Podcast for the Week of 06/28/10



OK, we're running a couple days late on this one - which is kind of sad, since it's been done for a week, just waiting for me to do the fifteen minutes worth of errands necessary to put the link up. You know how that goes. But it's a special mix this week - we interrupt our regularly scheduled podcast for a special tribute to the best band in the world that also had a new album released last Tuesday. (Sorry, the Roots.) I tried to steer clear of "the hits" with one major and obvious exception, and even if you're already a big fan there should hopefully be at least a couple tracks on there you've never heard before.

Also: I liked Sendspace OK, but I've received complaints that it still isn't working as well as it could. (Which, you know, makes sense considering that I get what I pay for, that is: nothing.) David Brothers suggested a site called Sharebee which looks to be, on first glance, at least simpler than either of the sites I've used thus far. So we'll go with this from now on, but the older podcasts will probably still remain available on Sendspace unless I get a huge groundswell of support for going back and changing them all. (It probably wouldn't take a groundswell, I'd probably do it if anyone expressed the desire.)

Amyway, as always, track listing and Amazon links are under the cut, as will be (from this week forward) links to previous podcasts. Check out this week's podcast here!

EDIT: Due to popular demand I've also went back and will continue to offer Sendspace downloads for those whose machines can't do Sharebee. Here's this week on Sendspace.

Book Group!



Ode to Kirihito
by Osamu Tezuka

Part 2

One of the reasons the second part of our discussion has come so late is that, while finishing the book, I realized that it would be an almost impossible book to sum up in only a few paragraphs. Even just a few paragraphs devoted to spurring discussion or providing a brief outline of ideas - I don't know where to begin.

The plain fact is that I've started and stopped a dozen different reviews for the second half of Ode to Kirihito as I've sat here, and I can't even begin to sum up the whole of what i just experienced. Is it reductive simply to say that it's a masterpiece? Does it reflect poorly on me if I free admit I am bested by the experience of reading this book? I can't speak for anyone but myself, but one thing I've noticed about reading literature on a semi-professional and academic basis for an extended period of time is that is instills within you strong feeling of contempt for literature. That sounds awful, but if you've ever spent any time trolling the review archives at Robert Christgau's website you probably know the sensation I'm describing even if you've never before bothered to articulate it, exactly. There's this feeling you get after you've started reading books or listening to music less as an avocation than a vocation where you start to secretly detest the thought of sitting down to crack the envelope or tear the plastic on your next purchase. You know you've got to think of something, anything interesting to actually say about whatever the hell it is you've got in your hands, and after a while it just seems so redundant. No matter how much you love minimal German techno, your feelings for the genre will be sorely tested the fiftieth tim you've had to conjure up 600+ words about the latest fascinating platter spun from the fine folks at Kompakt. You begin to think that Christgau has the right idea: none but the most spectacular CDs deserve more than fifty words, tops, and most probably only deserve two.

So you develop a congenital squint like a hypothetical gunslinger into a technicolor sun, and every time I new book steps into the middle of the street you've got its number, you've seen its kind before, you know just what to do and how to deal with it. Art is a known quantity, surprise is a forgotten word plucked from a foreign dictionary, you see your book and even if there's a part of you that keeps thinking to yourself "shouldn't I be enjoying this?" - well, you can't help it that even the best reminds you of something else that was better. But you keep plugging away because even after you've grown to hate the thing you love, it still beats digging ditches (even if you know you'd make a lot more money digging ditches).

But the problem with being a gunslinger is that even the fastest gun knows there's always somebody faster, and even the faster gun knows that he won't stay young forever. Sometimes you're just a picosecond to slow on the draw and you take a hot one right in the gut. I feel like that after reading Ode to Kirihito: the book is far better than my meager descriptive abilities. It may actually be one of the best comics I've ever read: is it an abdication of my critical responsibilities to heap these kind of empty plaudits on a forty year old magnum opus whose critical pedigree certainly needs no bolster from the likes of me? The series was originally serialized from April 1966 to May of 1967 - for context, that's a couple months after the first appearance of the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four #48, a full year before the publication of Zap #1. Why do these random dates matter? I dunno - perhaps because, for someone whose knowledge of manga tops out at the level of "general familiarity," the idea that this book started serialization before the Beatles had released Revolver is pretty much the definition of a "mind fuck."

