Micrographica
by Renee French

There has always been something in Renee French's work that has discomforted me on a very profound level. I can't point to any specific thing in particular, it's more a confluence of a number of different disturbing factors at work. There are lots of creepy / strange artists in comics whose work doesn't bother me in the least. But something about French's work just disturbs me. Perhaps it's the level of hyper-detailed, gently pencil-etched reality married to the strange, unpalatable subject matter - like a Edward Gorey as interpreted by Barry Windsor-Smith. Unclean.



To this day I've got a copy of The Soap Lady on my shelf that remains only partially read, because I can't quite seem to muster up the courage to make it through the whole thing. It's not scary as such, or particularly horrifying or gory or anything like that - I can take all of those things. There's something particularly effective about French's work because it seems so nice and wholesome on the surface. And then you get down to the faceless monsters and weird soap creatures. The dichotomy is killer.



The devil is in the details. Micrographica is a conscious attempt on French's part to move past the world of detail-oriented hyper-real imagery and into the realm of a more "pure" cartooning - focusing simply on figures and forms interacting on the plane of the paper. To that end, every drawing in this book (except for a few studies at the end) were originally illustrated at the mind-boggling size of one-centimeter square. Given that, the amount of detail she does manage to fit into these panels is mind boggling - if she uses pen-nibs this small for everything she does, she will probably go blind before long. (Think of poor Bernie Wrightson and his quixotic Frankenstein portfolio!)



The story is simple, about as simple as you'd expect given the format limitations: a handful of tiny hairless rats are wandering around a field looking for food. They find some shit, a sandwich, a dead guy, and more shit, roughly in that order. They talk trash with each other as they do so.



I liked the book even if it was a quick read. I think something like this is far more interesting as a formal experiment than as a work in and of itself - although I was amused by the rats' antics, the whimsical plot points seemed more perfunctory than finely wrought. The narrative was initially posted online as it was completed, but I have no idea how it could possibly have read in serialized form. This is fun stuff, but slight.



The most interesting aspect of Micrographica will be whether or not this consciously-limiting experiment will have any effect on French's future work. I think a detail-oriented storyteller like herself can only benefit from flexing her muscles in such a fashion. Which is not to say she should abandon her customary style anytime soon. The fact is that I find her work absolutely repulsive, but I can't hold that against her because it is supposed to be repulsive. I hope she continues finding new ways to be repulsive for a long time to come, and maybe her and Al Columbia can have a big Kaiju battle in downtown Portland over who gets to be the creepiest motherfucker of them all.

Um, what?

Against My Better Judgement

I haven't been buying a lot of CDs lately for obvious reasons, but I had a little bit of extra change in my pocket today so I decided to succumb to temptation and buy myself a record. I have to admit that buying CDs is probably my biggest vice, having supplanted comic books a long time ago (I buy many books as well, but it's not quite the same thing in terms of volume and consumption). Going into the CD store for the first time in quite a while and limiting myself to just one purchase was a difficult proposition, but after considerable deliberation I decided upon the recently released original soundtrack disc accompanying Todd Haynes' new Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There. I felt like a bit of a lazy post-boomer nostalgia fetishist, but the lineup of musicians involved was simply too much to resist, even with the almost certain knowledge that it was bound to disappoint at least as much as it would thrill. That is after all the nature of these kinds of all star-studded tribute compilations.

But still, even knowing better as I do, I still defy any reader out there to easily turn away from any compilation promising new music from a cast of characters as wide and varied as Sonic Youth, Steven Malkmus, Cat Power, Yo La Tengo, Tom Verlaine, Jeff Tweedy . . . Los Lobos, Willie Nelson, Richie Havens, Ramblin' Jack Elliott . . . man, you see the problem? There are 34 tracks spread across two CDs, and only a couple obvious clunkers evident from the label -- who invited Jack Johnson? But it's hard even to hate Johnson when he's wedged between Charlotte Gainsbourg and Yo La Tengo.

As I mentioned these type of tribute discs are always disappointing in one way or another, even though it's a rare tribute that doesn't manage at least a few notable interpretations. This set succeeds partly by overwhelming the listener with sheer mass: did I mention there are 34 tracks? Some disappoint, some thrill, some are neither here nor there, and some sound exactly as you would expect them to. As much as I hate to recommend such an obviously flawed set, the fact is that despite its flaws it's still pretty damn neat.

