Gutteral

Worlds Within "World"

2010-11-01T15:52:00.003-04:00

Two months since the last post here - it must be time for a links-filled update! The most exciting piece of news is that the academic journal Social Text recently published a revised version of my 2010 Pop Conference paper, "Curtis Jackson and the Jeweled Skull." 2400 words about 50 Cent, video games and the State of Rap Today.

Meanwhile, the posting with my friends Carl and Margaux is still fast-paced over at Back to the World, our group blog. Torontoist interviewed us, we're on Twitter and Facebook, and new content is appearing every weekday. Here are my own favourite contributions there, although you should browse around my comrades' posts as well; lots of good writing to trawl through, and some of it, like Carl's "Toronto in Moving Pictures" (from Videodrome to Scott Pilgrim) or Margaux's consideration of Mind Game, is very Gutteral-friendly.

On Hergé, Burroughs, and Charles Burns' X'ed Out as the latest in a long line of alternate Tintins.

"Primordial Ink" (what we talk about when we talk about proto-comics).

On Guy Maddin's "Hauntings" and cinematic necromancy.

"A Can-Can on the Tightrope of Logic" (Notes on Eccentrism).

Morris dancing, Grant Morrison's Batman and ambivalence.

On Lil B, the bizarre, internet-ruling teenage rapper I'm obsessed with.

Vocal improvisation games and glossolalia.

The style of superhero costumes.

Minor dance crazes: What is their deal?

On R&B star The-Dream.

World Cup songs, from John Barnes to the vuvuzela.

A really long discussion of bounce music.

19 haikus about Prince.

A Conversation With Bryan Lee O'Malley

2010-08-24T15:17:00.002-04:00

Last month, shortly before the midnight debut of Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, I interviewed Bryan Lee O'Malley for Toronto's Globe & Mail. The resulting article ended up appearing nearly a month later, coinciding with film adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World instead - blame the vagaries of newspapers - and at less than half of its original length. That's not unusual when you're slinging copy around, but it meant that the vast majority of O'Malley's charming, pithy and illuminating answers went unprinted, so I'm putting them here. A few questions dealing with movie-or-plot-related minutiae have been omitted for redundancy, and I forgot to hit "record" for several minutes at the beginning because I'm an idiot, but otherwise this transcript is only lightly edited. I also recommend this interview of Mal by Joe McCulloch, which delves more deeply into his background and artistic influences.

[NB: This post initially had my questions in bold and the responses in plain text, but I've reversed that formatting after a few people told me it was hard to read.]

***

CR: I want to talk about the new backgrounds, because they’re great. And I kind of feel like everyone in American comics should hire an assistant to draw these crazy, Taniguchi-style backgrounds. There should be a government program for that.

BLOM: I know, there should be an apprenticeship thing. That’d be awesome.

And there’s really – there’s some bold angles in there, there’s huge swathes of negative space on some pages, um, yeah…I guess I don’t have a question there, but could you talk about any of those things?

Did you read a printout, or did you read an actual hard copy of the book?

I read a printout.

I was starting the book, I think I had drawn, like, the first few pages or whatever, and I was like “oh my god, I’m never going to finish it in time.” I think I started it in October and then I had made no progress by December because I was just busy with other stuff. So then I was like, okay, I’m going to try and find someone to help me…So I ended up finding this guy John Kantz, he used to do a book for Antarctic Press, and he’s really talented. He has the whole skillset. He had no job, basically. He’d been laid off and he needed money, so I’m just like “I have some money now,” so I offered him the job. Aesthetically that’s just like – if I had, if there were two of me, I’d be spending this much time on the backgrounds. But there never have been before.

What was it like wrangling a couple of assistants? Obviously you did that kind of work yourself back in the day when you were starting out…

Yeah…We decided to kind of figure out the parameters of what I was doing and what he was doing. So at first I was taking on most of the workload and he would just – he did all the tones, but he was only doing little bits of the background at the beginning, and then as it goes on he’s taking on more and more. I kind of always knew that would be the case, because I knew he had complicated stuff towards the end of the book. I think it worked out. The other thing is that my art has always been so inconsistent, I mean, to my eyes, that I don’t feel like it’s jarring to have slightly more inconsistency in your stuff with three people.

[Mal had to excuse himself for a moment at this point, because his dog peed on the floor]

I thought you’d said your dog was on the floor and I was kind of horrified – like, his legs had collapsed or something.

[laughs]

My family’s dog is 14 now, so I’m paranoid about these things. Um, that vaguely ties in to the next thing I was going to ask, which is…I think there’s a loose consensus that your cartooning leapt really far ahead between the third and fourth volumes – it became cleaner, more stylized, there was less shading on the characters, or no shading at all, and I think the linework was obviously tighter. Do you agree with that? What would you ascribe it to, if so?

I think it starts to move that way in the second half of the third book, but then at the end of the third book I was really really rushing so it just looked crappier. But in the fourth book – I took a little longer between books that time, and in subsequent books I’ve always done that, just taking a longer time to write the script. And then when I got back into it I was drawing at a larger size, so I think that’s really what people are seeing. I’ve been drawing a lot bigger, so it looks a lot cleaner when I shrink it down. And then in subsequent books I kind of went back to a smaller – at least in book six I went back to a smaller size, but I retained that skill level, so it looks pretty good.

One thing that really struck me was those three consecutive blanks pages in the middle of the book…And it seems like there are more extended wordless sequences.

Yeah, I mean, I always knew I wanted it to be longer, so I wrote the script and then when I was breaking it down I gave myself room for that sort of thing.

How has your scripting changed throughout the series? I read that you’ve written full scripts since the very first volume, but it seems like the individual chapters have maybe become more self-contained over time?

I feel like that was really mostly only five and six, but it probably started in four. But yeah, I felt like I wanted each chapter to be more satisfying. For one thing it’s really hard to just write a whole book without some kind of breaking points like that. Just in terms of how I wanted to tell the story it started to evolve. I didn’t like the transitions in volume three, it just kind of blurs together. I wanted to have more discrete units within the story. Especially in volume six – I guess volume five and six – each chapter has a specific goal, one thing to tell you, and then it moves on to the next thing.

from Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour (vol. 6)

Even though you’ve been introducing these downbeat moments and emotional complications for at least a couple of volumes now, I was still a little surprised by how messed-up Scott is at the beginning of this one. He’s in a dark place, or at least a humiliating one. And there’s those really skeezy scenes with Knives and Envy…

Yeah. I don’t know, I kind of wanted to pull the rug out a little from Scott’s view of himself. In the first book at least people are kind of alluding to Scott being a jerk…Now we’re seeing a little bit of the potential for that within Scott. Or just being a clueless jerk at times.

Yeah. I think especially during the final three volumes you sometimes highlight the limitations of the central metaphor of your own series, the video-game thing. The dangers of mythologizing your whole life like this. Like when Gideon says he altered Scott’s memories to be more action-packed and less ambiguous.

Yeah.

He does use a power-up to come back to life at the big climax, but he and Ramona basically destroy Gideon’s hold on them with empathy rather than…cool new weapons. Or I guess empathy unlocks cool new weapons?

It is a cool new weapon [laughs].

I don’t know, like I said, there isn’t a question mark on the end of that. But maybe you could…speak to that?

I agree! I think that’s what I was going for, so I’m glad it’s coming across.

It’s tricky, I guess, because – that central metaphor is really powerful as well. But maybe you have to question it implicitly.

Yeah, I like to poke at it.

One thing I noticed is that Gideon is the only character in his thirties. He actually happens to share the same age as you. And that seemed – not that he shares your age, but that he’s in his thirties, that seemed integral to me, because in this book he comes off as a depressing, twisted corruption of adulthood. Like…I don’t know, Norman Osborn in Spider-man.

Yeah, he’s – that’s what Scott would be like if he grew up and became an asshole. Scott is like me when I started the book, and Gideon is like me when I’ve finished the book. That was intentional, definitely, giving him my age…His glasses are [like mine].

I like that Gideon’s approach to relationships is one that a Final Fantasy villain would have. Obviously I should build this giant machine and keep all the girls who got away in there!

Originally I was going to give him – he was gonna have evil exes of his own, he was going to have monuments to them or statues or something, but I realized he should actually have the girls. It’s a metaphor for – he says it straight up, they’re the girls who got away. You’re holding on to this image of a girl where it didn’t work out, and you’re waiting for this future carefree day when she’ll actually like you or whatever.

He’s this powerful, successful guy, but he’s also petty and controlling and vindictive.

Yeah. And he’s been jilted a lot of times. Guys who go through that get this kind of self-righteous quality to them, I think.

I like how even as the evil exes are still caricatures of horrible boyfriends or romantic partners or whatever, they become – they’re not one-dimensional. Sometimes they’re sad or tragic in some way.