If I can be forgiven a possibly specious comparison, reading Ode to Kirihito reminded me of nothing so much as reading a really strong run from the middle third of Cerebus. Dave Sim is a cartoonist whose work bears a great deal of resemblance to Tezuka's (even if I'm almost certain that Sim couldn't have encountered his work until long after Cerebus was under way, if even then): for starters, the both have no compunction about making their characters as silly and cartoony as possible, even in the midst of deathly-serious goings-on. Part of how they pull this off is through the conscious juxtaposition of crazy caricature and incredibly detailed backgrounds. You feel at every moment as if you are in the presence of a living and breathing world, a world of sweeping vistas and painstakingly detailed scenery - from the high arid plains of Afghanistan to the slums of rural Japan. There's something really bracing and positively electrifying about this technique, placing at times even crude caricatures and elastic, cartoony movement against photorealistic scenery and architecture. It's not a technique you see a lot in Western comics, although admittedly it has cropped up more since the late 90s when manga really made its presence known in mainstream comics.

If I can be allowed to generalize for a moment, there's a really strong tendency in the West to keep every element of the storytelling mise-en-scène perfectly balanced - you use the same type of lines and the same type of shapes for all the elements of your composition. Hergé's wholeness of style seems positively inhuman in some respects: a perfect control over every line and every element of the design. The lines used to illustrate the curves of cloth over Tintin's limbs were the same lines used to draw a banister or automobile. This is style: every line a cartoonist draws, on some level, looks like every other line they draw, and this consistency of effect is what gives an artist distinction. Tezuka, however, isn't afraid to employ multiple styles to create multiple different effects within the context of a single work. I don't know anything about the division of labor at Tezuka's studio, but the result is nevertheless striking in its uniformity of tone and style. The really amazing part is how that singular style could encompass so many different types of narrative and employ so many different types of narrative tricks. Tezuka's eye for minimal caricature at times seems Hirschfeld-eque in its economy (I would be extremely surprised if Tezuka hadn't seen Hirschfeld's work at some point), but within the space of a page he can switch gears and render an exquisitely detailed cross-hatched portrait of the same character. I offer the Sim comparison because I think Sim is the closest touchstone to that kind of polyglot technique as we have in the West. It enables Tezuka to pull off so much with such narrative economy that, even at 800-odd pages, the book seems positively packed.

Also, Tezuka shares with Sim an occasionally haphazard but never uninteresting willingness to throw ideas at his story, even when the narrative threatens to buckle under the weight of so much conceptual and thematic heft. And it must be noted that both mens' attitude towards women is problematic as well. But as it is I've already written more than my allotment for this sitting and not even scratched the surface, so I think I'll post once more on Ode before moving on to our next selection. I'll aim for this Wednesday for our last discussion on this book, and announce the pick for next week's discussion at that time as well.

Podcast for the Week of 06/19/10

Not much to say by way of introductory remarks since we seem to have all the preliminaries well and sorted out. Saturday will probably be the day for these for the foreseeable future. I think I'll include links to previous mixes on here as well, since they're still up and still available for download. I can also see how many people are downloading on any given week, which is nice. I'd probably do it regardless of how few listeners there were, but it's nice to see that a decent amount of you are interested - after all, it's free! What more can you ask?



Anyway, here it is!

SIR: Lightning Round

(Note: Part Two of our discussion on Ode To Kirihito will most likely be posted tomorrow because of my poor time management skills.)


