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."

Podcast for the Week of 06/12/10

Now that we've got the basics sorted out, we can get right down to the proper business of doing a podcast! Last week was sort of a test run, a bunch of stuff that was handy while I was learning to use the program. This week, we're actually jumping in with both feet and doing a right and proper theme.

With that in mind, one of the purposes of this week - and the next few weeks - is less to play a number of monstrously obscure songs than to draw a linear progression between a number of important songs. Some of these songs are less well-known than others (the first half dozen should be familiar to anyone over the age of eight with a pulse and a working set of ears, so no obscuro-points there), but hopefully in this context you can listen for some specific unifying concepts that might not otherwise reveal themselves. This may seem overly pedantic, but hopefully even if you think I'm full of shit you can enjoy hearing "Funky Drummer" again.

The tracks are, as always, below the cut - see if you can give it a first listen without spoiling the fun!

Have at it!

Book Group!



Ode to Kirihito
by Osamu Tezuka

Part 1

The image that lingers in my mind after closing the first third of the book is that of Jesus Christ, carrying his monstrous cross through the streets on the way to die on Golgotha. The picture is on page 184 and it comes on the heels of a particularly intense and troubling sequence set in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the apex of Apartheid. Dr. Urabe, attempting to uncover the secret behind an unexpected outbreak of the deforming Monmow disease in the country, has been shot and left for dead in a black quarter of town, along with SIster Helen Friese, the disease's first recorded white victim. Sister Friese wants to die because she has been turned into a strange dog-man hybrid, but Dr. Urabe, a nonbeliever, convinces her to live with these words:

Sister, I'm not a Christian, but I know the story of Christ's life! Jesus said he would suffer for all of humanity! Those were brave words. . . . bearing a crown of thorns and the public's jeers, he made his way to Golgotha Hill, to his own execution site. He persevered and died for his faith. . . . Your life, too, like his, could end amidst ridicule and contempt, unbearable suffering might become your lot. But, Miss Helen, don't you think this might be God's test for you? Don't you want to overcome this and be strong and live on?

Ode to Kirihito can be seen from one perspective as a catalog of suffering, a never-ending pageant of violence, rape, murder, racism, sadism and needless cruelty. The first rape begins on page 28, and it's remarkable just how often rape recurs throughout just the first third of the book. Life in these pages sometimes appears to be nothing but the unfettered exercise of power by the strong against the weak.

Dignity is only found through resistance, but the prominent example of Christ proves that resistance takes many forms. The book's titular hero, Kirihito, contracts Monmow fairly early, and turns into a hideous dog-man, more comfortable running on four feet than two. But he refuses to become a beast: even when he is kidnapped, beaten, forced to perform in captivity, raped by a dog (again with the rape, this time mixed with bestiality), and offered the chance to win his freedom through an act of despicable servility, he refuses to bow or compromise. He remains a man. When he escapes from captivity with the strange concubine Reika - who had previously been made to perform as a naked human tempura, covered in batter and deep fried for the pleasure of perverted oligarchs - she attempts, in turn, to rape him, proving to him that she has been warped by the violence of her captivity, turned feral, less than human and made into a slave of her own grotesque desires.

At first the grotesquerie is an affront. Then the reader becomes accustomed. But before long the parade of depravity reaches a point of sheer grand guignol excess that threatens to overwhelm the narrative. The scene where a python eats a live human baby should probably seem far more horrifying than it does, but on the heels of dozens of similar acts of inhumanity both large and small it barely registers. Is this surfeit of filth supposed to instill a deadened response on the part of the reader? Although in most ways the books could not be more dissimilar I am reminded of Ellis' American Psycho - another harrowing, inhumanly cruel reading experience constructed out of a parade of filthy setpieces. The lack of affect in American Psycho is the whole point: after a certain juncture the failure to register tragedy and emotional trauma becomes heartbreaking in itself, the repetition of numbing, gorey detail a sign of the most profound failure of human feeling. But I don't believe that Tezuka's intention is to overwhelm the reader to the point where the catalog of horrors becomes an academic exercise: he wants the reader to feel every moment of senseless cruelty in much the same way that audiences feel every lash of the Roman whips in The Passion of the Christ.

One of the problems with accepting the Christian allegory at its face value is that it forces the reader into a mechanistic appreciation of secondary and tertiary characters. Is the suffering of these dozens of ancillary characters "real" or is it simply a product of the process by which Kirihito himself becomes purified? The Christian metaphor shades into Buddhism: is suffering itself "real," or merely a distraction? There is a point at which anyone who wishes to perfect himself must pierce the veil of Maya and turn away from material reality. Even Nietzsche writes of the process of overcoming one's humanity in order to become more fully human. I am curious, then, as to how exactly Kirihito's life will resolve: will he reach his apotheosis through suffering and eventual renunciation? So far his story is a mythical story: he has set out on an impossible quest, suffered a strange transformation, lost family and been held captive against his will, been tempted at multiple junctures to betray his most cherished ideals. Already I can feel the looming presence of a monstrous, cosmic climax.

Next week: I only planned to read the first third because I didn't know how dense a book it would turn out to be. It's actually a really quick page-turner, so I imagine we'll be able to discuss the conclusion of the book this time next week.