I kind of wish I had explored that more on some occasions. I always feel like I gave them short shrift. I was not that interested in the evil exes throughout the series, which I guess makes sense – I’m trying to concentrate on the core characters and the actual relationship.

You could always do Scott Pilgrim Gaiden.

It’ll be like – Stephenie Meyer, she rewrote Twilight from Edward Cullen’s point of view. One volume from each evil ex’s point of view.

Were there any new influences that you internalized while drawing the final book? Envy reminded me of some Junko Mizuno characters in the final volume, but that could just be my own dirty mind.

Oh, stylistically? I guess I’ve still been on this ‘70s/'80s manga kick, Envy definitely looks like that. And the eyes have gotten even bigger, I think, they’re a little more chibified…But I don’t know, I’m too busy working to actually read a lot of comics. Or to actually apply influences. It’s all kind of evolved in this weird natural way. Everyone looks really different now than they did in volumes one and two. Knives Chau is just, like – completely chibified eyes now.

from Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour

It seems like the general manga influence, the shonen influence, has become more central to the series. Volume one especially looks sort of, kind of, like a scratchy American indie comic?

Yeah, the initial fight in volume one, it’s this really rough imitation of shonen manga. And that has become a lot more central, yeah. I think I’ve actually read a lot more of it at this point. At that point it was almost just an idea to me, I had just kind of heard of shonen manga and only read a little bit of it.

The fact that Gideon opens up his sinister, decadent lair, his Legend of Zelda boss lair, at–

At this homeless shelter.

Yeah, the corner with all the junkies and homeless people at Queen & Bathurst! It plays into all those debates about gentrification, and…

Yeah, totally. And Gideon is, you know, this American guy coming to town and making his own luxury bullshit…I can tell you my new metaphorical structure for the book, based on last year. Gideon is Edgar, and I’m Envy. He came back to town and started this whole industry, and gave people jobs, and pushed everything around to feed ourselves. I was just kind of along for the ride. So yeah, I feel like in this book I identified most with Envy Adams, which is truly disturbing.

[laughs] I love the psychosexual implications of that.

Yeah, there’s a lot of psychosexual implications in that.

I was gonna do a promo strip for the book that was…all these Toronto luminaries gushing about Gideon coming to town…It was gonna be, like, Chris Murphy and all that kind of stuff.

Margaret Atwood.

Margaret Atwood [laughs]. People saying what a genius he is and stuff. I should still do that, it’d be fun.

Do you post on message boards or try to follow what people are saying online? Obviously you have the Twitter, and that’s pretty busy, but do you do anything otherwise?

Well, I have my own forum, it’s relatively populated with a fanatical group of kids. So I go on there regularly and see what their new kooky theories are.

I like the generational aspect of it.

The whole internet thing is – even just everything. In 2004 I didn’t have a cell phone, I don’t think there was such a thing as Wikipedia, there’s a lot of stuff like that. Even the Nintendo DS was not introduced until after the first couple books.

One thing I noticed – mostly I’m saying this because you tore apart that page from volume three on your blog recently, the layout or composition of it. But I’ve seen a couple of other interviews where you’re pretty…self-critical about how you were drawing in the first volumes. Not in a reflexive, Chris Ware, “I suck” way but in a detailed–

Exactly what I was doing wrong, yeah.

from Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour

I’m guessing Oni is gonna try and repackage the books, after the movie comes out – the spines don’t match, for one thing – so have you thought about going back and…not redrawing them, but altering them in some way?

Yeah, a little bit. Someone asked me about this yesterday, but I’ve always felt that if you go too far in that direction then it’s just, that’s the end—

You become George Lucas.

You become George Lucas. Yes. So I’m saying to myself that I will only go and edit things for clarity and consistency – there’s a few panels where Scott’s hairline is radically different in the first half of the first book…I’m gonna try and stick to that rule. I probably will change a few things when we repackage them inevitably.

The spines were designed by someone else originally, and I was never really happy with it.

Oh yeah, I’m pretty sure Seth is one of the only cartoonists who obsessively design all of their own books.

I’m the shitty Seth. I’m the computer version of Seth [Chris laughs, a lot].

I’m assuming that you can’t say much about your next project yet, but do you have a firm idea of what it’ll be? Are you far long in the preliminary stages?

Um…no, not really. I just haven’t really had time to devote to it. I have two or three things that kind of brewed during Scott Pilgrim. Some of them date back to the very – like, between the first and second book I had some ideas. Some of them have been simmering for five years. It’s very complicated to actually turn those things that mean something to me, that have been evolving in my mind, and turn them into actual words on paper. It’ll probably take a while. I’ve realized I have to lay low for a bit after this is all done.

I remember there was an aborted side project years and years ago, Street Stupid.

Yeah, that was between two and three. That one in particular – I was kind of pressured to try and pitch something else, because it was when the Scott Pilgrim movie was starting to snowball a little bit, and…“We can sell something else!” And I was like, “Uhhhnnnnn, sure, whatever.” It just wasn’t working…I canned it, and ideas from it will go into whatever I do for my next book, but I don’t think I’ll do anything under that title.

I saw the transcript of that SPX interview you did with Joe McCulloch from a year or two ago, and I think you mentioned wanting to draw more webcomics?

Yeah. That’s the one thing from that interview that is no longer true. For a while I was like, “yeah, webcomics, that must be the future,” but it just seems that they’re…illegitimate? That people don’t take them seriously? I could do the next Scott Pilgrim as a webcomic and it would get a million readers, but Quill & Quire would not review it.

Even some critics who know a lot about comics and write smartly about them don’t seem to follow – I kind of hate myself for not following webcomics enough.

There’s so much.

Oh yeah. And it’s like its own little scene, I mean, not a little scene, but…

It’s weird. A lot of my friends are web cartoonists, and they’re really talented, and a lot of them are getting book deals or whatever, but it seems like you have to get a book deal in the end anyway. The main reason I look at webcomics is because of serialization, because, you know, print is dying and all this shit. The other reason I started moving to the chapter-to-chapter format is because I find it really hard to conceptualize a whole book. I’d like to try serializing, it’d be fun, but I don’t really like the comic book format in America. I don’t know any other venue, other than the web.

from "Bear Creek Apartments," script by Hope Larson

That one you did with Hope [Larson, O'Malley's wife, a cartoonist and screenwriter] was great, but it also took months to complete, right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, in terms of actual time it took me a week, I was just doing it in between other stuff.

And you don’t – you have no desire to work on any specific film stuff, right? Unless it’s an adaptation of something you already drew?

Umm…I don’t have a problem with the idea of it. I would like writing more, because comics take so long. I feel like I could bang out scripts for other stuff in between if I felt like it. I’m working on a strip with a friend, and I’ll see how that goes…

I think one overlooked aspect of Scott Pilgrim, or your work in general, is how much they’re informed by female cartoonists or comics aimed at girls and women.

I consider myself a feminist to some degree, and I would like comics to be more female-friendly. It’s something I’ve been grappling with over the course of the series. I’ve definitely seen female bloggers or whatever completely dismiss the series based on its premise, and think it’s some kind of chauvinist bullshit world, but hopefully it’s not.

…I don’t know if I have many or any questions left. Is there something you want to say about the final book or the series in general that I didn’t get around to?

Um…I have no idea [both laugh].

I’m kind of fascinated by the idea of aging over the course of the series…The idea of maturity, maybe. There’s even…self-mockery of that? They play a really bad cover of “I’m a Believer,” like you would in a shitty romantic comedy. But the basic idea…that’s what they’re talking about in the elevator at the end, right? This idea of change.

Change, yeah. Of evolution. That’s what my own views have come to be, so I was just kind of espousing my own views, I guess, like all cartoonists tend to eventually do. They have their own take on it, but that scene is kind of…I mean, it was hard to write, obviously, but it is definitely pulling back the curtain a little bit.

from Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (vol. 4)

So Scott is basically speaking for you there, in that monologue?

So is she. It’s kind of like an argument in my own head.

And then the final, final scene leaves it a little ambiguous as to exactly what they’re doing.

Yeah.

Which is nice. That’s supposed to be in Toronto, right, that weird hill?

Yeah, it’s supposed to be the park from the first book, but it’s…it’s drawn better [laughs].

[after rambling about Kim Pine’s kindred spirit Neko Case for a while] I guess…I…don’t have anything else!

I still can’t really comprehend the book. We just saw the movie yesterday and we can’t comprehend it either, because it’s…the fact that it was filmed in my old neighbourhood, and kind of based on weird versions of scenes from my own life…

How there’s a version of Michael Comeau in a Hollywood movie?

Yeah, exactly. It’s very weird for me to watch. I haven’t seen it with an audience of people who are not me yet, so I think that’ll make it easier. That’ll be like a mediation of it – just hearing people’s reactions, people who don’t have any association with it or baggage attached. Right now all I can watch is the scenes that have nothing to do with me. It’s like I can only enjoy those scenes fully.

