Something New! 

UPDATE! Due to popular demand I have updated to Sendspace, which seems after about two minutes to be a MUCH better file service. The link below has been changed accordingly.

In the spirit of trying new and different things, we are now embarking on another adventure in blogging, something I have been meaning to try for a while but which I haven't had the time to devote towards figuring out. Turns out that when I set about doing it, it was nowhere near as difficult or time consuming as I thought it would be - so chances are good I'll make a regular feature of it.

What is this Brave New World of blogging of which I speak? A podcast! Yes, a genuine podcast for your listening pleasure. Of course, it's not really a "podcast" in the sense of me spending a lot of time talking about this week's comics or whatever - I have little interest in doing that. I think it'll be more like a radio show, devoted solely to music and perhaps the discussion thereof. I don't know if I've ever mentioned it before, but I used to be on the radio. I was actually an honest-to-Gosh radio personality for a few years of the last decade, so this is essentially me trying to get back some of the fun of that.

Because this is still a new enterprise, it may take a little bit to figure out all the technical bugs. Keep in mind my technological illiteracy and bear accordingly.

But first, before you download, a request: call me old fashioned, but I don't like it when people scan the track listing of a mixtape before they listen. I can't stop you from doing so but I will strongly encourage you to resist the temptation to check out the coming attractions before you see the film, so to speak - let yourself be surprised, for better or for worse. The track listing is below the cut.

Here we go!

Please feel free to give me your opinions and suggestions for improvement. I had a lot of fun doing this and I think it might very well become a regularly feature.

SIR

Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal #3

What makes a man start fires?

Why is the sky blue?

What is the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning? The last thing you think of when you go to sleep?

Are you unhappy?

Do you like your life, are you comfortable with the choices you have made?

Why do you read comic books?

Do you have any other hobbies that require such a large time commitment?

Do you only read comics you enjoy, or do you regularly read comics you do not enjoy?

Do you have any children? If so, how many and how old are they?

Do your children ask you questions about the comic books you read?

Do your parents ask you questions about the comic books you read?

Do you ever ask yourself about the comic books you read?

Is it OK to read a bad comic book as long as you are clear to project an attitude of condescending superiority towards the idea of reading genre material?

What about a bad comic book that isn't "genre material"?

Do you hold bad superhero comics to a higher or lower standard than bad non-superhero books?

Have you ever read a comic book so bad it made you question your commitment to your hobby?

Have you ever felt the need to broadcast your opinions on a bad comic book?

Do you ever ask yourself why people make bad comic books?

Do you think its a question of intelligence or a question of commerce?

Is it possible for an intelligent person to make a bad comic book whose badness can be wholly blamed on editorial dictation, or does the blame for a bad comic book at some point devolve irreducibly onto the creator?

Does a bad comic book matter?

Does it mean anything beyond the fact of its own badness?

Can a particularly wretched comic book surpass the circumstances of its own badness in order to become a symbol of a larger malaise?

Do you think it's appropriate to judge all superhero comics on the basis of their level of appropriateness for a hypothetical audience of pre-teen children?

If yes, do you actually know any children who read superhero comics?

If no, do you know anyone above the mental age of twelve who would be entertained by most superhero comics?

Do you feel guilty for still reading superhero comics?

If yes, do you feel the need to periodically and ritualistically molest the open sore of your own festering guilt?

Do you think you are a more morally righteous person for castigating bad art?

Do you think anyone cares? Do you read this question as rhetorical or substantive?

If you do not feel guilty for still reading superhero comics, then why do you waste time reading bad ones?

Do you believe that people read bad comics to make themselves feel better?

Do you believe that people like to feel superior to escapism because they don't like feeling inferior to art?

Does it frustrate you that iTunes is often much less user-friendly than advertised?

Does it offend you when comic book artists either forget or are never told that certain characters are Asian?

Do you think that people of Asian descent are often ignored, either tacitly or explicitly, in American society?

Why are there so few prominent Asian-Americans in national politics?

Why are so many Asians in comic books inscrutable and ruthless martial arts masters?

Why is it OK to fuck a multinational terrorist with a body count in the millions? Would it be OK to fuck Osama bin Laden if he were a hot Asian chick and not a grody old man?