Invincible Iron Man #27

Maybe I'm a bit thick but just now as I was reading this is occurred to me that an argument could be made that the primary theme of Matt Fraction's run on the character has been change - or, to be more specific, people either changing in the face of a changing world or being hurt by their inability to adapt. It's an interesting theme for a superhero comic book, considering most of these ongoing adventure serials are predicated on a deep commitment to narrative stasis. I would be interested in going back to the first couple storylines to see how well my theory holds up.

Of course, my enthusiasm at what is otherwise a very well-written and drawn book is tempered considerably by the fact that the villain for this current storyline is yet another iteration of an Evil Iron Man run by competing corporate interests. So, yawn to that.


X-Men: Hellbound #2

Off to the side of the current crossover shenanigans is this little weirdo here. I actually think this is an interesting comic for a few reasons. One, as has been pointed out elsewhere, this story is built on the assumption that a number of secondary and tertiary characters floating around the X-Mythos are aware of their status as, well, secondary and tertiary cannon fodder, and resent being pressganged into a suicide mission in order to save a more "important" character who just might not be worth the trouble. Second, the junior X-Men franchises have developed a tradition in the last decade or so of getting the shit absolutely pummeled out of them every time they go to Limbo, so this is a nice extension of that - only, this time, it's not the generally likable Young X-Men characters but a bunch of not-so-beloved folks like Gambit, Dazzler, Northstar and Cannonball. They show up and within basically half a minute they're all beaten within an inch of their lives, Gambit betrays the team and Pixie makes a deal with the devil. I'm absolutely sure none of this will matter in the larger scheme of the crossover, but it fulfills its writ of telling an engaging story with a group of characters not otherwise entangled. Nice to know they can still do these when the mood strikes.


Daredevil #507

I swear to fucking God if i have to read another Daredevil comic filled with faceless ninjas fighting each other for no discernible reason I'm going to lose my shit. Oh wait, too late.


S.H.I.E.L.D. #2

So, tell me again how a brand-new series set in an alternate universe whose most recognizable character is Leonardo da Vinci is supposed to survive it's first year? It doesn't deserve so much as a small fraction of the praise it's received: If there were such a thing as a cliche-o-meter, it would have bust itself by page six. "You haven't been told the truth about your birth." "There's a secret society running the world from the shadows." "I'm back from years of traveling to set right what has gone awry in my absence." "Steampunk = rad." Urrgh.


Ultimate Avengers #2

Mark Millar deserves at this point nearly all the crap flung his way, but I'll give him this: he knows how to write Ghost RIder. The character doesn't always do so well in extended narratives (although the last series was pretty good), but there is one sure-fire default way to use him that always works: he's an unstoppable engine of destruction bent on wreaking holy vengeance, and if you put him up against a pile of super-heroes he will almost surely fuck some shit up. Regardless of how patently stupid the whole "Black Hulk" thing is (seriously, what the fuck?), the promise of the Ghost Rider going buck-wild on a bunch of unlikeable Ultimate Universe analogues of the Punisher and War Machine should keep things fun for at least a few more pages.


Batman #700

Is this good? I sure hope people don't think this is good, because it's pretty crappy. Morrison still has some neat ideas - and good on him for actually pulling off the neat trick of returning a large part of Batman's long discarded sci-fi past to the characters current status quo - but the actual story itself reads less like a coherent narrative and more like a set of bullet points where a story should be. I've made this complaint about every Morrison Batman story to date and I'll keep making them as long as the books keep disappointing: it's not that I don't understand them, it's just that the execution is slipshod and the attitude too clever by half. I can even see how writing a comic book like this might seem to be a necessary corrective to the explosive decompression of the early aughts, and how telling five issues worth of story in one beats telling one issue of story in five. But the result is still nothing I'm really jazzed about reading: maybe I'm getting old, but this is weak sauce, and it reads like someone smeared ritalin across the printers' plates. Consider it an extended middle finger raised in the general direction of Bill Jemas and move on.

