibility that rock will rejuvenate itself and become once again a popular art form. I do not necessarily believe that this is unlikely, but for the moment it does not appear as if it will happen anytime soon.

Will rock have to die before an intelligent critical culture arises around the genre? An examination of the field shows that it is only in the last fifteen or so years that academics have begun to write about rock in any significant numbers. The field is growing, but as with comic studies the field has yet to cohere in any meaningfully centralized fashion beyond a number of very enthusiastic, decentralized writers working in a scattershot fashion.

The way I listen to music has become increasingly curatorial. I notice in my listening habits an increased tendency - or at least a strong desire - to undermine or deemphasize emotional experience in music in favor of formal novelty and historical significance. I am frustrated, perhaps unjustifiably, with the shape of popular music criticism, which is largely defined by fashion and fannish enthusiasm. But even just vocalizing this complaint seems bizarre and the articulation thereof reflects an attitude towards music that is probably diametrically opposed to the way most people experience the medium.

There is a tendency within me to pull in the direction of Clement Greenberg in my tastes. There's something about minimalism that seems to be - for me - the consequence of the natural progression of aesthetics. A truly minimal sound is the apotheosis of sound. The problem is that, of course, once you achieve minimalism there's nowhere to go but up.

Minimalism as a genre in visual art eventually destabilized itself, sprouting tendrils before tentatively returning to representation in the fifties and then transforming into full-blown pop by the sixties. Minimalism in music led to some very nice work being done on the Kompakt label and a few other affiliated movements but really, where do you go from there? At some point in the last few years I realized that Richie Hawtin had already pushed the envelope of minimalism as far as it can go with DE9 / Transitions - which was released six years ago. It is possible to still be minimal, and good work is still done with less, but over the last few years much of the movement in techno has been a push backwards from sparseness and into a new engagement with illustrative sound. I think the Field is probably the paradigmatic artist of the last five years as far as that movement is concerned, and I look forward to his new album with great interest.

But as I say this I also realize that my own personal listening habits are nowhere near as Apollonian as I would like to believe, or that I would like others to believe. We're all guilty of nostalgia and we're all guilty of lapsing into purely habituated affective response. Otherwise, how else would I explain something like driving around in my car all summer listening to Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" on repeat? There's a hypocrisy implicit in any kind of proscriptive aesthetic program, especially in reference to music. The emotional immediacy of music is a phenomena that often exists beyond the realm of consciousness. Sometimes we are moved despite ourselves by frankly inferior examples of form.

The strength of great pop music lies in its ability to traverse the space between formal ingenuity and emotional novelty. Pop music is an extremely regimented genre, built almost wholly on the interplay of a relatively small number of melodic, harmonic, and lyrical effects welded to the grid-like precision of the 4/4 backbeat. The ability of musicians to consistently transcend this essential limitation of form is endlessly fascinating.

2011-10-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

The Superman Nobody Knows

The post-Flashpoint DC Universe has already made many of the same mistakes that dogged the post-Crisis DC Universe. Just as in 1986, the company based their reboot around a completely new start for the flagship Superman, starting over a "new" timeline built around amorphously undefined yet far reaching continuity changes that somehow managed to keep the ongoing continuities of Batman and Green Lantern intact while restarting other characters at arbitrarily different points. If you remember your history, you'll know that Steve Englehart and Joe Staton's popular run on Green Lantern ran right through the Crisis and that the title maintained a steady status quo throughout the crossover. Batman continued through the crisis as well, and it was only afterwards that the post-Crisis changes were dribbled out in fits and starts, in the pages of Frank Miller's Year One and then under the short-lived Batman: The New Adventures banner. Meanwhile, characters who retained full memory of their pre-Crisis adventures freely interacted with characters whose pre-Crisis adventures had been wiped completely clean. Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen still remembered and referenced their "Hard Traveling Heroes" era while Superman never met the Legion of Superheroes until 1987. These problems only mattered as long as the long-term benefits of the housecleaning outweighed the intermittent continuity bumps. The problem is that in a few cases these "bumps" metastasized into full blown meltdowns, and concepts such as the Legion and Hawkman were eventually permanently crippled.

The difference between 1986 and 2011 is that the rationale between the reboot is entirely different. The original Crisis was an obvious labor of love, an incredibly complicated and forbiddingly dense work produced by a small group of creators and researchers with an encyclopedic knowledge of DC history, and intended (at least in theory) to open up a wide array of new storytelling avenues. To a degree they succeeded. Flashpoint, however, was put together on the cheap and seemingly at the last minute, a ex post facto attempt to provide an in-story explanation for sweeping business decisions made far above the level of editorial. The post-Flashpoint DC Universe was created as a means of streamlining the company's staggeringly diverse array of IP into forms more easily amenable to bookstore channels and especially digital distribution services. The goal - successfully achieved so far - has been to make DC resemble something less than an eclectically diverse publishing line and something more along the lines of a streamlined television network.

Given that, its not hard to see that many of the more controversial creative decisions have been made with an eye towards developing a ruthlessly efficient commercial applicability. Hence the explicit T&A books, hence the multiple attempts to ape existing popular Young Adult book franchises (you should be able to spot them yourself with no trouble), hence the multiple attempts to reframe existing properties as potential basic cable drama programming. The goal is to create stories that can be easily packaged and sold by genre to casual readers using digital devices whose size and visual capabilities have now synched up almost completely with the technical demands of displaying comic books.

With this in mind, it makes perfect sense that the company appears uninterested in elaborating the status of certain characters' continuity. My personal guess is that the Flash may well become the Hawkman of the post-Flashpoint universe: the character's history is so completely defined by the existence of multiple iterations that it is almost impossible to imagine what might "count" in the new universe. The Flash wasn't just a legacy character, he was the first legacy character, the first multi-generational franchise, and (I believe?) the first married character. If you wipe all this away, what remains? If the new Green Lantern is the old Green Lantern, and selectively remembers portions of the preFlashpoint and (assumedly) pre-Crisis universes, but the new Flash has no Jay Garrick and no Wally West or Bart Allen, then what?

But no character is more crucial to the new universe than Superman. DC knows that Superman is the lynchpin around which everything else revolves. So we get, once again, a new Superman for a new universe, with a new coat of paint (and now an awful new costume) thrown over the existing franchise in order to "update" the character for an anticipated new wave of fans. The responsibility of defining the new Superman has fallen, once again, to a fan-favorite yet slightly controversial creator who has made a number of significant changes to a seemingly inviolate origin sequence. And, as in 1986, these changes will be the source of a few years' worth of stories before eventually fading into the background as the franchise inevitably, inexorably reasserts its default and realigns itself according to the model of the accepted Silver-Bronze age template.

It is somewhat interesting that such a doggedly non-political creator as Grant Morrison has seen fit to restore Superman's almost forgotten status as a populist rabble rouser. It can't be denied that a return to Siegel and Shuster's original formula seems an especially apt maneuver for our current cultural moment, but by that same token it seems all the more likely that when Superman's Silver Age temperament reasserts itself the change will be notably jarring. Make no mistake: whatever shape they bend Superman might serve as a nice change of pace, but the character will eventually revert to type. No one understands this better than Morrison, whose All-Star Superman was perhaps the best illustration of exactly why the character's reflexively mythic nature prevents any such short-term changes from producing more than superficial alterations to the status quo.

In the meantime, however, we're left with a rather unpleasant reality: a nasty, brutish Superman with an attitude and an ugly costume. Our "introduction" to Superman in the first two issues of the new Justice League series has been an embarrassing extended misunderstanding / battle / meet cute / team-up of the kind that Marvel had already made cliche during the Johnson administration. Superman comes on like a bully, tearing into Green Lantern, Batman, and the Flash without any attempt to communicate or negotiate beyond the basic de rigeur tough guy platitudes.

Along the same lines, Morrison's new Action Comics gives us yet another variation on the same long-standing and frankly exhausting "Superman vs. the Government" storyline that appears to have been the defining aspect of the Superman mythos for at least fifteen years. The idea of placing Superman in a position of antagonism with the government has never been interesting because it has always been predicated on a severe misunderstanding of the character's strengths. Superman works because Superman is good: he is the ultimate incorruptible and uncorrupted samaritan. Frank Miller's horrendous misreading of the character places him in the position of a government stooge unable to perceive the differences between law and justice, and placing Superman into overt conflict with the government is a similar kind of error. Superman isn't apolitical, he isn't an apologist for the government, and he's no-one's patsy: what he is is someone who never bows to any authority he doesn't respect, and who stands for moral justice even against the greatest possible opposition. Placing him in opposition to the government doesn't work because there's nowhere that storyline can go except around and around a circle: we know Superman is right because he's Superman, but we also know that for that very reason Superman can't very well decapitate the US government and exile the Secretary of Defense to the Phantom Zone. Playing up this antagonism as a source of perpetual conflict turns Superman into just another iteration of the Hulk, smashing up billions of dollars of military hardware every other issue because he's "misunderstood." Superman should be someone who the President can call at a moment's notice when the safety of the world is at risk, but he should also be someone whose moral authority surpasses any single President.

That's the point: Superman's virtue, his exceptional nature as a character, comes simply from the fact that he's good. He is allowed an absolute purity of intention that simply could not work for any other superhero, and could only work for the world's greatest superhero. He's one of those few strange creatures in the history of literature who can be successfully defined by a single central characteristic without distortion or simplification. Trying to change the character in order to make him more marketable to different demographics misses the point entirely. He's good: everything else that gets heaped around that - and this includes every periodic attempt to make him a thuggish "badass" - is just bullshit.

2011-10-17T01:49:00.003-04:00

How We Will Read Cerebus - Part II

It is highly probable that in terms of its current fanbase and critical esteem Cerebus the book will end - like Cerebus the aardvark - alone and unloved. Whereas twenty years ago awareness of Cerebus among the comics-literate was almost ubiquitous - with Sim himself as one of the most vocal figures in the English-language comics community - the series has almost entirely faded from discussion. The recent occurrence of two relatively exhaustive critical exhumations has only underscored an unavoidable fact: no one reads Cerebus anymore, and the reappraisal was necessary in order to begin the process of deciding whether or not further generations would ever need to return to Cerebus in any capacity. Oh, some people still read it, but relative to comics' expanding audience, it will remain a decidedly cult proposition for the foreseeable future. A whole generation of comics readers has come up in the world since Cerebus was relevant, and it's conceivable that many people who seriously engage with comics now can't even remember first-hand a time when Cerebus was a monthly presence on North American comic stands. The final issue of Cerebus hit stands a long time ago, and in the space of just the last seven years the industry and art form have changed significantly.

If you were to ask me point-blank whether or not you should read Cerebus, my honest answer at this late date would be a slightly reluctant, albeit very firm no. Many, if not most comics readers who haven't already encountered the series at this late date will probably never encounter it in any significant fashion. The books will stay in print for so long as Sim lives, and will probably always retain some small position of honor in many well-stocked comic book stores, in the same manner that a contemporary psychologist might keep a bust of Freud on the shelf, out of a sense of duty already tinged with anachronistic irony. People who come to the book in the future will come upon it as if it were already a relic, a text of primarily archaeological interest that maddeningly alternates between a brilliant explication of the comics form and an impenetrable hate-screed. The parodies, many already dated, will only become increasingly opaque as the years progress.

For all the good in Cerebus - and we wouldn't be talking about it at all if there wasn't still a considerable degree of good in the book to balance the incontrovertible horror - the price for being able to sift through the rubble of the bad in search of the good is simply more than most people should ever want to pay. As much as I wish I could simply recommend that people read "the good half" or "the good third," the fact is that there is no way in which a selective reading program of Cerebus could convey the work's depth, breadth or significance. For better or for worse, the questions asked in the first 150 issues of Cerebus are only answered in the final 150 issues. That the answers turned out to be so painfully, ruthlessly strange remains a singular disappointment.

But the end of Cerebus does not necessarily mean the end of Cerebus.

One of the most heartening trends of the last ten-to-fifteen years of comics criticism has been the very gradual assimilation of comics content into academia. We're still in the very early days of this trend, and part of the reason for this is that despite the enthusiastic early adoption of the medium by academics across the English-speaking world, there is not as of yet sufficient institutional consensus as to where exactly comics belong, and how best to incorporate them into existing disciplinary divisions. The profusion of extremely popular first-person narrative memoirs such as Persepolis, Fun Home and American Born Chinese has borne concrete results in terms of providing introductory-level comics texts that can be placed into a wide variety of contexts and find application to a number of different disciplines. But most of these books can be explained and discussed without significant recourse to medium-specific historical context. They work supremely well as pedagogical tools precisely because of their unchallenging approach to their chosen medium. They have, in other words, been adopted so enthusiastically by academia not because of their daring use of form but on account of the alacrity with which they communicate embedded ideas independent of form. While it is not unusual to see more formally daring texts such as Watchmen and Jimmy Corrigan on college syllabi, the utilization of these texts in a primarily literary context lessons the degree of medium-specific critique immanent in their pedagogical use.

We don't yet have the kind of institutional support in academia to be able to create a common critical language for texts as far ranging as Maggots, Terry and the Pirates and The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck - let alone simply to acknowledge the commonality of these three texts on any existing generic continuum. The discipline of comics studies, whatever it will eventually be called, is still so far in its infancy as to remain barely perceptible. My gut feeling is that this kind of conversation would be best served in the field of Comparative Literature - a portmanteau discipline whose polyglot nature would ostensibly allow for the kind of cross-disciplinary pollination necessary for a field that rightly encompasses parts of Literature, Art History and Cultural Studies while belonging precisely to none. While I have certainly seen a few comics courses taught in the context of Comparative Literature, I am wary as to whether or not the ongoing (and potentially existential) disciplinary roil in that field will allow for the kind of sustained focus necessary to stake sufficient claim to such a seemingly protean field as comics.

Regardless, the current academic climate indicates that sometime within the next 15 to 20 years we will see the formulation of something resembling a more coherent field of "comics studies" within some corner of the humanities. Already you can discern the faint outlines of such trend, with many young hires in English and Comp Lit departments listing "Graphic Novels" somewhere on their CVs. We haven't yet achieved the kind of critical mass that would lead to the splintering of a distinctive discipline, in the same way that Film Studies formed in the mid-century. At this point, however, and despite these obstacles, I would argue that the preponderance of evidence points to this formation as less a possibility than an inevitability. Arguably, the one factor standing in the way of any generic coalescence is the relative paucity of theoretical models within the field - and no, Understanding Comics doesn't really count, although that will probably remain popular for a long time to come. (I would argue that the greatest current obstacle to this type of theorization is the reliance among comics critics on models of close reading that depend on narrative-and-text based models of reading - i.e., the way that literature PhDs are taught to read texts, as opposed to the way Art Historians are taught to interpret visual culture. Comics will remain partially opaque to theoreticians unless and until they can discover a cross-disciplinary model that successfully hybridizes these approaches.) When we begin to see strong theoretical readings of the medium in significant numbers in the academic press, half the work of disciplinary formation will have been done: from that point, it's only a matter of waiting until the scattering of proto-"Comics Studies" academics organize themselves around these models.

Once this occurs, the first business of the academics will be to historicize comics history into coherent genealogies. This will require the formulation of more holistic historical narratives to describe the medium's aesthetic and economic origins. The dominant narrative among fans of "serious" comics in the English-speaking world for the past two or three decades has been the gradual evolution of form away from the stultifying constraints of (extremely familiar) traditional generic restriction - in other words, the emancipation of medium from the shackles of genre. This has been a great narrative by which to understand the formation of a contemporary class of "graphic novelists" who exist separately and independently from the realms of "mainstream" adventure comics and newspaper strips, and who have escaped the inexorable illogic of the direct market as a primary means of comics distribution. This is at least partially the catalyst for the pervasive "Team Comics" rhetoric that engulfed the field in the late nineties and early aughts: a bunker mentality born out of a shared experience of communal solidarity in the face of economic retrenchment and stultifying generic hegemony. It was common to define comics as the province of a small but tightly-knit community that had weathered decades of the worst conceivable circumstances and survived to see cartooning gain culture-wide traction as an increasingly legitimate medium.

Anyone who comes to comics from this point forward will have to do the hard work of reconstructing the medium's historical trajectory. What this means in practice is that all of the particulars of economic production and distribution in the medium will have to be exhumed and reexamined. Any history of Crumb will require an explanation of what, exactly, the transgressive artists of the late sixties were rebelling against - not merely the cultural politics of the sixties but the shape of comics as a mass media. Any close reading of Love & Rockets will have to in some fashion acknowledge that the series was originally serialized in magazine form primarily through a distribution channel known as the direct market, and the same goes for other already-canonized artists such as Clowes, Ware, Burns, Seth, and Brown. (And, of course, there will be alternate narratives written for every alternate distribution channel.) It will be necessary when discussing comics history at the end of the twentieth century to acknowledge the dominance of super-hero books, and the ways in which the emergence of alternative genres and economic models were always conceptualized through the formation of rhetorical distance from the supposed "mainstream" of corporate-owned superhero properties. Just the term "mainstream," with all its strange and historically-specific connotations, will have to be unpacked for future readers who will come to comics without any prior knowledge of just how this generic opposition shaped comics discourse for multiple generations of readers.

Imagine, then, a series that ran from the late seventies through to the early twenty-first century, shipping monthly and taking as its explicit subject-matter the evolution and transformation of the medium in this unique transitional period.

Imagine a series whose defining relationship to its historical moment is that of parody, and which provides through this parody an incessant commentary on the hoariest and most inane indulgences of surrounding comics culture. It is just this generic contextualization that future critics will regard as an invaluable record of the most changeable and disposable aspects of an unimaginably strange commercial culture, an often embarrassing commercial culture that will need to be reconstructed at least in part as a predicate for any comprehensive historiography of comics.*

Imagine a series constructed along the lines of an eclectic personal journal, providing not merely an extended comics narrative but - in the form of copious backmatter - an ongoing critical engagement with itself as well as the larger realities of economic and ethical considerations within the quickly changing medium.

Imagine one step further, that this series also represents one of the most sustained autobiographical statements thus far produced in the medium's history, the record not merely of one man's Zelig-like ability to appear and reappear throughout some of the medium's most contentious and crucial intersections, but of his gradual estrangement and painful separation from the very same independent comics culture that he, in part, helped to create. With a few decades' perspective, the sheer horror of the series' final years will come to be seen less as the gradual derangement of a single individual than as symptomatic of the final stage of the medium's painful and protracted adolescence.

For better and for worse, Cerebus is the grand narrative of comics throughout our lifetime. Dave Sim began as just another amateur zine publisher, became a firebrand and a rallying point for the absolute moral rights of creators, before descending into painful self-parody and obsolescence. The series will fade from memory perhaps within our own lifetime - we already see this process in effect today, the inevitable and justifiable reaction to Sim's willful abjuration of modernity. But it will be rediscovered, and it will in time come to be seen as one of the most crucial primary documents of these, our strangest and most interesting of times.

* There is one specific point about parody in reference to Cerebus that I have been trying to fit in for a while but which just never seemed to fit into the main body of any article. There is an assumption that the parodies featured in Cerebus will only hurt the work's long-term reputation because most of the books being parodied are simply not worth remembering in any form and will only serve as embarrassing obstacles for any potential future readers. R. Fiore, in the online comments for an excerpt of Tim Kreider's Journal article, arguses this position in as succinct a fashion as possible when he states that: "If parody is going to endure then it has to parody subjects that are going to endure." With all due respect to someone who was written about comics in a far more intelligent fashion and for much longer than myself, I have to say that this statement could not be more wrong. Not only is it factually wrong, but it would be far easier to argue the opposite point: parody often endures because, not despite, of the transience of its subject.

For proof of this I would point to some of the founding books of modern European literature: The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, Candide. All of them are in some fashion parodies of other books, general literary trends, philosophical schools, or political ideologies. Don Quixote survives despite the fact that the vast corpus of popular chivalric literature against which Cervantes inveighed has almost entirely disappeared into the dire realms of graduate school and post-doc research. Most of the genres that Chaucer utilized in the Tales were vastly popular for hundreds of years across Europe, and yet I can say with absolutely no fear of contradiction that (for instance) the only penitence manual still in general circulation in 2011 remains "The Parson's Tale." (Of course, I would argue that "The Parson's Tale" isn't quite a parody in the same fashion as "The Knight's Tale." It's complicated position within the Tales hinges in part on its status as a rebuttal to the preceding satire. But it remains a kind of parody because it utilizes the form of the penitence manual to achieve a literary effect beyond merely the salvation of individual souls.)

Far, far more people have read and will continue to read Candide than have ever read Leibniz, and although Leibniz retains a fairly high reputation among historians of philosophy far more people know the man's ideas through Voltaire's satirical mirror than will ever go further beyond the footnotes in the Penguin Classic paperback. In all cases there are a number of reasons why the original genres and ideas pilloried in these texts have faded from view, but there remains one overriding, inescapable fact that frames our understanding of these books: people over the course of many centuries have decided in no uncertain fashion that the parody is far more interesting than the object of parody. Hell, it's even possible that more people read Shamela than Pamela, and many people still read Pamela. (OK, many college students, but I would argue that they're people too.)

Cerebus is, obviously, a lesser work than Don Quixote or The Canterbury Tales (I shouldn't need to say that), but for future scholars looking to reconstruct the shape of comics culture and the interplay between popular and independent publishing modes, Cerebus will serve a similar function in helping to contextualize our strange era. Spawn will almost certainly not survive to become an object of serious critical investigation, but Spawn will retain its significance as a historical artifact for anyone wishing to understand comics in these last few decades. If my assessment is correct and Cerebus finds a fertile afterlife as a subject of great scholarly interest, one of the most important aspects of the work for future scholars will be precisely that aspect that seems least interesting to current readers, with their first-hand knowledge of the historical conditions of the comics marketplace: the constant riffing on and vivisection of disposable bits of comics ephemera.

2011-10-10T01:34:00.002-04:00

Apathy

I've been trying for some time to formulate an adequate response to the massive existential changes currently tearing up the comics landscape, but it's been a busy month, what with starting a new job and new classes in a new town. Also, whereas normally I would have been tempted to post any old thing just to have something on the site, I've been wary of posting anything substantial on the site until I am done with my Cerebus series. I have a bad history of unfinished series, and I am loath to do anything that might otherwise impede the completion of my Cerebus thoughts. I'm trying to be better about these things . . . but the end result is that, since the Cerebus posts have been incredibly time- and thought-intensive, I jhaven't been posting anything at all. But I can promise you that as of this writing the final - or at least what I am foreseeing as being the final - Cerebus essay is half-done in draft form. It will be finished hopefully within the next couple days. And then hopefully I won't have to write anything about Cerebus ever again. (Unless of course I actually write that book about Cerebus I like to threaten myself with when I'm being particularly bad. But even if I did that it would be many, many years from now before I could even begin to think about devoting the resources necessary to a more in-depth explication of the book.)

But that doesn't mean I haven't been paying attention to the slow roll-out of the Nu52 relaunch, or even the death spasms of Marvel's extremely boring Fear Itself crossover. (Just a quick aside because I don't think the series deserves any more attention than I've already given it: how weird is it that FA would almost certainly read better if the main series had not been published - if all we had to read was the crossovers in the Avengers family of titles and a few of the satellite minis? Think about that for a minute.) I just haven't had anything to say. I briefly - as in, for about two minutes - toyed with the idea of doing the requisite rundown of all 52 new titles, but soon thought better of it. Because, you know, the vast majority of them have sucked. But the most depressing thing about so many of these books is not that they're bad - which they are, but which isn't exactly a crime and is hardly novel - but that DC finally seems to have figured out something about which they were blissfully ignorant for the longest time.

The secret lesson of the Nu52 is that they no longer feel as if they have to pretend that crappy comics are anything more than crappy comics. Without having to worry about whether or not this or that book will be "good" on any kind of arbitrary scale, it frees them up to be a lot more efficient and ruthless in the kinds of stories they tell. So that is exactly why we have so many titty books, whereas titty books had been somewhat underscored in recent years: it's not that T&A books never sold, but for whatever reason the particular publishing culture at the company had moderated against early WItchblade / Jim Balent Catwoman-style T&A. Which is not to say that there was no T&A - God forbid - but that the T&A usually existed in a slightly mediated form, and in other contexts. But now there is no real desire to provide any kind of ameliorating context. We can just have T&A books like it's 1995 all over again, and they're going to sell well because, as I said, they haven't really been doing them like this for quite some time. As crazy as the Star Sapphire costumes are, there's a big difference between a book that has T&A elements and a book that exists exclusively as a T&A delivery vehicle. Suddenly, they realized that for all the good reviews and critical goodwill the early-00s revamp of Catwoman received when reimagined as a slightly more sophisticated, less specifically T&A property, the best way to sell Catwoman comics is still just to go - pardon the expression - balls-deep into the realm of vaguely R-rated content. (Still no nipples, but just about everything else.) If you give up on the idea that you should at least on some level be publishing "good" comic books, that frees you to be a lot more ruthless in your determination about what exactly the core strengths of any potential franchise might be. The T&A in Catwoman and the Red Hood book was no mistake, and complaining about the sexual content is a bit like complaining that Spam is salty. It's supposed to do that.

The few truly good books produced by the revamp are, tellingly, books that most people were expecting to be good going in. Animal Man is a delightful series, perhaps the best of the Nu52, but most people could have predicted that it would have been at least more interesting than the bulk of books that surrounded it because Animal Man as a property has always depended on a high level of execution for its relative success. Ergo, the best way to "sell" Animal Man is to frame it as one of the line's few "prestige" books, the proverbial Merchant-Ivory production sitting next to the sea of Michael Bay joints. You can say similar things about Batwoman, but that's a special case inasmuch as the book would likely have existed in much the same shape whether or not the line had been rebooted.

Most of the other "good" books in the relaunch are not so much spectacular creative achievements as solidly conceived genre material that will probably hold up reasonably well in collection: Batman, Stormwatch (the second issue of which was massively better than the first), Swamp Thing. But at this point in the genre's history the ability to pull together solid creative teams on any given book seems to be as much alchemy and luck as any kind of outgrowth of legitimate aesthetic sensibility. Batman is a bog-standard book enlivened by some fairly spectacular artwork by Greg Capullo - but Capullo's art would have enlivened any other book to which he had been assigned. Swamp Thing has promise but so far seems far less impressive than the similarly themed Animal Man, and this is especially noticeable inasmuch as both books appear to be participating in a larger shared storyline, the size and scope of which is still mostly inchoate. Aquaman is pretty much exactly what you'd expect a relaunch of Aquaman by the company's number one creative team to look like, and as such it succeeds precisely to the degree you would expect. (OMAC is a freak that doesn't really fit any model because it is so obviously only good because Keith Giffen is doing some of the best work of his career on a story that is otherwise fairly tepid, and it will be a miracle if the series lasts a full calender year.)