I’m really interested to see how Toronto reacts to it specifically, because – I think Scott Pilgrim is part of the general comics zeitgeist in this past decade, maybe the representative series from what a younger generation of North Americans are doing. But also I think it was part of a smaller local thing in Toronto, starting around 2002 or 2003…celebrating or mythologizing [the city].

Yeah. Yeah. I kind of accidentally was in the right place at the right time. People always ask me about Toronto, what it is about Toronto, questions like that, and I’ve never really had a statement. I guess Scott Pilgrim is my statement on Toronto. I don’t think it’s conclusive in any way, but…I only lived there for three, four years. I just happened to be there. I was nobody. It was really weird to go back last year and be introduced to Chris Murphy and Broken Social Scene and all those guys, to have them be like: “Where did you hang out? Why didn’t we know you?” Because I was a fucking nerdy cartoonist! That’s why you didn’t know me, I’m not a rock star.

[laughs] That’s great. I think it’s because Toronto is a really big city, but one that didn’t – I mean, it’s not like New York, where there’s whole layers of lore…

It doesn’t have that weird history, that mythologized history that New York has or L.A.

The mystique, where all these young smart people want to go there and [emulate] Woody Allen or Martin Scorcese or Jay-Z.

I’ve always been intimidated by New York for that reason, because there’s too many stories. It’s been [so] fictionalized that I can’t really comprehend it.

And L.A., in a different sense, the glitzy sense. But Toronto didn’t have – it had boring, conservative Protestantism…

Conservative white people, yeah.

But there was all this raw material.

Yeah, and I feel like I’ve maybe unfairly mythologized Toronto. I’ve definitely seen kids being like: “I want to move to Canada now!” And, um…it’s cool, but it’s just a city.

from Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness (vol. 3)

Comics Enriched Their Lives! #swag

2010-07-26T11:07:00.002-04:00

Soulja Boy.

See also: the Death Note mixtape.

(Concept for this post blatantly stolen from the good people at Comics Comics.)

A song with a brand new sound

2010-07-06T03:37:00.002-04:00

Remember that exciting new group blog I mentioned before? (Maybe not, since I mentioned it a couple of months ago.) Well, it's up, so take a look: http://backtotheworld.net/. I haven't written anything in-depth about comics there yet, but I plan to. There may even be crossposting soon if I can figure out how to mate Wordpress with Blogger. Until then: BACK TO THE WORLD!

Update, Bigger Update, Biggest Update

2010-04-30T01:59:00.003-04:00

Dear god, two months since the last post. At least I have something to show for it.

Firstly, my team (South Korea) made it to the knockout stages of the Pop World Cup. The effervescent "Gee" by Girls' Generation is currently locked in a tough round-of-16 contest with a South African house track. You can vote on that match for the next few days here: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2010/04/pop-world-cup-2010-round-of-16-match-2i/

I also presented a paper at this year's Pop Conference a couple of weeks ago, about 50 Cent's latest video game and personae in hip-hop. The panel itself went great, and I loved hanging out with fellow writers/academics/nerds in Seattle; my paper is probably going to see print in slightly different form soon, but for now here's the abstract (out-of-date or frantically revised in various places).

The most momentous update is that, as announced on Zoilus, I'll be joining my friends Carl and Margaux at a new group blog. It looks like we're going to launch that within the next month? I plan to keep writing about comics and music primarily, but I want to experiment with different subjects as well; there will probably be cross-posting over from there, Gutteral remaining the home for ridiculously niche posts like this one. As soon as the new site goes up, you'll hear about it here (well, actually you won't, because we'll be pressing random buttons and tinkering pre-launch first, but still).

Home & Away

2010-02-16T06:45:00.000-05:00

I have a lengthy interview with the curator-residents of new Toronto art space Double Double Land up at Zoilus, which is a block or two away from my house (uh, the venue rather than the blog, that is). Non-Torontonians may want to skip that one, although there is lots of talk about relational aesthetics and the artists who love them.

Much further afield, I'm managing South Korea in Tom Ewing's 2010 Pop World Cup. All the participants were randomly assigned a country headed to this summer's actual World Cup and are selecting songs by relevant nationals for the epic tournament. My first track and blurb were pitted against Greece a few days ago (I decided to go with aggro Autotune), and there's still time for readers to pick their winner. So go vote for South Korea! Or vote for "Adiaforeis" if you like it more.

2009 Tabulated, Part Three: Songs

2010-02-05T12:45:00.003-05:00

I swear the next post will be about comics

And here's the grand finale, only...a month late? Oh well. At least I put some work into it. Just about every entry on the list comes with a clip or mp3, and you can download every single track at once via those ZIP files at the end. I mostly considered singles, loosely defined, which means that some of last year's best LPs aren't represented - Blackout Beach, Clues, Amampondo, you all win in my heart. Everyone was also restricted to one headlining entry each, which still allowed for shameless legal trickery on behalf of Dirty Projectors and the man above. They don't need any more raves, but the guys at #1 moved 6000 albums during their first week, so: listen to that song. "Hey Playa!" is a brilliant demonstration of hip-hop craft, but not a chilly or laboured one; it's mastery with a grin. "I'll make the sun flicker, your poison is my liquor / I'm - that - much - quicker." Even if BlaQKout tanked, no 2009 sample was a better bargain than those Moroccan chants found via cooking TV show. Glorious yet effortless is always a good look.

THE 75 BEST SONGS OF 2009
1. DJ Quik & Kurupt - "Hey Playa! (Moroccan Blues)"
2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - "Zero"
3. The-Dream - "Kelly's 12 Play"
4. Pill - "Trap Goin' Ham"
5. Shakira - "She Wolf"
6. Big Boi ft. Gucci Mane - "Shine Blockas"
7. Walter Jones - "Living Without Your Love"
8. Busy Signal - "Dah Style Deh"
9. Alphabeat - "The Spell"
10. Dirty Projectors - "No Intention"
11. Maxwell - "Pretty Wings"
12. Camera Obscura - "French Navy"
13. Pet Shop Boys - "King of Rome"
14. Future of the Left - "Arming Eritrea"
15. Destroyer - "Bay of Pigs"
16. Micachu & The Shapes - "Lips"
17. Raekwon ft. Cappadonna & Ghostface Killah - "10 Bricks"
18. Think About Life - "Havin' My Baby"
19. Lady Gaga - "Bad Romance"
20. Kelly Clarkson - "I Do Not Hook Up"
21. Fefe Dobson - "I Want You"
22. Pink Dollaz - "Im Tasty"
23. Neko Case - "People Got a Lotta Nerve"
24. The Mountain Goats - "Genesis 30:3"
25. Annie - "I Don't Like Your Band"
26. UGK ft. Lil Boosie & Webbie - "Harry Asshole"
27. The Hidden Cameras - "Underage"
28. Extra Golden - "Thank You Very Quickly" (no clips of the new songs around, so here's "Obama")
29. St. Vincent - "Marrow"
30. Amerie - "Why R U"
31. K'naan - "Wavin' Flag"
32. Cam'ron - "My Job"
33. Z-Ro ft. Lil O - "I Can't Leave Drank Alone"
34. The Lonely Island ft. T-Pain - "I'm On a Boat"
35. Nifty - "Fine Grind"
36. Chain & The Gang - "Unpronounceable Name" (can't find it anywhere, but I give you "Deathbed Confession")
37. Tune-Yards - "Fiya"
38. Electrik Red - "So Good"
39. Dirty Projectors & David Byrne - "Knotty Pine"
40. Brad Paisley - "Then"
41. The Very Best ft. Ezra Koenig - "Warm Heart of Africa"
42. Eve - "Me N My"
43. Royksopp ft. Robyn - "The Girl and the Robot"
44. Keri Hilson - "Slow Dance"
45. R. Kelly ft. Tyrese, Robin Thicke & The-Dream - "Pregnant"
46. Gentleman Reg - "We're in a Thunderstorm"
47. Sway - "Mercedes Benz" (Radio Rip)
48. Joy Orbison - "Hyph Mngo"
49. Cold Flamez - "Miss Me, Kiss Me, Lick Me"
50. G-Side - "Paradise"
51. Art Brut - "Slap Dash for No Cash"
52. Kode9 - "Black Sun"
53. Handsome Furs - "I'm Confused"
54. Meleka - "Go" (Crazy Cousinz Remix)
55. Oumou Sangare - "Koroko"
56. Kids on TV - "Poison" (SIQUEMU Remix)
57. Baobinga & I.D. - "Man Down"
58. Vieux Farka Toure - "Sarama" (well, at least Amadou & Mariam's "Sarama" is on Youtube. here's "Fafa")
59. Toddla T - "Shake It"
60. Roy Davis Jr ft Erin Martin - "I Have a Vision" (Juan Maclean Remix) [link goes to a different remix]
61. Rick Ross ft The-Dream - "All I Really Want"
62. Gucci Mane - "Wonderful"
63. Dirty Danger - "'Ard Bodied"
64. Sleigh Bells - "Crown On the Ground"
65. Lady Antebellum - "Need You Now"
66. Canaille - "Vincent Massey"
67. Tinariwen - "Chabiba"
68. Katie Stelmanis - "Believe Me"
69. Discovery ft Angel Deradoorian - "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend"
70. Emiliana Torrini - "Jungle Drum"
71. Lullabye Arkestra - "We Fuck the Night"
72. Lil Boosie - "Loose as a Goose"
73. Killer Mike - "Man Up"
74. DJ Caloudji - "Sentiment Moko"
75. Double Suicide - "Touch the Sun" (as a consolation I give you half of Double Suicide, playing a song called..."Double Suicide")