Madame Xanadu #23

I always wonder why more people don't talk about how good this book is. Despite the fact that it's ostensibly a Vertigo book, it's nevertheless set firmly in the regular mainstream DCU - and not even just the Vertigo-ish magic part either. Past issues have focused on characters like the Golden Age Sandman and the Spectre, but the current storyline features a team-up with the distinctly un-Vertigo Martian Manhunter against an updated version of Kirby's Morgana Le Faye. You have a particularly odd situation when what is arguably the best DCU title currently being published is being published by Vertigo - and really, it is so much more tame than even the most restrained issue of Brightest Day in terms of sex and gore that the comparison is kind of ludicrous. I'd be tempted to say that the book might even be the best shot DC currently has at pulling in that coveted YA female demographic, if they could manage to get the collected editions under the eyes of some Twi-hards. Matt Wagner and Amy Reeder are doing some great, great work here, and it deserves to be outselling almost everything else DC publishes on any given month.

One More Word About the Letter X

In response to your carefully considered responses to my last post regarding the X-Men franchise, I've come to realize that the X-Men we're talking about are really two different - separate if not entirely mutually exclusive - things. Many of you wrote eloquently and persuasively about the underlying metaphor behind the franchise, and how many creators - Grant Morrison in particularly - had managed to tell many interesting stories that involved foregrounding the minority metaphor and dealing with the ramifications of mutants as a significantly large and legitimate subspecies of humanity. Now, I would argue that while Morrison told a few good stories within his own framework, most of his series actually consisted of set-up for ideas that were picked up by later writers and artists. A lot has been said in the last few years about how many of Morrison's ideas were immediately abandoned or reversed once he left the company, but enough were kept that his impact on the series is still immense. It's important to remember that before Morrison Cyclops was hardly the central figure in the X-mythos up to that time - and after Morrison, the books have been all about Cylcops, his responsibilities and his personality. Morrison's decision to kill Jean Grey - a rare death that appears to be sticking, for the time being - was also useful in terms of moving the franchise past decades worth of congested continuity. All good, all different.

But I think that a solid case can be made that one of two things happened in the first part of the last decade: either Morrison misread the franchise or the writers responsible for carrying on in Morrison's wake misunderstood Morrison's run. I tend to think it's a little bit of both. I do think Morrison is still a very smart writer even if his execution these past few years has steadily deteriorated. He put a lot of thought into reimagining the X-Mythos for the new millennium and, at their best, his stories sing with a full complement both of new ideas and new wrinkles on old ideas. The problem is that, at least in part, these ideas took the franchise away from it's true core, which is that it was always just slightly less about creating a metaphor for minority representation than it was for crafting a metaphor for being a teenager. Morrison dismantled a large part of the edifice that Claremont and his various successors had spent decades building, and you can certainly argue that in the short term many good stories resulted, but in the long term it's become increasingly difficult to argue that the franchise hasn't floundered.

Let's approach the question from another angle: what was, historically, the most important factor in the X-Men's popularity? You get the buzzer if you answered anything but soap opera. Everybody loves to mock the 90s but the X-Men sold a lot of comic books during the decade - especially the early part of the decade - and many of the fans who loved the books loved them because they wanted to see if Rogue and Gambit would ever get together or would remain forever "star-crossed." If you go back and reread any representative chunk of the X-Books from the period roughly 1992-1996, you see that very little ever happened in any of the books, except that things kept threatening to happen and in between the flashes of events characters had passionate little affairs and episodes of heartbreak. Secondary and tertiary characters would only be considered viable if they could be spliced into the ongoing soap opera shenanigans. Many more romantic subplots fizzled than burned - remember Bishop and Storm as a couple? What about Cable and Storm? - but the constant churn of even unsuccessful romance was fuel for the franchise's engines.

This is what being a teenager is all about, broadly: you think you're part of a persecuted minority because you can't have what you want and you're constantly being shut down; but in actuality the perception of constant persecution creates an intensity of sensation that, combined with the unceasing surge of hormonal activity that occurs from puberty through young adulthood, makes the teenage years the most acutely felt period of one's life, for good or ill. The X-Men books were all about this, whether it was the hysterical sexual drama of Rogue's inability to be touched or the absurd masculine play-acting of surrogate father figures like Cable or Wolverine. Even the endlessly asinine machinations of all the shadowy supervillains who manipulated our heroes from afar can be seen as a metaphor for the frustrating half-cognizance of adolescence, filled as it is with the paranoid conviction that everyone around you knows more than you do and is plotting against you.