First of all, the disc gets all a lot of points for going out of its way to dig deep into the Dylan catalog, deeper than any comparable sets have ever ventured in the past. Sure, all the obvious suspects can be found here, and in many cases their ubiquity serves to stymie even the best intentions of their interpreters. I don't particularly hate Eddie Vedder, and I even have a few Pearl Jam albums (although, truth be told, I don't listen to them very often), but could there be anything more obvious than Vedder singing "All Along the Watchtower"? They don't even really make a pretense of trying to slip in the new life into this overplayed FM dinosaur rock staple, hewing fairly closely to Jimi Hendrix's arrangement (but then, even Dylan has played Hendrix's arrangement). Likewise, if I never hear another cover of "The Times They Are A Changin'" it will probably be too soon, likewise "Knocking On Heaven's Door". I'd be willing to bet even money that even Dylan regrets writing these songs at this point. But, these are probably unavoidable lapses (and, to be fair, Antony & The Johnsons' reading of "Knocking On Heaven's Door" is unlike any I've heard before). It's hard to be mad at a set that digs as deep as Empire Burlesque ("Dark Eyes", by Iron & Wine) and Saved ("Pressing On", performed by X's John Doe). A number of lesser-known tracks from Biograph and the first installment of The Bootleg Series -- not to mention the legendary Basement Tapes -- appear throughout. I consider myself a fairly well-versed Dylan listener, yet I will readily admit that there were quite a few surprises on here for me. (Not all of them good, but your mileage may vary.) The catalog is voluminous enough that they could release albums like this at a fair clip and not come close to tapping the well of original Dylan compositions for many, many years.

There are a few tracks off of John Wesley Harding, probably my least favorite Dylan album from the classic. Nothing much off Nashville Skyline. The biggest deficiency would have to be the lack of material from Dylan's late period renaissance -- the trilogy of excellent albums he's recorded the last decade, beginning with 1997's Time Out Of Mind. Tom Verlaine, of all people, tackles "Cold Irons Bound", but that's it (if ever a track was made for a Tom Waits cover, it that one -- but Waits is MIA). I haven't seen the movie yet so I don't know how much if at all these interpretations are a part of the film, and I don't know whether the artists in question had any choice as to what songs they would be interpreting. Some of the choices are inspired, and a few of them seemed to be the type of dead-on readings that could only have been inspired by a deep love of the sometimes very obscure source material -- but that's just a guess.

Some of them also fall flat. Far be it from me to gainsay Richie Havens, but he just doesn't know what the hell to do with "Tombstone Blues". For all I know it may be his all-time favorite Bob Dylan song, but the fact that he can sing a line like "The sun's not yellow, / It's chicken" with a resolutely soulful straight face tells me that he has absolutely no business singing it in the first place. Karen O's reading of "Highway 61 Revisited" really doesn't do anything but remind the listener of how good PJ Harvey's interpretation of that same song is -- and I like Karen O, but it's one of s few tracks that show a dogged lack of imagination on the part of the interpreters. Karen O, as well as Vedder, Verlaine and Stephen Malkmus, are backed by an All-Star pickup-group called the Million-Dollar Bashers. The fact that this group is composed of the likes of John Medeski, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and Tom Verlaine should not serve to distract you from the fact that it's still essentially a karaoke band. Sometimes that works, as on Malkmus' performance of "Ballad of a Thin Man", which does a pretty good job of turning Dylan's warped narrative into the best late-era Pavement B-side you've never heard. Malkmus himself is a distinctive enough performer that you don't really mind the band's overly literal arrangements: he'd still sound like Stephen Malkmus if he were backing the JB's or singing a track for the Chemical Brothers. But Vedder just comes off as lazy -- a grunge Sinatra in all his insouciance -- and Karen O is overwhelmed by her material, rudderless in comparatively calm seas.

Still, there's more than enough to love here. Yo La Tengo's version of "Fourth Time Around" is quite simply perfect. Cat Power seems to be having so much fun with "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" the you easily forgive the familiar arrangement. Jeff Tweedy delivers a characteristically melancholic reading of "Simple Twist of Fate". Willie Nelson singing "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)" may be almost as obvious as Vedder singing "All Along the Watchtower", but that doesn't make it any less satisfying.

If I were king, I think I would probably put a ban on any kind of encomium for living artists until at least 50 years after their death. People have been praising Bob Dylan for over 40 years now and as a result the man is now the embodiment of insufferability. I like Bob Dylan, and I even quite like his later-era albums, but gnomic ponderousness is a particularly unflattering mood for any man to adopt. I blame all the rock journalists who have been calling him a genius since 1963. Better that he should have lived a long and productive life in relative obscurity then we should be made to suffer through these aggrandizing monuments to boomer self-importance, existing as they often do outside any continuum of genuine aesthetic consideration. Still, for all that this is still a pretty irresistible package, and if we must have bloated celebrity tributes to living artists who hardly need to have their heads in deflated any more than they already are, I guess this is as good a model is any to follow.