If you were Robert Smith of the Cure would you have sex with your makeup on?

Would you become upset if your lover could not get aroused if you didn't wear your makeup?

What's your favorite Cure album?

Do you think that Roy Harper listens to the Cure? Do you think his favorite Cure album would be Pornography or Head on the Door?

Have you ever suffered severe depression?

Have you ever suffered severe depression as a direct result of tragedy?

Do you believe that popular entertainment trivializes tragedy?

Do you believe that it is ethically suspect to create art that uses the Holocaust as a setting?

Do you believe that it is ethically suspect to create art that uses the terrorist attacks of September 11 as a backdrop?

Do you believe that it is wrong to create art that uses the audience's familiarity with the September 11 attacks as a trope while also displaying a seemingly blithe disregard for the actual experience of having lived through a massive terrorist attack?

What if you wrote a story wherein a super villain demolished a major American city and killed thousands of people, and yet all the characters expressed a marked emotional detachment totally unlike what millions of real people really felt during a real tragedy that persists in the living memory of anyone old enough to read these words?

Shouldn't 9/11 have made it harder, rather than easier, for superhero comics writers to casually murder thousands of civilians in order to get their villains over?

Is it odd that, in hindsight, Civil War seems positively classy in its portrayal of massive tragedy and its immediate aftermath?

Isn't it odd to structure a series explicitly around rehabilitating an oft-maligned villain, only to end said series with the grisly murder of said villain?

Is it good or bad that more comic book writers do not possess direct familiarity with narcotics use?

Don't you think, if you're going to do a story about heroin use, it might be helpful to watch Trainspotting first? Or at least listen to this? Or this? Or this?

Do you think Roy Harper is more or less hardcore for smoking heroin, as opposed to the more commonly portrayed intravenous usage?

Do you think heroin causes uncontrollable violent rage? Have you ever actually read a book describing the effects of heroin addiction?

Do you think a comic book that manages to trivialize terrorism, drug addiction and the death of children is reprehensible or hilarious?

Do you think that Roy Harper should feel bad that he can't get his penis hard in order to have sex with his mass murdering inscrutable and ruthless Asian martial arts master ex-girlfriend?

Is that the most improbably sentence I have ever written?

Do you think that a person's favorite David Bowie album says something deep about their character?

Do you think that Grant Morrison gets a free ride from fawning critics or a bad rap from philistine proles?

Do you think that certain scenes in The Rise of Arsenal are specifically intended to recall parallel scenes in Batman R.I.P.?

Did you expect to see Red Arrow screaming "Zur-En-Arrh" as he crouched in his dingy alleyway?

Do you recall that Bat Mite came to Batman whilst he was under the influence of crystal meth in much the same manner that Red Arrow's ex-pusher and dead daughter appeared whilst he was under the influence of heroin?

If Grant Morrison had written The Rise of Arsenal, would it be praised or condemned?

If a man named J.T. Krul rewrote certain scenes from Batman R.I.P. using a much less popular character, would the results be praised or condemned?

Do you think you're better than J.T. Krul because he wrote a bad comic book, or do you think he's in on the joke?

Did you know that J.T. Krul has a number of production credits on Seinfeld?

Do you find that to be an inexplicable statistic?

Do you feel bad when you see reviews devolve into ad hominem attacks on creators?

Do you believe that crass escapism deserves to be judged more harshly than unsuccessful art?

Do you believe that the distinction between escapism and art is meaningful?

If no, do you believe that people who do make such a distinction are making insupportable and condescending qualitative judgments that betray a snobbish insecurity?

If yes, do you think you possess a sure fire way to discriminate between the two categories in all cases?

Do you think that the mercenary motivation behind most or all superhero comics precludes honest creative expression within the genre?

Do you think the inability of academia to properly contextualize the implications of the previous question results in an attitude of benign condescension towards the medium on the part of even the most well-meaning academics?

How do you believe scholars of the future will judge a cultural artifact such as The Rise of Arsenal?

WIll the book be dismissed as aesthetic trash or embraced as an accurate retroactive bellwether of mainstream comics culture trends circa 2010?

Step back from the realm of the hypothetical: do you think you should judge mainstream comics culture on the basis of its worst book or its best?