So DC has finally learned a lesson that Hollywood has taken as dogma for decades: any creative endeavor is essentially a set of variables. The success or failure of any endeavor will depend (or so this model goes) on the ability of the producers to control every possible variable. Execution - as in, whether or not something is actually, legitimately good - is the hardest possible variable to predict with any certainty. This explains why, even though serious dramas usually cost significantly less than action movies or even star-vehicle comedies, its harder to get dramas made at major studios than ever because the success of a serious, potential award-bait movie is dependent on things that no producer or studio can ever completely control - the temperament and talent of artists. (This also explains why most larger studios have almost entirely subcontracted the production of serious movies to cheaper boutique labels such as Fox Searchlight or Miramax - lower overhead, less risk.) So there are only a handful of truly good books in the Nu52 by design: those are the maximum number of dice rolls that the company felt they could legitimately get away with. Most of the other books, inasmuch as they are or are not dicey commercial prospects, nevertheless represent familiar types produced by dependable craftspeople who can be counted on to produce the exact product for which they are contracted to produce. T&A books usually don't need A-list creators, and neither do ultraviolent paramilitary stories or low-key superhero action books, and it is as avatars of these discrete categories that the books will be packaged and sold both to veteran readers and to the supposed newcomers attracted by hype and investment potential. They are less aesthetic genres as product descriptors. And if the logic of capitalism has been evident throughout the industry for a long time, this is still the first time in a long time that the strings have been quite so clearly visible. The best DC can hope for these books is that by producing so many of them in such a rigorous and industrial fashion, they will be producing stories that can most easily be packaged for sale in the same way that thrillers, supernatural romance and science fiction have traditionally been packaged: as impulse buys for travelers and casual readers. That's progress, of a kind.

2011-09-26T22:39:00.000-04:00

When Bad Record Covers Strike

New Order - Republic

This one wouldn't maybe be so bad if the band in question didn't have a history - dating all the way back to Joy Division's 1979 debut, Unknown Pleasures - of having some of the best covers in pop music history. Like all the Joy Division and New Order sleeves that precede and follow it, Republic is a Peter Saville joint. I guess Saville lost a bet or something, and that bet probably went something along the lines of "I'll bet you can't make a record cover so ugly we could use it to scour tub grout."

REM - Fables of the Reconstruction

As opposed to New Order, REM never had many good record covers. In fact, it's far easier to count the bad album covers than the good ones. Of the bad ones, this is one of the worst, although it's hard to say that it's objectively worse than Life's Rich Pageant or Document or Out of TIme or any of their atrocious Photoshop disasters from the last decade. But seriously, people: look at this hot mess. It's like a baby threw up, and it just happened to be baby William Faulkner.

2Pac - All Eyez On Me

"Hello, I'm Tupac, I like sunsets, Lakers games and catching a late dinner at Pink's. I'm looking for a girl who's looking for something on a serious tip 'cause I'm sick of having my heart broken. Enter 9898 to leave a message, and I'll holler back at ya."

This one gets extra points for the fact that the 12" vinyl pressing still has the same "2 Compact Disc Pac" sticker that the CD version had. And for some reason I always see this record for sale at Urban Outfitters when I go in looking for their clearance tchotchkes. So you know there are a ton of Studio Art / Ethnography double majors for whom this is the token artifact of "black" culture that gets displayed prominently in their dorm room.

Bob Dylan - Infidels

The problem with Dylan is that when it comes to certain aspects of his career, he just could not give a shit. Dude seriously could not care less about half the shit that goes along with being a rock star. Like recording albums: it's a well-known fact that one of the reasons that he had so much trouble recording decent albums from 1976-1996 is that he hated being in the studio and really resented the fact that recording equipment got so damned complicated. He hated having to deal with multiple takes and overdubs and layered arrangements and all the methodical stuff that you have to do to record a decent sounding non-Sebadoh album. So if you go back and read about any Dylan album from this period, the story is usually something along the lines of: Dylan finds a producer he thinks he likes. Said producer asks Dylan to do another take, work on the arrangements a bit longer, teach the songs to the other members of the band before pressing "play" on the tape machine - you know, any of the stuff that goes along with actually recording a professional-quality rock & roll album. Dylan walks off in a pissy huff and the album is compiled from scraps of whatever they had sitting around the studio that Dylan didn't piss on out of spite at being asked to, you know, give a shit.

Again, you could argue that Dylan has some worse record covers. (Empire Burlesque is a cheap shot.) But I would argue that you will never find a lazier album cover in the history of pop music - at least, not from a major recording artist working for a major record company. This is seriously the most "don't give a SHIT" record cover ever pressed on a cardboard sleeve. Robert Pollard takes longer to crap out a collage to slap on the front of whichever new Circus Devils record is being released this month.

Husker Du - Flip Your Wig

I have a strong feeling this started life as a Sisters of Mercy album cover - or maybe Killing Joke? - before getting lost behind a filing cabinet somewhere. Fast forward to 1985: Hüsker Dü need an album cover. Someone spots a lost Federal Express box behind the filing cabinet. "Hey guys, let's use this, Bob won't care." "But," someone says, "it looks all gothy." "No problem, we still have some candy letters from that birthday cake we made last week."

David Bowie - Never Let Me Down

Yeah, OK, I know I said Empire Burlesque was a cheap shot, and if you accept that premise then Never Let Me Down should probably be covered under the same "fish in a barrel" clause that covers quite a few other 1980s-era recordings from similarly popular rock stars. (Dylan, Bowie, Neil Young, Elton John, the Rolling Stones, etc.) But I'll plead special circumstances for this one because I actually like Never Let Me Down. It's not a great album but I think there's some good material that shines through despite the awful production. Bowie himself famously hates this album, but it's not that bad. (OK, still pretty bad.)

But the cover? Man, if Dylan didn't give a shit, I think Bowie is a victim here of giving too much of a shit. Seriously, what's going on? Is he swinging on a trapeze through a flaming hoop? Is he cleaning his room? Is he being held captive by the Circus of Crime? I dunno, man. This one's a bit too "high concept" for me.

Orbital - Snivelisation

The Hartnoll Brothers have all of one decent album cover to their names - that would be 1999's Middle of Nowhere. Other than that, we're looking at a vast wasteland filled with either aggressively awful or just ploddingly utilitarian designs. This, however . . . this one takes the cake even over In Sides. This is one of the ugliest pictures I own of anything. I would rather tattoo a picture of Ed Benes to the inside of my eyelid than have to look at this thing for longer than the five seconds it takes me to take the CD case out of the drawer.

The Rolling Stones - Their Satanic Majesties Request

I like this album. It's one of my favorite Stones albums, right after all the ones you're "supposed" to like. It's different. They never tried to get this far out of the sandbox again, and I like that. They could probably have recorded a whole album of songs like "She's A Rainbow" and it would have been one of the best things ever.

But this? This looks like four guys who are terribly, terribly hung over, wondering why the hell they can't remember signing off on the concept for this album cover, probably because they were high at the time. But they really don't care enough to fuck with it, the whole point is to goose the Beatles and I guess you can say that, yes, the bare minimum this cover accomplishes is that it gooses the Beatles right good. (The fifth guy in the picture? That's good ol' Charlie Watts, smiling that same old Sphinx-like smile, perfectly content to show up on time and do everything that is required of him so long as the checks clear.)

2011-09-21T04:21:00.001-04:00

A Word About Hate

Unfortunately we do not live in a world wherein all hate comes wrapped in bilious anger, color coded for our convenience. It would be wonderful of all bigotry came in the form of (to use Tom Spurgeon's wonderful analogy) Bull Connor-style red-faced pyrotechnics . . . but that's just not the case. Rage does not necessarily precede hatred. It is possible for hatred to come wrapped in piety, shorn of any overt animus. Hate in these terms is not an emotion experienced but a sensation conveyed. History is replete with examples of passive racism and bigotry that takes the form of (seemingly) gentle condescension and even active (seeming) beneficence. This is one of the reasons why a book such as Uncle Tom's Cabin is such a tricky, unpleasant read: there was almost as much antipathy towards black slaves on the part of white abolitionists as southern plantation owners. The difference is that the bigotry of the latter came cloaked in righteousness and religious conviction, wafted on a cloud of noxious, patronizing contempt.

The situation becomes even harder to parse when we view history through the lens of gender. We don't have the option of erasing sexism from history because history is permeated with - and in many ways, even predicated upon - the assumption of institutional sexism throughout every layer of society. This is a very difficult subject precisely because it implicates almost the entirety of human culture. We can choose now in the present not to give our money or attention to blatantly racist, sexist, or homophobic garbage media, but we can't look backwards with these same blinders: we would in that instance find precious little on which to fix our attention.

The problem is not that hateful attitudes and soft bigotry in all forms existed throughout history, however. That is given. The problem is that these ideas, whatever they may be, are by no stretch of the imagination dead. We can't sit back and calmly, disinterestedly dissect the racism in The Birth of a Nation because the ideology that inspired Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman is still alive, regardless of our best wishes and actions to the contrary. But at least we can say that any reasonably intelligent person should reflexively regard these kinds of stories with the proper contempt they deserve. The Birth of a Nation will always be important as a primary document in American history as well as one of the formative works in film history, but there's a difference between appreciating a desiccated cultural artifact for its inarguable significance and keeping that same artifact as a part of our living culture, right?

Let me introduce an example that might hit a bit closer to home for many of my readers. Say, just for the sake of argument, that there was an American author from the first half of the twentieth century who - while obscure in his lifetime - in death eventually became recognized as one of a handful of the most influential fiction writers of the century. Let's say that this author's stories became widely read and anthologized even outside the small ghetto of his genre, that he became recognized as one of the preeminent writers of American gothic fiction, an heir to Poe and contemporary of Faulkner. Let's go one step further and say that this hypothetical author was even inducted into the esteemed company of the Library of America, gaining the imprimatur of the "official" guardians of American literary culture, and confirmed as an artist of enduring historical import.

But let's also pull back the curtain and look at the reason why this writer's work has remained so persistently popular. Let's say this writer produces horror fiction, books and stories filled with images of unease and dread, animated by an overwhelming and overriding spirit of animal revulsion to the mysteries of an unknown universe. Let's say that the source of this dread - one of the prime factors in this hypothetical writer's ability to so effectively conjure up imagery of inescapable terror - was actually a very real and methodically documented pathological racism, a hatred of non-whites so severe as to resemble a form of psychosis. What then do we do with this hypothetical writer, a man whose books have against all odds become a part of the American canon, and whose work is now more popular and more widely read than it ever was in his own lifetime?

You probably see where this is going, and the chances are good that if you're reading this blog at home you might just be able to walk to a bookshelf and pull down an example of this "hypothetical" author's work. It might even be something you take great pleasure in reading - not just for homework, mind you. The author in question is H. P. Lovecraft, and despite his unquestionable importance he was also, inescapably, a terrible, terrible racist. And it's not even as if - as is the case with Roald Dahl - we can set these facts aside in our considerations of a (relatively) sanitized body of work. No, Lovecraft's racism permeated just about everything he ever wrote.

We can't just say that because an artist is a racist or a sexist or a homophobe that his work is without merit. We can't even say that work produced with the express purpose of promulgating objectionable or offensive ideas can be safely set aside, because we can't erase these ideas from the history books, and we can't erase the influence of even an unquestionably, unforgivably racist document such as The Birth of a Nation. We can hope that the only people who will ever want to see The Birth of a Nation are scholars and historians.

All of which is to say that we can't sidestep the fact that large portions of Cerebus are unquestionably, unforgivably sexist. Sim himself can quibble all he wants over just what the word "misogyny" actually means, but dictionary arguments impress no one. He proposes with a straight-face in as unambiguous language as it is possible to use that he believes women do not possess the mental capacity to differentiate themselves from animals and babies (for just one example). He sincerely believes that women are substantially and substantively inferior to men in every significant way. Under almost any contemporary definition, the assertion that an arbitrary percentage of the population is sub-human is simple bigotry. This is the social compact that most reasonable human beings should accept as a given, even if these ideas have obviously not been expunged from society. For vast stretches Cerebus transforms into a strange hate screed, a rant whose offensiveness is only very slightly ameliorated by the fact that Sim's self-imposed exile from mainstream society appears to have brought far more harm to him than his words have ever harmed another human being. I will not go so far as to say that Sim is crazy, or unhinged, or possesses in any way a compromised mind: these are ad hominem attacks that do little to engage with the reasoning (or lack thereof) behind Sim's actions. No, Sim's words speak for themselves, and they say in as unambiguous a manner as possible that Sim's ideas about gender are a cauldron full of hateful gibberish built on subjective readings of religious documents and specious anecdote.

So with that said, can we dismiss Sim as a useless and tired crank? Can we throw Cerebus in the trash heap? I don't believe we can dismiss the work in any such summary fashion. As much as we would all like to believe that Dave Sim and Cerebus are exceptional outliers with little or no relation to the mainstream of comics culture, doing so ignores a very important and very unsettling fact: the sexism that Sim perpetrates is not, in fact, totally alien to the comics field. Despite the best efforts of a number of diligent historians and activists to shine light on forgotten or ignored crevices of comics history, the fact remains that the comics industry - or at least the North American English-language comics industry - has traditionally been the bastion of men. This is especially pronounced in the later years of the twentieth century, at which point the gradual industry domination of superheroes and similar adventure genres only exacerbated the push in readership away from generic diversity. In other words: historically men have always produced most comics, but for much of the last century comic books (as a children's medium) were read by boys and girls in comparable measure. Towards the end of the century this changed, and the increased masculinization of the field meant that creators who came to prominence in a post-superhero world were producing books for an audience that had become increasingly, exclusively male.

When the underground comix appeared in the sixties they were playing off the mainstream - not necessarily in direct conversation with the superhero comics that found renewed popularity in that decade, but with the very idea of sanitized, family-friendly entertainment represented by the diverse array of properties found in any given run of Dell's Four Color. When the undergrounds receded the post-underground artists who rose to prominence in their place were the product of a more active dialogue with the then-current mainstream. When the first generations of post-underground "alternative" comics artists rose to the fore, many of them - and some of the most prominent names, such as Ware, Clowes, Bagge, Chester Brown and Joe Matt - produced work that was preoccupied with the issue of masculine identity. These are ideas that we can't help but understand, having grown up as readers in the crossfire of the mainstream / "alternative" dichotomy. In forty or fifty years it is conceivable that readers might need footnotes to explain the precise significance of the Superman figure in Jimmy Corrigan or the consistent self-effacing anti-masculinity present in the self-representation of autobiographical artists such as Brown. In the last years of the twentieth century, at the very instant when comics began their push out of the straitening confines of the direct market / superhero retail wasteland - and it must also be said, at a time when more and more female artists began to appear, first in a trickle and then in a deluge - a substantial part of the medium was still for one moment defined by the kind of masculinst / anti-masculinist narrative that already now begins to resemble ancient history.

Which isn't to say that sexism is dead in comics. But for the longest time the dialogue inside the industry was completely dominated by competing views of masculinity, with only so much room for women as was provided by the stupendously large breasts of female superheroes. Some of the most formally adventurous and aesthetically rewarding work produced in the late eighties and the nineties was the product of artists who grew up in the hothouse of men's adventure stories rebelling against the conventions of the dominant power fantasy by producing successive waves of anti-power fantasy - impotence fantasies such as I Never Liked You, It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, the aforementioned Jimmy Corrigan, American Splendor (which, to be fair, began in the seventies when the undergrounds were not yet entirely dead), almost everything by Clowes with (of course!) the exception of Ghost World. Which is not to say that this was the only ideological current stirring the tide in comics, but with so many of the medium's foremost talents dedicated to untangling questions of masculine identity, it's hard not to see that male identity exerted a powerful force on the evolution of the medium in our lifetimes. (And if you don't believe me, another viewing of Terry Zwigoff's Crumb might prove the point.)

In this light it's easy to see that Cerebus, while by far the most extreme example of a masculinist narrative, is essential - and will, in passing years as these historical distinctions become more distant and (hopefully) academic, become even more essential. Dave Sim is one of the great products of the massive wave of post-underground comics artists who did not merely reject the mainstream out of hand but who had grown up with superheroes and fantasy comics, and whose work was conceived in response to and in parallel with these ideas. (You can probably add the likes of Howard Chaykin and Frank Miller, on the more mainstream side, as important creators whose work was defined in part by problematic gender politics.) You can't say that Cerebus is external to comics history because the gender issues confronted in Sim's masterpiece are, for better and (mostly) for worse, inextricably a part of comics history. We were a boy's club for so long that it's easy to forget how odd the shape of our industry might well look to those readers and scholars who will follow in our footsteps, and even how the very idea of the comics "industry" at the fin de siecle period warped the critical dialogue. In order to understand why the comics of today look and read the way they do, people will need to understand why the industry developed the way it did and the ways in which its shape influenced the artists who rose to prominence. Dave Sim, as weird and hateful as he is, is an essential part of this history, and his reactionary politics offer perhaps the most stark representation of exactly the issues at stake throughout the industry in a time of great upheaval. There are few sadder stories in comics history, after all, than the gradual destruction of Jaka by her creator - once one of the great female characters in all comics, turned into a shrill and bumbling bimbo by a creator who had willfully abjured modernity, and in the process turned his back on a medium that had moved onwards and away from him. There's a lesson there, for those who care to listen.

2011-09-05T05:34:00.002-04:00

How We Will Read Cerebus - Part I

As I discussed previously, it's difficult to discuss Cerebus without also directly discussing Dave Sim. The hazards of this kind of ad hominem criticism should be obvious. It's easy to dismiss the whole sum of Sim's oeuvre with some kind of reference to his supposed mental state or mental illness. This is a tempting idea even for those of us who find (on balance) a lot more to like about Cerebus than to dislike. But it doesn't really get us anywhere in terms of approaching the work itself, or salvaging the book's reputation from its own damning testimony.

With this in mind, we'll begin by presenting our argument, a la Sim himself, in the form of a series of statements and explications.

First Statement: Dave Sim is a very intelligent and very talented person.

This should go without saying. His ability to perform at the highest levels of competency within his chosen field of cartooning cannot be gainsaid by even his most vigorous opponents. It furthermore must be said that he is an extremely well read person who has consumed and synthesized a monstrously large range of secondary material in the process of making what can only be the most literate comic strip in the history of the English language.

Second Statement: Dave Sim has an incredibly strong will.

This should never be forgotten in any discussion of the man or his work. He set out to accomplish something that almost any objective observer would have deemed impossible, and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Furthermore, he didn't need to starve or live in a garret in order to crank out 300 issues of Cerebus: by all accounts he made quite a bit of money, and even if circulation dropped precipitously in the final years has still been able to support himself quite comfortably off the proceeds of his little gray aardvark.

If you haven't already seen it, I would like to recommend a 2008 film called Man on Wire. The film tells the story of Phillipe Petit's 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It's a fantastic film not merely for the reason that it tells the story of something that should by any measure have been impossible to accomplish, but that it does so without airbrushing the fact that anyone who could accomplish something so monumental would almost by definition be a difficult person with whom to deal. Phillipe Petit did something that no one thought could or even should have ever been done, and the result is that by the end of the movie he has become a raging egomaniac. And really, who can gainsay someone who's done something like that? Who will ever be able to tell that person "no"? Publishing 300 monthly issues of Cerebus from 1977 to 2004 is, I believe, a feat akin to Petit's high wire walk. Dave Sim full well knows this. This is, to put it mildly, a problem.

Third Statement: Dave Sim is an autodidact.

Tim Krieder explains the problem rather well:

Being an autodidact has a lot of the same advantages and hazards for intellectual development that being free of any editorial control does for artistic development: it allows you to pursue original, heterodox, potentially interesting new directions without being hobbled by conventional wisdom. But there's also no one to correct you when you're headed down a blind alley, straying far from your area of competence, or just talking out of your ass.

It would be absurd - not to mention monumentally classist - to assert that someone can't be smart without having gone to college first. College doesn't even do that great a job of making most people smart to begin with, after all, given how many university degrees are little more than trade school certificates for entry to reasonably remunerative middle-class jobs.

But with those caveats well in place, it needs to be said that if you want to be a working intellectual of any caliber, college really is a good idea. You can learn almost anything on your own without the benefit of a professor or a classroom of your peers, but the one thing you can't get on your own is the sensation of being told "no" by someone who is objectively smarter than you. Being told "no" and being able to learn from being told "no" is the single most invaluable experience any intelligent person can have.

Here in these United States we have a lot of respect and reverence for "self-made men" who craft their own destiny through nothing but hard work, perseverance, and willpower. (Yes, Sim is Canadian, but the point still holds.) This idolization of individual autonomy has turned into something of a mixed bag. People who learn from hard-won experience to trust no one's authority but their own, to disregard the wisdom of their elders, and that the habitual breaking of proscriptions carries no negative consequences, are quite insufferable. They make bad neighbors and bad citizens. Dave Sim succeeded in accomplishing the impossible, and in the process became an artist of formidable intelligence, but the price he paid was the acclaim and esteem of his peers and his potential audience. Because he succeeded so definitively in what, to him, became the only possible meaningful measure of success (that is, the exercise of his Herculean will), there's simply no one alive who can tell him "no" in a way he'll understand or respect. In fact, he almost certainly sees the disdain of his detractors and the neglect of critics as perverse reinforcement.

Fourth Statement: Dave Sim does not see the world the same way that you or I do.

This fact is a consequence of the first three. Sim rejects modernity on an almost wholesale basis, an abjuration that extends all the way to having a disinclination for computers (his internet presence often takes the form of transcripts uploaded from his electric typewriter). His religious turn - a turn which was preceded by and followed perhaps as an inevitable consequence of his conservative turn - recasts almost the entirety of modern existence in negative terms. He dislikes Picasso and dislikes Freud and dislikes Marx and (although I can't remember specifically if it's come up) probably dislikes Nietzsche as well.

What this means in practice is that he explicitly rejects the language and collective metaphors that we - many of us, at least, of the leftist, liberal or conservative persuasions - use to discuss the contemporary world. Although he has little patience for narrow-minded congregationalists, he has cast his rhetorical lot in with the forces of anti-modernity who insist on using the language of scripture to diagnose the sins of the present. He outright dismisses the language of contemporary (and by "contemporary" in this instance I mean at least the last 250-300 years) philosophy and social theory as meaningless "bafflegab."

This is frustrating on a number of levels. The first level is that, according to our First Statement, Dave Sim is a very smart person. There is no good reason why he couldn't read and understand Sartre (to pick an example mentioned in the most recent issue of Glamourpuss) if he decided it was important for him to do so. Most contemporary philosophy is very difficult to read, and the same goes for economics, political science, literary theory, historiography, sociology - pretty much any highly specialized academic discipline you care to mention. But this is an unavoidable consequence of the accretion of thousands of years of scholars building increasingly complicated idea systems, systems which can most easily be penetrated by recourse to highly specialized and specific jargon. If you think, say, Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (to pick a completely random example of a book on my desk) is dense and difficult to parse, you're very much right (especially in translation). But that doesn't mean you can't understand the book if you try.

Sim rejects this notion outright. The entirety of modern political theory rests so far outside his purview that speaking to him on these terms is futile. He rejects the language of modernity, and refuses to read or willfully misunderstands the books that explain the concepts of modernity. I will repeat for emphasis: it's not that he couldn't if he wanted to. There are lots of conservative academics and intellectuals who defend their worldviews in a persuasive and articulate fashion without being swallowed in the sea of "bafflegab." He chooses not to do so, and so it should come as no surprise that he is left without the means to explain much of what he castigates in contemporary society.

Take, for example, his infamous "Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist." If you've never read them or the screed from which they are taken ("Tangent"), they are helpfully reproduced here. Sim begins from the highly biased position of rejecting the last however many hundreds of years of social development in favor of a worldview that refuses to accept any advancement since (in his exact words!) "the death of God's Last Messenger and Seal of Prophets, Muhammad (peace be upon him) in 632 CE." So that's, uh, 1400 years of backwards progress, I guess. If you read through the list, it's not even as if he hasn't pinpointed a few of what could be construed as legitimate points of contention and grounds for reasonable disagreement within contemporary civilization, but he's done so in a way that cannot be breached by recourse to any reasonable argumentation that postdates the birth of Islam.

When I read back over that list in the year 2011 what I see is a number of assertions that can best be answered by economic data, assertions based on faulty premises, assertions based on a frankly bewildering intentional misreading of selective data, and assertions that are meaningless to anyone who does not believe in God. But he distrusts and loathes the Marxists / Feminists / Homosexualists so much that the possibility that he may, just may be misrepresenting the other side of his imaginary straw-man arguments never even occurs to him. A few of these assertions are issues of domestic politics that, icky as they may seem, do little more than prove Sim's status as a inveterate chauvinist. But the larger part of the list is built on the premise that social conditions which haven't existed in hundreds of years are the default norm and that any possible ethical morass will either find immediate explanation in Scripture or ultimate explanation at The Last Day (again, his words). Put aside the reality that much of the "sins" Sim diagnoses are direct manifestations of economic inequality, because the language of economics - not even, to be sure, Marxian economics, but all economics - simply has no basis in Scriptural authority. The sum of economic theory since the Reformation is predicated on a materialist interpretation of human existence. Sure, the Protestants helped matters considerably by welding economic success to spiritual esteem, but as soon as the general Catholic distrust of industrialization was lifted across Northern Europe, we were off to the races and haven't looked back since. Our lives as citizens are not defined by our relationship to God and King - as per Hobbes - but by our relationship to Mammon, otherwise known as market capitalism. This is something that cannot be adequately explained in terms of religion, and that is why so much of the religious right in the industrialized west is completely unable to produce effective social policy.

Sim refuses to understand the modern world on its own terms. Of course contemporary civilization is going to come up short when measured against the moral proscriptions of prehistoric desert nomads and the people who subsequently wrote their fan-fic. But in order to engage with modernity most people - even religious people - accept the premise that most phenomena can be explained by recourse to the material world. If you put aside those wonderful people who believe that God creates recessions, most economists believe that economic systems can be described by recourse to data, and although the systems they use to interpret this data may differ widely depending on where an economist falls on the ideological spectrum, few of these systems involve reference to the Pentateuch.

To sum up: if you do not believe in the literal truth (although he fudges some on his metaphorical reading of Genesis, for instance) of not just the Bible, but (on equal footing) the Torah, the New Testament and the Koran; if you do not reject the materialistic interpretation of culture that has dominated discourse in Western society to varying degrees since the Enlightenment; if you do not believe in a fundamental equality between the sexes that exists despite uncontroversial and objective differences between the physical makeup of men and women; if you acknowledge the authority of any academic or scholarly writing in the fields of the humanities or the social sciences; if you do not believe that academia as a whole has been infiltrated by inveterate Marxists; if you do not believe that women are unable to distinguish between the cognitive abilities of pets, children and people; if you do not abhor pet ownership as a concession to female weakness; if you do not believe that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was ultimately undermined by feminism - well, you have to part ways with Dave Sim. And since there is an infinitesimally small percentage of the world's population who would agree with all these propositions - and that population is essentially one person in Kitchener, Ontario - Dave Sim stands alone as the only person in the world who sees the world in quite this way.