Well, That's Pretty Impressive

As I rule I have no use whatsoever for Halloween. I didn't care for it particularly as a kid, see no use for it as an adult ,and have even less patience for grown adults who do. My surliness in this matter should come as a surprise to no one.

But if the holiday involved more people walking around dressed like this . . . well, I would probably change my tune.



Remember, folks, the gentleman's name is Blackagar Boltagon.

Also, who knew that Apocalypse was such an oenophile?



I've always liked Apocalypse, or rather, the idea behind Apocalypse, given how few good stories he's been in. It's rather surprising in hindsight that he didn't make it into Morrison's X-Men run, but maybe his pedigree was too recent to be of interest, considering that Morrison's X-Men stories were more concerned with providing riffs on "classic" X-Men scenarios than dealing with a great deal of the muck and mire of post-Claremont X-shenanigans.

The great tragedy of Apocalypse (well, besides the raft of bad stories written about him), is that he's one of those characters whose definitive story has already been written. There's not a lot you can do with him after The Age of Apocalypse. Kirby never properly "finished" the Fourth World, so you can say that Darkseid is still a fairly open-ended character -- Morrison came close with "Rock of Ages", but that wasn't so much a Darkseid story as a, well, everything and the kitchen sink, with Darkseid's alternate-future Earth being but one component. Lee & Kirby did some fantastic, defining Dr. Doom stories, but they also left room for future interpretations.

However, The Age of Apocalypse said pretty much everything you can say on the subject. It was pretty good, for super-decadent 90s post-Image action-driven corporate comics (talk about your qualifying statements!), but it had the unfortunate side effect of sidelining a character who had been very methodically established over the previous decade as one of the X-Men's top bad guys, just a notch below Magneto and the Sentinels. Kind of like Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet -- what do you do with a character like that after you take him to his zenith? Apocalypse showed up a couple of years back, if I recall, after lying low a long time in the aftermath of the late-90s clusterfuck that was "The Twelve". ("The Twelve" was a storyline so bad it somehow managed to encompass Wolverine being impersonated by a Skrull, Apocalypse being revealed to be a wizened old man in a giant puffy Apocalypse suit, and then having Apocalypse and Cyclops merged into one person. Or something.)

Whatever Happened to Hank McCoy?



I got a simple question today. It's been bugging me for a little bit now, and I haven't really been able to find a satisfactory answer. I suspect there is no satisfactory answer, but merely a moderately depressing and dispiriting answer.

OK, to wit: whatever happened to the Beast?

We know who the Beast is: he's an X-Man who also spent a fairly long stint on the Avengers in the 70s. He's one of the first five X-Men, one of the few characters in the franchise to really feel the strong influence of Lee & Kirby, considering how few X-Men stories the two men actually created. Even given the gray / blue fur he received in the early 70s (a rare example of a significant cosmetic upgrade that actually stuck), he was still talking like Stan Lee and hitting people with his giant feet. He was a fan favorite, and that's probably why he stayed a significant player in the Marvel Universe when the other four original X-Men were relegated to support status in their own book, following the invention of the "All-New, All-Different" team.

He was a fun character. He used to jump around and hit people. A splendid time was guaranteed for all.



And then, after a lengthy tenure with the Avengers and a not-so-lengthy tenure with the New Defenders, he got shuffled back into the X-Men books for good with the invention of X-Factor, and there he's stayed ever since. And while there has still been a great deal of hitting involved, in later years the character has been seen in increasingly depressed states, usually in a lab coat muttering about science. Nowadays the Beast is more likely to be sifting through the mass graves of an ethnic cleansing than hopping around and hitting bad guys with his feet. Is there something wrong with me that I don't see the fun there?

Everyone loves the Beast. More specifically, everyone loves the Beast who appeared occasionally in the pages of Kurt Busiek's Avengers run: fun, flip and funky. The Beast who actually appears in the X-Men books is a clinically depressed recluse. It seems like there's always some kind of virus or mass contagion or something that comes along to sideline the Beast as an active participant in stories, relegating him to the role of generic Science / Doctor Guy. Whenever I flip through an X-Men comic today the mood is invariably Grim, Grim, Grim (that's been the default mood since, what, 1987?), and there's not a lot of room there for a giant blue teddy bear who talks like Stan Lee and kicks people with his giant feet.

So I ask you: why is this so? Do they think that a morose, non-functional Beast is better than a happy-go-lucky kick-happy Beast? I would posit that the latter is a demonstrably more interesting character, inasmuch as the latter is much more fun. Fun is good, yes? Or no, is fun not good? I forget how that works . . .


(Courtesy of these fine people.)