Should America be judged on the basis of 300 years of slavery or the Declaration of Independence?

Does a bad comic deserve to be so relentlessly vilified, or is it merely the herd instinct in practice, the coppery smell of spilled blood inflaming the nostrils of a hungry pack of ravenous animals?

Are all the critics dogpiling on The Rise of Arsenal just lining up to take a swing at this week's whipping boy out of a sense of friendly competition with one another, in order to see who can summon the wittiest bon mots?

Is it just one big dick measuring contest between the biggest pissants on the internet?

Is there something vaguely pitiful about seeing so many grown men wet themselves with the sheer pleasure of writing mean things about a bad comic book?

Should the word "vaguely" in the previous question be changed to "extremely"?

Is it upsetting when comic book artists don't know how to differentiate the textures of flesh, leather, metal and plastic? Does it bother you when all the people look roughly plasticine?

Did you, like me, just now realize that Red Arrow is essentially a nickname for your cock? And that having a guy walk around calling himself Red Arrow in the light of day is like unironically calling yourself Big Johnson?

Has It Come To This?

For the past few months I've been working on an idea for this blog. I haven't tried it before now because the last few months have been very busy, but now that the summer is here and my schedule has opened up, I think it's time to give it a go.

There have been a lot of roundtable discussions lately, they seem to be the current hot format for "serious" discussions of comics on this here blogosphere (probably owing to the recent profusion of group blogs). I don't think I'm alone in thinking that some of these discussions - the Wilson roundtable over at Savage Critics, for instance - haven't quite lived up to their potential. It's sort of like hearing a collaboration between two of your favorite bands: in your head you expect all parties to go in swinging, give their all and come up with something truly intense, greater than the sum of its already-excellent parts . . . but in reality, the products of these types of collaborations are usually disposable, laid-back jams of the kind that are recorded on an afternoon's break from touring. No offense to any of the folks who regularly participate in these types of discussions, but I don't believe that dialogue is the best format available for this type of criticism: no one brings their A-game to pickup ball. It may be fun to shoot the shit with friends and peers, but more often than not it seems as if the resulting transcripts are just that - shit-shooting, rough drafts of ideas best developed later in solitude.

But with that said, I have been (hypocritically?) thinking for quite some time about how to incorporate more of that type of interactive discussion into this blog. I really liked the dynamics of the recent Frank Miller "roundtable" David Brothers hosted from 4th Letter: instead of a group discussion, he sent out an e-mail to writers he liked and respected and ask them to write something on the subject, as much or as little as they wanted, and in whatever format they wished. It was loose and friendly, but each writer was able to work to his or her strengths. Seeing how that worked got my mind to wondering further.

A final piece of the puzzle slid into place in recent weeks since my new commenting system went up. It may seem like a relatively small advancement, but bear in mind my absolute technical unsavvy - just being able to respond to specific posts within the comment threads seems to produce a noticeable uptick in the depth of discussion, with each individual thought given the space to elicit commentary and response of its own. Like I say, it's hardly the Next Generation in Web 2.0 Interactivity, but it's the little things that make all the difference. Also, it must be said that I really like my commenters: people who read this site and comment on a regular basis tend to do so in a thoughtful, well-reasoned and respectful manner - even if we disagree, I don't attract many trolls.

So with that said, here's what we're doing - or rather, what I will be doing and what I hope you will be joining me in doing. We're starting a Book Club - or Reading Group, whatever you want to call it. We'll come up with a snappy name later, if this works. If you're reading this you're invited to participate - read the book and think some thoughts. If you want to post something on your own site I'll link to you. If you want to respond in the comments, you'll (hopefully!) have a decent sized group of friends with whom to spark discussion. I will be posting some thoughts, but maybe in a more open-ended manner than my usual long-winded diatribes - I haven't decided. There'll be time to fine-tune as we go.

Basically, the animating idea is simple: I want to give myself a prod to talk about something more substantive than I might normally do if left to my own (very lazy) devices. I am also interested in eliciting comments and reactions from as wide a variety of bloggers and readers as possible. I want to have a good conversation, hopefully avoiding some of the pitfalls of a more informal roundtable while inviting everyone to participate as their own level of comfort or interest dictates.