Fifth Statement: Dave Sim's ideas don't make sense to anyone but Dave Sim.

Perhaps this should go without saying. Unless you see the world in exactly the same fashion as Sim, many if not most of his assertions will seem completely untenable, if not simply perplexing.

In the United States (and much of the world as well) we're used to religious conservatism walking hand-in-hand with some manner of populism. It wasn't always like this, of course: the constituency we now call the religious right sat out politics for many decades in the middle of the Twentieth Century. Ironically, it wasn't until Jimmy Carter ran for President in 1976 that evangelical Christianity became interested in electoral politics. After being generally disappointed with Carter's progressive stance on social issues, the evangelicals realigned themselves with the GOP, and they've been a dominant constituency on the right ever since.

Religious conservatism is, in other words, something we're used to dealing with. We recognize it and understand it's arguments. Sim is a religious conservative but he's not evangelical. He is a staunch individualist who lives an extremely regimented life according to a highly personalized interpretation of the three great Abrahamic faiths. To the best of my knowledge he has never seen fit to publicly proselytize his beliefs, outside of the occasional public Bible reading. He does not believe he is a prophet, and Cerebus is not intended to be the scripture of a new religion. He appears to be perfectly content to live his extremely ascetic and highly eccentric life - complete with five-times-a-day prayer, frequent fasting, and compulsory charitable tithing - on his own terms and no one else's.

It is difficult to imagine any conventional Christian denominations seeing anything admirable in Sim's ready acceptance of syncretic heterodoxy. He lives according to some tenets of Islamic law but he is not a Muslim. His reading of Scripture is - well, interesting. He believes that the Book of Genesis to be the (heretofore unseen) story of a battle between God and his female opposite, YHWH. Dave Sim appears to have recreated a highly charismatic form of Zoroastrianism.

Dave Sim's religious conversion is, to put it mildly, not the kind of religious conversion that could happen to just anyone. He came to God through intense study. His reading of the Bible(s) is the kind of reading that could only occur to someone who knew their Bible inside and out, knew some Hebrew, cared about the history of the text as a text. Someone educated and intelligent and confident enough to propose a novel reading of the most read and re-read book ever published in the history of the world. And - it really should go without saying - someone with the balls to assert that he perhaps the first person in the history of the world to really understand what God was trying to say.

So it's probably for the best that he is not an evangelical. His religious methodology is so pervasively anti-populist that it's difficult to imagine him being able to gather followers even if he wanted. Anyone intelligent enough to retrace Sim's steps in order to recreate the revealed wisdom he has discovered is, frankly, too intelligent to ever agree with him. These are ideas that make sense only to Dave Sim. He is a religious conservative (small "r," small "c") but he has about as much to do with the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as they do with Lukács. They are populists, whereas he is essentially a hermit, a modern-day anchorite living in modern society but not of modern society. We understand the likes of Beck and Palin because they are - each in their own way - permutations of political and social movements that have been a part of United States society for decades and centuries. Dave Sim is and will likely remain a movement of one.

Sixth Statement: Dave Sim's ideas must be understood in order to understand Cerebus.

Roald Dahl was very lucky to be blessed with a series of extremely courageous and patient editors who were able to excise most examples of his corrosive racism, sexism, and pervasive anti-semitism. It is possible, thanks to these men and women, to be able to enjoy Dahl's essential and strangely heart-warming cynicism without also being exposed in the process to his vituperative rants against international Jewry. The world is better for having Dahl's books, even if the world was perhaps not so blessed to have had Dahl himself.

We're not going to get off quite so easily with Cerebus. All of Sim's beliefs - and the evolution of his beliefs along the way - are part and parcel of Cerebus in a way that could never really be extricated without leaving the work itself crucially bowdlerized. Tim Callahan could not have said it better when he said that, "Cerebus is as autobiographical as any comic book ever written." It's Sim's story, from page one right on through to the end. It is the greatest example comics has produced of a Künstlerroman: not merely the story of a young man's growth and maturity, but the growth and maturity of an artist. That the story does not end, as David Copperfield or Wordsworth's Prelude, with the artist having attained some degree of nineteenth-century Romantic idealism and spiritual empathy, is incidental. By issue #300, Sim has become an artist of exacting skill and intellect, but instead of growing into a great and more nuanced engagement with the world as it exists over the course of twenty-seven long years of labor, Sim's muse (a term I use gingerly considering our subject) has led him away from society and towards a wholesale rejection of modernity.

In order to come to grips with Cerebus we must grapple with Sim's philosophy - as contrary, repulsive and downright unintelligible as it may appear from the outside. The work's unique, even demoniacal power comes from the fact that to be immersed in Cerebus is to be completely immersed in the another man's mind, with all his prejudices and irrationalities wholly intact. It is highly likely that by the end of Cerebus you will hate Sim, you will be angry with Sim, you might even pity Sim, but you will understand him as you have understood few other human beings on this planet.

Seventh Statement: Cerebus will never be widely read.

If Dave Sim set out to create a work of great literature that would be widely read and disseminated in his lifetime he failed fairly definitively. As the years proceed there will most likely never be any kind of "Cerebus renaissance." Perhaps one day after Sim's death when the work has passed into public domain the book will be anthologized and may appear in some expurgated form. But I do not believe the work as a whole will ever be read by any but a very small minority of even the comics-literate population. When I say, "we will read Cerebus," I'm conscious of two things: one, we don't read Cerebus now; and two, when the time comes for Cerebus to be rediscovered and to reenter the critical dialogue about comics in any meaningful way, it will be championed by the audience Dave Sim himself is probably least eager to cultivate, the critics and scholars of academia.

Even if you discount the controversial second half of the run and winnow Cerebus down to the "good" first half - High Society, Church & State, Jaka's Story - you're still left with something like 3,000 pages of extremely dense, highly allusive, very wordy, and very cerebral stories about a talking aardvark who becomes Pope. And of course the further into the back half of the run the reader progresses, the further down the rabbit's hole of Dave Sim's psyche the reader falls. It is quite simply too complicated and too involved for any but the most dedicated reader to penetrate.

I've seen the comparison between Cerebus and The Birth of a Nation, and while I think that's not necessarily a bad analogy I think a better one would probably be between Sim himself and Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is without a doubt one of the most significant and influential philosophers of the twentieth century, but he was also a card-carrying member of the Nazi party from 1933 through to the end of the war. This problem is compounded by the fact that, despite a long and prolific career in the years following the fall of the Third Reich, he never publicly addressed his Nazism in any but the most abstract and disinterested fashion. He never came as far as Günter Grass, who after six decades of outright lying finally admitted his membership in the Waffen-SS and pleaded, with the equivalent of sixty years' "good behavior" (and a Nobel Prize), for clemency in the court of public opinion.

Emmanuel Faye has argued, in essence, that Heidegger's work needs to be cordoned off from the mainstream of philosophy and exiled to the realm of "Nazi studies." Heidegger's work, some argue, actually provides a philosophical rationale for Fascism that would otherwise never have been created. (It's worth noting that Heidegger himself was anathematized by factions within the party on account of the fact that his books and articles were primarily gibberish to anyone not extremely well-versed in academic philosophy.) But on the balance I think the problem of Heidegger's fascist tendencies is self-correcting. The reason for the this correction is blessedly simple: no one can understand Heidegger. I've read Heidegger and someday I will almost certainly have to read more. I can say with some confidence that there are very few writers in the history of literature less user-friendly than Heidegger. I believe that in order to be able to read and understand a book such as Being and TIme a reader will already need to be sufficiently well-versed in the subject matter and possess a considerable understanding of the historical context. He or she will have been trained and given the necessary tools with which to grapple with the most problematic aspects of Heidegger's philosophy. Just the most simple question as to whether or not dasein reflects the ultimate manifestation of fascistic ontology is so far beyond even the educated the layman that the question of whether or not these are dangerous ideas is moot: no one able to approach Heidegger on his own terms will be unprepared to deal with the ethical consequences thereof. The people who will care whether or not Heidegger was a Nazi will be such a miniscule percentage of the population as to be statistically negligible, but for those who do the question has and will continue to inspire decades of fruitful investigation.

So too with Cerebus. I keep stressing that no one now reads Cerebus, because I think that's essentially true. And the audience for Cerebus is now probably as big as it will ever be. But it will not be forgotten. The conundrum at the heart of Cerebus is the contrast - a contrast that only became larger and more fascinating with every passing issue - between Sim's personal conservatism and the formal radicalism of Cerebus. Sim's transformation into an arch-conservative Biblical literalist was not accompanied by any diminution of his cartooning prowess. On the contrary, his understanding of the depths of formal invention still hidden within the medium rivals that of any Fort Thunder experimentalist. It's hard to see, sometimes, because of how conservative the narrative appears: Sim doesn't appear to have been influenced in any way by manga, most of the action throughout the entirety of the story consists of long conversations, and Sim is heavily enamored of textual exposition. But in practice what this means is that he's been given almost complete free reign to explore a corner of the medium that has been more or less abandoned by his peers in "serious" cartooning. To this effect he's turned his post-Cerebus vehicle Glamourpuss into an examination of the genealogy of "fine line" realistic cartooning, the school of Stan Drake and Alex Raymond. To say that this is fallow territory among contemporary non-mainstream cartoonists would be a severe understatement.

With Cerebus Dave Sim has produced the longest and most diverse sustained poetics yet devised in the comics medium. If we need another analogy then the Cantos of Ezra Pound will do. The Cantos stretch and warp the shape of poetry almost beyond recognition, pulling form past all recognition of function and turning language in on itself. It's an immensely complex work of forbidding erudition. It is also the product of an avowed fascist who spent many years in mental hospitals. His support of Mussolini was no mere theoretical concern: it is addressed directly within the text of multiple sections of the Cantos. His work was immensely influential and important, and yet is now almost exclusively the domain of graduate students and that miniscule portion of the population able and willing to devote their leisure time to parsing some of the most difficult and ethically compromised poetry ever written. So too with Cerebus.

Next: We will discuss the function and importance of parody in Cerebus, and the significance of parody in the work's continued relevance.

2011-08-26T16:44:00.000-04:00

Why We Will Read Cerebus

Before you read any further, I recommend you first read Tim Kreider's article "Irredeemable: Dave Sim's Cerebus," from the massive 301st issue of The Comics Journal - excerpted here - as well as Tim Callahan's two-part Cerebus retrospective at Comic Book Resources, here and here. Both pieces are excellent.

Despite the fact that Cerebus has suddenly reentered the critical conversation, these pieces nevertheless point to a larger fact: it seems as though the time is ripe to discuss the work precisely because it has fallen off the radar for so long. Not even ten years have passed since the publication of Cerebus #300, yet the series already appears to be the product of another time, a strange artifact of an era in comics whose time has passed. It was an anachronism even in 2004, a time-traveler from the dawn of the direct market.

The time has come to once again discuss Cerebus because the wounds left by the series' long and painful denouement have perhaps begun to heal. This does not and should not be taken to mean that Sim's words from the series' final years have been forgotten (rather, they do and will remain of vital importance to understanding Sim and his sad magnum opus), but the particularly sensationalistic circumstances have already begun to fade. Who now remembers the time when every increasingly strange and inflammatory statement from the back pages of Cerebus was (seemingly instantly) transcribed and uploaded to the Journal's message board for the outraged dissection of the internet at large? Those who never knew Cerebus could be forgiven for rubbernecking at the carnage, but those of us who loved the book could only watch in mute horror as Sim repeatedly set himself on fire in public, for seemingly no reason other than to see how how fast he could burn.

Those few brave souls like myself who actually stayed with the book through the bitter end could be forgiven, at the time, for staggering away from the wreckage in half-delerious exhaustion. I can forgive those fans who stick with crappy superhero comics through the lowest lows just for the sake of completion, because I stuck with Sim through a lot worse than just bad comics. As "bad" as Cerebus got it never actually had the common decency to be bad: issue #300 was no less beautiful a production than issues #200 or #100 had been. Cerebus towards the end wasn't so much a poor reading experience as the final violent convulsions of a bad marriage. I couldn't turn away even though each successive issue angered me more than the one before, even though the reading experience left me consistently enervated and perpetually downcast. Reading Cerebus always put me in a bad mood, a real bad mood, but I never gave up. Because even when the book pissed me off - which towards the end was was damn near always - it was still something I cherished despite myself. And when it was over I missed it, even though my reaction was as irrational as that of a battered spouse longing for their abuser.

I set out to write this because I want to state unequivocally, and in friendly rebuttal to the explicit concerns of both Kreider and Callahan, that Cerebus doesn't need defending. But it's telling for me that even the most cursory approach brings me circling back around to my own feelings regarding the book and the very complicated set of associations I hold towards Dave Sim himself. I use the word "feelings" with the full awareness that some intangible representation of Sim is standing over my shoulder, chiding me for expressing my "feelings" instead of communicating the results of my rational deliberation. Sim is a pedant of the first order, someone who has historically made great hay out of overanalyzing the fact that the word "feel" when used in colloquial speech means about as much as "think" or "believe." Most people in casual speech use these terms interchangeably even though they are perfectly aware that the words have distinct and different meanings. The overuse of the word "feel" is not a sign that society has become rigorously feminized, it is an indicator that everyday speech is informal and imprecise, and of no greater significance than the overuse of the word "like" as a grammatically null placeholder syllable or the perpetual (and usually harmless) misuses of "literally" and "nonplussed."

But that's the kind of trap into which thinking about Sim leads the reader to inevitably fall. He's a very smart man, and even at his worst he expresses his (often completely illogical) ideas with such forceful conviction that you cannot help imagine yourself in some kind of personal dialogue with him. After reading 300 issues of Cerebus, the reader feels / believes / thinks that he or she knows Sim. Tim Callahan is right to stress the fact that Cerebus is "as autobiographical as any comic book ever written." That is precisely why it is so hard to separate the man from the work. It's not just that Sim's ideas permeate the book, it's that Sim permeates the book, to the point where any discussion of the book inevitably devolves into a discussion of Sim himself. I confess that I was vaguely surprised Sim survived the end of Cerebus, not because I expected him to commit some sort of gruesome hari kari as the final issue rolled off the printer, but because, like Charles Schulz and Peanuts, he had become so inextricable from the epic undertaking of his life's work that it was impossible to imagine the two ever parting. Without a new issue of Cerebus to produce every month (it occurred to me), perhaps the man would simply evaporate.

All of which is to bring us back to my main point: it is necessary to restate that Cerebus does not need to be defended. It's as problematic a work as has ever been produced in comics, and those problems will not diminish with time. But the way readers react to these problems will change over time. To put it another way: it's hard to talk about Cerebus - even today - because even though it might sometimes feel like ancient history, it's still recent enough that most people who know comics can feel those old passions rumbling just beneath the surface. It's been long enough since 2004 - and Sim has remained sufficiently, blessedly quiet in the intervening years - that Kreider's reappraisal seems timely and overdue. A write-up in McSweeney's Believer magazine from a year or two ago struck the same chord. It's been long enough that people are starting to look back with the desire to answer the question of where this strange artifact fits into our burgeoning critical canon. But it's still too soon to be able to fully appreciate the work separate from the (largely negative) passion it inspires.

People don't really read Cerebus anymore, and it's apparent from the hook of these articles that people aren't likely to overcome this resistance anytime soon. The moment has passed: the barriers to entry in terms of time, money and willingness to tolerate offensive reactionary horseshit, are simply too high. Fantagraphics has done a good job of keeping the otherwise intimidating bulk of Love & Rockets (thirty years of continuous publication!) accessible to the casual reader by offering the whole of the series in a variety of attractive and affordable formats. Conversely, I cannot imagine Cerebus being published in digest form for casual browsing (imagine Gerhard's crosshatching in a tiny tankobon), or being cherry-picked for "Best-Of" anthologies (at least in Sim's lifetime). Even someone with the willingness to drop a few hundred dollars on a foot-and-a-half of black and white phonebooks has to confront the fact that the final third - something like 2,000 pages - is considered to be either (at best) wildly inconsistent or (at worst) pure hate speech. Then there's the insularity of the constant and unending series of industry-specific parodies. Etc etc etc.

My point is not that these imposing facts need to be mitigated or underplayed or ignored. People aren't reading Cerebus now because the current comics "scene" (make of that what you will) has moved long past Dave Sim. This isn't likely to change anytime soon. But people will read Cerebus again. It will never have a wide audience. It will never find readers who regard Sim's sincere religious and political beliefs with anything more than sad curiosity. But I believe Cerebus will nevertheless achieve a kind of immortality despite its creator's best efforts at marginalizing himself, and among the kinds of readers who Sim himself would probably rather eschew. In the future, the only people with the specialized vocabulary and resources necessary to understand, discuss and appreciate Cerebus will be academics and scholars. The series will be a gold mine for critics and historians looking to reconstruct the trajectory of the comics industry in the late twentieth century. Cerebus tells the story of the evolution of the medium in the English-speaking world throughout this crucial period in a way that no other single text can. It will survive because it is simply indispensable, and without it our understanding of comics history would be immeasurably poorer.

2011-08-16T10:07:00.000-04:00

This Thing I Did

I participated in the Hooded Utilitarian's recent International Best Comics Poll. At the risk of seeming flip, I didn't put an inordinate amount of time into my ballot: I submitted it late, and was furthermore wary of the very real dangers of overthinking the matter. My list, in no particular order, was:

• Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green
• Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• The Donald Duck Stories, Carl Barks
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby
• Louis Riel, Chester Brown
• Love and Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez & Jaime Hernandez
• Maggots, Brian Chippendale
• Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff
• Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, E. C. Segar
• The Weirdo Stories, R. Crumb

I didn't overthink it, and this meant in practice that I looked at my own bookshelves and listed the works with which I was most familiar that I felt most deserved to be represented on a list like this. If I had thought about it longer I may have tried to parse whether or not Gary Panter deserved a spot on the list over Chippendale, for instance (Cola Madness might have made the list if it had been eleven). Perhaps I should have argued with myself more forcefully for John Porcellino - but at the expense of what, Justin Green? No, that might have been an injustice in whatever personal Nerd Court I've convened in my head.

I'm disappointed, based on the Top 115, that no one else apparently thought so well of Maggots or Louis Riel, which is disconcerting if not surprising. In my own personal pantheon I think those represent the most significant achievements of our current "Golden Age" of "mature" (cough cough) cartooning.

I could not in good conscience vote for anything created outside of my primary language (English). My familiarity with European comics (despite a fairly decent grasp of written French) is catch-and-catch-can, and my knowledge of manga is woeful. (The only two manga series I've ever finished are Lone Wolf & Cub and Akira, which says as much about my age as anything else - those were the two first "serious" manga offerings to make any kind of popular impact in America back in the 80s, so they've stuck in my head as touchstones ever since.) I can't speak for whether or not anyone else on the panel made the decision to vote for works produced in languages they could not themselves read. Is it churlish of me to wonder how many of the seventeen votes for Tintin were placed by readers who have only experienced the stories in translation? It's academic, I believe, since the top ten (top fourteen!) was exclusively English language works anyway. The international context could never have been representative in any way whatsoever unless a truly international panel of critics and scholars was convened, staffed by figures with demonstrable experience in the cartooning traditions of multiple cultures and equipped to compare the relative merits of artists as diverse as Crumb, Kirby, Hergé and Tezuka.

Such a poll is, of course, impossible. When the Journal attempted their own English language list back at the turn of the century they went out of their way to admit just just how impossible it would be to produce any such list, before presenting their own. Their list was probably the best such attempt that ever could be made, from a period when the critical space in comics was a lot more homogenous. This was basically a duffer's list, compiled from working pros, amateur scholars, fans and a few dedicated intellectuals. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, and I'm happy to have been allowed to participate, but if anything the list only underscores the urgency of Domingos Isabelinho's counter-programming. I may not agree entirely with his conclusions, but it's a necessary curative to the poll's circumscribed limitations. I'm very conscious of the fact that my own list is restricted to a (roughly) eighty-year field, as well as a very set understanding of what comics look and feel like, as well as the kinds of people who make the comics. And yet this is what I know and, because of a combined lack of resources (in both time and money) and lack of curiosity (and I'm still more curious than most people about most things), my experience of comics is limited. Perhaps not relative to 99.99% of the population, but I know enough to defer to my betters in the fields of their expertise.

I respect Tucker for many reasons but I'll never understand his enthusiasm for Calvin & Hobbes, nor will I ever be able to understand the sway it holds over so many people. But then, I've always thought Pogo was slightly overrated as well, and don't get me started on Maus. (No, seriously, I don't want to talk about Maus: it's a Sacred Cow for a very good reason and I don't feel like putting the effort necessary into tipping that cow and not looking like an asshole.) But Maus is still "better" than Watchmen, which itself should never, ever be ahead of Jack Kirby on any list, let alone Los Bros Hernandez, Robert Crumb and Carl Barks. And don't get me wrong: I like Watchmen, but there's a big difference between "I like" and "I think this deserves to stand head and shoulders with the best of one hundred years' worth of comics literature." It doesn't have so much to do with the same po-faced appeal to some totemic ideal of artistic "maturity" and virtuosity that makes armchair Clement Greenberg's out of every wannabe Comics Journal columnist. It has to do with history, I think, and an understanding of which virtues endure and which prove themselves to be ultimately transient. History is the final judge and arbiter, of course.

I don't think Calvin & Hobbes will be remembered in the same breath as Krazy Kat and Peanuts. I don't think it is any kind of insult to Bill Watterson to say that his work was never built to last in quite the same way. This is my gut feeling, yes, but it's a gut feeling informed by quite a bit of knowledge and experience. That's all these lists are, though, is the compiled gut feelings a large group of 211 respondents. Some of whom know and care about Guido Buzzelli's Zil Zelub, some of whom probably weren't even joking when they nominated Elektra: Assassin. With such a wide group of disparate yahoos involved, is it any wonder the list itself is kind of schizoid and probably useless to anyone who might be looking at a list like this as any kind of meaningful aesthetic yardstick?

But then, looking over the list of lists, I say that Abhay put Calvin & Hobbes on his list, too. Which just goes to show, the only real aesthetic yardstick that matters is the one you use to beat yourself soundly across the head and shoulders.

2011-08-09T06:17:00.001-04:00

SIR

The Punisher #1

I must be missing the gene that makes crime / police procedural stuff appeal to a person. I read a comic like this and it's hard for me to even keep my eyes on the page, they just slide off like I'm looking at a blank wall. Is this a well-made comic book? I can't even answer that question because the very premise is so far and away from anything I'm interested in reading that I can't possibly judge.

For me, at least, the Punisher's appeal comes from the juxtaposition between his black & white, pulpy roots and the technicolor fantasy context of the Marvel Universe. He's a noirish figure who could have stepped out of any men's adventure magazine published between 1930 and 1970, a bloodthirsty urban vigilante stuck in a world of superheroes. The Punisher on his own outside the Marvel Universe is just another guy with a gun - which is something that the makers of the Punisher films, to their detriment, haven't quite realized how to make interesting. The right tone to strike with the Punisher is just slightly absurd, leaving the protagonist as a kind of straight man placed in an incrementally exaggerated version of the "real" world, be it the world of superheroes or something else. No flies on Garth Ennis's Punisher: even in his MAX stories Ennis understood the fact that the Punisher has to have something slightly larger-than-life to work against to keep him from becoming a garden-variety thug. Accordingly, is run was partly defined by the horror-tinged macabre tone of bookends The Tyger, Born and The End.

These things can go badly wrong, of course - go too far to one extreme of tonal juxtaposition and you risk doing something stupid like making him temporarily black or turning him into a renegade angel warrior. The Punisher is less about character and plot than tone and execution, and these are hard attributes to fudge. Mike Baron understood this perfectly. His run was never particularly original but he knew how to write the best kind of action stories - overheated like an 80s action movie, filled with mustache-twirling villains who deserved their inevitable comeuppance, which they received in superbly improbable action sequences. If you've seen Stallone's Cobra or Schwarzenegger's Raw Deal, then you should be able to understand the appeal of the Punisher in the late 80s and early 90s. These weren't really "serious" stories because they were obviously hyperventilated boy's fantasies, and could only be taken seriously with at least part of the tongue planted firmly in cheek.

The best Punisher story since Ennis left the franchise was undoubtedly Rick Remender's "Frankencastle" sequence - a story that worked where "Angel Punisher" failed through consistently strong execution and a precise understanding of exactly how to play the character. The Punisher is the man who keeps his head and stays 100% consistent in any and every situation: even when he's been turned into a giant Frankenstein's monster, he remains focused on nothing more and nothing less than killing bad guys in the most efficient way possible. In theory you could write a decent Punisher story in any genre if you just stayed true to the character's core tone - and certainly, there have been good funny Punisher stories, good fantasy-tinged Punisher stories, good sci-fi Punisher stories, even a handful of Punisher romance stories. As long as the Punisher remains the Punisher, the concept is pliable, all the more so for its stark simplicity.

But this? The first issue of Greg Rucka's anticipated run? I just don't understand how this is anyone's idea of a good comic book. There's no high concept here, barely any concept at all besides the most bafflingly, numbingly literal take on the character: criminals kill people, the Punisher kills them, rinse and repeat. It's strictly a police procedural with organized crime or terrorists or something like that. The Punisher, for one, is barely in it - he shows up at the end to shoot some people after almost a whole issue of nothing much happening. I thought the days of the heroes barely appearing in the comics were gone with Bill Jemas? There's cops at crime scenes and crooks gathering in underworld bars and oh god I'm getting bored just typing it. I don't like crime stories, that's an admitted weakness on my part, but come on: how is this anyone's idea of an interesting comic book? You're telling me you've been given the opportunity to write superhero comic books, a medium and a genre where literally almost anything is possible in the hands of an experienced practitioner, and this po-faced Law & Order-meets-Bernhard Goetz slash fiction is what you want? Really? For a comic book in the year 2011 to be so derivative and so uninteresting, and yet to take itself so damn seriously, is nothing less than a complete abdication of creative responsibility on the part of the creators involved. You really have to get up pretty early in the morning to craft something as willfully mediocre as this.

Is this what "real" Punisher fans want? Hardcore crime fiction with nary a trace of the fantastic, either in tone or content? Well, damn, I guess you get your wish then. I'll just wait a few years until sales drop back to cancellation levels and they turn Frank into a space alien for six issues.

2011-08-03T03:04:00.001-04:00

Doctor Doom's Mailbag

Doctor,
I noticed recently that you sided with that dastardly fiend the Red Skull in one of his many attempts to destroy the United States and crush Captain America. I was wondering, since you have a long history of enmity with the Red Skull, just why you decided to help the ex-Nazi.

Sincerely,
S. Rogers, Washington, D.C.