Part One (tracks #1-15)
Part Two (tracks #16-33)
Part Three (tracks #34-53)
Part Four (tracks #54-75)

2009 Tabulated, Part Two: Gigs

2010-02-01T05:29:00.002-05:00

Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex at Polish Combatants Hall, 9/13/09, photographed by John Leeson

MY TOP 15 SHOWS OF 2009

1. Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex at the Polish Combatants Hall, September 12 & 13 (you can watch the entire Sunday show on Youtube)
2. Dirty Projectors at Lee's Palace, July 22 (photos; clip of "No Intention")
3. Bite Yr Tongue II w/Lucky Dragons, Corpusse, Nif-D, Feuermusik and Castlemusic at Centre of Gravity, November 21 (Carl briefly and beautifully described this show during Slate's year-end Music Club discussion)
4. King Sunny Ade at Harbourfront Centre, July 4 (opening song from the set)
5. Buraka Som Sistema at the El Mocambo, April 29 (can't find any documentation of the show online, but this will give you an idea of how crazy it was)
6. Owen Pallett's 30th birthday party w/Final Fantasy, Kids on TV, Hank, $100, The Magic and 24 other bands at the Lula Lounge, September 6 (three songs from the Canaille Electric Trio's mini-set were recorded)
7. Micachu & The Shapes at the El Mocambo, July 14 (photos; clip of "Lips"; my review of the show for Eye)
8. Oumou Sangare at Afrofest, July 12 (forget the title of this song, but look at those dancers!)
9. Veda Hille & Christof Migone at the Music Gallery, June 28 (the iPhones stayed pocketed, it seems, but here's a music video)
10. Irma Thomas at Harbourfront Centre, September 6 (photos)
11. Cluster at the Polish Combatants Hall, October 21 (a review by Dave Morris)
12. Bite Yr Tongue I w/Final Fantasy, Gowns, Huckleberry Friends and Wyrd Visions at the Guild Inn, September 5 (photos; more photos; assorted live recordings)
13. Blood Ceremony at the Silver Dollar, July 31 (no snaps or clips from this show; the sendoff before their European tour a month later, with special guest stars, was a lot less raucous but almost as good)
14. Extermination Music Night XII w/Christine Duncan's Element Choir, Faroah Phinkelstein, Slim Twig and Onakabazien at one of the usual clandestine locations, on the bank of the Don River, July 17 (ArtStars were there for some not-entirely-serious reporting)
15. St. Vincent and Gentleman Reg at the Horseshoe, August 8 (photos; more photos; the "Dig a Pony" cover; even more photos of Annie Clark)

That #1 is the easiest decision I've made all year. The ongoing collaboration between Getatchew Mekuria and the Ex embodies my musical ideals: of technical virtuosity, of great outfits, of Fourth World mutualism and of party-starting. At times their sword-wielding dancer seemed to be vibrating every atom in his body. Seeing Dirty Projectors pull off Bitte Orca's vocal harmonies live was astonishing, and Buraka Som Sistema incited a different riot of hips, but nothing else in 2009 left me feeling so elated as that weekend of guitars, Ethio-jazz and Polish beer. September was a good month! And this one might be even better. I'll take one last look back tomorrow.

I come from the East, bearing lists

2010-01-19T14:50:00.005-05:00

Not too far east of here, mind you - I was in England visiting relatives for a couple of weeks over the holidays. And before that...well. It turns out that I vastly overestimated how much free time I'd have during the final semesters of my undergrad. But that's concluding now, and I decided to come back with link/mp3-heavy year-end posts on music in 2009, all week long. Today is download-only stuff and reissues; tomorrow will be live shows; Thursday is albums; and then finally a massive list of individual tracks. (There'll be a year-end list of comics too, it's just been delayed by remedial reading.) I have exciting unrelated news, but I'm gonna wait until the details, unlike this gankable bounty, are up online.

TOP 15 DOWNLOADS OF 2009
1. Pill - 4180: The Prescription (mixtape, download at Blvd St)
2. Z-Ro - Cocaine (mixtape)
3. Pink Dollaz - "I'm Tasty" (off the Jerkin With JHawk tape)
4. Spoek Mathambo - H.I.V.I.P.: Uncle Tom is a House Niggah Mix (found at Generation Bass)
5. Solange - "Stillness is the Move" (The Internet, 2009)
6. Nigerian Rap: The First Decade (1981-1991) (curated by African Hip-Hop)
7. Debruit - FACT Mix 90 (Oct '09) (from FACT)
8. Bill Diakhou - "Baye Aiou Mat Baye" (a song from Nation, which you can grab here)
9. V/A - Zambiance (uploaded by Awesome Tapes from Africa)
10. Busy Signal - "I Fucked Your Girl" (Katy Perry detournement c/o Dave Quam)
11. UGK - "Ain't That a Bitch (Dirty)" (Cocaine Blunts)
12. Rihanna ft The-Dream - "Hatin' on the Club" (this was up on Rihanna's site for a while I think)
13. Elephant Man ft Drake - "Worst I Ever Had" (also from Dave Quam's blog)
14. Fucked Up et al - "Do They Know It's Christmas?" (iTunes)
15. DJ DSign & DJ Exota - UnderGround 2 (D. Quam again)

***

TOP 15 REISSUES OF 2009
1. Franco - Francophonic vol 2 (Sterns Africa)
2. Kraftwerk - The Catalogue (Kling Klang/EMI)
3. V/A - Legends of Benin (Analog Africa)
4. Hank - How to Prosper in the Coming Bad Years (Blocks Recording Club, newly available here)
5. The Beatles in Mono (Apple/EMI)
6. V/A - Freedom, Rhythm & Sound: Revolutionary Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement (Soul Jazz)
7. V/A - Tumbele! Biguine, Afro & Latin Sounds from the French Caribbean, 1963-74 (Soundway)
8. Royal City - s/t (Asthmatic Kitty)
9. Death - For the Whole World to See (Drag City)
10. Serge Gainsbourg - Histoire de Melody Nelson (Light in the Attic)
11. V/A - Ghana Special (Soundway)
12. V/A - Panama! 2 (Soundway)
13. Amadou & Mariam - The Magic Couple (Wrasse Records)
14. The Fates - Furia
15. Drive-By Truckers - The Fine Print (New West Records)

Beyond, Beyond, Beyond

2009-10-21T18:18:00.004-04:00

Very, very busy with school at the moment but some more real posts are coming up in the next few days. For now, another roundup of things I wrote elsewhere.

Here's a Zoilus guest post about Toronto jazz group Canaille: http://www.zoilus.com/documents/general/2009/002415.php

Any regular reader has probably seen this already, but for the sake of comprehensiveness, my interview with Yoshihiro Tatsumi: http://comicscomicsmag.blogspot.com/2009/10/tatsumi-in-toronto.html

And, uh, this is me on Twitter, many months after I started nattering there: https://twitter.com/randlechris

They also wrote comics criticism, no. 2

2009-10-04T19:03:00.001-04:00

A while back I posted about a writer-on-comics primarily known and acclaimed as a novelist/playwright, trolling for more examples of this species in comments. Several rolled in, but no one suggested Angela Carter. Just 51 when she died of cancer in 1992 and slighted before then - most of the British literary establishment treated the author like her friend J. G. Ballard, as a curio - Carter's reputation only thrived posthumously. Her severely creepy modern fairy tales are an obvious antecedent of Guillermo del Toro's. (More sex, though - The Bloody Chamber throbs with perverse intensity.) I knew she'd written plenty of essays and criticism but never read any of it until I picked up a cheap used copy of her non-fiction collection Expletives Deleted earlier this week. And there next to considerations of Edmund White and Grace Paley is a piece on Gilbert Hernandez.

It was apparently published as the introduction to an early British edition of Duck Feet from Titan Books, which I imagine is now out of print. Here's a sample: "Gilbert Hernandez' comic strips in the series, Heartbreak Soup...are about gossip. Especially, about yesterday's gossip, about the memories our parents share with us so we almost come to think that they are our memories too. The intimate folklore of family. Gilbert Hernandez' family, of course, is not my family, or your family, but this kind of folklore has a cross-cultural similarity, most of all in cultures where people often find themselves short of a bob."