So now that the ground rules are set, there's probably only one thing you're still wondering: what the heck are we actually gonna read, those of us who resolve to do this thing?

I'm glad you asked, because the answer is:



One week from today - Wednesday, June 9 - I will begin a discussion of Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito, chapters 1-7 (up to page 277 in Vertical's one-volume edition). According to Amazon, the one-volume edition is out of print. If you can't find the book in your library, it's also available in two smaller volumes. Please join me, hopefully it will be fun and not a dismal trainwreck. It's all in your hands!

Why the X-Men Are Broke



In principle, M-Day was an excellent idea: clear the table, get rid of 90% of the excess mutants clogging up the Marvel Universe, reorient the X-Books after a long spate of creative floundering. Consider for a moment just how repetitive so many of the storylines and events of the mid-to-late 90s actually were, how redundant the hundreds and hundreds of faceless cannon fodder minions and nameless conspirators lurking under every rock of the mutant world. Eliminating mutant powers from the vast majority of the world moots a large percentage of these problems. Ideally, the moment House of M finished they should have hit the ground running with a new direction, new storylines, new villains, new directions for old villains, new themes and a streamlined cast.

But that's not what happened. Instead of accepting the new status quo and moving forward, the books rebelled against the idea on the most profound level. This was perceived by some as a passive-aggressive reaction on the part of the creators to M-Day itself, an idea seemingly imposed by editorial fiat. From the moment M-Day hit, the X-Men's major goal was undoing its effects. They took to speaking of themselves as an "endangered species." The books got grimmer and more inward-looking, obsessed with picking at the threads of this one singular moment in franchise history. It's now been five full years since House of M and the books are still obsessed with the resolution of that one storyline.

When I first heard about "No More Mutants," I just assumed the mutant status quo would simply be returning to pre-1990 levels. Up through the end of Claremont's initial run, mutants were still very rare: meeting a new mutant under any circumstances was notable, and every mutant was significant in some way. After 1990 or so, however, new mutants began to show up in simply absurd quantities, often attached to any number of hopelessly generic paramilitary mutant supremacist groups or shadowy government agencies. The problem persisted throughout the subsequent decade until, during Morrison's run, he took the idea to its logical conclusion and simply posited a world wherein mutants had become a significant portion of the population. House of M took this further iteration to its logical conclusion by giving us a supposed utopia wherein the mutant plurality entirely transforms civilization. M-Day should have cut through this untenable status quo and given the creative teams more room in which to move about. In the process they could restored what had historically been one of the book's most reliable engines for conflict and story generation - the process of discovering new mutants, something that had become a particularly uninteresting idea in a world filled with literally millions of mutants. But maybe if mutants weren't quite so common, the stories could return to treating them special.

After M-Day, there was one bit of dialogue I kept waiting to see. You could have had any of the main characters say it, although maybe it would have been best coming from the Beast or Cyclops. Essentially, I kept waiting for someone, anyone, to say "you know, maybe not having so many mutants isn't a great tragedy - honestly, it was all we could do to keep ourselves from destroying the planet many times over. Maybe having the genie back in the bottle isn't such a bad idea. We're all still alive, at least, we're still human, and that's the most important thing." You get the picture: everyone became obsessed with resurrecting the mutant race, finding new hope for the species. It was all they could talk about, the only thing they could write stories about. None of the characters - not that I ever saw - ever actually articulated the idea that having less mutants wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

And this touches on the real underlying problem: the slow-motion car-crash that has been the storytelling "solution" to M-Day has gutted the books in a truly profound way. The reaction to M-Day has made them thematically unintelligible in a manner I don't think many people have yet realized.

Pop quiz: what are the X-Men about? It's simple, even the average American moviegoer knows the answer: prejudice and minority rights. It has been present since the very beginning, even back to Stan's brief tenure. The X-Men have always represented the idea that minorities are first and foremost human beings, and that specific differences can always be overcome by the appeal to larger commonalities. Furthermore, it is accepted as a given that minority communities can and should demand equal rights and representation based on these commonalities. Most thematically-linked X-Men villains were historically split between two camps: human bigots who believed that mutants were less than human and therefore deserved to be segregated or exterminated, and mutant chauvinists who believed that mutants were more than human and therefore deserved to rule or exterminate mainstream humanity*. The X-Men we situated precisely in the middle of these conflicts: mutants were neither worse nor better than humanity, they were humanity.