Marvel makes a big deal about how Spider-Man's marriage prematurely aged the character, and how the idea of a hypothetical divorce or widowerhood would even further distance him from his ideal demographic. Any but the most hopeless partisans have to acknowledge that there is some truth to this. But I would posit that they have unwittingly done the same thing with the X-Men. Morrison and later Whedon established the idea of a core group of X-Men - long tacitly acknowledged as Cyclops, Wolverine, the Beast, Jean Grey, and maybe a couple others (Colossus, when he returned, and Emma Frost as well) - responsible as leaders and from that point forward the crux of most of the drama. Now, obviously, anyone who read the books knew which characters were more popular than others, but for the first time the books themselves seemed to acknowledge that most of the rest of the franchise was window dressing arranged around a hard core of half-a-dozen marquee names. (A similar thing happened at DC around the same time, when heroes in the books themselves began to talk about whether or not they were "A" list or "B" list - see Ted Kord's internal monologue in the COuntdown to Infinite Crisis special for a good example of this.) Many of the less popular or less interesting characters were farmed out to secondary and tertiary books like X-Treme X-Men.

So suddenly the books are about a small group of older characters responsible for steering the fate of a large population of mutants. Whoa whoa whoa! Sounds pretty heady to me - where are all the younger characters, the readers' perspective characters, the budding romances and raging hormones? Still there, but shuffled off to manifestly less important books. Even the central interpersonal conflict of Morrison's run was older persons' romance: Cyclops cheating on his wife with another woman, and his wife in turn falling (temporarily, as it turned out) into the arms of an old flame. Nice drama, sure, but isn't the reason Spider-Man signed a deal with the devil to make sure his appeal remained eternally young? Cyclops is hardly Spider-Man and the character serves a different purpose. But the X-Men as a franchise is all about youth and dynamism, and suddenly all the stories were really not very youthful at all, not even in that really exaggerated hyper-serious way that 90s X-Men stories usually were. And as much as many fans liked the last decade's worth of stories, the books have fallen deeper into creative stasis - M-Day was an attempt to break the post-Morrison logjam (because, really, only a handful of writers working for Marvel at the time had either the interest or aptitude necessary to properly follow up on Morrison's ideas), but it failed because the result was to focus the books even more sharply on the minority metaphor, almost completely abjuring the conception of the franchise as a focal point for inchoate teenage angst.

Now you've got an unworkable status quo based on a rotating cast of dozens of characters who float in and out according to the needs of the plot, most of whom serve merely as colorful backdrop to the main action of the core team. Are there even any real interpersonal subplots in any of the books anymore? I mean, ones that get any substantial panel time? These types of character interactions aren't and should never be a distraction, they're the whole point of books like X-Men. What happened to all those readers who hung anxiously on every issue of the Gambit / Rogue romance? Maybe they're reading some of the tertiary books that occasionally touch on those types of issues, but the message has been loud and clear for some time that those aren't the types of stories that the X-Men franchise tells anymore.

If you were to ask me what I would do to fix the books if I had carte blanch to reshape the franchise as I saw fit, I would start by getting rid of almost all the supporting cast. Cut the cast down to maybe 7-8 main characters. Get them off the static environment of an isolated island or even a mansion, put them on the Blackbird and send them around the world fighting villains and questing for various MacGuffins. Make sure there's lots of sexual tension and plenty of characters who want to fuck each other but, for whatever reason, can't. it may not look a lot like the X-Men of the past decade and change, but it might just look a bit more like the same franchise that dominated the industry for over two decades, stretching from the tail end of Jimmy Carter right through the first part of George W. Bush. Basically, the X-Men need their own "Brand New Day."