"...The daily life of Palomar is a cruel parody of the chaste suburbia pictured in that family newspaper strip of my childhood, Blondie. It is a world of brawling kids and feckless, licentious, drunken men, dominated in every sense of the word by endlessly fecund earth mothers, furiously sexy women who might have come undulating straight out of the crudest kind of male fantasy if they didn't pack such big punches...Sexiest and most furious of all is Luba of the big breasts and uncertain temper."

"...There are things about Heartbreak Soup that make me think Gilbert Hernandez must respond sympathetically to the politics of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but of course, he didn't have to know about Macondo to invent Palomar. They are both places that existed once, in a continent caught between post-colonialism and neo-imperialism; but to think of Heartbreak Soup as a sort of Classic Comics version of Garcia Marquez is to do Gilbert Hernandez a great disservice. What Heartbreak Soup is most like is life."

Some bits could almost be written by a '00s comics blogger. Carter says that Heartbreak Soup "is easy to talk about as if it were a novel; and it isn't, of course. But it is fiction, a category that includes novels, movies, soap opera, sitcom, tragedy, comedy, and comic strips." Even more ahead of its time was her essay "Once More Into the Mangle", which examined Rapeman-esque gonzo manga all the way back in 1971. A feminist outsider drawn to Japanese culture, Carter writes that the quasi-porn comics "would appear to be directed either at the crazed sex maniac or the dedicated surrealist" (coming from her, this was probably a compliment). I feel like we should revive "mangle" as a critical term in tribute. Ineptly flipped localizations, maybe?

Seth on Thoreau MacDonald and Kramers Ergot 7

2009-09-11T07:35:00.003-04:00

not Seth. Thoreau MacDonald

Well, I guess that was the right month for me to fall off a cliff, since almost everyone else writing about comics online seemed to take a late-summer vacation as well. (I did visit NYC and MoCCA for the first time, but a dying hard drive deserves more blame for the radio silence.) And now, after my sloth coincided with absolutely nothing happening, I get to return as Disney buys Marvel and DC's proprietors violently shake its organizational Etch-a-Sketch. I doon't have anything new to say about either of those things yet, though. This post is about the past.

Around the end of last year, I spoke with Seth for this Eye Weekly piece on Kramers Ergot 7. Background-y interviews normally remain on my tape recorder, not archived online, but his description of the KE editorial process and heartfelt elaboration on Thoreau MacDonald in this one made me reconsider. I hope he gets a chance to write that book about the man. We talked just after Seth was filmed for a possible NFB documentary; there's a slight parallel to the framing device of his new book George Sprott in that, but perhaps not one that he enjoyed.

(Note: I still edited out large chunks of the conversation, devoted to aspects of Kramers 7 that soon became common knowledge or me rambling about Matt Baker, for reasons of banality.)

*****

CR: How are you? How was being filmed?

Seth: Oh, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m exhausted, to tell you the truth. It’s not really a very pleasant experience in a way. It’s not the filmmaker’s fault. I just don’t really care for that much attention being focused on me.

Is it for that NFB documentary?

Exactly.

Is that a feature-length thing, or…

It is, and we’ll see what happens, I don’t know. There’s still a little time to go ‘til they get it together. Maybe it’ll work out. I feel nervous about it, I’ll tell you that. But it's out of my hands, so there's only so much I can do about it.

I guess you're sort of helpless, but you don't have to do anything.

It's a funny thing, you know - a documentary when you're watching it you feel like it's just someone filming someone, but it's incredible when they're actually filming you how much pressure you feel to...perform. Which is really difficult, because I'm not an actor. Having a camera aimed at you and having people constantly talking to you, asking you questions...it's worse than being on stage, actually. I know this, I'll never agree to do another one.

...

Have you ever worked on something approaching that size before, or…because I’m assuming nothing in the book will be blown up.

I guess – yeah, exactly. I guess I’d worked on a few things in the National Post when it first started – I did a few comic strips there that were like the size of two pages of the newspaper put together. But I think at that point I wasn’t using the space to the optimum, how I might like to have used it, because of the fact that I was working in the newspaper you had to deal with an editor and even though they weren’t interfering with the work I didn’t have that sense of complete freedom, that I could do whatever I want. And also the deadlines were a hell of a lot tighter. So this was the first real opportunity to do something that big and have the time to work on it to do whatever I wanted.

Right. I’ve seen very small jpegs of the pages – did you change something from what you would normally do in a page of Clyde Fans or whatever?

Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, the thing that excited me about working on this is that I wanted to do something that was super-dense. I wanted to be able to get 120 or 150 panels on a page. That’s what I was really excited about.

That’s what you can see in the samples, a million tiny panels on this landscape.

Every once in a while, you’ll see a few comic pages of your work gathered up somewhere in a catalogue or something, sort of just stacked up. I like the way that looks, they’ll shrink them down and you’ll see there’s a lot of little panels stuck together because of that. Normally when I’m working on my own comics, I don’t usually go over 20 panels on a page, and even that’s really pushing it. Just for clarity’s sake, I don’t want to go any smaller than that on the page. When you’ve suddenly got a page as big as a newspaper page you’ve got the same clarity you’d have in a comic book, but you can really expand out, and to me that’s what was exciting. For some people it was like, “here’s a chance to do a really big drawing,” or to do some comics that have very large elements to them. That’s great too.

I expect that there'll be a mix of people doing very, uh, elaborate fragmented things and then people doing ridiculously huge splash pages.

Yeah, exactly. It’s tempting. If I’d had another couple of pages I might’ve considered putting some huge images in there too. But even as it was, by the time I came on the project Sammy only had one page to offer to me, so as I started to work it out I had to say to him “I cannot possibly do this without two pages.” I got two pages, but I think it would’ve been pushing my luck to ask for four. Basically it came down to – to get the amount of story into it and the level of density I wanted, there wasn’t going to be any space for giant drawings.

What were they like as editors? Did they just assign you a certain number of pages and then act completely hands-off, or…

Yeah, exactly. I think they were rigorous in their – what came in had to be up to whatever standards they wanted. I guess I’m just lucky that whatever I sent them, they liked it, because I think they did reject a thing or two. It just wasn’t using the space in any manner that made it worthwhile, I don’t really know the details. But they certainly didn’t get involved in any sort of preliminary stages, making you send them a pencil version of the strip or anything. I think with most of the cartoonists that they asked they trusted them to know what to do, which is usually a good policy, I think.

I saw in one piece about it that there was an unnamed cartoonist who had to redo their pages, which sounds horrible, but…

It happens. I mean, in a situation like this where you’re working with so many artists there’s definitely going to be a case where something’s gonnna come in that you just don’t care for. I’ve had that happen myself with other anthologies and things I’ve worked in. You always end up hating the editor, but, I mean, that’s their job, that’s what they gotta do.

...

[loses train of thought, apologizes] I’ve googled around and I’ve looked at some of MacDonald’s drawings and I saw that he was colour blind, which is interesting…what made you choose or alight on him as a subject for the strip?

I think it just has to do with the growing interest I’ve had in his work over the past…eight years, I suppose. I’ve been progressively more and more interested in what he did and finding that, you know, you have certain paths you go down in your interests. Thoreau MacDonald is an artist I’ve been very interested in and I knew that eventually I would get around to doing some piece of work on him. It’s part of the process of…you go from being interested to being influenced and then starting to dig into their past, discovering their work in more detail. That usually leads to some project or other, when it’s an artist that’s at the top of your list of things you’re interested in. I certainly find lots of artists and cartoonists of the past that I have a passing interest in, but a few of them will stick around and become more personal, where you sort of take them on as your own, and he’s certainly fallen into that category for me. I would probably put him at the top of my list for the last five years or so, as someone whose work and life I’ve been very interested in. And I just see it as part of an ongoing project. I’ve written about him, I’ve certainly collected his work, I’ve done a strip about him now…I imagine that probably it’s going to end up somewhere down the road doing a book about him. The work appeals to me on a very basic level: I think it’s beautiful work, it’s really sensitive and solitary and it relates to the cartoonist’s art. And I think as a person he’s fascinating, because he was a very humble and self-effacing but – a very deep person. Even looking into him I’m having a hard time figuring out the details of his private life. I mean, there’s a couple diaries published that are very interesting, which is where I got a lot of the information for these strips, but I still don’t know the real intimate details of his life. He seems to have been an unmarried man, but I’ve heard some clues that there was some woman he lived with for years. The funny thing is that there’s just no source material to look this stuff up, so I’m seeing this as part of an ongoing process where I’m probably going to continue looking into him. There might even be material for another strip in there too. But certainly I think a big book of his work is somewhere in the works in my mind, somewhere down the road.