This is a very good question, and one which Doom sees no harm in answering in as frank a manner as possible. It is well-documented, after all, that Doom and the Skull were hated enemies for a very long time. Considering the many times that the Skull has tried - obviously unsuccessfully and futilely - to kill me and conquer Latveria, it might seem incongruous that I would stoop to aid my most bitter enemy in his latest futile scheme to conquer the United States. Yet I trust that my reasoning is not overly opaque to anyone with so much as a modicum of sense.

To put it as succinctly as possible: the Red Skull is an idiot. It is true that he can be dangerous under certain circumstances. There are few creatures so wretched on this world as the Red Skull, and the depths of his hatred towards every living being are truly astounding. But this monomaniacal focus on spite and loathing leaves him fatally blinkered, unable to see beyond the limited realm of his obsessions and fixations. He was once a Nazi, and remains very much the product of the Third Reich's institutionalized state torture regime. He is a ruthless, capable killer who no doubt rejoiced at every tear shed by my gypsy ancestors as he oversaw the mass exterminations at Buchenwald and Chelmno. But he has long since abandoned any pretense of remaining faithful to the discredited racial paranoia of Nazi Germany. He is no longer a German Nationalist, as he has been anathematized and disowned by a country that now rightly sees him as a deeply humiliating reminder of their most shameful history. He is a man without a country and without ideals, a creature born only to foment distress and promulgate his vision of the world as a barbarian arena of endless cruelty perpetrated against the weak.

But the important question remains: given all of this information, has the Skull ever actually achieved anything of importance? Hasn't he been defeated time and time again, either by the superior cunning of his foes or the misery of his own hubris? Is there any doubt whatsoever that he is one of the the most hated men on the planet, aided only by a small coterie of like-minded thugs who are relentlessly undone by their own sniveling devotion to such a pitiful figure? He is, not to put too fine a point on it, a joke. It does not help matters that his sworn arch-foe is one of the few so-called "super-heroes" whose competence and courage earn the admiration even of Doom. Captain America is a man with whom to be reckoned, and so long as the Skull remains fixated on the Captain he will remain a hollow, impotent figure, easily checked by his betters.

So why give aid to such a loathsome figure? As a self-identified villain, the Red Skull is quite simply a tool par excellence. He can dependably be counted on to sow chaos and destruction in his wake, while just as dependably self-destructing before ever truly causing irreparable damage. Why not give him passive aid and encouragement, supporting his plans inasmuch as they are certain to inconvenience my own enemies and potentially achieve some degree of salutary success? The Skull could never represent any real threat to Doom. There is no profit to be gained in actively working towards his destruction while he can still be useful. Given enough time the Skull will always destroy himself. And for so long as he remains active, it costs Doom nothing to humor him, to allow him to cherish the misconceptions that we are in any way equals and that I have forgotten his past transgressions, all the while gleefully toasting his inevitable humiliation and well-deserved defeat.

Dr. Doom,
Something I've been wondering for quite some time - please forgive me if you've heard this one before - but who is more dangerous, you or Lex Luthor?

Sincerely,
C. Kent, Metropolis

If there is one subject - besides the accursed Richards! - which Doom detests above all others, it is surely the incessant comparisons to the Lex Luthor that have plagued me for decades. The very idea is simply too absurd to seriously contemplate. Yet, since the subject recurs with an annoying regularity, I will address it once again in the hopes of finally putting a rest to this most insipid of subjects.

Lex Luthor is a fool. His supposed brilliance is the product of a lifetime's theft and cunning. His skill, if it can be called such, is simple ruthlessness: he is nothing more than a petty criminal with delusions of grandeur. Whatever rudimentary intelligence he might possess is perpetually wasted in his rivalry with the alien Superman. If he were sincere in his desire to devote his life to the supposed "benefit" of humanity, it would be a simple manner to surpass his petty resentments in order to truly devote himself to these lofty, if foolhardy, ideals. But he remains fatally fixated on his inability to overcome one single vexing opponent, and this unconscionable fixation is the unambiguous source of his repeated defeats.

Setting aside these embarrassing neuroses, his personal abilities are barely adequate. As a scientist he is an excellent businessman, by which I mean that without a great deal of money with which to buy the finest scientific minds, he would have no means with which to replenish the stock of superior weaponry with which he vexes the Kryptonian. It is no great matter to be a plutocrat in the industrialized west. Money can buy many things but it cannot purchase strength. Where in Lex Luthor is any strength to match the will of Doom, the same will that cowed the mighty Beyonder? The same might that humbled great Galactus? The same courage that awed malefic Mephisto? Shorn of his stolen wealth and bought weaponry, bereft of the underlings whose uncertain allegiances he has purchased and the "allies" who seek only to betray him at any sign of weakness, Lex Luthor is merely a weak, bald man.

Stripped of armor and naked, Doom could still crush Luthor to death with his bare hands, raze his ostensible "empire" to the ground and pour a glass of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1945 over the smoldering ashes.

Dear Doctor,

I was wondering who would win in a fight between you and Lord Voldemort. I bet you could take him.

Yours,
H. Granger, London

Although I cannot but admire Voldemort's ambition and foresight, he nevertheless poses little in the way of a threat to Doom. As with most of his wizard brethren, his dependency on physical wands in order to channel his power renders him highly vulnerable without this tool. Additionally, his almost total disdain for "Muggle" science makes him easy prey for any number of strategies outside the realm of magic. While it is true that with his wand he is a formidable foe, a disarmed Voldemort would die like any other human if you shot them in the head. The ability to speak to snakes will avail you little when you have been bound and gagged by the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak, helpless at the tender mercies of Doom.

Enough! Doom grows weary of this unending avalanche of idiocy.

2011-07-25T10:00:00.003-04:00

Comicon News Roundup

Fantagraphics to publish Complete Four Color

Fresh off recent convention-season announcements that venerable art comics publisher Fantagraphics had secured reprint rights to the classic EC Comics library as well as the groundbreaking underground anthology Zap, the publisher announced their further acquisition of the reprint rights to one of the most important series in the history of comics: Dell's long running Four Color series.

"This announcement is a long time coming," states Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth. "Over the years we've become adept at working with a wide range of rights holders in order to reprint a large variety of archival material running the gamut from Charles Schulz's Peanuts and E. C. Segar's Thimble Theater through to Floyd Gottfredson and Carl Barks' classic Disney comics. Licensing the Four Color series required working not only with Dell itself through Random House, but with the rights holders for every individual licensed feature published in the magazine's long run. Thankfully, our relationship with Disney meant a large chunk of the prime material was already squared away, but that still left Warner Brothers [Dell published the Looney Tunes characters side-by-side with their Disney counterparts for decades], in addition to other properties as diverse as Raggedy Ann & Andy, Felix the Cat and Zane Grey's Westerns.

"It's taken - no exaggeration - years of diligent work to bring together all the rights holders. But it'll all be worth it be able to present the highest-selling and most influential comic series in history in strict historical continuity. There's a lot of work here that contemporary readers are completely ignorant of - Jack Callahan's Tillie the Toiler, for instance, is really going to wow people. Just the other day I was poring over a stack of Harvey Eisenberg's amazing Charlie McCarthy books - these stories definitely deserve their chance to once more stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Barks' more famous Ducks."

"We haven't completely finalized the details of the books, but we're most likely looking at publishing the series five issues at a time, in oversized hardcovers that will probably come out to around $40. If we can keep to a strict quarterly schedule, we'll be on track to finish the Complete Four Color in only 67 years, give or take. I think any serious historian of the medium is going to want to find room on their shelf for these books."

R. Crumb takes the reigns of Iron Fist

In a surprise announcement on Saturday's Cup of Joe panel, Marvel CCO Joe Quesada stunned panel attendees by introducing perhaps the last creator anyone expected to see in residence at the House of Ideas: legendary underground comics pioneer R. Crumb. Crumb will be writing and drawing a relaunch of Marvel mainstay Iron Fist to be set in the immediate aftermath of the company's line-wide Fear Itself event.

"I'd been talking to Joe off and on for years about doing some work for Marvel, but the timing never seemed right before now. But since I wrapped work on my Book of Genesis adaptation, I'd been casting around for my next project. By happy coincidence I happened to run into Joe and he let it slip that Iron Fist was going to be left in a particularly interesting situation in the immediate wake of Fear Itself. After a little bit of prodding he explained exactly what Iron FIst's new status quo entailed, and the more I heard the more I realized that these were stories I wanted to be a part of telling."

When asked by audience members why the notoriously independent Crumb was making a move to Marvel after almost five decades of independent publishing, the underground pioneer demurred. "I don't think it's as much of a stretch as some people are likely to believe. In hindsight I think it's obvious that a lot of my career has been building towards working with Marvel. I'm finally ready, I think, to put my nose to the grindstone and built up a nice, long run. That I've been given the opportunity to work with such an iconic character as Iron Fist is just icing on the cake."

"There are probably some old underground fans who are going to be disappointed that I'm working at Marvel, but I'm confident that once people start seeing these pages any objections are going to be completely forgotten. This is some of the best work of my career. I really feel that this is the work I'm going to be remembered for."

When asked about the new series direction, Crumb was chary. "Basically, there's a lot I can't say because, well, we're going to be picking up almost immediately after the final pages of Fear Itself and Joe here would have to kill me if I gave away the ending! But rest assured, longtime Iron Fist fans are going to be pleasantly surprised - we're happy to be picking up on Matt [Fraction]'s work both in Fear Itself and The Immortal Iron Fist, sort-of dovetailing a number ideas that have been put out over the last few years about just where Danny Rand fits into the cosmology of the Marvel Universe. He's going to be a major player in the next year, he's still going to be in New Avengers and also in The Defenders. It's a good time to be an Iron FIst fan. This book is going to be ground zero for some very important developments that are going to be felt throughout the Marvel Universe. That's all I can say for now."

Finally, Crumb concluded with a few specifics to appease still-curious audience members. "Alright, I will say there's a lot we don't know about the Seven Cities of Heaven. That's something I really want to explore, so be on the lookout for that. And also - OK, I'll just say, sometime in the first six months we're going to be seeing a big fight with Darkhawk, simply because," Crumb concluded with a laugh, "I've always wanted to see who would win in a fight between Iron Fist and Darkhawk."

Harry Potter comes to DC

In a move many feel was years overdue, it was finally announced that DC Comics would be publishing a comics adaptation of the enormously successful Harry Potter series of novels.

"I'm thrilled to say that, after years of work, Harry Potter is finally coming to DC," co-publisher Dan Didio announced to thunderous applause on Friday. "You may have heard of this guy," Didio say, gesturing towards a large slide of the iconic boy wizard atop his trademark racing broom, "he had a movie out not too long ago, some low-budget independent thing. It made a few dollars." The audience laughed: the highly anticipated eighth and final film in the Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 has broken worldwide box office records in recent weeks.

"Harry Potter is one of the biggest entertainment brands in the world, and his entrance into the world of comics is years - decades - past due," Didio continued. "This is one of those instances where our creative synergy with Warner Brothers [makers of the Harry Potter films] really paid off. After some initial discussion, we realized that not producing comics to tie-in with these phenomenal books and movies was really just leaving money on the table.

"Comics have a huge advantage over any other medium, in that our production budget is limited only by our imagination. We have as much space as we feel necessary to do these books justice, and we're working very hard to make these comics the most accurate and exhaustive adaptation possible. Harry Potter fans love every word, every supporting character and every scene, and we're going to take advantage of the medium to show you every detail of Harry's world, including all the stuff they just couldn't show in a two- or three-hour film. Whether you've been a fan since the first book or you've just recently jumped onboard the Hogwarts Express, we want readers to feel like they're coming home with these books.

"We know Harry Potter is immensely popular, and even with no new books or movies on the horizon he's likely to remain popular for a long time to come. We could probably make money by publishing 22-blank pages with Harry Potter's name on them every month" - the audience laughed again at this line - "but we've taken steps to secure the best talent we could, the most qualified creators in our stable and the ones we feel best suited to meeting the creative challenges presented by Harry and his world. We're pleased to announce that J. T. Krul will be spearheading the adaptation, with Philip Tan on art. I was happy to be able to work with Philip on Outsiders, and his skill has grown in leaps and bounds in the last year. When you see his Potter work, you're going to be blown away, he's really taken it to the next level."

Didio concluded his presentation with an admission of the unique opportunities presented by adapting such a popular and well-known franchise. "I think anyone coming to these books is going to be impressed, whether they've been reading comics their entire life or whether this is their first time. We know these books are going to be huge. We know that Harry Potter has the potential to be a lot of people's first comic. We want to do our best to put the medium's best foot forward."

2011-07-18T06:59:00.001-04:00

And You May Find Yourself In Another Part Of The World

I moved to Massachusetts in late October 2003, and began The Hurting in January of 2004. A week and a half ago I moved out of Massachusetts and back home to California. It had been, all told, an exile of exactly eleven years: I moved away from the west coast in June of 2000 (to Oklahoma, where I lived for three years), and marked my official return in July of 2011.

Moving is terrible. I've certainly done it a few times over the years: I lived in five different houses in Massachusetts, which adds up to a lot of unpleasant lifting and carrying, to say nothing of dismantling and reconstructing cheap furniture. But hopefully this will be the last move for the considerable future.

In the beginning and for a few years thereafter this blog had a decidedly more personal bent - which was not so much an intentional focus as an unavoidable consequence of the unpleasant circumstances surrounding my life at the time. I was living in the middle of what could only in hindsight be described as a slow-motion nervous breakdown, unemployed, in a shack in the middle of the woods with a crumbling marriage. (Hindsight being 20/20, the writing had been on the wall regarding the marriage for a long time, but it took a while before either of us realized that fact.) The reason this blog was titled The Hurting wasn't just tongue-in-cheek - there was a thick layer of real bleakness caked underneath the orange Blogspot template.

If you have had a blog for any amount of time, you should be intimately familiar with the unpleasant sensation of rereading your earliest posts. For me, however, the sensation is doubly unpleasant on account of the fact that my circumstances have changed to such a significant degree that I can barely recognize the person who wrote the first few years of this blog. It's been a long time since we were so poor I had to beg readers for money to buy groceries (that grocery money actually appeared is one of the great miracles of my life). It's been a long time since the "we" in question was a going concern. Now the "we" in question is entirely different, and the person with whom I moved to California represents a definite and marked improvement over the one with whom I moved to Massachusetts. I've gone from working the night shift at a children's mental hospital to working in academia. A working scholar and a teacher, of all things. Jesus H. Christ!

After having lived there for almost eight years, I can say with some degree of confidence that New England sucks. I'm sure it works fine for Andrew Weiss and Kevin Church, but I'm simply ecstatic to once again be in the land of Mike Sterling and David Brothers. It's not the winters, as most people would maintain - I grew up in the cold parts of California, after all, so I'm hardly a stranger to the snow. But there's something indefinably uncomfortable about the region, a coldness that goes deeper than the weather if you get my drift. If you weren't born there, it's hard to really make yourself fit - which is in itself an odd thing to say about a region filled to the brim with immigrants - but there you have it. Whenever people found out that I had come from California, they're first question was always "what the hell are you doing in Massachusetts?" In all the years I lived there I never found a good answer, and I still don't have one. Thankfully, it's not a problem anymore. The whole place may be two minutes away from falling down around my shoulders at any moment, but I'm back in California, and be it ever so humble there's no place like home. (And, not for nothing, it's worth pointing out that even with a crumbling infrastructure, the roads out here are still better than the roads in good ol' Taxachusetts - and no tolls to ride the damn freeway, either.)

I'm not a superstitious person - or more precisely, I'm one of those people who always likes to say he's not superstitious, but is in fact just as superstitious as the next person. It is therefore submitted without comment that upon returning to California the very first song heard on the radio in the rental car on the way from the airport to town was "Once In A Lifetime" by the Talking Heads. Don't ask me how, but David Byrne knows these things.

Now might be the time you could reasonably expect me to say something along the lines that, given the change in circumstances over these past eight years, The Hurting has run its course and it's time to put the blog to bed. Well, fuck that shit, you should know me better by now. We're gonna rock it till the wheels fall off. Stay tuned for more half-assed content delivered on a completely inscrutable timetable from now until the end of the world.

2011-06-27T01:43:00.000-04:00

DON'T BUG ME

2011-06-17T05:02:00.000-04:00

The Two Donalds

Everyone knows Donald Duck, right? Three feet tall, orange bill, sailor suit and cap? This guy?

Donald needs no introduction. He's three years older than Superman, having first appeared in 1934's The Wise Little Hen, from back when every Disney cartoon was a "Silly Symphony." Gaining in popularity steadily throughout the 30s and into the 40s, Donald soon threatened to eclipse Mickey Mouse as Disney's most popular character - much to Walt's chagrin, if the stories are true.

But the Donald we know from the cartoons and even from his appearances in Ted Osborne and Al Taliaferro's Donald Duck newspaper strip, is not the same Donald with whom comics readers are most familiar. As you probably know, the person most closely associated with Donald and his family in comics is a man named Carl Barks.

I don't know - I can't recall - if anyone has ever pointed this out before, but Barks' Donald is not the same character as the cartoon Donald.

Go back up to the top of the post and watch a minute of that Donald cartoon. What's the first thing you notice about Donald? What's the one thing everyone knows about Donald? He talks funny. He talks like a duck. His inability to communicate properly became a trademark, much like Porky Pig's famous stammer. The Ducktales cartoon even specifically referred to it as a "speech impediment," I want to say, in order to explain the fact that literally every other duck in the world could talk normal except for Donald.

Funny voices are just not something comics can do very well. Accents are notoriously difficult, and rightly so: almost every attempt to convey a regional dialect in comics comes across as awful.

Given these limitations, it's probably a blessing that no serious attempts were ever made to replicate Clarence Nash's distinctive quack on the comics page. But in the absence of his recognizable voice, Donald slowly evolved into an entirely different character from the one in cartoons. By 1947 ("The Waltz King") this is what Donald "sounded" like in Barks' comics:

I've always suspected (perhaps its been verified elsewhere) that Barks was fully aware of the discrepancy between the way his Donald spoke and the way the cartoon Donald sounded. The comic Donald is a fast-talker, glib and confident, and that's significantly different from the way Donald was ever portrayed in the cartoons. There's a reason for this: it's impossible to imagine Barks' dialogue for Donald coming from Nash's mouth.

The nerve of that chick! Tellin' ME that I might not be able to waltz well enough to be her partner! I, who invented pressurized tails for zoot suits!

These tongue-twisters would be gibberish in duck-speak.

This is one of my favorite Donald bits, from that same year's "The Masters of Melody":

Three years earlier, the issue of Donald's voice was specifically addressed in the story "Kite Weather."

Donald puts on a show in drag by assuming a different voice altogether, including an exaggerated lisp. It's only after Donald gets popped by the boys' slingshot that he drops the act - "Oh! Oh! I know that voice!" the boys scream.

Barks' interpretation of Donald became the standard interpretation for subsequent generations of Duck artists. In 1987 Don Rosa made his entry into the field with a style that very consciously recalled Barks. His Donald was, just like Barks', an extremely verbal, even loquacious character.

But the Donald we know in the comics could never properly translate to film. When Barks' Duck stories were adapted into the widely successful Ducktales series, Donald was notably absent. He appeared in the first episode and rarely thereafter, leaving his nephews with his Uncle Scrooge to accept a new commission in the Navy.

In Barks' classic Scrooge stories, the dynamic between the flinty, uptight Scrooge and the lackadaisical Donald was central to many plots. Writing Donald out of Ducktales required significant alteration, and so the character of Launchpad McQuack was introduced as a kind of surrogate Donald. McQuack was similar enough in conception that the substitution was relatively painless. Most importantly, however, the character had no speech impediment. His dialogue would not slow down or unnecessarily complicate the expository mechanics of a fast-paced weekday-afternoon cartoon plot. I don't know exactly why Donald was written out of the series, but I can't imagine that the difficulty of understanding Donald's (instantly recognizable and thereby inalterable) voice over the course of a 22 minute cartoon was not a factor. Perhaps someone out there in readerland knows more.

What does "our" Donald sound like? Of course comic book characters exist in a silent medium, but all of us in our heads carry around some idea of what these people must sound like. From a very young age I had no trouble whatsoever discriminating between the two Donalds. I understood that the comic Donald had to have his own voice. He didn't have a noticeable speech impediment. And because I grew up with Carl Barks' stories I always felt that this Donald was the true Donald, and that the cartoon version was a bowdlerized doppelganger. In my mind Donald has always sounded just a bit like Spencer Tracy.

2011-06-10T05:45:00.000-04:00

Superman Returns

One of the bigger mistakes (among many) that the people at DC have made in the last few years has been to almost completely disregard Clark Kent. One of the very best things to come out of Byrne's Man Of Steel revamp was his reconceptualization of Clark Kent as more than just a mask for Superman. The idea of Superman as someone fully in touch with his Kryptonian heritage and slightly removed from the run of humanity ran its course in the years leading up to the original Crisis. Introducing a Superman who never even heard the word "Krypton" until (I believe) his late teens meant giving us a Superman who believed himself to be fully, completely human in every way that mattered.

This might seem like picking nits - after all, Superman is Superman, right? - but it goes back to the compassion at the heart of Superman's character. Despite his great powers Superman really does not - cannot - believe that there is any meaningful difference between him and any other other person on the planet. He truly believe that the only thing separating himself from the run of humanity is that he has been given by accident of birth the opportunity to act on his compassion. And therefore it is necessary for him to believe himself human, to believe that as much as he is Superman he is also a man named Clark Kent who uses the means available to him in order to fight for the same ideals that Superman holds.

The biggest mistake any writer can make is to portray Superman as naive. Superman is an optimist, yes, and an idealist. He honestly and genuinely wants to see the best in every person he meets. But Clark Kent is a journalist. As a journalist he is necessarily well-acquainted with the absolute worst humanity has to offer. Different creators are inconsistent as to exactly what kind of journalist Kent is - specifics don't really matter so much. Journalism is essentially a good plot device to enable Kent to be put into a number of different situations. But whether he's walking the political beat, doing crime or business or war or even sports, Clark Kent is constantly being pulled into close contact with bad people doing worse things. Whatever kinds of corruption and cruelty might miss his eye as Superman, he sees as Kent. He's a trained investigator with a super-brain, able to sift through massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye, and probably about as shrewd and clever as he wants to be depending on his circumstances. His limitations as Kent are that his reporting is obviously limited to what he can verify as Kent with the cognitive faculties and resources of a normal human at his disposal. (It strikes me that there is a great deal of story potential to be found in the discrepancies between what Superman can know and what Clark Kent can prove.)

So it's probably fairly hard to surprise Superman. He's seen it all, either as a super hero or a journalist. And that is one very important reason why Clark Kent is so necessary to Superman: without Kent, it's easy to lose sight of how smart Superman is. He is very smart. He may not have the same instincts and specific detective experience as Batman, but he's usually able to suss things out just fine on his own. It's important to Superman not to be seen as particularly calculating or cynical - because he's neither of these things, not really. But he can be these things, and being Kent is necessary because it allows the reader to see that the character understands shrewdness and cynicism just fine. Most of the time Superman can't afford the luxury of being cynical: he has to be perceived as eternally optimistic, because that's where his power lies. He is eternally optimistic, but it's not because he's ignorant of the "facts" regarding things like recidivism rates and political corruption and ethnic cleansing. It's in spite of these things that he carries on in the face of the worst the world has to offer.

If you wanted to make the comparison to Batman, this is where the two characters differ. It's Clark Kent's job to acknowledge the hard facts and expose malfeasance, to be suspicious and to act on those suspicions. Superman presents another option: an alternative based on forgiveness and an ideal of mutual responsibility. Bruce Wayne, as a public philanthropist and not-so-public captain of industry, uses his great resources to work on the larger scale for hopeful outcomes, helping ex-cons get back on their feet and funding educational initiatives to lift the working poor out of the desperation that begets crime. But as Batman he deals with the failures of the social welfare system and is forced into close contact with the scum of humanity. Superman and Batman are both essentially two people working for the same goal, but the genius of their dual identities is such that they are each able to become their own compliment, should the need arise. It's moot since (in most incarnations) Batman and Superman always know each other's identities, but it's conceivable that a Clark Kent / Batman team up - two investigators using their minds to expose corruption - might be almost as interesting as the traditional light / dark dichotomy of the World's Finest team.

Garth Ennis is rightfully praised for Hitman #34, featuring Tommy Monaghan's first unlikely encounter with Superman. Rarely discussed is the follow-up, 2007's JLA / Hitman, a direct sequel from the first story picking up the thread of how exactly Superman would react once he knew that the man with whom he had shared such a powerful moment was, in fact, a hired assassin. Everyone in the JLA reacts to Monaghan with the same identical abhorrence - he's a killer, a mercenary, a murderer. But Superman . . . Superman can't forgive Tommy for what he's done and what he does, but by the same token he can't bring himself to condemn anyone - even a hired killer with hundreds of lives on his hands. It's not moral cowardice that compels him to great benevolence even towards his enemies, rather, it's his limitless compassion that enables him to perceive the best in even the worst specimens of humanity.

There was a truly great moment in the otherwise underwhelming conclusion of Paul Cornell's recent "Black Ring" arc in Action Comics. At the climax of the story, after chasing a serious of MacGuffins halfway across the universe and coming into contact with some of the most terrible villains in the universe (as well as Death), Lex Luthor has achieved his lifelong goal of godlike power. He has the ability to do anything - to remake the universe in his image, to create lasting prosperity, eternal peace and harmony. He even wants to do these things - but there's one thing he wants to do first and more than anything else. That's right: kill Superman. The only problem is, because of how the power works, it will only obey him if his actions are completely benevolent.

It shouldn't require any kind of spoiler warning to tell you that, of course, Lex is unable to overcome his animus against Superman, even at the highest cost imaginable. But what's Superman's first instinct, when face to face with a godlike incarnation of his single greatest enemy? Forget me, forget everything about me, he says, I'm not important, I'm every bad thing you've always said I am. Just put me aside and do something good.

Because that's what Superman is all about: everyone, even Lex Luthor, is as capable of doing good as anyone else. We all possess within us the potential to perform great acts of kindness, because simply by being human we have been given the ability to choose good over evil. Even if he's 99% certain that a person will do the wrong thing, he has to believe that, if given the chance, anyone will be able to rise up and better themselves, to be that 1% that bucks the odds and makes the world a better place. If he didn't believe that with every fiber of his being, he wouldn't be Superman.

2011-06-08T03:55:00.002-04:00

Superman

Superman's greatest power is his compassion. Throughout every successful iteration of the character that one virtue remains constant: he is an extremely powerful and endlessly resourceful man motivated by bottomless reservoirs of compassion to help people in whatever way he can.