There was another thematic detail which has long since been abandoned which I also think was crucial to the overall shape of the series: it was for a long time established that two mutants would not necessarily breed "true" - that there was no guarantee mutants would breed more mutants any more than two normal humans who gave birth to one mutant would necessarily breed another. That maybe isn't how mutation works in the "real world" - but this isn't real genetics, either, this is a specific dormant X-gene placed in humanity's ancestors millions of years by 500-foot tall space gods and activated primarily by atmospheric radiation. It may have seemed like a small matter to have, say, Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor's child be a regular human, but it was thematically important because it reinforced the fact that these mutants really were just a part of humanity, no different than people with ginger hair or double-jointed thumbs. Of course, that was all long gone by the time you had Wolverine's kid show up with identical Wolverine powers. If mutants always breed true, then they are one step further to speciation, and if they can be legitimately called a distinctive species, then the civil rights metaphor at the heart of the franchise gets a lot harder to sustain.

But that's not how it is anymore: Cyclops 2010 talks just like Magneto 1980, or Apocalypse 1995. Mutants are a species separate from humanity, they must protect themselves from humanity, they must act to ensure their own survival at all costs. The moment the X-Men started talking like this, they obliterated the moral argument at the heart of the franchise. Reading this latest X-crossover - the supposed climax of all these post-M-Day plot threads - it becomes progressively more clear that not only are the X-Men themselves backed into a corner, but the people who write the books are as well: they need to realize that they've turned the characters from staunch integrationists into de facto separatists.

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* This obviously doesn't include thematically nominal villains like Arcade or the Limbo demons or the Brood or any of the Japanese mafia folks who've taken up space in the books over the years - but it's worth pointing out that the profusion of these non-mutant threats was a direct consequence of the fact that the books were always concerned with more than just core thematics, and pulled from a wide variety of genre tropes in order to craft an interesting long term soap-opera serial. This kind of cross-generic fecundity is good for the long-term health of any franchise: it's always good to have a strong thematic core to which to refer back, but never to the extent of making the books monotonous. Think of it this way: if every Spider-Man story were explicitly and solely about power & responsibility, then the books would be unbearably boring - Spider-Man stories can be about lots of things, even if they're all still a little bit about power & responsibility. Same with the X-Men: they're all a little bit about "protecting a world that hates and fears," but ideally the storytelling engine is versatile enough that they can be and have been about lots of other things too.

Stuff I Heard

The New Pornographers - Together

Is it time to give up on the New Pornographers? I've got a general rule of thumb when it comes to these things: one off album can be a fluke, two bad albums is a trend. Challengers was somnolent and portentous, this is slightly more spritely but still difficult.

Normally, I'm all for bands changing and evolving. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing a good band become a great band through hard work and ingenuity. But the inverse of this is that there is nothing worse than seeing a great band derailed as they lose touch with their core strengths in favor of . . . well, I don't know. I think that AC Newman probably thinks he's onto something since he's produced two albums in a row in this general vein, but I'm just not buying it. Especially galling is the fact that his recent solo joint, last year's Get Guilty, was actually pretty good, but would have definitely benefited from the muscular punch of the rest of the Pornographers.

This is turgid and uninteresting, frankly a chore to get through. Perhaps the singular unifying thread throughout the band's first three spectacular albums is just how effortless they seem: there's a joy that can't be faked and a contagious energy. Although each track is perfectly polished they still project the illusion of spontaneity. In hindsight, it was probably inevitable that Twin Cinema would be their last truly great album - although it was by no means inferior to either of its predecessors, its very big sound lay the foundation for their next move towards a further estrangement from the group's relatively no-frills origins in favor of a burgeoning infatuation with making every song sound like an ELO pocket symphony. Sure enough, Newman indulges his inner Jeff Lynne here, and the result is awful: the songs sound nice, except that there's no thrust, no movement. It's all layered choruses and stutter-stop rhythms. It's like watching a movie that keeps promising to do something but which keeps doubling back on itself to retell the first three minutes. It's exhausting, and it's not fun. The New Pornographers used to be effortless, now all I can hear is the effort.