I thought it was…almost Greek levels of tragedy to be the son of this Group of Seven painter and to end up colour blind.

[chuckles] Well, the funny thing is, I’ve seen a few of his paintings and he did well for someone who was colour blind. What’s great about him, I think, is that he didn’t try to compete in the exact same sphere. His work is more about drawing, which I think is probably why I was more attracted to him. I mean, I certainly enjoy the work of his father and the Group of Seven in general…I like their work, especially Lawren Harris, but I think Thoreau’s work spoke to me more than any of them just because it’s close to the actual trade of a cartoonist. He’s working in simple black-and-white images. He’s using them the way a cartoonist uses them. It’s more about a cartoon language or an iconographic language than it is about trying to draw nature. He’s using black-and-white drawing – and he used to say it himself, he never went out into the field and drew - what he would do is come back into his studio and draw from memory. And I think that kind of ink drawing - where you’re creating iconic images to stimulate the viewer’s memory and make them plug in the actual details - that’s very similar to a cartoonist’s art. That’s what attracted me to him.

I just looked on Google Image Search, basically, and unfortunately there isn’t a lot there—

Yeah, it’s funny that there isn’t, actually.

It’s striking how he did these very abstract – well, not very abstract, but unexpectedly abstract renderings of wildlife and the natural environment.

He was a fascinating character. The work really appeals to me, and he was a great graphic designer, but personally too, reading his diaries, he was a very sensitive and humble person, which is always very appealing when you’re reading about someone. Occasionally you’ll read about some particular genius like Frank Lloyd Wright or something and you will think it’s kind of great that they were such an asshole, but generally I think we’re drawn to people that we would want to like and he seems like a person that I would like.

And so those diaries are basically the only primary sources on him?

Well, they’re the only primary sources I have access to. I come across slight bits of information that I don’t have my hands on, a few old magazine articles and stuff, but generally there doesn’t seem to be any written material that really goes into the details. Because he was a nice person I have a feeling that the majority of people did what he would’ve liked, and that’s that they didn’t write about him much. He didn’t want that kind of attention. I think to find out the real details of his life would mean going out and interviewing some people who have first-hand information. I know a great deal about his life up until 1960 or something but I have no idea about the details of his personal life, or what went on between that period and when he died in the ‘80s. I’m very curious, but I don’t have access to anyone who knew him personally, so I don’t really know.

Rewind, Rewind, Rewind

2009-07-29T14:40:00.003-04:00

I haven't done one of these roundups in a while, and they make me look like somewhat less of a slacker, so here's all my recent music writing from EYE WEEKLY. Four concert reviews:

Chain & the Gang at Whippersnapper Gallery, April 24
Clues at Sneaky Dee's, May 21
Joel Plaskett at Massey Hall, May 23
Micachu & The Shapes at El Mocambo, July 14

And one album review: Immaculate Machine - High on Jackson Hill

There are also a few larger, collaborative works in the works. One of them is this, where I am now the assistant/permanent intern/galley slave. The other project is still top-secret, and too nascent for much detail anyway, but it's going to be awesome. Another music-related thing, only differently music-related!

Michael Redhill: award-winning author, man about town, secret nerd

2009-07-21T18:45:00.000-04:00

probably the only Booker nominee who ever wrote a letter to The Comics Journal

I still need to catch up on the well-named Wednesday Comics (good luck finding a copy on any other day of the week), and I definitely don't want to write about Asterios Polyp yet, so here's a distraction in the meantime. I recently flicked through the first issue of The Beguilling's short-lived in-house magazine, Crash, subtitled "The Quarterly Comic Book Review" and featuring an inauspicious cover story on Chester Brown's Underwater. It was published in 1994 and very much of its time (one that preceded both the current management regime and my entry into first grade), but what caught my eye was a number of credits for Michael Redhill.

Redhill is a local novelist, poet and playwright who currently edits the Canadian literary journal Brick; his 2006 novel Consolation won the City of Toronto Book Award and was longlisted for the following year's Booker Prize. I knew that he writes criticism on the side, and vaguely remembered/imagined an affinity for comics, but I was unaware that the two ever dovetailed. Here's a chunk from one of his articles in Crash #1, a comparison of Jeff Smith's nascent Bone to Walt Kelly's Pogo:

We may begin by asserting that there are no funnier animals than people, and here is where Kelly and company began their explorations. Pogo, Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge were antropomorphications of recognizable types of their day, namely Americans, living in America. The creators of these books were connected to their time and their place, and these comics proceeded out of a secreted, but powerful, concern for the issues of the day. Barks is an out and out capitalist (cf. any number of theses and tracts critical of the Disney Ducks for inculcating ruthless capitalism in young children), and Kelly more of a crypto-socialist, but he's more concerned with political systems than he is with parties. The Pogo strips, comics and books are some of the best populist criticism we have of American politics in the fifties...Here is the main point of conflict with Bone. Addressing little more than itself, it gives the illusion of having the kinds of concerns those Golden Age stories did, but it does so without taking those kinds of risks. It's gorgeously shallow.

The next issue included a rambling, amusing letter from Robert Crumb: "...Who's this Michael Redhill? I found him rather sophomoric (but then, so am I, huh?)" Has Redhill written comics criticism more recently, post-Crash? I'm curious about any and all writers-on-comics who found renown with different subjects (writers-of-comics too: hi, Mr Delany), so feel free to post other examples of the genre in comments.

The Man-on-the-Moon

2009-06-29T18:35:00.004-04:00

I've seen more than one eulogy that quoted Jay-Z circa 2001: "Mike was a superhero when I was a kid." It rings true, not just in the trivial sense that he read comics avidly or the comical one of his mid-90s attempt to buy Marvel but with a central resonance. Michael was far beyond normal people as a performer yet desperately apart from them as anything else, emerging from a childhood trauma with both titanic powers and crippling vulnerabilities. He wasn't human. Or he was metahuman. Earlier this year I read that, in what must be the most poignant act of cosplay ever, he was auctioning off a life-size statue of himself dressed as Batman.

Anecdotes like that can subsume his extraordinary talent, and they shouldn't. At an age when most musicians are churning out chirpy kitsch and most other children are dozing through fifth grade, he sang one of pop's most perfect songs, a sonic equation for pure joy. Later, he led the integration of radio, the charts, whole mediums, along with the music they broadcast. He made Thriller, apotheosis and template. He could walk on the moon. Part of a post-consensus generation, I was born too late to witness the zenith of his hegemonic fame, but I feel a strange, fleeting pang for that dissipated cohesion all the same. Every public song I've heard these past few days is one of his, singing the mythical monoculture's last words at its own wake.

The post I wanted to write this week was going to be about Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart's very Adorno, very funny comics project Seaguy. It's set in a amusement-park utopia that isn't, a Disneyfied world where the blissful comforts everyone's provided with by adorable, viscera-trailing Mickey Eye barely disguise their dissatisfied misery and routine exploitation. The magic kingdom is undergirded by wish-processing sweatshops and asylums full of numbed superheroes. It reminds me of the delusional man's extravagant simulacrum, but also the cruel bridling of that radiant boy. I don't mean to suggest that every group like the Jackson 5 is necessarily controlled by an abusive tyrant like Joe J. , or that their brutal backstory makes a single note of "I Want You Back" or "ABC" sound false. There are moments when love really is that simple and that easy, no further layers or ambiguities, nothing else worth saying. I just don't think Michael Jackson experienced very many of them.

On Facebook my friend Carl quoted John Darnielle: "there is no monster without somebody who made him that way." As he added, the maxim could be extended to allow social/historical forces in; sometimes the somebody is a something. The basic truth stands, though. To me Jackson's grim final decades resemble another Morrison creation, Quimper, the tragic Invisibles villain. Once a soothing visitor from a higher dimension, the otherworldly "little light" is dragged into our solid world by the authoritarian nemeses of the piece (who ultimately prove to be equally captive). They crush and corrode the friendly alien into a creepy, white-masked freak. He begins seeding his personality inside unwitting thralls...which is probably where the parallels end. But the King's twitchy imitations of everyday behaviour had their own sad monstrosity. At one point during the second Seaguy miniseries, a character says: "Mickey's everyone's friend and no one's." So was Michael.

Comics Critics Cry: "Context!"

2009-05-15T05:45:00.001-04:00

The panel I looked forward to most at this year's TCAF was the Critics' Roundtable near the end of the final day, and it didn't disappoint, except in the sense that I left wishing it had been at least twice as long. They'd assembled a great lineup: Jeet Heer, Douglas Wolk, Dan Nadel and Bart Beaty, plus moderator Bill Kartalopoulos. The latter began by goading everyone with this quote from a review of Rutu Modan's Jamilti in The Guardian: "It's no longer necessary to convince people that comics can be more than Batman or the Beano. On the other hand, anything with any merit tends to get overpraised and is routinely spared the sort of critical scrutiny brought to bear on everything else, from a new Zadie Smith novel to the latest Star Wars flick. The mainstream press almost never measures a graphic novel's actual achievement against its unfulfilled potential. New converts, reluctant to show their cluelessness about the ninth art, merely parrot the publishers' hype."