This isn't a new observation, and it comes fairly close to what I think most people consider to be Superman's most basic core principles. But I don't think very many stories really take this idea as far as it could go. Certainly, Morrison's All-Star Superman is justifiably celebrated for being the best Superman story of at least the last decade, but its important to remember that the book succeeded not because it was in any way revisionist or "deconstructionist" (in the informal sense) but because it amplified the character's most central attributes to the point of bare iconography. It was in many respects the "purest" Superman story ever told, in that every story element was expressly dedicated to reflecting some facet of Superman's core thema. It is not the type of Superman story one can imagine coming across very often, because the tone is so unabashedly sincere that it would probably seem merely bathetic in the hands of an inferior creative team. Despite whatever qualms I may possess in regards to latter-day Morrison, there's no doubt that All-Star Superman is a towering work in the field.

But it wasn't All-Star Superman that inspired me to muse on this subject, it was a far less celebrated spin-off limited series from the mid-90s called The Doomsday Wars. If you don't remember it, don't worry, it's been largely forgotten for a number of reasons - the first of which being it is deeply mediocre, and the second of which being it served as a prelude to another in a long line of subpar Brainiac revamps that stretched from the immediate aftermath of the Crisis and on through very recently. I reread the series recently on a whim, looking for a light read and vaguely remembering the series (along with its predecessor, the actually-pretty-decent Hunter / Prey) being a good popcorn read. Sure enough, the actual plot was not particularly memorable, but there were a few bits that did stick in my mind. There's a subplot involving Superman remembering a story from his youth - mid-teenage years - wherein, during a fierce blizzard, he was unable to reach a herd of cattle stranded on a far field, and they died because he crashed the truck into a snowbank while trying to reach them. (Keep in mind this was still the post-Crisis period when Superman's powers did not even begin to emerge until late adolescence.) The flashback echoes the contemporary story, with Superman trying to carry Lana Lang and Pete Ross' newborn son from Kansas to a state-of-the-art neonatal care ward in Atlanta, but being waylaid by Doomsday in the process. (Don't worry, he saves the kid, but not before getting the snot beat out of him a few times. It doesn't end on a downer.)

The point of the story is an important one, despite the rather gruesome imagery of a young Clark Kent being traumatized by dozens of dead cows buried in shoulder-deep snow. Every now and again someone does a story that follows the general idea, "Superman can't save everyone." It's a downer, yes, and there are certainly many examples of the trope done poorly - but it's necessary to do the story every now and again for the simple reason that it underscores what might be the character's single most crucial character trait, the one virtue that enables everything else he does: humility. He is (for all intents and purposes, Captain Marvel notwithstanding) the most powerful man on earth. And yet he must be constantly aware of his own limitations, always conscious of exactly what he can and cannot accomplish with his powers. He knows that there are many, many things that he simply can't do even with all the power in the world, and although it might prove frustrating time and time again - and provide fodder for countless stories - at the end of the day he is Superman because he accepts these limitations and moves forward to do the best that he can.

He has to be able to forgive himself for not being able to be everywhere and do everything, and so by necessity he also has to be forgiving of others as well. Few writers have spent time articulating just how differently the world would seem to someone like Superman. His senses would give him an unenviable vantage point from which to observe humanity. Even if he never used his hearing or his sight to invade privacy - which would probably be fairly difficult to do in absolute terms - he would still be privy to more of the panoply of human behavior than anyone other being in history. He could see cause and effect, the roots of poverty and wealth, the consequences of charity and compassion. Elliot S. Maggin's averred that Superman would have to be a vegetarian, because his enhanced senses, extending to the infrared spectrum, would enable him to "see" the heat auras of living creatures, and register their emotions in much the same way as Daredevil does. He couldn't eat meat because - having grown up on a farm - he would be intimately aware of just how much pain an animal suffers as it dies, would be able to feel, see, smell and hear the process so viscerally that it would be overwhelming.

I think if you extrapolate that idea outwards, it's not hard to see that Superman's compassion is completely reflexive and therefore completely inextricable from the character. It's easy to do an "evil Superman" - just give us the same basic person with the same powers only without the compassion. Without that bedrock human decency, it's hard to see why all that power would not corrupt - but if you believe that "super empathy" is as much a part of Superman's powers as super strength and hearing, it's easy to see why the character would remain so steadfast throughout decades (and, in many alternate versions, centuries and even millennia) of the "Never Ending Battle."

To the best of my knowledge Neil Gaiman has only written one Superman story (not counting cameo appearances), the Green Lantern team-up Legend of the Green Flame. Originally written to run in Action Comics Weekly (that was a long time ago), it was dusted off and finally published in 2000. It's not that memorable of a story, but there's one bit that's always stuck with me. The gist of the story is that, thanks to a mystical MacGuffin (something to do with the Golden Age Green Lantern's lantern, considering that this story was supposedly set during the period when the original Justice Society had been exiled to fight an eternal Ragnarok inside a pocket universe [an odd Roy Thomas plot that was also mentioned during Season of Mists]), Superman and Hal Jordan are killed within the first few pages, and spend the rest of the story wandering the afterlife trying to find out how to return to life. There's an absolutely great bit with Superman and Hal in Hell - the real Hell - and Superman is rendered almost completely insensate. His can see and hear everything, and it's impossible for him to look away from the limitless catalog of torture and suffering in the inferno. He just stares, eyes wide open, unable to do anything but float rigidly above the lake of fire. When faced with the apogee of human suffering, suffering which he is definitively incapable of alleviating, then and only then when hope is obliterated can Superman be completely defeated.

2011-06-02T04:44:00.001-04:00

SIR

Fear Itself #3
Flashpoint #2

We were somewhere around Seventh Avenue on the edge of TGI Fridays when the drugs began to take hold. I think there was supposed to be a Flashdancers Gentlemen's Club somewhere on the block, maybe in the same building as the place we were looking for, the greasy armpit of American pop culture detritus headquartered in the heart of the capitol of American business. Right off the Great White Way. Somewhere up and down these savage hallways and corridors there lurked a man, a Superman, shorn of his underwear and given a sharp v-neck turtleneck, as if the year were 1989 and Star Trek was still making nighttime sexy for Patrick Stewart fans everywhere. There's something indefinably rancid in the stew, some kind of mad brew of noxious chemicals piped in from across the channel in Jersey where all the goombas and grisly morons drain their tanning lotion down the sinks and shower drains of a thousand underwater tract homes. We're getting high on failure, the drugs are cheap and plentiful as long as you don't mind the rattle of bones.

There's no money left, no money left anywhere, we're all in debt up to our eysockets and hoping against hope that the credit card companies and the collection agencies deputized to act in their stead don't figure out the new number for at least six months. I don't even use the land line anymore except to call out because the line is always busy, always busy, Unidentified numbers calling in from unfamiliar area codes somewhere near Barstow, one of those punk ass burgs filled with unlicensed backyard wrestling of the kind that puts kids in crutches with sutures across their bulging collarbone. Fat and yet malnourished with an XXL Ke$ha T-shirt, you know the type. I just spent eight dollar American on fifteen minutes worth of reading material, smeary pages on cheap paper, but not cheap enough to make it cost less than lunch. I don't think toilet paper would be cheap enough to pay the rent without lopping off at least a small finger's worth of flesh. They demanded a pound and by gosh they took a pound, and they don't give a flying fuck that the blood is pouring everywhere in rivulets and dried dollops like the skin off a British pudding. That's what two pounds sterling for our friends across the pond? Not that they have any more money than we do, they're rioting in the streets to keep the library doors from swinging shut.

Two cheap floppy pamphlets filled with gibberish, so easy to drop them down a manhole cover somewhere between here and Central Park, it's not exactly art so it's not exactly littering. Let the rats fight it out. But I spent so much money on these things that I am loath to part. Too much money and heart and soul invested in these little bastards, one of which suffers from a lack of soul the other from a lack of heart. I'll leave it to you to decide which is which. Does it even matter?

The overwhelming sensation is sheer desperation: something bad is happening and the folks in charge of minding the lighthouse lost the oil on the stairs, there was a big bottle of lamp oil and it took a plunge somewhere on the fifth floor staircase. They're on their hands and knees trying to sweep up enough oil into their cupped hands in order to keep that lamp burning bright for as long as it takes for - what, to make sure the ship gets safely to shore? Is that even something we can be sure we want? Wouldn't it be easier just to let the whole damn thing crash on the reef and let the cargo holds fill with salt water, drowning the ballast, drowning these books and abjuring any power left in the tainted sigils of our distant childhoods? That's what's going on, only it's not lamp oil, it's shit, it's liquid diarrhea and it keeps dribbling through your fingers in chunky bits. It's what you think you want because you've been doing it for so long that you don't have any other way of making things go forward, but really it all boils down to sticking your hand up against the cow's anus and expecting something besides grassy, oily shit to flop into your hands. It's like maybe one of these days it won't actually be shit, it'll be caramel soft serve or something equally delicious. But until that day you'll keep eating it anyway because real food loses its flavor when you've spent thirty years eating shit.

But let's step back a moment, because that's an awfully stupid thing to say. It's not shit, it only looks like shit on certain occasions, say, every alternate Tuesday when you're feeling peculiarly phlegmatic. Because really it's just too easy and too condescending to talk down to superhero comics like they're some sort of blight on the cultural landscape. Let's take a minute and breathe this city air, see if we can get the balance right here right now: somewhere in this city there is a great and terrible beast slouching towards some modern-day Bethlehem waiting to be born, but it's nothing in Los Angeles, sorry Joan, and sorry Hunter, this great virus has infected itself in the heart of American capitalism. It's bigger than that, but there's your artificial dichotomy: here's your approved cultural product and your disapproved cultural product, they all cost the same and they all leave you feeling similarly empty. Emma Goldman's Living My Life costs $16.99 American, and you bet your ass the good folks at Penguin have no interest in examining the irony of that proposition. The truth is that it's all terrible, every single bit of it, every shred of escapism dedicated to distraction and contentment. Crying out low art and high art distinctions doesn't impress anyone anymore, I say to my friend as we slouch across the city street, still keeping our eyes open for the supermen, the true guardians of this loveless isle of Manhattan. I've got a copy of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word in my jacket pocket and I'm feeling twitchy, so I pull it and see if I can find something interesting in these snot-stained pages:

But wasn't there something just the least bit incestuous about this tendency of contemporary art to use previous styles of art as its point of reference? Early Modernism was a comment on academic realism, and Abstract Expressionism was a comment on early Modernism, and now Pop Art was a comment on Abstract Expressionism - wasn't there something slightly narrow, clubby, ingrown about it?

Then there's some bit about Clement Greenberg asserting that art is about art, which I guess makes sense inasmuch as it's something of a tautological assertion of value without basis. More or less the definition of petit bourgeois bullshit, but there was a point there. Something sitting right past the edge of my nose, daring me to pick it up, pluck it out of thin air like a will 'o' the wisp . . .

No, not that jackass.

So these comics, what are they about? I've got both issues wadded in my hand like soiled tissues, leafing through the creased pages . . . all possible criticisms are either cheap or easy. Mouthbreathing morons in their basements, etc etc. You can fill in the same circle-jerk elitist shit you've been sniffing for decades. It's not that criticism of these things on the basis of their idiocy isn't valid, it's that there's really no point in making that argument because it's moot. These aren't really collectibles or pieces of art or anything, they're just stories, bad stories, but on some level an honest attempt on the part of someone to communicate some kind of idea. Cultural product is product yes but the people in the sausage factory can usually be counted on to convince themselves that the sausage they're making is good to eat. Personally, I like sausage, even if I know that most industrially-produced sausage probably contains trace amounts of human and animal fecal matter. It's the price we pay to do business in this man's world, don't you know.

Narrow, clubby, ingrown - this are the watchwords we mutter under our breath. With the industry on a respirator what do we do, what can we do but double down on what we got? I look on the calender and see two giant event comics hitting store shelves the same day, the exact same moment on retailer shelves across the nation, and what I smell is two large sewer rats, giant fuckers plucked out of the sewers under Seventh Avenue and starved for the better part of a week before being locked in a cage with one and the other. It's a struggle to the death, is what it is, the two largest media conglomerates in the world waking up from their long stuporous haze and realizing that they have their very own Southeast Asian country in which to wage their proxy battle for domination of the Twenty-First Century mediascape.

So let's see what we see when we pull the cock out of the condom:

Now that is what I call a goddamn comic book cover.

Let's be frank, now is not the time to mince words, there is no more point in complaining about the scabrous content of American superhero comic books because kids don't read them. They don't. Pointing this out at such a late date is simply an insult to everyone with a pair of functioning eyes. but if you put a dude on the cover getting shocked by an electric chair, what you're really saying is, yeah, this isn't for kids, but really, it is totally for kids, because who the hell else is gonna be turned on by seeing the Flash get fried (and there's a pun too obvious for me, ladies and gentlemen) but a little kid? They've gone from being obviously for kids to being for grown-ups in such a way as to primarily appeal to kids. It would almost be brilliant if it seemed intentional, but I doubt this was the intention. Kids loved and still love gangsta rap because it was dirty and violent in all the ways that they weren't supposed to like, but they loved it anyway and sat around their friend's basements listening to Too $hort rapping about "Blow Job Betty" like it was Little Orphan Annie's secret code phrase waiting to be deciphered. That's something that a lot of people don't seem to get: the best way to appeal to kids is to make it as stupid, violent and inappropriately sexy as possible. In this instance, I have a hard time believing that DC could be doing a better job than having one of their most recognizable superheroes be electrocuted by a demoniacal Batman on the cover of their big crossover. Not that it'll help, of course.

How many middle-aged management types are going to start downloading DC comics to read on their Kindles and iPads on those long flights from Topeka to Seattle? Judging from the type of shit that gets sold in airport kiosks under the names "Brad K. Thor" and "Robert Patterson," I'd say it's a good bet that they might just be able to sell some of these shitty pamphlets to the salarymen, if the advertising works the way it should.

But in the here and now the fleshbags responsible for making these stories are charged with the solemn responsibility of making these business decisions somehow translate into four-color stories. As far as these things go, it could be worse: nerds love alternate-reality stories because then they get to play put the puzzle together only some of the pieces are missing or colored differently or mad rapists or whatever. It's hard to fuck one of these up, but by the same token it's kind of easy. I'm certain the people who made this book had a good time making it because, yeah, it's kind of fun. But cheap all the same. Which is not to say it's not worth doing, but don't say we didn't warn you when you're bending over with the tiny comb trying to find all the little crablouses in your crotch. There's a reason she's got a t-shirt with bicycle handlebars where her tits go.

But enough about your sister.

I'm sick of inhaling truck fumes but there's not a lot else to get high on in New York City here and now. Oh, I'm sure there's real drugs somewhere but I lost my case in security and my friend - my associate - my business partner - my platonic lover - he's not that picky. He'll take just about anything, really. Things are getting desperate in these parts. He's a sexy man with a sexy plan, and it doesn't necessarily include reading these silly little comic books, but that doesn't mean he's not open to the possibility. He speaks in grunts and riddles, spends his spare time down at the Brozone jacking off the Shake Weight because that's the only way he can get off these days. I pass the copy of Fear Itself under his nose and he snorts like an animal who just smelled one of its own dead and upwind. He lets slip a mournful moan, because in the moment he smells that sucker he can see his tribemate dead on the side of the road, a large black bulk hit by a car and dead before the body hit the ground. What is this? It's dead, it's inert. It's got Nazis attacking the American capitol in giant robot suits with machine guns, and wow that's pretty much the laziest kind of nightmare we can imagine in the year 2011, isn't it just?

If comic books had a Daily Recommended Minimum, it would be Fear Itself. It represents starvation rations from a group of men so emaciated of imagination that even their most fantastic daydreams appear to be cribbed from unproduced Law & Order spec scripts. Here's the one where Briscoe finds the ancient Norse warhammer and turns into a giant monster in downtown Manhattan. Of course this is a problem because he starts making mistakes and crooks start walking on technicalities and then Sam Waterston looks grim and resolved, or is it pensive and angry, I can't tell because seriously the man has one single facial expression with which to express the enormous range of human emotion. Seriously, these fuckers are so damaged they can't even imagine what a fantasy story looks like that does not in some fashion involve paramilitary law enforcement people sitting around a room with giant television screens and deliberating their course of action. This is what all these stupid stories are about: who gets to sit in the control room telling heroes what to do. This is such a massively boring and inescapable preoccupation on the part of men entrusted with our societal dreaming that it amounts to nothing less than a complete dereliction of duty. If you sit down and read fifty issues of The Avengers and think that what it most needs is to resemble a police procedural, then you're just bleeding frothy pink shit out of your ears.

(A digression on the matter of fecal metaphors: people use shit because it's an effective way of expressing disgust in an appropriately transgressive manner without resorting to the kind of crude sexual imagery that brings immediate censure. For instance, I could say that Fear Itself resembled nothing so much as getting raped in the mouth by an eight-hundred pound gorilla, but then someone would raise their hand in the back row and say, "I . . . I was raped by a circus gorilla. His name was Bobo and he was not a gentle lover. It took me years before I could leave the house without checking the bushes outside my doorway for banana peels . . . >choke< . . . how dare you?" while fighting back hot tears of rage. So, that's why we go back to shit so often. We're not Tyler, the Creator, people.)

My friend points to one strange bit of serendipity: both issues end with a central character at or near death, broken and burned across his body. (SPOILER!) How interesting that both comics did the same thing on the same day. It's almost like they're really in cahoots, sitting in a freezer box at the base of the Triboro Bridge with red spray paint coating their lips like glam strawberry jelly as they pass the paper bag back and forth. With the cars whizzing by and my friend mooning disconsolate against the red afternoon sun I realize with a sudden flash of clarity that it's all over, every single bit of it, it's all done and gone, we're just now hearing the echoes from the last fading sonic boom of fading glasnost. The Cold War is over, things are boiling hot, the rockets have flown, these are the End Times, everything is over except the screaming. There's nothing left but to crack the glass on the bell jar and see if maybe, just maybe, Sylvia Plath will crawl out of the seam and help us all put our heads in the oven.

2011-06-01T04:50:00.001-04:00

A Simple Thought, Expressed Succinctly

When the creative teams for DC's 52 relaunches are announced, we should arrange a mass drinking game for every "TBA" therein. DC will be responsible for any and all hospitalizations for alcohol poisoning.

2011-05-31T03:32:00.001-04:00

SIR

Iron Man 2.0 #5

You gotta give them props for being honest with us: whatever semblance of a story Iron Man 2.0 may have been telling in its first four issues is completely unimportant compared to the possibility of scratching at a small corner of this month's giant crossover. War Machine says as much, "wow, I was fighting someone else and doing something completely different, and then a crossover happened, so here I am with some other guys who've never appeared in my comic before doing something completely unrelated." The problem is that, as uninteresting as Fear Itself has proved to be so far, the hook for this particular crossover is still a billion times more interesting than whatever the hell Iron Man 2.0 has been doing for four issues.

(Don't worry, I know what it's been doing, I've read it. So far it all adds up to a strangely deaf attempt to ape the tone of Fraction's regular Iron Man. And since Fraction's regular Iron Man is already kind of a boring book at its very best, Iron Man 2.0 comes out like a faded photocopy of a VCR manual.)

I was one of the few comics bloggers who was strangely unmoved by the recent Iron Fist reboot - I just don't care that much about martial arts in comics under the very best of circumstances. Given that, you have a pretty steep road to climb to get me to want to pay attention to Iron Fist, and what I read seemed oddly static and talky for a martial arts adventure. But this actually was pretty fun. If in hindsight a surprisingly large percentage of pages in The Immortal Iron Fist was expository set-up, this is where we get the pay-off: some nice, fairly original characters and concepts added to the sandbox for later writers and artists to play with. In this case, Nick Spencer decided to check in and see what was going down in the Seven Cities of Heaven during Fear Itself; which involves getting the Immortal Weapons involved in the hunt for one of the Serpent's giant hammers; which involves Titania and the Absorbing Man; which I'm down with as well; which has fuck all to do with War Machine and is basically pressing the "pause" button on a series that's not yet five issues old. But maybe this is a good thing? Because honestly the way it was heading Iron Man 2.0 was really boring and superfluous. The regular storyline might not suck so bad when they take it off anesthesia in a few months. Maybe it actually gets some blood pumping with this definitively gratuitous crossover action.

The Mighty Thor #2

I've written a great deal about how boring Matt Fraction's run on Thor has to date been. There is no doubt: he is leaning heavily on talented artists to fill sketchy plots with "epic" scenery, seemingly oblivious to the damning fact that even in hardcover the story will still take less than 20 minutes to read.

I've been on an old comics kick lately - lots of bronze age stuff, some 80s and 90s books as well, maybe some stuff I'll write about, maybe not - and it never ceases to amaze me how long it takes to read any average issue from 1985 or 1995 compared to almost any example from 2011. The change is easily explained: after Quesada and Jemas took over Marvel in 2000, they did away with thought balloons and third-person narrative captions. Not all at once, but slowly and more-or-less permanently. I still don't know, and really have not seen a single compelling reason, why these changes were pushed through so thoroughly, but the more I think about it the more I am fully convinced that this shift was undeniably deleterious to the long-term quality of the line. It's a question of economy: captions and thought balloons were an extremely efficient way of communicating a large amount of information in a surprisingly concise package. Back in 2000 $2.25 for 15 minutes of reading was a good deal. No amount of inflation will make $3 or $4 for 5 minutes a good deal for anyone.

The good news is that, as of this issue, Fraction seems to be getting ever so slightly more comfortable with the character and the format. This issue took more than 5 minutes to read - and there's a fair amount of content in here. We are left with the promise of a truly awesome Thor / Silver Surfer clash, which is something we haven't seen in decades. I already like this new relaunch better than I did the entirety of Fraction's previous storyline. It's fairly obvious that before he was padding for time before Fear Itself hit, laying the groundwork for that crossover with what was essentially an extended prelude. It's nothing short of scandalous that they expect to get off charging so much for so little, but maybe one of these days they'll figure out that people might just be inclined to buy more comics if they thought they were actually getting a reading experience commensurate with the exorbitant price, and not just ten or twelve Roger Dean album covers with some sparse lettering across them. Letting writers write more may have resulted in some talky, ponderous and boring comics back in the day, but it also offered an opportunity for more characters to shine by allowing an insight into every character's thoughts and feelings. Some of what has been lost might conceivably be dismissed as "cheap melodrama" by readers more accustomed to contemporary storytelling, but dramatic irony and purple prose were the grease in the gears of mainstream comics for at least fifty years. Throwing out many of the tools that allow the comic book reading experience to be distinct from any other entertainment medium is extremely short sighted, unless your only goal is to transform your properties into adaptation-friendly forms that can be easily transported into other mediums. Any contemporary issue of Avengers should illustrate this point well, with the writer actually resorting to reality TV debriefing scenes in order to convey exposition and character beats that could have been much more succinctly delivered through captioning.

A book like Fraction's Thor could definitely benefit from increased density. Thor is usually an ensemble book, and its cast can be very large - basically, the entire realm of Asgard, plus anyone else from Earth who happens to be near the action at any given moment (such as, for the moment, the town of Broxton, Oklahoma). There's only so much plot that Fraction can display in any given issue because the widescreen format he's chosen (literally widescreen, filled with long double-page spreads). There's only so much character development he can provide in the context of relentlessly epic action spreads. This issue was a bit more talky than usual, and I take that as a good sign: it actually took a few more minutes to read. Maybe with a bit more density the book might actually live up to some of its perpetually frustrated potential.

Secret Avengers #13

Marvel botched this title really badly, and what we're seeing here is some pretty aggressive water-treading in the form of an action-packed crossover tie-in. This was also written by the above-mentioned Nick Spencer, and appears to fit in either directly before or directly after the action in iron Man 2.0. As with that issue, this is a surprisingly good (not "great," but solidly good) and surprisingly focused tie-in story, even if it (again) has fuck-all to do with the stories that immediately preceded it.

(The problem with Fear Itself seems to be that the story itself really is nowhere near as involved as people were led to believe, hence a lot of people continually complaining that they don't "get" what it's really "about." For months we were "treated" to teaser images of all our heroes being faced with images of their greatest, most profound fears. It is reasonable that most people expected that the story would involve many of these heroes being brought face to face with their greatest, most profound fears in some fashion. But no, really, it's just about a bunch of bad shit happening all at once that the heroes are too busy to clean up in an organized fashion. A bunch of really strong people get giant magic hammers that make them even strongerer. So yeah. That's it: they're afraid because shit just got real. Which, eh, isn't really the story they advertised, but whatevs. How this is any real-er than Secret Invasion or Secret Wars II or Maximum fucking Security is not really clear. Giant hammers and Nazi robot? Oh my, the pulse, it throbs with suspense.)

Secret Avengers hasn't worked because the stories being told were nothing like the stories people wanted to read in an Avengers book with this cast of characters. As written, Brubaker's Secret Avengers was essentially a Steve Rogers book, with a loose cast of affiliated Avengers as tertiary characters being called as the mission required. The first arc, with the whole of the team on Mars, was something of a red herring: every subsequent story has gone out of its way to provide as little actual Avengers action as possible. So finally we get to see Avengers Avenging, and while it's better than what preceded it, that's not saying a lot. There's a bit of a ham-fisted conversation between the Beast and someone who is obviously supposed to be a stand in for John Lewis, a former Freedom Rider-turned-Congressman who is also an omega class mutant with the power to turn the Lincoln Memorial into a giant Nazi-killin kaiju. All well and good, and there was some good action bits in there, but obviously "fill in." Kind of sad that the fill-in actually works better than the regular series has up to now. Maybe the Warren Ellis run will be better, but I still don't think it will be anything like what people had in their minds' eyes when the book was announced over a year ago.

2011-05-17T03:43:00.002-04:00

Still Alive

Blogging will resume imminently. Been a busy couple of weeks, but I do have a couple things on the hopper.

In the meantime, this is what I've been up to:

2011-04-29T03:09:00.003-04:00

Epic!

(This is part one of a two part discussion of Game of Thrones, the second part of which will is featured here at The Factual Opinion.)

It should surprise no one at this late date that I have read my fair share of fantasy novels. However, I have not read George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. Perhaps an explanation in is order.

When I was just a little shaver coming up in the world I split my reading time pretty evenly between sci-fi and fantasy. (I'm going to type sci-fi and if you've got a problem with you can just suck it.) My tastes in sci-fi were, even at the time, hopelessly retrograde. I had a teacher in high school - we all had this teacher in high school - who was really, seriously into sci-fi and used to tease me for being stuck in the mud with my Heinlein and Asimov while he was jazzing out to Lucius Shepard and Bruce Sterling. He actually gave me a couple books when I graduated - Shepard's Kalimantan and The Difference Engine by Sterling and William Gibson. I finally got around to reading the former a few years back and it was pretty tepid, and the one time I tried to read The Difference Engine I just about had a stroke because it was so damned dry. It's still there on my shelf, unread, next to my autographed (and similarly unread) copy of Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon's The Chrome Borne. (True story: Lackey & Dixon are the nicest people you could ever want to meet, and if you're ever in northeast Oklahoma you should stop in and say hi. I have no idea if they remember me fondly at all.)