The only good thing about Together is that it makes you want to flip around on the ol' iPod to hear "Letter to an Occupant" and "Miss Teen Wordpower" and "The Bleeding Hearts Show" all over again. And then you get sad because you realize that they've lost it completely and will likely never do anything even half as good again.

I reserve the right to change my mind six months down the road, but I've already spent the better part of a week listening to this album and trying to hear the "return to form" that everyone else is going on about. Still waiting . . .

(Here's the one half-decent song on the album:)



The National - High Violet

I'm new to these guys, so I don't know if this is a characteristic release or not. But I can say after listening to the thing half-a-dozen times this last weekend, it's pretty damn strong. I can't remember the last time I was so immediately impressed with an album. This sounds like some seriously next-level, Yankee Hotel Fotrot, Gimme Fiction shit right here.

What I like about these guys is that their sound is relatively unique: there are guitars and bass, sure, but it's really all about the interplay between Matt Berninger's stately baritone and Bryan Devendorf's intense drumming. On first listen it's an odd dichotomy: Berninger's voice is so smooth and level that it's practically a monotone, whereas Devendorf's drumming is so manic that is veers damn close to straight-up jungle a few times throughout. And yet somehow these two disparate parts really come together to create a remarkable effect. The year is almost half over but I don't anticipate hearing many better albums before January.



New Young Pony Club - The Optimist

One of the most frustrating parts of being a critic - even a really half-assed critic like myself - is that sometimes, despite all your efforts to proselytize on behalf of worthy causes, sometimes it just doesn't stick. Case in point: the New Young Pony Club. Their 2007 debut Fantastic Playroom was one of my favorite albums of the entire previous decade. I wrote an embarrassingly glowing 9/10 review for Popmatters. But the album was nevertheless roundly ignored after an initial bout of polite, if distinctly muted and entirely unenthusiastic praise (I think it received a Mercury Prize nomination, if that matters for anything). The Optimist is, if not better, just about as good as their first, and yet it hasn't even received the perfunctorily polite reception of their debut. The press has been decidedly mixed. Furthermore, it's been roundly thrashed by all the usual suspects who usually thrash former buzz bands who fail to live up to their supposed buzz - I won't bother to link, but neither Pitchfork nor Popmatters were particularly thrilled.

What the hell, people? Am I the only one who can hear how awesome these guys are? I'm not going to sit here and belabor the point. Everyone who I've ever convinced to sit down and spend some time with Fantastic Playroom has come away convinced. Is it because they sold their first single to an Apple commercial? Yeah, "Ice Cream" was kind of annoying, but if you listen to the first album you understand pretty quickly that "Ice Cream" was essentially a novelty song about fucking, and no real indicator of the band's sound other than sharing the general milieu of 80s-indebted post-punk. Or rather, perhaps it would be better to say, if you listen to the rest of the album, you understand that "Ice Cream" is satire, a poke in the eye of the male-dominated indie rock world, a world - despite the ostensibly progressive politics embodied by most bands - wherein women are still valued primarily as objects and not subjects, and the only appropriate role for a intelligent woman is either a predatory femme fatale or a fresh faced ingenue. Tahita Bulmer's lyrics are stridently feminist, and deal frankly with the ways in which women are commoditized and dismembered in order to be bought and sold in the culture - practically chopped into bite-size pieces for easy digestion. Given this, it's more than a little ironic that the band suffered as a direct result of being written off as a gimmicky dance-pop act defined by a sexy lead singer with a pouty voice.

Take my word for it: this is a good album. If you liked the first one, you'll like this one as well, and if you haven't heard the first one, you should hear them both. The comparison I made back in 2007 was that Fantastic Playroom reminded me of nothing so much as the Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings and Food, and if I can be allowed the conceit of extending the metaphor I'll say that The Optimist bears more than a passing resemblance to Fear of Music - it's still clearly the same band, but there's a newfound emphasis on minor keys, a new confidence in exploring the down beat. I am again confirmed in my opinion that the New Young Pony Club are one of the best bands in the world - or would be, if anyone else was paying any attention.

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