Beaty broadly agreed with the sentiment, noting that when he writes non-scholarly articles (like his "Conversational Euro-Comics" series for The Comics Reporter) his role is typically the enthusiast or tour guide. Douglas added a point he's made before, which could be stressed more often: most mainstream or non-specialist publications still don't cover comics routinely enough to make critical broadsides feasible there, let alone pieces about older works. I write a fair number of negative music reviews for EYE Weekly, because their coverage of the medium in Toronto aims to be comprehensive. Anything about funnybooks is more sporadic, so I tend to pitch articles about comics I expect to be good, or at least interesting - and EYE already gives me more space for my ramblings than most alt-weeklies would. There is no perceptive critic writing regularly about comics at the New Yorker or whatever, but then there aren't many of those left in dance or classical music either.

Anyway! After describing his past life as a film reviewer, Jeet Heer came up with a fantastic analogy for the comics critic's dilemma (it's a heavy burden to bear). This is paraphrased at best, because I couldn't scribble it down verbatim, but here you go: "We're almost like religious missionaries...If you're speaking to an outsider you'll say 'wow, isn't this cathedral great?' but if you're inside the church we'll talk about how such-and-such priest is a pedophile." When everyone had stopped laughing at that Kartalopoulos changed the panel's structure a little, introducing various new/recent/upcoming books to see how the roundtable responded to them. The first one was Drawn & Quarterly's opening volume of The Collected Doug Wright, and Kartalopoulos quoted a promotional blurb from Chris Oliveros (which I can't actually find to quote here) making the case for Wright as an undiscovered Kurtzmann/Crumb/Schulz-level figure.

Heer replied: "I would have to say Chris' comment is hyperbole...he's not a new Kurtzmann or Crumb or Schulz. But I would say he's a new John Stanley." (That is, a cartoonist who did remarkable and brilliant things within a circumscribed commercial substrata.) And if he's only coming to light through the idiosyncratic lens of Seth, well: "Artists invent their ancestors...We now read Donne differently because of Eliot." Heer ended up placing Wright below masters like Schulz but above extremely talented craft guys such as Hank Ketcham. Beaty argued that Wright and Ketcham are "almost peers," but Heer distinguished the former as an observational cartoonist, portraying the actual lived experience of suburbia. All of Ketcham's housewives wear high heels; Wright's wear pants.

Around this point Kartalopoulos changed the topic to Fantagraphics' Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941. It was the first time Dan Nadel really leapt into the discussion, so much so that all my notes from this segment are about him. Both crotchety and self-deprecating, he said that Supermen! was "very blatantly influenced by a book I wrote called Art Out of Time, which is fine." But he criticized the newer anthology for having no "curatorial verve," reprising a theme he's sounded in his own book and elsewhere: that critics should locate strange old pulpy types like Fletcher Hanks within their historical and aesthetic contexts instead of simply gawking at how "weird" it all is (later on, Heer characterized the latter as the "Look at all this wacky stuff!" approach to comics writing). Even some giants are susceptible to those fannish lines of criticism; when talk turned to Jack Kirby and the many, many words devoted to him, Nadel groused: "There's so much written about Kirby and it sucks so bad."

He was just as cheery when Kartalopoulos introduced Craig Yoe's Boody: "Here's an example of the absolute worst tendencies in contemporary comics publishing." Nadel's jihad against the book mostly followed his earlier attacks at Comics Comics' blog, but being harsh doesn't make you wrong, and I still agree with most of what he said. I'll co-sign this: "If you want to be taken seriously, be serious." He also suggested that Boody "makes a great argument for the role of archives and universities in comics." The general sentiment at this point seemed to be "fuck camp, yo."

The last book under consideration ended up being Jules Feiffer's The Explainers, which made this focus on history oddly appropriate - as Beaty noted, Feiffer has sort of been written out of it. He was apart from the Mad crew and an older generation than the undergrounds. According to Douglas, Fantagraphics got about three volumes into a complete Feiffer by the early '90s and then just stopped. Sometimes the context defies its surveyors. I'll give the last word to Jeet: "The history of comics is a history of clubs...and Feiffer was an unclubbable man."

(OK, the panel did take up Asterios Polyp briefly, agreeing that it's the kind of book which will take months to fully digest and frustrate immediate reviewers, but this post is already long-winded to the point of self-indulgence. I can hear birdsong outside my window.)

The disappointing comeback album

2009-05-10T05:21:00.000-04:00

So, uh, that was an unforeseen sabbatical. Sorry! Not dead, just incredibly busy with end-of-term work and summer internship applications and preparations for TCAF which is happening now. I wrote about Yoshihiro Tatsumi and A Drifting Life for EYE WEEKLY and interviewed him yesterday. I can't post much about that now for various reasons (one of which being that I really, really need to go to bed so I can get to the festival in reasonable time tomorrow) but I should say that he is one of the most humble artists I've ever met, incredibly so considering what the new memoir represents. Also, he and his wife are a stylish and adorable couple. Between that and the Doug Wright Awards and the fashionista guy I saw wearing Vulcan ears in Yorkville I feel as if good vibes will float me gently towards the ceiling.

I've been taking notes during the show so there will be more to come. Also it turns out I may not be the only music critic with "Like a Prayer" as one of their karaoke staples. More to come about that too.

Nothing says Valentine's Day like a best-of-2008 list!

2009-02-11T07:39:00.001-05:00

Or more properly a list of my own favourite comics from last year, since my reading was a little too selective to be comprehensive: the most glaring gaps include Acme Novelty Library #19 (I slept on the earlier Rusty Brown stuff and couldn't really afford to catch up yet), Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby (Canada Customs have been protecting my delicate sensibilities from it) and The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard (I suck). Webcomics are a recurring blind spot, though KC Green's Horribleville almost joined the few here.

I also excluded reprints of anything that's already collected in English, because otherwise Popeye would've ended up at #1 on the countdown. To my mind it's the greatest comic strip ever, but still, boring. This bylaw does get fuzzy when applied to a book like Where Demented Wented; thus I strived, with a hateful scowl, to always rule on the side of Anti-Life. I second-guess myself way too much when it comes to year-end lists (surely Trondheim could be higher...shut up shut up shut up), so I'll just post the thing and hope for forgiveness, plus overlooked recommendations.

25. various comics by Kate Beaton
24. Dororo by Osamu Tezuka
23. Nocturnal Conspiracies by David B. (review here)
22. Chiggers by Hope Larson
21. Red Coloured Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi
20. Final Crisis by Grant Morrison, J. G. Jones, Doug Mahnke et al (that post about Final Crisis, Grant Morrison and Afrofuturism is here; a look back at the whole frenzied catastrophe is coming soon)
19. Casanova by Matt Fraction and Fabio Moon
18. Disappearance Diary by Hideo Azuma
17. Tokyo Zombie by Yusaku Hanakuma
16. Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella by Lewis Trondheim
15. Speak of the Devil by Gilbert Hernandez
14. Skim by Mariko & Jillian Tamaki
13. Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
(brief review of one individual issue here)
12. Fight or Run: Shadow of the Chopper by Kevin Huizenga
11. MOME vol 12, by various artists
10. Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
9. Black Jack vols 1-2 by Osamu Tezuka
8. BodyWorld by Dash Shaw
7. "Superman in Excelsis" (from All-Star Superman #10) by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (retrospective of sorts on the whole series here; you can see a potato I got Mr. Quitely to sketch here)
6. Ganges #2 by Kevin Huizenga
5. Omega the Unknown by Jonathan Lethem, Karl Rusnak and Farel Dalrymple
4. Kramers Ergot 7 by various (I wrote about it here)
3. Love & Rockets: New Stories #1 by Los Bros Hernandez
2. Travel by Yuichi Yokoyama
1. What It Is by Lynda Barry (I went to her IFOA appearance and wrote about how she's awesome; bonus spooky joke about John Updike dying!)