Fantasy is an easy genre for a kid to like, but all the same more problematic than sci-fi. Sci-fi can always fall back on (at least the appearance of) a patina of sophistication and rationality. It's the Literature of Ideas! I loved fantasy but at the same time I was always deeply skeptical of the genre. Even as a kid it was pretty easy to tell that some of that shit was just not right. Fantasy, after all, is the Literature of LARPing! I will say for clarification that while I have read books (plural) by Piers Anthony, I have never read a Xanth novel. I have never read read Terry Goodkind, L.E. Modesitt, or R. A. Salvatore, but I have to my eternal shame read a Dungeons & Dragons novel. (In my defense it was actually pretty good.) However, with the exception of rereading some Tolkien in the middle of the decade, I haven't read any "high" fantasy in over a decade. There is one very simple reason for this, and if you know fantasy at all you'll understand exactly why I walked away from the genre: The Wheel of Time.

Epic fantasy is a strange beast, but even in the world of epic fantasy The Wheel of Time is a remarkable and sui generis specimen. The genre is notable for its extreme depth of field: every epic fantasy series (and all epic fantasy comes in series) walks in Tolkien's footprints, and Tolkien's primary virtues as an author were his extreme attention to detail and unparalleled sincerity of affect. That is why his books endure even after decades of awful fandom and mediocre movie adaptations. I'll stand by The Lord of the Rings even after all the shit that has been perpetrated in its name - damn fine books, and the ending of The Return of the King still chokes me up every damn time. (Don't talk to me about those fucking movies!) So every epic fantasy series is long and long and long, composed of multiple thick door-stops of cheap newsprint, published every couple of years like periodical drugs, and dissected with the ferocious loyalty of Thomas de Quincey rushing the doors of his favorite opium den. There's money to be made ad infinitum from nerds forever chasing that dragon, trying to somehow reclaim that first high, pretending as if their arms weren't already covered in the scabby purple track marks of narrowed expectations.

I'd be lying if I didn't say that the type of people who read these books was, at a certain point, a major factor in my having become seriously disinclined to read more of them. Besides Tolkien, the only series to which I ever gave my heart fully was Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books. I loved those books partially because of the way they gleefully dismantled so many of the genre's hoariest cliches. (The protagonist was a physically deformed rapist, for crying out loud.) A lot of hardcore fantasy fans seriously dislike Donaldson for just those reasons. But then against my better judgment I got sucked into The Wheel of Time. It it not without good reason that I say "against my better judgment": I had a number of friends who kept pushing the damn things on me over the space of about a year. I resisted and resisted, made a couple false starts but then finally got sucked in. The problem was that the books themselves were awful things in which to get sucked, totally aside from any discussion of quality, simply because they never ended. The first book in the series, The Eye of the World, was published in 1990. The series' author, Robert Jordan, died before the books could be properly completed, but the series will finally be completed in 2012 with the help of an assistant hired by the estate to flesh out Jordan's final notes and outlines. The last volume of the series will be the fourteenth volume. The story when completed will be larger than Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, and that's the second biggest non-genre fiction series that comes to mind. (The longest is most likely Balzac's Comédie humaine, which stretched over 95 finished and proposed novels and short-stories.) You could fit two and a half Prousts inside the Wheel. (Maybe you could actually find Marcel somewhere in the Wheel if you looked hard enough, nibbling on a madeleine and swinging a sword against rampaging trollocs.) Check this out: when all is said and done, the whole thing will top out over four million words. Nerds are masochists, not to mention slaves to habit.

I freely admit I loved the books in the beginning. They are great fun, and even if the characters are about as transparent as saran wrap the stories themselves can be quite novel. So over the course of many months I kept reading and kept enjoying myself, until around book five a torpid kind of lethargy set in . . . book six was a dutiful obligation . . . and finally in the middle of book seven, after reading literally six chapters in a row of different characters I couldn't remember all arriving in some vaguely defined spot in the woods whose location I couldn't remember without an atlas, I gave up. I don't know if I literally threw the book against the wall but I wanted to, real bad. I was done. No more! No more epic fantasy! Because that shit . . . never . . . fucking . . . ENDS. Life is too short: in the years since I gave up on reading fantasy, I actually read War & Peace, which really isn't all that difficult if you've hacked your way through The Shadow Rising.

It was around that time that Martin's Game of Thrones first came onto my radar. The first book was actually hand-sold by a very enthusiastic bookstore clerk at The Other Change of Hobbit in Berkeley, California. This was back in 1999. That book, the titular volume of A Game of Thrones, has been sitting on my shelf, unread, for 12 years. In that time i have encountered many, many people who have urged me to give the books a try. Give it a shot, they said. Read to page 80, they said. (Everyone says that, "read to page 80"!) Die-hard fantasy fans love it. Even a few friends of mine who have no real interest in contemporary fantasy have found themselves surprisingly devoted. But I had been burnt so badly by the Wheel that the thought of ever diving into another fantasy series just made me want to die a little on the inside. I am not feeling the whole "fantasy" thing so much these days, for whatever reason . . . maybe there's a statue of limitation regarding how long one man should be expected to care about elves and kobolds?

And now HBO has saved me the trouble of deciding whether or not I eventually wanted to commit to Martin's series (not as voluminous as The Wheel of TIme but still quite large, and still frustratingly unfinished). If a slavish adaptation on TV's premiere network for prestige serial drama can't sell the books, then the books aren't worth being sold, right?

I am not unconvinced but still somewhat nonplussed. I didn't absolutely hate these first two episodes, and I am firmly on board for the rest of the season (it's pretty to watch and well made, if nothing else, and I'd rather watch fantasy on TV than a crime procedural or a singing competition) . . . but based on the story I see, I can't for the life of me imagine why these characters and these situations have resonated so strongly with so many readers over the last fifteen years. Either the charm of the stories themselves is becoming obscured by the difficulties of adaptation, or the stories are less compelling than the manner in which they are told on television - I don't know the answer, and unless and until I read the books myself I will be in no position to judge one way or another.

There is also the fact that, frankly, I am sick to death of the default medieval setting for epic fantasy. Anyone who writes this type of fiction is still essentially playing in Tolkien's toolbox, and even the most clever inversion (such as Donaldson's books) is still just a clever inversion of an instantly recognizable and intimately familiar archetype. So we see the castle, the swords, the furs and the rusty armor, and we already know going in what the stakes are and what the general shape of the story is going to be. Genre is a phenomenon that trades on familiarity: people love The Lord of the Rings so they want more books like that but different, preferably for the rest of their lives.

The reason these series become so big is that the fans want extreme immersion. It's undoubtedly a byproduct of publishing evolution: series became bigger and more elaborate over the last few decades since the original publication of The Sword of Shannara. Shannara in 1977, moreso even than Tolkien, was the spark that lit the epic fantasy boom. Writers and publishers were rewarded for providing "more but different" all down the line, until the emphasis on "more" ran straight into the creation of electronic word processors. Looking at the history of genre fiction especially it's easy to see how the invention of word processors made the act of physically producing reams of regrettable prose far, far easier than it had ever been in the age of pen or typewriter. (Remember manual correcting fluid?) Perhaps there has been something of a backlash in the wake of The Wheel of TIme. Everything I have seen on the matter indicates that Martin is very much adamant about not wanting to needlessly inflate his series too far past the point of absurdity. With his hand firmly in the back pockets of a generation of fantasy readers this is an admirable show of restraint.

So here we are once again in a society that vaguely resembles medieval Europe, complete with struggle over hereditary kingships. Oh boy. You know you're in fantasyland (in more ways than one) when the audience is immediately invited into ethical complicity with royalty. Again, this is Tolkien talking: Tolkien was a professor of medieval history and language. He was a philologist of the old school. We are not. I do not automatically respond to hereditary authority with deference and respect, and I am actually resentful of any author (or director or screenwriter) writing in the year 2011 who takes it as a given that my sympathies will automatically lie with the king without giving me a damn good reason. Shakespeare was a man of his time writing historical propaganda, alive in an era when absolute monarchy was all the rage - he gets a pass. But don't forget: not 46 years after the peaceful death of Good Queen Bess, Charles I was executed for treason by a rebellious parliament.

This is especially important to remember now, of all times, when so many eyes are focused on another "spontaneous" outpouring of naive enthusiasm for a royal wedding. We are perpetually attached to our fairy tales of noblesse oblige. We want to believe that the marriage of William and Kate is a grand romance and not the wedding of two social parasites propitiously timed to distract a weary body politic from a series of regressive, crippling cuts into the social welfare state on the part of David Cameron's penurious austerity measures. These medieval fantasies appeal to us in moments of societal upheaval and uncertainty. Who wouldn't rather be a serf under stolid, wise Eddard Stark than a contemporary citizen in our current burnt-out shell of a democratic republic?

There is a profound lack of imagination at the heart of the popular fantasist's persistent refusal to reiterate any vision of society besides the most reactionary kind of feudalism. I like Geoffrey of Monmouth as much as the next guy, but the reason he wrote the stories he wrote was because he was a propagandist for the house of Normandy in the years immediately following the conquest of 1066. Tolkien's masterwork was an incredible synthesis of a thousand years of English (and Welsh, Irish, Germanic and French) heroic tradition. But the fact that we're still writing and reading all these stories that are content to begin with Tolkien's presets intact is deeply distressing. (And yes, I know that there's a lot more kinds of fantasy out there than can be dismissed on these grounds - but those aren't the kind of fantasy stories that Hollywood pays hundreds of millions of dollars to realize.) I like fantasy, and I've even got a big old soft spot for epic fantasy, but I'm not twelve anymore and I would like to believe that there is something in the genre of popular fantasy fiction that will not insult my intelligence.

2011-04-21T04:41:00.001-04:00

That Was It

Speaking of the Strokes, New York's finest continued their comeback at Coachella (after recently releasing their first album in five years), although the tracks from their breakthrough debut Is This It drew the most elated audience response. "Hard To Explain," "Last Nite," "The Modern Age," "Someday," "New York City Cops," and "Take It Or Leave It" all sounded so fresh, so relevant, so freakin' cool, it was mind-boggling to realize that these songs were recorded (prepare to feel old) TEN YEARS AGO. The Strokes truly set the blueprint for the indie-rock revolution of the 2000s; many baby bands playing Coachella '11 owe them a huge debt, and a huge amount of respect. And their Coachella concert, with sunglassed-at-night, trucker-hatted singer Julian Casablancas in fine surly form and Albert Hammond Jr.'s distinctive guitar as tinny and angular and, well, Strokes-y as ever, was a welcome reminder of their influence and impact. 04/18/11

I saw the Strokes at Coachella in, I want to say, 2002? They were playing in the middle of the day on the main stage, a very short set composed of the entirety of Is This It with, I want to say, two new songs. One of those songs was "Meet Me In The Bathroom," which later appeared on Room On Fire. I remember standing there in the crowd at a fair distance and enjoying the set in a mild enough fashion - they played their songs with an admirable degree of precision, but they seemed a bit lost on a giant festival stage. It must be said, however, that no one really looks good in the midday slot at a festival.

Listening now to Is This It, I am struck as much by the simplicity of the music as anything else. I'm not a musician, I want to stress: it's been a decade since I held a guitar for an extended amount of time, and even longer since I beat a drum. (I was a moderate duffer.) But listening to their earliest songs, the purposefully sparse style is nevertheless impressive. There aren't very many guitar parts on the album that you couldn't play with a basic knowledge of power chords and some simple scales. Give me some tablature and I could probably figure out the rhythm guitar for "Last Night" in ten minutes. But it sounds pretty damn nice all the same.

The production is crisp and naked in a way that positively screams New York: no lush Los Angeles atmosphere, no British warmth, everything is bright and even tinny, very trebly with not a lot in the way of bottom end. If the album sounds like anything, it sounds like Television's Marquee Moon. To my ears that album has one of the most fascinating sounds of any rock album ever recorded. Television maybe weren't the best songwriters (I'll get pilloried for that in the comments) but they got by on a hypnotic degree of atmosphere and some truly stunning arrangements. At a certain point I don't think it even matters whether or not the members of the Strokes are or were as well-versed in rock history as a lot of critics (including myself) always gave them credit for being. Either the Strokes knew Television and the New York Dolls or they heard all the bands who were influenced by them - the result is a wash. Anyone with half an ear for music history can identify where the disparate parts of the sound came from, either first-, second-, or third-hand. Milo (in the comments to the last post) was right to point out the Cars as an influence - I had never made that connection before, and I quite like the Cars. But I suspect that someone, somewhere along the line - perhaps producer Gordon Raphael - had to have heard Marquee Moon. All the details, right down to Julian Casablancas' omnipresent fuzzy vocal filter standing in for Tom Verlaine's croon, are just so dead on that it would stand as an amazing coincidence of convergent evolution if the Strokes had arrived at the same sound without any prompting.

The Strokes have been around as a cultural force for ten years now. Their new album really isn't much to write home about but they've been met by rapturous crowds everywhere on their current tour. People like the Strokes an awful lot. This is funny, for anyone with a good memory of the last ten years. Is This It was hot for a while but their second album - the aforementioned Room On Fire - was a disappointment, commercially if not critically. Their third album, First Impressions of Earth, received negative reviews and was met with wide indifference. by 2006 people were writing the band's obituary - maybe they had influenced a great deal of the music that followed, but they seemed trapped in amber themselves, of their moment but unable to move beyond a certain image suspended in time.

Personally, I quite liked Room On Fire. For all the complaints of it being a retread of their first LP, I thought their sophomore effort was an improvement in every way. For one thing, the songs were better. There were a number of standout tracks on their first album, but it feels overlong at 30 minutes. Room On Fire, however, is strong throughout and ends with the one-two punch of "The Way It Is" and "The End Has No End," two of the best rock songs of the last decade. "The End Has No End" also gets credit for the fact that the video is an unannounced and completely sincere sequel to 2001:

Nice!

Anyway, I liked their second album, but I loved their third album. First Impressions of Earth was the type of album I didn't think the Strokes had it in them to make. It was different - longer, with many types of songs, denser arrangements and heavier riffs. I listened to it a lot when it first came out and I still go back to it. I thought, this was a fantastic album, this is change, this is the kind of stylistic evolution that people like to hear. And then no one else liked it. It got some polite notices from the usual suspects but a savage 5.9 from Pitchfork. The air went out of the balloon, the band drifted apart. Albert Hammond. Jr. went off to do his awful solo stuff. (I saw him open up for Bloc Party when Bloc Party was touring behind A Weekend In The City. Completely innocuous but instantly forgettable.) Casablancas released a solo album too.

What i didn't understand at the time was that, regardless of my reasons for liking their third album, the band was in a torturous bind. Normal rock bands are expected to change, to evolve and to grow. We all know what's supposed to happen because we all know the critical shorthand: Pablo Honey becomes The Bends becomes OK Computer; Please Please Me to Revolver to The Beatles. We expect our great bands to be smart bands, filled with smart people who want to stretch and who chafe at any self-imposed limits. Even when they don't quite make it we applaud the effort anyway (see: Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys). But the Strokes couldn't play that game. They had not rose to popularity solely by virtue of an acclaimed debut album. They were popular because of what they represented at a certain point in pop music history: they were rock stars, they had that swag. The moment they had to try, the moment they needed to either put up or shut up, they lost a bit of their glamour. The difficult second album? The arduous third album? These were not the kinds of narratives that you could stick on a band like the Strokes, because their whole appeal was anti-narrative. They were cool. They didn't sweat. The moment we caught them working at it, the spell was lifted.

It is an inescapable fact that the Strokes are wealthy children of privilege. This makes them, by any stretch of the imagination, fairly despicable creatures. It's hard not to hate them just a little bit when you learn that Casablancas met Nikolai Frature at the Lycée Français de New York, for instance. There is a class element to their appeal: their image is composed entirely of signifiers pointing to their class status. Urban petit bourgeoisie could see in the group something to which to aspire, an image of cool made of smoke rings, Pabst Blue Ribbon and po-faced Members Only jackets. The Strokes didn't invent hipsters, but the existence of the Strokes crystallized the category of "hipster" as a concrete object, either for aspiration or derision.

Look around record stores and takes a glance at the people buying contemporary rock records - not Nickleback or Coldplay, but the good stuff: Spoon, TV On The Radio, the National, Neko Case, Fleet Foxes. Who's buying the good critically acclaimed and interesting rock records? Middle class white people. College students. NPR listeners. Intellectuals. Contemporary rock has dropped out of the mainstream and into a solidly upper-middle-class socioeconomic niche. Listening to rock now isn't as simple as plugging in your FM radio, it's a lifestyle choice. It's fashion. It's contingent. It's identity politics. The idea of a rock star coming up now and making a bald-faced populist appeal without sacrificing their credibility is simply laughable. Credibility matters, but credibility these days isn't tied to integrity, it's tied to the consistency of your brand.

I can't lay all these sins at the Strokes' feet. There's a ton of good rock music being made right now that doesn't fit neatly on any kind of hipster fashion axis. But rock doesn't occupy anywhere near the central position in our culture that it once did. (Hip-hop doesn't either, anymore - good hip-hop has become just as much of a niche as good rock. It's all balladry, dance pop and R&B. That's the cultural center, because that is the kind of music most easily marketed towards children.) Perhaps that was inevitable - nothing lasts for ever. Established forms always grow in complexity and increased self-referentiality as they approach obsolescence. I hear the Strokes and I can't help but think that the supposed "renaissance" of rock in the last decade was also a definite restriction. The bands can say: now we know who the audience is. It's not kids, it's not casual listeners who don't get the allusions and post-ironic genre signifiers and the post-post-ironic-but-not-emo-new-sincerity. It's people who can dress like us. Find a band that dresses like you and follow them. Dress in casual blue jeans and deceptively expensive cardigan sweaters. That's it.

2011-04-15T04:02:00.000-04:00

That Was It

In hindsight the 90s was a strange time for music. It would be a mistake to overstate the amount of influence Nirvana in specific and grunge in general exerted over the musical climate, but at the same time it's hard not to see the general outlines of the "alternative" exerting an influence over large swaths of the musical landscape beyond the strict confines of guitar-based rock & roll. It wasn't just a matter of how people dressed - although the general shapelessness of 90s fashions was also felt across the music industry, right up until the end of the decade and the concomitant rise of teen pop and metrosexuality. (The phrase "metrosexual" wasn't in common usage until the early 00s, but when seen in contrast with the likes of Limp Bizkit, it's not hard to see the widespread popularity of 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys as precursors of the following decade's fashion consciousness.) Music across the board - from Pearl Jam on through Tupac - was fixated on the concept of authenticity. Even the obsession with irony was a product of this fixation: the only way to truly care about what you were doing was to seem as if you didn't care at all, because that kind of ambition - in any field, not just music - could easily be seen as rude careerism. Of course, there's a good argument to be made that this focus on conscious self-effacement in the rock world provided ample opportunity for hip-hop - with its enthusiastic celebration of material success and unabashed commitment to conspicuous consumption - to leapfrog over white rock and achieve lasting popularity as the "good-time music" of the 90s, occupying the space that hard rock had abdicated in the late 80s.

Let's look at SPIN's Top Twenty Albums for the year 1999, a year in music I remember as being particularly strong. Many of my favorite albums didn't make SPIN's list, but it's nonetheless a good cross section of what critical consensus looked like in US music critic circles at the fin de siecle:

1. Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile
2. Rage Against The Machine - The Battle of Los Angeles
3. Moby - Play
4. The Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs, Vol. 1, 2 & 3
5. Prince Paul - A Prince Among Thieves
5. Handsome Boy Modeling School - So…How's Your Girl?
6. Basement Jaxx - Remedy
7. The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin
8. Goodie Mob - World Party
9. Beck - Midnite Vultures
10. Fiona Apple - When the Pawn…
11. Built To Spill - Keep It Like A Secret
12. The Chemical Brothers - Surrender
13. Ol' Dirty Bastard - N***a Please
14. Ibrahim Ferrer - Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer
15. Mary J. Blige - Mary
16. The Promise Ring - Very Emergency
16. Rainer Maria - Look Now Look Again
17. Wilco - Summer Teeth
18. Sleater-Kinney - The Hot Rock
19. Kruder & Dorfmeister - The K&D Sessions
20. Eminem - The Slim Shady LP

If one thing jumps out at me about this list, it's that the late 90s was a time when the leading trends in critically-acclaimed pop music were definitely skewing older. Nine Inch Nails had been around for over a decade before The Fragile, Play was an "overnight" success ten years in the making on Moby's part, the Flaming Lips had been around for fifteen years before The Soft Bulletin conquered the universe. Sleater-Kinney were punk but they were very serious punk, Wilco was "dad rock" long before "dad rock" was even a thing, the Chemical Brothers were retro revivalists for genres most Americans hadn't even experienced the first time around. Making sweeping generalizations about periodization is hazardous business under the best of circumstances. But I've been thinking about this for a little while, so bear with me. As someone who lived through this era in music and who bought around half of those records new off the rack way back in the day - some of them even at a Tower Records, and a couple downloaded off Napster 1.0, for God's sake! - it definitely seemed as good music was really . . . mature back then. Adulthood was a "thing."

Contrast that with the best selling albums of that year:

1. Backstreet Boys - Millennium (13x Platinum total sales)
2. Britney Spears - ... Baby One More Time (14x Platinum)
3. Shania Twain - Come on Over (20x Platinum)
4. 'N Sync - 'N Sync (10x Platinum)
5. Ricky Martin - Ricky Martin (7x Platinum)
6. Limp Bizkit - Significant Other (7x Platinum)
7. Santana - Supernatural (15x Platinum)
8. TLC - Fanmail (6x Platinum)
9. Christina Aguilera - Christina Aquilera (8x Platinum)
10. Kid Rock - Devil Without A Cause (11x Platinum)

There is nothing new in the observation that the music that sells best is often not very good, or that the music industry made a lot of money over the course of many decades by marketing disposable pop music to children. Of the top 10 selling albums of that year, four of them were prefab teen pop, three or four (depending on how you count TLC) were slightly older skewing adult contemporary pop, two were rap-rock albums, one was a complete fluke of a hit by an artist who had been around since the late 60s.

The contrast between what the critics were listening to and what the masses were buying was pretty phenomenal, but not necessarily unusual. What was unusual would not be obvious until a good few years after the fact. See, 1999 was pretty much the high-water mark of recorded music in the fin de siecle period - the last supper, so to speak. We didn't know it at the time, but remember how I said just a few paragraphs back that I downloaded a couple albums off Napster? That was important. The following year, 2000, the number one album on SPIN's top twenty list was "Your Hard Drive." It seemed silly at the time, a puckish response to the fad of music piracy. Remember when it just didn't seem like that big a deal? Remember when it just didn't seem possible that the proliferation of personal computers and broadband connections would really have any effect on the way people consumed and purchased music? It was hype, it was industry fear-mongering, it was hyperventilating futurism on the cover of Wired magazine.

Until it wasn't, and suddenly people just . . . stopped. Stopped buying records, that is. Which is not to say they stopped listening to music - quite the contrary. But the old business model was transformed by changing circumstances into something almost beyond recognition. Lady Gaga is perhaps the biggest pop star to come out of the last decade, and yet her first album - The Fame has sold only 3 million copies in the US since its release in 2008. 3 million records is a big deal now - but for comparison, Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope was released in 1997, sold only 3 million copies in the US, and was considered a relative disappointment.

So far I've put out a fair amount of information, a pair of lists and some numbers. What does it all mean? I'm not sure it all means anything. Correlation does not equal causation, after all, and at the end of the day the gut feelings of an aging industry trainspotter are just that - gut feelings. But if you want to know what brought on this sequence of thoughts, I'll answer that I've been listening to and thinking about the Strokes a lot lately.

If you don't remember or weren't paying attention at the time, the music industry really was violently divided in the last years of the 90s. Guitar-based rock music only sold if it was nu-metal (almost all of which was awful) or sub-Pearl Jam grunge excrescence like Creed. (Rage Against the Machine was very popular and also very good, but they were an anomaly among all the other groups who rode similar sounds to chart success.) When the Strokes came around in 2001 they were a big deal - which is something that I imagine might become more and more difficult to explain to younger listeners the more time elapses. Rock was seen as being officially in the doldrums, and the critical metastory - certainly enabled by reams of recording industry propaganda - was that rock, real rock, was ripe for a rebirth. The twinned forces of grunge and 90s post-college "alt" rock had ran their courses. Hip-hop had stolen the thunder in the mid 90s, and the rise of teen pop had dominated the industry for a solid three years (although, it must be said, teen pop as a universal fad died pretty much the precise moment we hit Y2K). It had been ten years since Nirvana broke! Nirvana! We needed a new Nirvana! Brooklyn was the new Seattle! If this seems a bit intense, remember, I was working college radio at the time: the people who made money off selling records wanted badly for the Strokes to be a huge hit that reignited America's love affair with rock and roll. They said as much in the promo material they sent to radio stations to accompany the US release of Is This It. Because, as I said, teen pop had run its course, and rap-rock was showing its age as well. Sales were maybe, kind of, sort of beginning to get soft. The British press was hyperventilating over these guys, they had to sell a zillion records, right? Right?

The Strokes were never going to be the "next big thing" in America. Is This It dutifully sold one million copies in the US, but no more. There were a number of reasons for this - certainly, the fact that it was released in the US right after 9/11 couldn't have helped. The album's best track, "New York City Cops," was voluntarily excised after the attacks because of its derogatory nature. But regardless of timing, the Strokes were never going to achieve the kind of mass popularity that a large part of the industry breathlessly anticipated. They were too deeply enmeshed in the vocabulary of hip New York at the turn of the century to sell to the heartland. But even moreso than the Stroke's specific appeal, the larger question was whether or not the music industry was still operating under a viable thesis - i.e., whether or not rock music like the Strokes had the chance of shifting the culture once again and making a stab at universal appeal, or whether rock was doomed to diminishing returns as a contingent genre standing largely on the cultural sidelines.

It wasn't the Strokes' fault. I quite like the Strokes now, although I didn't so much at the time. The problem was, and I see this now, that the band wasn't really meant for me. I hear in the Strokes the sum of their influences. They've got the rhythm of the Ramones slowed down from 45 to 33 1/3 RPM, the sparse and nervous energy of Television, the smirk of 70s glam Lou Reed. They sound a little bit like the New York Dolls and a lot like the Feelies. If you can get all that just from listening to Is This It - and if those influences get in the way of appreciating the music - then you're too old. Because the reason the Strokes were popular to the people for whom they were popular and important for the people to whom they were important had less to do with the music - and I really don't want to seem like I'm denigrating them, because really they have grown on me over the last few years - than with the swag. This is something that I just could not understand.

Just watch this, if you haven't seen it in a while. Weird to think that some of them are married with babies. The whole point, back in the day, as that they were young and they had that swag. If the late 90s was all about serious music that older college students and urban intellectuals sat around contemplating while they stroked their beards - I'm looking at you, The Soft Bulletin - then the Strokes were about wanting to be "cool" again. It seems like such a simple idea now but at the time it seemed positively obscene. Remember, the biggest rock album of 2000 was Kid A. Rock was Serious Business. Some kid singing about meeting up with other kids at the bar and getting drunk seemed - well - perhaps revanchist is not too strong a word? Positively atavistic.

Looking back on the 90s, I can now perceive the common denominator between groups as disparate as Pavement and the Chemical Brothers. It was all about the anti-swag. It really got started, I guess you could say, when Kurt Cobain threw on some thrift-store sweaters and torn jeans and called it an outfit - the point was that it wasn't "an outfit," it was just what he happened to be wearing at the time he had the camera pointed in his direction. The clothes you were wearing were not - or were not supposed to be - important. Being a musician meant being a serious person who really wasn't particularly interesting when he wasn't making music, and didn't particularly want to be. Of course, there were still lots of people who wanted to play the rock star game, and many who did - but you always knew that the Stone Temple Pilots and the Smashing Pumpkins were less cool because they wanted to be cool. Pavement were just some dudes who looked like they might just as easily be hotel clerks or accountants in their day jobs; the Chemical Brothers might easily have been university professors if they hadn't gotten into acid house in the early 90s. That was what the 90s - the real 90s - was all about: the best way to show you truly cared was to not care.

The Strokes, on the other hand, tried to say that they didn't care at all by appearing, well, not to care at all. They were louche in a way that no one had been in quite some time. They had no desire to pretend to be anything other than super cool rock stars who just happened to be fabulous. And that's why, when they first came out, it felt to me as if I had set my hand down on a hot plate. What was this kiddy shit?

Next, whenever I get around to it: Swag Stories of the Early Aughts.

2011-04-13T02:13:00.005-04:00

You Know It's True

Ultra Boy can only use one super power at a time - i.e., he can't be both super strong and invulnerable at the same time. Why doesn't he shatter every bone in his hand every time he throws a punch with super-strength?

One of the best bits in Kirkman's Marvel Zombies was the bit where Wolverine's arm got torn in half when he tried to slice the Silver Surfer open. His bones were unbreakable but his ligaments were not. It was funny in the book because zombie Wolverine was a rotting corpse but that should really come up more often. Just because his bones are strong doesn't mean that he couldn't be torn limb from limb, unless he had magic ligaments and cartilage.

And while we're on the subject of Wolverine: his claws are super sharp but he's not super strong. Even the sharpest knife in the world is only as strong as the force behind it, so his ability to cut metal and stone would be limited unless Colossus was standing behind him pushing his elbow forward.

Also: as annoying as the "super" Wolverine of the last decade is, I do appreciate that a few writers (such as Jason Aaron) have taken the time to establish that Wolverine's true weakness is drowning. It makes sense, since he's not super-strong, that he would sink like a stone.

One of the few things that the Daredevil movie did well was actually showing how Daredevil's radar sense might actually work: he "feels" the reflection of sound waves off surfaces and objects. Would Daredevil's radar sense work in a completely silent room?

I generally liked Geoff Johns' work on Superman but one thing that has always bugged me about the "Superman and the Legion of Superheroes" arc is how Superman's powers instantly return the moment Sun Boy turns the sun back from red to yellow. Even if we accept for the sake of the story that Superman wouldn't need any kind of interregnum to recharge, we're still left waiting the seven minutes it would take yellow sunlight to reach Earth from the sun. The way that scene was written required precise timing to work the way it does, but unless we bypass the most elementary understanding of the physics of light we're left with a situation where Superman would be dead long before the new sunlight could revive him.

It is practically a law of nature that the more popular a character becomes, the stronger he will be. This is true of Wolverine to an absurd degree, but it's also become true of Luke Cage as well. As originally written, Cage was just not very strong - in his earliest stories, his invulnerability is far more prominent than his strength. But now he's gone from being maybe roughly Spider-Man's equal to someone who can hoist an eighteen-wheeler above his head and walk half the length of the city.

It is a continuing per peeve of mine that so many creators seem to believe that the Silver Surfer is still human underneath his silver shell. The whole point of the Surfer is that he was completely remade by Galactus: he is his shell, he's solid silver throughout. Otherwise, this wouldn't make any sense. It is always within his power to pretend to be human, but no force this side of Galactus has the power to actually make him human again.

It's really quite awesome that Thor possesses the ability to communicate with amphibians. It's probably not something that comes up very often, but I imagine it's a really neat party trick.

I've said it before but it bears repeating:

Thor = Green Hulk = Juggernaut > Wonder Man = Thing > Grey Hulk = Colossus = She-Hulk

The Silver Surfer can theoretically be as strong or stronger than any other character if he chooses to be, based on his theoretically limitless ability to channel the Power Cosmic, but he rarely chooses physical confrontation.

Traditionally, Superman > Everyone. This was not strictly true in the years right after Crisis when Superman was depowered considerably. It made for some memorable stories not because Superman was weak but because he could be an underdog against enemies like Darkseid and Doomsday. Now he's basically back to pre-Crisis levels. So:

Superman = Captain Marvel > Power GIrl = Martian Manhunter = Wonder Woman

Among villains, Doomsday is by far the strongest since he's been shown almost killing Darkseid, and Darkseid is easily the better of Mongul, Despero, or any other of the strong villains.

2011-04-08T11:15:00.002-04:00

SIR

Fear Itself #1

Let's hope it drops so much of the "relevance" hoo-ha. I still don't see how this is a story for the whole Marvel Universe and not just a Thor storyline, but at least we now know that, yes, Fraction's first Thor storyline was padded because it had to kill time on its way to setting up this. Not terrible, but we'll see if people care in half a year.

Brightest Day #23

The series to date has been uniformly awful, there is no doubt. But I will admit to being slightly impressed with how well they pulled everything together here: turns out the series did have a plot after all, and seeing how all the pieces fit together was actually quite neat: I honestly was surprised by how things came together at the end. If only the previous #22 issues hadn't been so dire.

Uncanny X-Men #534.1

Perhaps because it's a done-in-one issue, but Kieron Gillen's maiden solo flight on the flagship mutant title reads really well. It's kind of funny and kind of sad how badly Fraction's run on Uncanny was a non-starter - something about the book just never gelled. EIther he didn't "get" the characters or had trouble with the Utopia status quo or whatever, his stories were distractingly superficial, barrels of misshapen plot filled with a cast of rotating ciphers. Just in this one issue Gillen shows more insight into Magneto's character than Fraction did in two and a half years. Maybe I'm reading too much into one issuer, but frankly, it's easy to see in hindsight that Fraction just didn't work on this book. Gillen is off to a hopeful start.

Avengers: The Children's Crusade #5

This is a Very Good Book, especially for old-school Avengers fans. There's a vocal minority of Avengers fans who have been unhappy ever since Disassembled with the franchise's sharp turn away from its historical roots. The problem is that since New Avengers dropped a lot of the historical trappings of The Avengers, the book has been the centerpiece of the number one franchise in comics, so there wasn't really a lot of room for complaint on any grounds other than personal preference. But oddly enough, Allan Heinberg appears to be very much of the Old School, and despite the fact that his main cast of "Young" Avengers is composed of entirely new characters, they are all plugged into established Avengers continuity in such a way that this feels like far more of a direct continuation of the good old Thomas / Englehart / Stern days than anything else since Busiek. It doesn't hurt that he seems to be inching towards selectively rewriting parts of Disassembled, an awful story whose awfulness has not diminished with time. Personally, I'm hoping the explanation for Wanda's behavior these past seven (!) years is revealed to be Chthon - demonic possession essentially let Hal Jordan off the hook for murdering thousands of people and destroying the universe (it got better!), so that's be a nice way out.

Secret Avengers #11

Who Is John Steele? No one cares, I'm sure. Brubaker seems like a nice guy who is capable of writing good comics when he feels like it, but his heart was so not in this book that it's not even funny. Considering how many people were genuinely excited by the eclectic cast of characters when this book was first announced, the fact that Brubaker has shown a methodical disinterest in actually doing anything with most of them is just perverse. Perhaps that's not the book he wanted to write, but that is without question the book the fans wanted to read. This, however, is the living definition of Weak Sauce.

Ultimate Spider-Man #156

I'm probably going to die a peaceful death of natural causes long before they get around to "killing" Ultimate Spider-Man, right?

Deadpool Team-Up #883

Now cracks a noble heart.—Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

2011-04-05T00:00:00.001-04:00

This Year's Bitchfest

Because I love pointing out the obvious, let's run down all the people who haven't been inducted into the Hall of Fame yet despite their eligibility.

Kraftwerk
Estimated Years Eligible: 16
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: Even

The same crowd who complained when Madonna and ABBA were inducted (and Grand Funk once again overlooked!) would probably weep tears of blood to see Kraftwerk inducted. And yet: without a doubt one of the five most influential bands ever. I mean, they're German! But without Kraftwerk the shape of modern music would be so different as to be recognizable. Every group either goes through a Kraftwerk phase or they go through a phase where they emulate the no-/new-wave bands who were influenced by Kraftwerk, or the 70s Bowie albums that were made under the direct influence of Kraftwerk and cocaine, in that order. Even U2 went through a Kraftwerk phase, for Chrissakes. If you're a rapper, you've got Kraftwerk so far back in your RNA that even if you don't know who Florian Schneider is, you know all the guys who built hip-hop out of sampling "Trans-Europe Express." If you sing pop music in 2011, you're basically standing on Kraftwerk's shoulders. They'll get in eventually, I'll wager, but probably not before half the band is dead.

Afrika Bambaataa
Estimated Years Eligible: 6
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 10-1

Founding Father of hip-hop. Let me repeat that for emphasis: Afrika Bambaataa is the guy who named hip-hop. After DJ Kool Herc and DJ Kool Dee, this guy here was right in the center of things, using the idea of throwing hip-hop parties as a way to keep Bronx kids from joining gangs. Afrika Bambaataa sampled Kraftwerk to make "Planet Rock." "Planet Rock" is one of the handful of most influential hip-hop songs ever recorded, and therefore fully 2/3 of the songs on the radio straight-up would not exist if this man hadn't figured out how to sample the hook from "Trans-Europe Express." Unfortunately, it looks as if we might have to wait a while before more artists fromthe early days of hip-hop are inducted - they inducted Grandmaster Flash in 2007 and Run-DMC last year. Unfortunately, so much of early hip-hop was a singles genre that it's hard to make a case for the fact that so many early rappers and DJs can only point to a handful of songs to make their case for history. That didn't stop any of the 50s doo-wop or Brill Building groups who've been inducted over the years, but it might be a while before they get around to folks like Afrika Bambaataa - we will probably see more prominent groups such as Public Enemy (a sure first-ballot pick for even the most conservative voters) and NWA inducted before Bambaataa, Fab Five Freddy or the Sugarhill Gang.

DJ Kool Herc
Estimated Years Eligible: 10-ish
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 250-1

You know what I said earlier about Afrika Bambaataa being one of the "Founding Fathers" of hip-hop? Well, this is the man who actually, you know, created hip-hop. As in: before Kool Herc there was no hip-hop, then after him there was. Of course, the fact that he was never a recording artist means his chances of being inducted are pretty near zero, but there are two other types of awards for which he qualifies: the sporadically given "Lifetime Achievement" award (for "unique contributions" that fall outside the strict roll of producer or artist, folks like Jann Wenner and Seymour Stein), and then the Ahmet Ertegun Award, given to non-performers. Often this goes to producers such as Phil Spector and Berry Gordy, but they've also given it to folks like Alan Freed and Dick Clark. Either The Man Who Created Hip-Hop gets one of these awards before he dies (which might be soon considering he's been in need of an expensive kidney transplant for some time), or the whole damn thing is just a joke. Every millionaire in the music biz who has made so much as a single dollar off hip-hop owes that dollar to this man, end of story.

The Cure
Estimated Years Eligible: 7
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 5-1

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Cure will actually get in one of these years, but it probably won't be soon. Despite the fact that they check all three boxes on the Induction Schedule (popularity, acclaim, influence), they are just too British to sit well with the old white guys on the induction committee. The let in John Cougar Mellencamp the first year he was eligible because Mellencamp is a "serious" American artist who does rootsy Americana type stuff, regardless of the fact that it's awful and boring. The Cure started off as punk - sort-of - and evolved with that genre in the direction of new wave and synth pop but not before taking a detour in the direction of industrial. Their prime period careens between jangly college guitar rock and synthesizer tracks. So far, not a single new wave or synth-pop group has been inducted, despite that fact that anyone around since 1986 is now eligible for entry. Robert Smith puts on makeup, which is just about the worst thing you can do in terms of getting the Hall of Fame to pay attention. (See: Alice Cooper, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis). They're big enough and still relevant enough that it's hard to imagine them not being inducted at some point, but don't hold your breath.

Depeche Mode
Estimated Years Eligible: 5
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 10-1

Much of what I said for the Cure applies to Depeche Mode as well, but moreso. Despite the fact that they were for a good decade one of the biggest bands in the world - maybe not quite as big in America as everywhere else - they also played synths and made dance music. They certainly have the critical heft and the influence. But they're just too . . . well, fey and poppy, I guess. Maybe someday, I can see them waiting a while and then having a big synth-pop year just to get rid of these guys in one big rush.

Joy Division / New Order
Estimated Years Eligible: 7 / 5
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 25-1 / 10-1

If they induct either band, it will probably be New Order, because it's as New Order that they sold millions of records and performed across the world. But in a perfect world, if Eric Clapton can be inducted thrice than Bernard Sumner can be inducted twice. (But in a perfect world, would Clapton really need three inductions?) I can see these guys, Depeche Mode and the Cure being lumped together in a box somewhere in Jann Wenner's office that says "silly British disco shit." Ironically, the one time I actually visited the Hall of Fame in Cleveland they had a very nice display of Joy Division / New Order memorabilia, including a few of Ian Curtis' hand-written lyric sheets. So it's not like they're not on the list, but I doubt they're very high on the list.

Big Star
Estimated Years Eligible: 14
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 50-1

Pretty much the poster boys for all those bands who have exerted a completely disproportionate influence relative to their popularity. I just checked Wikipedia and I see that the Box Tops haven't even been inducted yet. If anyone deserves a double induction it's Alex Chilton, yet I see his first band getting the nod a long time before anyone thinks to give it to the guys who, you know, pretty much invented "indie" rock.

Devo
Estimated Years Eligible: 8
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 15-1

I'd say the odds are good these guys will eventually make it, but it won't be soon. They've got the whole "funny" think working against them, despite their undeniable influence, and despite the fact that the ideas behind their music were about as funny as a heart attack. Old white guys don't care for satire in their rock & roll, don't you know. And they don't care for synthesizers either, despite the fact that they were by all accounts always a ferocious live band.

Meat Puppets
Estimated Years Eligible: 5
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 30-1

The best chance these guys have will be in a few years when all the grunge guys get inducted - you know, all the guys who built their careers off the riffs on Meat Puppets II. (Which is a lot more people than just Kurt Cobain.) One of the biggest problems the Hall of Fame is going to have in the coming years is the fact that, starting in the late 70s and working through the 80s, the majority of critically acclaimed acts were simply not very popular by any reasonable stretch of the imagination. There's a huge disconnect in the 80s and 90s and 00s between what the critics and musicians listen to and what actually sells records. Are we going to see the Smashing Pumpkins inducted before Pavement? Amazingly, the Meat Puppets do actually have one Gold record to their name - 1994's Too High To Die - but their weirdness and obscurity will probably keep them out of the Hall of Fame.

The Replacements
Estimated Years Eligible: 5
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 25-1

Just slightly more likely than the Meat Puppets. Made some of the best records of the 80s, left an enduring legacy, but just not very popular. Again, when the 90s guys start getting in there's a chance they might sneak in under the radar as "influences" if people like Eddie Vedder make a big deal about it. There's a slight chance. And, you know, in thirty years when all the current old white guys are dead and the old white guys will be people who grew up in the 80s, then there will be another chance that some rich and powerful established artist might lobby for an aging Paul Westerberg in much the same way Elton John obviously did for Leon Russell this year.

Minor Threat
Estimated Years Eligible: 6
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 100-1

Hah! I'm sorry, what? You founded a whole genre of rock but you also did it by flipping the proverbial bird to every old rich white guy in the business? Eh, sorry, I think this is the year we finally give Grand Funk Railroad their long overdue recognition.

Sonic Youth
Estimated Years Eligible: 4
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 10-1

I give good odds on these guys making it eventually. Maybe they'll make it the same year as Nirvana - which is, you know, only three years away! Do you feel old yet? But in the meantime, you know, Eric Clapton's Taint ain't gonna nominate itself, guys.

They Might Be Giants
Estimated Years Eligible: 1
Chances of Eventually Being Inducted: 15-1

They Might Be Giants will be eligible for nomination this coming year, I believe. (If you didn't feel old yet today, you do now.) I think they have a pretty good chance, in time. Their career trajectory has been almost as influential as their music at this point, and their significance to the evolution of indie rock in the late 80s and early 90s cannot be overstated, even if it only seems as if they were on a different planet entirely from bands like Nirvana and Sonic Youth. They started out as DIY as possible, went to a major label and got a Platinum plaque, then went indie again and probably make more money now than they did then by a wide margin. They were the first band to release exclusive original material on the internet. They might have a few more gray hairs before they get the call, but I think in the long run they stand a better chance than Big Star or the Meat Puppets.

2011-04-04T00:00:00.002-04:00

If No One Else Cares . . .

I look forward to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony every year. I stopped caring long ago about whether or not we should care about the Hall of Fame, when I realized something very simple: it's not really about trainspotters and armchair critics such as you and I, analyzing and discussing who is and isn't worthy to be inducted next to industry giants such as the Eagles and David Crosby (twice!). It's about people who actually do deserve the award and who really, really, really appreciate the honor.

I came to this realization back in 2007 during the induction ceremony for Patti Smith. Now, Smith by then was a few years' overdue for induction. Her status as a critical darling "musician's musician" meant that while she wasn't guaranteed to get in soon, she would probably get in eventually. If you were to compile a list of all the people in rock who probably don't need any more affirmation to prove that they are incredibly awesome and influential, Smith is near the top of that list. She influenced half the people who influenced all the people currently bumping on your iPod. And yet . . . up on stage clutching her statue, Smith started to cry, talking about her late husband Fred Smith and how he had been certain she would be inducted . . . eventually. When the day finally came, it meant a lot to her, and it was great to see.

So that's why I pay attention every year. While there may be any number of less deserving nominees, and always the obvious picks who hardly need the additional recognition, there will always be those who really do deserve it, and who deserve to have the recognition and respect of their peers validated in as definitive a way as possible. 2009 is a good year for comparison: yeah, Metallica were always getting in on the first eligible ballot, and yeah, they certainly deserved it. Run DMC were similarly "sure things." But you know who probably appreciated the award most that year? Bobby Womack and Little Anthony.

This year was an odd year. There were no young first-ballot inductees, it was all old folks who had either been overlooked in previous years or simply forgotten. Alice Cooper, Dr. John, Leon Russell, Darlene Love, Tom Waits and Neil Diamond. Of them all, the biggest surprise was obviously Waits, another one of those "critical darlings" so firmly entrenched on the far side of the mainstream that one could easily imagine him never getting the nod. I've never been the biggest Waits fan but it was still nice to see him get the nod. (Maybe it's time for one of my periodic attempts to get into Waits?)

New Orleans funk had always been one of those genres that people claimed never got any respect from the Hall, so putting in Dr. John and Leon Russell in one fell swoop, while long overdue, certainly felt like "unfinished business." Dr. John basically looks like Dr. John always has, but Leon Russell - if you've seen his picture recently - has obviously seen better days. He's practically a ghost - Wikipedia says he's only 69 but you could be forgiven for thinking he was twenty years older from his pallor and obvious weakness. By all accounts Elton John apparently resurrected the man after a string of debilitating illnesses and an end-of-career depression: it's always truly great to see that kind of belated but long overdue respect and recognition for someone who obviously very desperately needed it.

Darlene Love is someone who was similarly appreciative, even if she had - comparatively speaking - been doing fine for herself, still performing. When I heard she was 70 you could have knocked me over with a feather - since when can septuagenarians pull off those kind of plunging necklines?

It was nice to see Bette Midler induct her, although - sorry, Bette - you might have a while to wait before your induction. You've got a triple curse: you're primarily known as being a "standards" singer (hardly the most popular artist in today's climate), you spent a disconcerting amount of time in the schlocky adult contemporary ghetto, and you've never taken yourself particularly seriously. How many people remember the glory days of her sui generis "Divine Miss M" cabaret / rock show / Borscht belt comedy revue? Maybe if you come out with some super-serious Americana roots think produced by T Bone Burnett and / or Rick Rubin you've got a chance.

Alice Cooper deserved his shot, but it's not hard to see why it took so long. The Hall of Fame basically operates under the guiding principle that if it wasn't getting 4-and-a-half star reviews from Rolling Stone in the mid-70s, it doesn't count as good - with the exception, of course, of groups who have sold hundreds of millions of records. Which means that groups and artists who may not have been critical darlings in their time but who have nevertheless proven to be singularly influential and of enduring quality might be stuck waiting. Black Sabbath had to wait a long time for their induction, despite the fact that they are (obviously!) one of the most influential bands of all time. Greil Marcus never wrote an essay about Ozzy Osborne's relation to Herman Melville, no doubt. Cooper was overdue even if you could still sort of sense some of the gray-hairs in the audience bristling when he brought a choir of blood-stained schoolchildren for a rousing chorus of "School's Out." If Sabbath and Cooper are in I think we will probably live to see Kiss inducted, but it will undoubtedly be the most grudging acknowledgment in the history of awards show.

But of course, the big name of the night was Neil Diamond. His induction was so overdue that Paul Simon made a point of leading off his induction speech with the fact that it was twenty years overdue. I think he might have been eligible for even longer than that, but the point stands: how is it that we're even still talking about this in 2011? I mean, seriously, you're not going to find many fervent Diamond fans in the under-fifty set, but the fact that he wasn't inducted decades ago is simply perverse. To his credit he responded in kind during his acceptance speech. He was obviously drunk, had not bothered to prepare any words other than a backhanded "fuck you" to Paul Simon for slagging on Barbara Streisand during his induction speech, and spent half the time taking pictures of the crowd with his iPhone. But then he launched into a pitch-perfect rendition of "I Am, I Said," and at that point it was almost kind of funny to see someone who, let's be honest, was at one point one of the biggest mega-superstars on the planet before settling down to be just a normal garden-variety superstar, slumming for a long, long, long overdue recognition from the Hall of Fame. Like, "fuck all y'all, when I'm done here I'm going home to sit in my sapphire-encrusted hot tub and watch season four of Mad Men on a plasma screen TV the size of Ecuador."

2011-03-31T01:32:00.003-04:00

Got That Swag

When we are young we are all baby birds, clean slates awaiting the first mark. The mark is made by our idols, the first images of "cool" that imprint themselves on our consciousness. Whether we realize it or not we're stuck with the idea of "cool" we form from a very young age, and although we can always change and grow and learn new things, those first pieces of cool wedge themselves very deeply into our nascent personas.

Cool is impossible to define in the abstract, it's simply something you know. It's relative. Consensus is a very fragile thing for cool: if something becomes too cool, it's hard for it to retain its aura. Usually once someone is dead and gone it's easier for people to agree on whether or not they were "cool." And of course, when we are kids we are most likely to imprint ourselves on something obvious and extremely popular - there's nothing at all wrong with that. Some people grow out of their cool, some people keep it with them forever. If it's cool for you, no one is going to be able to change your mind. It's never cool to judge.

Identity is pliable, especially for the young. Actors or musicians or artists or athletes who project an aura of cool that appeals to the young remain cool for a long time. When the fans grow up they carry the influence of their idols into adulthood. As we grow older the possibilities for our own lives shrink: every decision we make closes off possibilities. By our mid-twenties we usually are exactly who we will be, with maybe a little wiggle room on either side. We still look to our idols to inform us, and as we grow older the fantasy of a permeable identity becomes the most appealing and transgressive fantasy of them all.

When I was young, really young, I wanted to be a rock star, because everyone did. I wanted to be an astronaut or a scientist and all those other things that seem glamorous to little kids who have no real conception of what those professions actually entail. My parents still have a class newsletter from first grade where I said my favorite subject was math and I wanted to be a scientist: in reality, I would grow up to be awful at math, and could never have been a scientist under any circumstances short of a sudden extinction-level event that left me the only man on earth with working arms.

But when I got older and reached that age when we are most impressionable - when we start to peer outside our nuclear family unit, looking beyond our parents for concrete role models and behavior patterns to emulate - it wasn't a rock star or an athlete who made the biggest impression on me. It was Jack Lemmon.

This might seem odd if you don't know me.

Recently I sat down with Violet and watched Save the Tiger for the first time in a few years. She had never seen it before. When we had finished watching it she looked over at me and said something to the effect that, she really understood just why that movie would appeal to me. Extrapolating backwards, it was easy for her to see that this was a movie that I had seen when I was young that had imprinted itself on me, for whatever reason. Sometimes I talk like Jack Lemmon, apparently, without even realize it. The way he wears that shiny gray Italian suit - never has such an expensive suit looked so cheap! - slumping around early 70s LA with the weight of the entire world on his shoulders - that, to me, was cool. That's how I walk when I think no one is watching, or when I think everyone's watching.

I guess I can see why Toshiro Mifune and Steve McQueen are cool. They are cool. I'm partial to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke myself. But to me there has always been something a bit obvious in that kind of cool - a young man's cool, a lazy and dangerous cool. Lemmon, on the other hand, was never a young man - even in his earliest roles, Mr. Roberts and Some Like It Hot, for instance - he's a young man playing an old man, cranky and high-strung and always just two steps behind everyone else. He's a striver and a searcher, with anxious eyes, someone whose only real composure comes in the moment just before disaster strikes. If there was ever a real life Donald Duck - and I mean Carl Barks' classic Donald Duck, the Donald of the 1940s - it was Jack Lemmon.

Here's the secret to Jack Lemmon. Whether he was playing comedy or drama his virtues as a performer never wavered. He was always that guy in just over his head, with a touch of panic at the edges when things didn't go quite the way he planned. He's that guy in The Apartment and he's that guy in Days of Wine and Roses. He's that guy in The Odd Couple and he's that guy in The China Syndrome. It's only the context that dictates whether we're supposed to be laughing at him or crying with him. You know, like life.

Save the Tiger is one many respects an odd film. On face value, it's one of the most depressing films ever made: the movie is about a man having one of the worst days you can possibly imagine, a bad day on the heels of a string of even worse days. This is America at the height of the bad old seventies, with Vietnam not quite done, the Watergate scandal in its infancy and the recession deepening. Five minutes into the movie you're taken aback by how dark the whole thing is - every scene is another rock on Harry Stoner's back. Ten minutes in and you're ready to slit your wrists. But fifteen minutes in, you realize that it's not so bad after all - things keep getting worse for Harry, but it's not a movie about failure. It's a movie about resilience. Harry doesn't have anything left on which to hold, no secret reservoir of strength. All he has to go back to is baseball, from when he was a kid - the only real baseball. Every time he stops long enough to gather his thoughts he goes back to the beaches of Enzio and the bloodiest days of the war. The onslaught of awfulness never subsides, never wavers. Literally everything Harry encounters is broken: if he's not arranging a prostitute for a rich buyer, that buyer is dying of a heart attack because the hooker was too intense. He can't even walk down the street without being assaulted by news of mass extinctions.

After a while, though, it gets funny, and you begin to see just how Harry's resilience actually works: it's not the strength to triumph, it's the strength to endure. As I said, by about the fifteen minute mark you realize you're not watching a tragedy in the conventional sense, you're watching the modern-day trials of Job. It's funny because it's not happening to you except, of course, when it is. And that's when you need you sense of humor the most.

And that's what always draws me back. In our moments of greatest need we're not Bullitt and we're not Sanjuro, we're just Harry Stoner. Sometimes all we can hope for is a walk along the beach at dawn - and sometimes, if we're lucky, that's all we really need.

2011-03-28T23:48:00.000-04:00

SIR

FF #1

Tucker wuz right, naturally, but Mighty God King was right, too. Even though the two reviews are saying pretty much the exact opposite of each other, both Tucker's critique and MGK's praise hit fairly near the mark. The truth is somewhere in the middle. By which I mean: it's a good comic if you like the Fantastic Four, and fairly well-constructed as well, but hardly perfect and in some ways a lot worse than it should be.

It's frustrating to be a Fantastic Four fan, it really is. Batman fans - people like Tucker - get tons of awful Batman stories to sift through, but the higher volume means that simply by dint of stochastic reasoning more good Batman stories will be produced. If 10% of all Batman stories are good, than the chances of their being good Batman stories on any given month with at least ten Batman comics being published is usually pretty strong. And again, the high volume means that even if only 1% of all Batman comics are great, that means there will be at least a handful of truly great Batman comics in any calender year. The same math works for Superman, Spider-Man and the X-Men (although Superman's percentage might be lower simply by virtue of the fact that no one at DC seems to have a vested interest in producing good Superman comics anymore). But if you buy into this logic - a simple extrapolation of Sturgeon's Law - characters who appear at a far lower frequency than Batman or Spider-Man have a much harder road to hoe. If only 10% of all Fantastic Four stories are worth reading, and there are only twelve issues of Fantastic Four printed in a calender year, how many of those comics are worth reading? The math is not encouraging.

Because - as I discussed briefly in the context of eulogizing Dwayne McDuffie - Fantastic Four has always been the symbolic flagship of Marvel's fleet, the book has traditionally attracted top-tier creators even though it has rarely sold in numbers directly proportional to this esteem. Looking back over the last twenty five years of Fantastic Four, you see a murderers row of top-shelf mainstream creators - Byrne, Simonson, Jim Lee, Jeph Loeb and Carlos Pacheco, Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo, JMS, McDuffie, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. Even those creators who were considered either subpar or past their prime - I'm thinking the underrated DeFalco & Ryan run, and Chris Claremont's underwhelming run - still considered themselves to be "standing on the shoulders of giants" in a way that you can't quite argue for any other long-running franchise. New creative teams on Fantastic Four are a Big Deal. Just because it's a hard book to get right - and an even harder book to make a consistent commercial success - doesn't mean that some of the biggest names in comics haven't spent decades trying.

So maybe the math on Sturgeon's Law is skewed the other way for Fantastic Four? I would argue - and there aren't many properties in corporate comics you could make this argument for, but I'll make the exception for the House Stan & Jack Built - that the relative scarcity of Fantastic Four writing gigs, and the commensurate prestige that comes from writing the characters, actually brings out the best in most of the creators involved. Everyone loves Batman, but there are so many Batman comics produced on any given month that there's hardly any prestige left. No one gets the gig of writing Detective and talks about following in Bob Kane and Bill Finger's footsteps - or if they do, it doesn't really carry any weight.

Here we are, then, with one of Marvel's periodic attempts to pump new life into the book. It is by no means a new observation that it is simply impossible to boost readership by producing a good comic on a monthly basis and building a new readership through the accretion of word-of-mouth. FF #1 is in no way shape or form substantively different from what Fantastic Four #589 might have been. It's equally certain that FF #12 will probably once again be Fantastic Four #600. (What this tells me is that there is literally no good way to effectively build audiences for serial periodicals anymore: it seems as if emphasizing a new storyline through heavy promotion merely results in costumers choosing not to spend more money on comics but to shuffle their purchases. I think it's probable that every time they promote a new book Marvel is competing with their own long tail as much as with any "Distinguished Competition.") So, what's the deal? In choosing to push FF #1 as hard as they are, Marvel are effectively putting their weight behind the creators themselves. Jonathan Hickman is the name above the masthead, and his stories are the stories that have effectively built the head of steam that brought us to the point where a major media initiative was deemed necessary in order to expose the book to a slightly larger pool of readers than those who might otherwise have been willing to purchase Fantastic Four.

Is it good? Well, it's as good as Hickman's run to date has been, which is to say, good but . . .

For those of us who love the Fantastic Four, it's a pleasure to see the characters written well. Hickman knows how these characters think and act, knows how they interact as a family, and is very much intent on putting the dynamics of these familial relations front and center. I've been reading Fantastic Four for a good long time, and I've suffered through things like battling Kraven the Hunter over a Lockjaw puppy in the sweres beneath the Baxter Building and Reed Richards defending the HUAC, so I appreciate the fact that Hickman cares enough about the book to let the characters' actions dictate the plot, and not vice versa. (How Hickman plans to rationalize this issue's last-page reveal is another matter - as has been pointed out, accepting the gentleman in question as a "family" member will be significantly more of a stretch than Spider-Man.) I like the what is happening generally: I've liked Hickman's run since those first three truly cosmic issues with the "Council of Cross-Time Reeds" and the Celestials taking on the Star Brand. That's good stuff, and even if subsequent issues haven't been anywhere near as high-stakes, we have every indication that Hickman is building gradually towards something very big indeed.

The problem is that the book, as presented, is just terribly, terribly slow. While, as I said ,I'm generally a fan of what actually happens in this book, precious little actually happens. We don't hear as many complaints about "decompression" as we used to, and I think the reason why has as much to do with readers' adjusted expectations as it does to any increase in storytelling density on the part of the creators and editorial. (I think both factors are probably at work across the industry, but a grossly decompressed storyline - such as Fraction's Thor - still sticks out like a sore thumb.) This comic could easily have done with a significant increase in plot, or even just more character interaction - there's a lot of big silent panels, and splash-pages, and quiet looks, and all sorts of stuff that might add up to good "Merchant-Ivory"-type superhero storytelling, but precious little in the way of energy and verve. There's a fine line between respectful and stolid, and I hate to say that Hickman's obvious reverence for the characters risks throwing the balance of his storytelling towards the latter, but it's hard to argue with Tucker's rationale when he says:

Underneath bland covers that answer the brain tickler of what it would look like if an Alex Ross obsessive finished a John Cassady convention sketch (hideous n' sickly), you'll find what seems to be the past and future Hickman ideal: multiple splash pages of mid-to-high end website design, which is what settles for art amongst those whose dvd collection ranges from Shaun of the Dead to Spaced.

I have more affection for these characters and ideas than Tucker does, I think it's fair to say, but I share his frustration that such a well-meaning comic - and a comic which, at least from my perspective, nevertheless possesses much to recommend it - is still quite damningly imperfect. The characters are right-on, the plot whirs smoothly, the big moments are well-balanced with the small moments and all those other things that traditionally stand for "quality" in mainstream comics - but it still can't help but seem a bit boring.

And it hurts me to say that, because there aren't many fans who are more invested in the perpetual hope of a truly great Fantastic Four run than myself. The earliest issues with Dale Eaglesham, were - as I said - great, but the art since then has been perfectly competent and otherwise completely unexceptional. Steve Epting is capable of doing great work but his strengths are perhaps not those of an artist best suited to the Fantastic Four. The visual remit here seems to be blandness for the sake of blandness. This is not good news in a book that desperately needs to sing.

Is Hickman's respect - respect for the characters, respect for the book, respect for the fans - just another kind of pandering? Because I get the respect: I recognize it and appreciate it. But respect shouldn't be the destination, it should be the launchpad. It's where you go that matters. So far the book is perfectly "good," but Hickman so far seems unwilling or unable to turn the corner and really run with the ideas he's very painstakingly established. His writing, at least on this book, is extremely methodical. He needs some jazz. So far, as much as it pains me to say it, we're stuck with the superhero comics equivalent of Wynton Marsalis: accomplished craftsmanship, obviously a very respectful approach to the source material . . . but man, this is supposed to be fun, not a damn mausoleum. You don't have to top the King but you at least have to try to top yourself. Go Kirby or go home, dog.

2011-03-21T00:55:00.002-04:00

SIR

Fear Itself: Book of the Skull

I can't shake the notion that the reason we're being blessed with the company of an event book called Fear Itself is very intimately related to the fact that periodical comics sales have cratered fairly spectacularly in the last year or so. Which is to say: Marvel was always going to do another event, but it seems as if this particular event might have been rushed through the incubator with less foresight than might otherwise have been exercised. I have nothing to go on here other than my own multiple decades' experience as a trainspotter for these kinds of publishing events, so take of that what you will, but something seems decidedly perfunctory.

You can make a very good and cogent argument that every event since Avengers: Disassembled back in 2004 has led in a more-or-less coherent fashion to the following event, and that for those readers heavily invested in following the large superhero event cycles there was more than a small amount of foresight attached to the macrostructure of successive events. If the individual stories themselves - Disassembled, House of M, Civil War, Secret Invasion, Siege, as well as the unifying interregnum "Initiative," "Dark Reign," and "Heroic Age" events - were sometimes less than satisfying in and of themselves than as pieces of a larger puzzle, that is only to be expected, since each story carried the responsibility of feeding into the next with clockwork precision. "Event fatigue" is easy to say but hard to prove: how do you decide whether or not fans are sick of events if they still continue to buy the events? Well, here's a way: stop doing events and see if sales stabilize across the line. If they don't, then the data can be interpreted to say that fans really do prefer events despite their hassles for the simple reason that people like big, loud, "important" stories when they've been trained for almost a decade to regard anything that falls outside the imprimatur of an event as small, quiet and "unimportant."

All the events I mentioned earlier "mattered" because they all fed one into the other in a very clear and coherent matter. Any fan - even a casual fan - could read those events in succession and feel as if they were reading single chapters in a much larger story. This is, on the face of it, an extraordinary thing: even the most well-coordinated events of previous years and cycles were confined to their own calendar year. Inferno did not lead into Acts of Vengeance which in turn had absolutely nothing to do with Infinity Gauntlet. (Infinity Gauntlet itself spawned two direct sequels but they were nowhere near as all-encompassing in scope and execution as any of Marvel's 00's crossovers.) The closest thing I can compare this current series to is the state of the X-books in the mid 90s, but even there the feeding mechanism was less conscious structure than institutional momentum. (This momentum ultimately destroyed itself in the form of Onslaught.) Marvel has devoted the last eight years to banking on the long memory of habitual comics fans. "Fear Itself" - at least from the outset - does not appear to have any kind of overt connection to the previous half-dozen events. Whether or not the fans will remain invested - when even Secret Invasion and Siege, which were direct sequels of earlier events, were themselves less successful than Civil War - remains to be seen.

The other way the data can be interpreted is that in the middle of an excruciatingly protracted period of economic uncertainty, $3 or $4 a pop for 5-10 min of leisure reading really is not a very wise transaction. if this is in fact the case, we will see the main Fear Itself series (and Flashpoint too) and its most essential tie-ins sell well while the midlist withers on the vine - because if people only have, say, $30 to spend on comics where they used to have $60 or $90, they'll purchase what they feel they need to purchase and leave the rest behind. Marvel gets the money either way, but I imagine if the end result of Fear Itself is not some kind of line-wide sales bump, they'll be sorely disappointed. If the downturn in sales is the result of larger macroeconomic forces, it is almost certain that any sales bump will be confined to the Top 20 or 30 of the sales chart while the bottom half of the list is decimated due to cannibalized sales. I'm sure Marvel would be happy if those sales were cannibalized from DC (and vice versa), but we shall see. The most likely result is simply a wash, with the end result being more creators losing their jobs because the companies are able to support fewer and fewer mid-list titles.

All of which is to say, this is the long-awaited prologue to the next year or so of Marvel's mainline publishing initiative. And the result is . . . well, hunh. That's what we're going with, then? The Red Skull found a spell in 1944 that enabled him to summon a mysterious Viking war hammer but he didn't know how to use it, so the weapon (and the spell that summoned it) sat unused for sixty-five years until Sin - the Red Skull's annoying sociopath of a daughter - decided to go leafing through dear old Dad's back pages. On the face of it, and given what else we know so far - that we will see the return of Norse gods who predate Odin and Asgard and whose actions send the world into spiraling chaos - that does not seem so promising. I live to be proven wrong, of course, but if this first chapter was intended to elicit excitement on my part, it rather succeeded in accomplishing the opposite effect. Even though the creative team is quote-unquote "top shelf" - Ed Brubaker and Scott Eaton - the result reads less like an essential chapter in a massive epic than one of those sad one-shots they squirt out at random intervals whenever a character has a movie coming out. This feels perfunctory, as if the people involved were sleepwalking. And do I detect the faint odor of flop sweat?

Captain America" First Vengeance

This, on the other hand, is "one of those sad one-shots they squirt out at random intervals whenever a character has a movie coming out" - or rather, that should read "one of those sad eight-part digital e-comics they squirt out at random intervals whenever a character has a movie coming out." This comic took about two minutes to read - a fact that is made only slightly less damning given that the book is thirteen pages long. I have to wonder whether the paucity of story is a conscious effort to format a story for the iPad - something brisk, without a lot of small word bubbles and story detail to be obscured on a tablet screen. All I can say is that if you own an iPad and this is your first exposure to Captain America, there's not a lot here to bring you back for seconds. That's a shame, van Lente is usually a lot better than this.

Uncanny X-Force 5.1

Seemingly out of nowhere, Uncanny X-Force has surprised a lot of people by being quite good. The reason why this series impressed so many people can be summed up in the very simple observation that Rick Remender knows who his characters are and how they should be written. The cast is small, only five heroes - Wolverine, Deadpool, Fantomex, Psylocke and Angel - and the size allows each team member the room to breathe and speak without being crowded out by the sheer mass of superfluous characters who clog most of the X-books. Sometimes, for long-term readers, it really is something as simple as letting the characters act like themselves.

This is simple, Writing 101: every character in a story should have something to do or he or she should not be in a story. I've been rereading some old Levitz / GIffen Legion lately and its remarkable how well the book reads as a direct result of the creators following this simple rule. It's not as if every character has to appear in every issue, but every time a character shows up on panel he or she should have something to do, something to think, a goal or a purpose. Levitz and GIffen had to work pretty damn hard to keep the book humming with so many characters, and the reason why the main X-Books have failed pretty spectacularly for these past few years is easily diagnosed by anyone with the patience to read back and see how team books like these should be written. The larger the cast, the harder it is to keep narrative focus; when in doubt, pare it down. Uncanny X-Men is an illegible mess because - for all the characters who are supposedly cast members - almost none of them get any significant panel-time and those that do are often reduced to reciting rote catch-phrases, the comics equivalent of "hey, rtemember me? I'm still here, waiting to be killed off-panel at some point." Since that's the direction they've set out for themselves in the flagship, the only room for real development is in satellite titles like this. The small cast and careful mixture of characters - two popular, overexposed heavy-hitters (Wolverine and Deadpool), two long-neglected veterans (Angel and Psylocke) and one fairly recent cipher (Fantomex) - enables the creators a great deal of freedom in crafting stories that actually utilize all the characters at their disposal.

This is another good issue, and a special treat for longtime fans. I've always had a soft-spot for the Reavers - they were the main villains through one of my favorite runs, the mid 250s of Uncanny when Claremont tore the team apart and killed half the cast. They were dangerous then but they haven't really done much of anything since then - I recall that they appeared in Claremont's X-Treme but that's about all. They're good villains of the mustache-twirling variety, and they present a nice tactical challenge for a clever writer like Rick Remender. I have to question one bit of errata towards the end of the book - how exactly is Psylocke able to make herself invisible from detection on Utopia? She's nowhere near as powerful a telepath as Emma Frost, so I'm curious as to how she's able to do what she does. That's a quibble, though, and might have as much to do with confusing Psylocke's powers as anything else. (Does it go back to the Australia-era X-Men being invisible to machines?) Uncanny X-Force isn't going to be winning any Eisners, but for those of us who like the occasional old-school character-driven action book, it can't be beat.

2011-03-17T01:38:00.003-04:00

Great Moments In Irish History

(Idea courtesy of Violet.)

2011-03-16T04:27:00.003-04:00

One of the Beautiful People

I've been trying to avoid sitting down and writing out my thoughts on The Social Network since I finally saw the film a few weeks ago. It was not something that I felt a driving urge to sit down and write about in and of itself - spoiler alert, I didn't think it was very good. At all. The fact that so many people did like, and turned the film into the year's critical darling cause célèbre, is somewhat - no, scratch that - is very mystifying, and therefore fascinating to me. It was by any reasonable stretch of the imagination a deeply mediocre film, and yet it received almost universal praise. So much so that the praise itself became a kind of marketing gimmick:

I put that image plenty big so you could make out the plaudits, if you haven't already seen the DVD box before. Notice how all these great critical notes are stacked on top of each other like status updates on a Facebook wall? Wow, is that clever or what?

Watching the film, though, the thought that kept recurring to me was, what the hell happened to David Fincher?

Fincher used to be a fantastic filmmaker, full stop. There's a reason why Se7en and Fight Club became decade-defining cult classics. Both of these films profited from lavish attention in the early days of the DVD format - if you were around back then and buying movies, you will also remember a time when the super-deluxe two-disc sets for both movies were pretty much the gold standard of the then-young format. Everyone had them on their shelves back in the 2000s. I still regret that my ex-wife got the Fincher DVDs in the split. (She loved Se7en to distraction.) They are good films that hold up well despite the kind of lavish cult attention that would have wilted a lesser movie.

In the same period Fincher also produced the profoundly underrated Alien 3 - one of the grimiest sci-fi movies ever - and The Game. Situated between Se7en and Fight Club, The Game has been almost completely forgotten, despite it being every bit as good a film as the other two. The problem, perhaps, is that The Game isn't particularly a young man's movie - it's a surreal adventure thriller, yes, but the protagonist (Michael Douglas) is clearly on the wrong side of middle age and the overriding themes of the film are those of maturity and aging. Fight Club is about youth in revolt and rebellion and all that good stuff, but The Game is about growing old. Not perhaps the stuff that taps into the frat-boy zeitgeist in the same way as "I want you to hit me as hard as you can!" but it's a great film nonetheless.

So what happened to the David Fincher who made all these delightfully off-kilter latter-day grindhouse classics? He grew up and decided he wanted to win an Oscar. Is that flip? I don't know: Benjamin Button was such an unabashedly awful and cynical film that the bad taste has lingered in my mouth ever since. Far be it from me to impute the artistic motivations of a grand artiste, but . . . there's a certain type of film a filmmaker makes when said filmmaker wants to start winning awards, and Benjamin Button is definitely that kind of film. There's a stereotype of Academy voters as either firebrand liberals or fainthearted septuagenarians - it doesn't seem to me that the two images are at all mutually contradictory. People who win Oscars learn how to pander to this audience: the Weinstein Brothers have built their careers on manufacturing "prestigious" "issue" films that pander to awards voters like curvy brunettes pander to Eliot Spitzer.

It's not even that Oscars are even political - invariably, the films that win awards are the films that figure out the most ingenious way to pander to their intended audiences. Crash won over Brokeback Mountain because the voters were chickenshit, yes, but the fact that the film that won was itself a self-righteous paean to white-liberal guilt and "tolerance" is no small irony. Yeah, the Academy Awards are the biggest joke on the planet to anyone with half a brain, but if you work in Hollywood you still lust after the damn things with a fiery passion. And you don't win an award for doing the "best" anything, elsewise the last decade would have seen Werner Herzog, Fatih Akin and Pixar trading Best Picture like a relay baton. You win it by convincing all your peers in your field to vote for you, and you do not always do that by being a technical virtuoso or shocking visionary - you sometimes win by showing your peers the most anodyne and unobjectionable vision of their profession possible.

Fun fact - between then, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Akira Kurosawa won precisely 0 - zero - Best Director statues. (A few of these men received other awards, but no Best Director statue.) No one wants to be the guy winning the Honorary Lifetime Achievement when they're 85 - AKA, We Fucked Up When You Were Actually Doing Good Work And Voted For The Fucking Sting Oops Our Bad So Here's A Consolation Prize. And although it's better than nothing, no one wants to be Martin Scorcese, accepting the award finally for a very good but by no means great cop drama when, you know, Raging Bull lost to Ordinary People. So fuck doing anything interesting: let's just go balls-deep into creative bankruptcy and make a movie where Brad Pitt turns into an old man Forrest Gump - and hey, we're still gonna lose to some feel-good dalitsploitation flick directed by the guy who did Trainspotting. I can just imagine Fincher's thought process: Jesus, I sold every ounce of credibility I had to make the most meretricious piece of octogenarian-fellating three-hanky Forrest Gump slash English Patient tripe ever conceived - and stepped over the rotting gin-soaked corpse of a canonical American author in the process - and I couldn't even win a fucking Golden Globe for my trouble?

But now that he has crossed the threshold from interesting "juvenilia" into "serious" filmmaker, he is an Important Artist Who Can Say Important Things About Our Lives And TImes. Do you see where I'm going with this? Let's pick a story, any story, it doesn't even matter if it's dramaturgically interesting, or if we have to bend over backwards to try and convince the audience that there is any drama whatsoever in the unfolding of a slow-motion car wreck of dueling sociopathies - let's gussy it up as An American Tragedy and make sure the audience - those who care - get the serious Citizen Kane vibe. Because, you know, blowing the lid off Facebook is totally just like sticking it to WIlliam Randolph Hearst.

There just isn't anything interesting at the heart of The Social Network. It is as empty as the era that spawned it - if by that you mean it "defines the dark irony of the past decade" then yes, I'll sign onto that sentiment, Mr. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone. It is "darkly ironic" in its inescapable vapidity. We're supposed to buy Mark Zuckerberg as not just Charles Foster Kane but Jay Gatsby, too. In our degraded modern lexicon, the image of Zuckerberg feverishly refreshing his Facebook page, trying to see if his ex-girlfriend has "friended" him, is the solitary green light flashing across the expanse of Long Island Sound. But he'll be waiting forever, because she doesn't "friend" him! Oh wow!

Sick burn, dawg!

Actually, that's probably the best part of the movie - and I mean that with complete sincerity. The very last scene, with Zuckerberg refreshing his Facebook page while the Beatles' great, underrated deep cut "Baby, You're A Rich Man" kicks in on the speakers, that's a great scene. (An aside: is it even possible for the Beatles to have deep cuts? That's always been one of my very favorite Beatles tunes, because it's nasty and funky, two modes with which the Beatles sometimes struggled.) It's a great moment because it encapsulates the film in one perfect set-piece: the whole thing is about stupid little shits boiling with class anxiety who get rich and become sociopaths. And you're nodding your head and saying, OK, yeah, that's the movie, what's the problem? The problem is that I just spent two hours watching a movie devoted to the premise that Capitalism Breeds Sociopaths, which is A) something I already knew and B) watching slimy little shits stab each other in the back is hardly the stuff great tragedy. I didn't find in Fincher & Sorkin's fictionalized Zuckerberg any sort of great figure or fascinating enigma - just an absolute shit-heel whose behavior, as presented, belongs somewhere along the autism spectrum. The great epic story of our times is just no story at all, really - no great tragedy, unless you mean the tragedy of our times that these people are given by our contemporary neo-liberal capitalistic regime the means to fling shit at each other to their hearts' content while consuming a disproportionate percentage of our national consciousness in the process.

It's not just that the story itself is poor - and really, the movie works about as well as you might expect a popular business history book to read on screen - but that the story is actively insulting. I don't want to know these people, or to spend even two hours in a darkened theater with these people. While I realize perfectly well that we're not exactly supposed to "identify" with Zuckerberg, I find the fact that the center of this multi-billion dollar world-changing industry is a complete cipher - distinguished only for his relentless devotion to pissant behavior - is no great revelatory irony, just depressing. Really fucking depressing. Are we supposed to feel "good" that one of the richest men alive is a socially retarded jerk? At the end of the day he's still a billionaire and I still have unpaid credit card bills. Unless the film ends with Slajoj Žižek bursting into the Facebook offices and blowing Zuckerberg's head off with an AK-47, it's safe to say that no ending the film can provide will ever be at all satisfying for us lowly teeming billions without the privilege of an Ivy League education as a launchpad to enact our fantasies of petit-bourgeois ressentiment.

Now, it's not as if The Social Network doesn't put a number of ideas on the table - I think I've touched bases on a number of interesting concepts that the filmmakers were obviously intended to lay out in the film. It does try. But just because there are ideas in the movie doesn't mean that these ideas are conveyed well or that the ideas themselves couldn't be more effectively communicated by other means. Sorkin's script is extremely methodical, by which I mean positively schematic. Sorkin seems like the kind of writer who plots everything out with Post-It notes, hitting every dramatic beat and thematic nudge with absolute precision, moving his little yellow sticky pads around to suit the narrative's expertly crafted dialogic rhythm. Paired with Fincher's sluggish, rote directing, the result is a bit like taking a batch of quaalude brownies, only - at least! - without the possibility of date rape.

So what happened to the man who made Fight Club and The Game? Is he dead now? One of the reasons The Social Network was such a crushing disappointment for me was that it was boring. There was no life in the damn thing - all these great ideas, all these angry notions running through my head as the movie played, and I just felt a crushing sense of disappoint that the man who put Gwyneth Paltrow's head in a cardboard box couldn't jazz it up even just a little bit. Sorkin's script hums along with the precision of a Swiss watch but any movie whose narrative backbone consists of a legal deposition is by definition going to have serious pacing problems. If Benjamin Button was a naked stab at awards show glory, The Social Network was an attempt to claim the mantle of "relevancy" - another great strategy for winning lots of awards. It just so happens that the subject matter he decided upon for his big "relevant" picture is one that the bulk of Academy voters probably don't even understand. (Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer sure didn't.) Too bad. I hope your next film makes a lot of money since you've been slumming with these "prestige" pictures - oh snap, I don't think that's going to be a problem.