Put a retrospective gloss on it

2009-02-01T12:55:00.000-05:00

Fuck preamble! This is late as it is (I was hoping for January). It's plain from the lists that my relationship with this year's critical consensus was a distant and unfaithful one, but sometimes - like when Beyonce is involved - I just can't resist. My favourite comics from 2008 will probably (hopefully) be enumerated later today. For now

BEST ALBUMS
1. Fucked Up - The Chemistry of Common Life
2. Marnie Stern - This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That
3. Feuermusik - No Contest
4. Ne-Yo - Year of the Gentleman
5. The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride
6. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part 1: 4th World War
7. Hercules & Love Affair - s/t
8. Hank - The Luck of the Singers
9. G-Side - Starshipz and Rocketz
10. The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
11. Bun B - II Trill
12. Destroyer - Trouble in Dreams
13. Taylor Swift - Fearless
14. Drive-By Truckers - Brighter Than Creation's Dark
15. $100 - Forest of Tears
16. Blood Ceremony - s/t
17. Martha Wainwright - I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too
18. 9th Wonder & Buckshot - The Formula
19. Cursed - III
20. Matmos - Supreme Balloon

BEST TRACKS AND/OR SINGLES
1. The Mountain Goats - "San Bernardino"
2. Hercules & Love Affair - "Blind (Frankie Knuckles Remix)"
3. The Magnetic Fields - "The Nun's Litany"
4. Lloyd ft Lil Wayne - "Girls Around the World"
5. Lil Wayne - "A Milli"
6. TV on the Radio - "Golden Age"
7. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!"
8. Girls Aloud - "The Loving Kind"
9. Beyonce - "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)"
10. Alphabeat - "Fascination"
11. Ne-Yo - "So You Can Cry"
12. Annie - "I Know Ur Girlfriend Hates Me"
13. Bun B ft Lil Wayne - "Damn I'm Cold"
14. The Juan Maclean - "Happy House"
15. Big Boi ft Andre 3000 & Raekwon - "Royal Flush"
16. Scarface ft Lil Wayne & Bun B - "Forgot About Me"
17. Matmos - "Rainbow Flag"
18. Taylor Swift - "Love Story"
19. Usher ft Beyonce & Lil Wayne - "Love In This Club (Part II)"
20. The Hold Steady - "Constructive Summer"

BEST REISSUES
v/a - African Scream Contest
v/a - Spiritual Jazz
Nina Simone - To Be Free
v/a - Nigeria Special Part 2
Mission of Burma - Signals, Calls & Marches

Sketchbook #2: Darwyn Cooke

2009-01-22T02:19:00.011-05:00

A characteristically stylish rendition of Klarion the Witch Boy by Darwyn Cooke, fantastic cartoonist and the man with no website.

I think this well-regarded run on The Spirit is his most recent project that's been collected in trade paperback, but he's also about to publish the first of several books adapting Richard Stark's Parker novels, which I'm really looking forward to. I should point out that the patchy inking on Klarion's goth dandy outfit is all me - a lot of people ask Darwyn for sketches at conventions, so I sat down and gamely filled it in while he continued drawing next to me. He also waited until I could borrow an issue of Seven Soldiers for reference, because he's a nice guy like that.

The Mirror of Cats: Hope Larson & Bryan Lee O'Malley

2009-01-12T01:37:00.003-05:00

(idea for content ~~inspired by~~ shamelessly stolen from Douglas Wolk)

I've brought a sketchbook to comics conventions ever since TCAF 2005, when certain festival-goers saw a stupid kid running around with many sheets of cartooned-on paper. Since then a bunch of artists have taken the time to draw something inside it, and sharing their lovely work seems like the least I can do in return.

This piece, which I guess would be the rough (yet adorable!) equivalent of a split 7", was drawn by the thoroughly awesome Hope Larson and battlin' Bryan Lee O'Malley. The former recently published Chiggers, and the latter is about to debut Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe, and you should buy both of them. It's fitting that I can't remember who drew the first feline.

(click for big!)

The Hack Freighter

2009-01-07T18:11:00.004-05:00

Jonah Goldberg, for those lucky enough to need a primer, is a contributing editor and columnist at National Review whose specialty is phrasing nonsensical pseudointellectual arguments in the style of a nerdy frat boy. Recently seen arguing that The Wire is right-wing, Goldberg also gave the world Liberal Fascism, a book that attempted to challenge the scholarly consensus on fascism despite its author's total non-fluency in German, Italian or Spanish. And now, at the new Zhdanovite culture warrior base Big Hollywood, Jonah argues that Watchmen is really an allegory about good Democrats being usurped by evil Republicans: "This exposes one of the problems with Moore’s political vision: he seems to think the Cold War was a purely Reaganite phenomena that descended on America like a dark curtain thanks in part to the death of JFK...The real problem with Moore’s anti-Reaganite vision is that it places the blame for the omnipresent climate of fear on Reagan himself."

Aside from this unintentionally hilarious portrayal of committed anarchist Alan Moore as a starry-eyed Camelot bobby soxer, there's also the small issue that Reagan doesn't actually appear in Watchmen, not even as an incidental background character like, um, JFK. But that's OK, Goldberg hurriedly clarifies, because his "stand-in" Nixon does! Plus Moore's a self-hating pinko so there: "the miasma of conspiratorial phobias that hangs over Watchmen’s universe is one that suggests Western governments were not only to blame for Cold War tensions, but that Western governments were actually the real villains." I could quote some Reagan administration statements about Central America here, but anyone who thinks that Watchmen is all about blaming "the West" alone for the Cold War - or who fails to notice that the book's right-wing vigilantes are disarmingly, uncharacteristically sympathetic - is simply a fucking idiot. And this flatters Goldberg's coherence: the last graf (where he claims that Reagan's vision triumphed in transcendence while Moore's resembles "'80s kitsch") really begs for a close reading, in the same way that Jeff Goldblum pleads for a quick headshot at the end of The Fly.

But it gets better: Bill Willingham shows up in the comments!

I see the book as a chronicle of the wonderful but tragic genius hero who saw the way to save the world, and was the only one willing to do all of the horrible things needed to bring that about — just like all of those poor souls who had and will have to die horribly in order to bring about the glorious communist utopia that will come, if only the superior geniuses of the left are willing to break enough eggs to accomplish it.

Uh, well, I'm down with reader-response criticism, but even Stanley Fish would struggle to wring that meaning from the book. I guess the Black Freighter mise en abyme was written in a trance after Moore's subconscious conscience wrested control from his raging commie id.

A creature stirs

2008-12-25T15:03:00.002-05:00

Exams + Christmas + end-of-year list-making have devoured my life, but somewhere in that madness I wrote this piece about Kramers Ergot 7 for Eye Weekly. I'm hoping to edit the full transcript of my interview with Seth for that article and post it in the next couple of days, but meanwhile I can emphatically say that the anthology is worth the scratch, even if you don't have a suitable bookshelf or, um, somewhere to comfortably read it (maybe I need to visit Ikea). And I'm also working on two year-end lists, for comics and music (the latter has the more pressing deadline, so it might end up on here first). Otherwise, I hope that anyone reading this is enjoying the holiday of their choice, and that they'll stick around for new posts in the new year.

soggy little bee

2008-11-16T02:14:00.004-05:00

Links! Copious links! To stuff written by me. I reviewed David B.'s Nocturnal Conspiracies for the latest issue of EYE WEEKLY, but there was significantly less space on the books page than is usually the case and it's a new collection by goddamn David B. so I'll be expanding on the thoughts in that piece here (I planned to see Mr. B. and Igort at a Beguiling-affiliated event tonight, and then freezing rain reached a Book of Revelation intensity so I wimped out).

And since I'm archiving, here's my evalution of the new T-Pain album (~~probably~~ definitely the best music review I've done in a while) and here's one of the Bicycles' Oh No, It's Love.

Carve a B in ya face

2008-11-03T21:22:00.002-05:00

(via)

(also any Americans readers had better vote today I swear to god)

"I've always had a boner for Canada."

2008-10-30T00:56:00.007-04:00

Lynda Barry and Chip Kidd should have their own sitcom. That was my first thought after their joint International Festival of Authors appearance last Sunday. I've seen postmortems which suggested that they didn't have much chemistry together, but for such outsized personalities they both played off poor straight man Bill Douglas nicely. Kidd is a regular at IFOA and his deadpan wit is still one of its best attractions, whether gently mocking Douglas for calling Margaret Atwood "Peggy" or replying to Barry's admission that "I was the girl guys dated before coming out..." with "Full disclosure: Lynda and I used to date." He spat out "poet" as if the very word was curdling inside his mouth ("I wake up next to a poet every morning, so it's a struggle..."). Most of his information about Bat-Manga - the search for obscurities that don't actually exist in DC's archives, staunch right-to-leftism, the book's idiosyncratic lettering - will be old news by now. For me, the most valuable segment was his discussion of artistic methods with Barry.

It took a while to get there. Even though the pair's lines of conversation eventually drifted into the same orbit, I feel like they had to be acclimatized to each other first. Barry began by explaining why it took so long for What It Is to come out: Sasquatch, who'd released One! Hundred! Demons!, quickly soured on comics, and incredibly no other publishers took an interest in her until Chris Ware pulled some strings. During this time she apparently made a living by selling stuff on eBay. After some more atomized exchanges they progressed into a discussion about each other's vastly different working methods, focusing heavily on composition. Barry seems to view composition as pen-and-paper intuition, with her rarely-used computer as a mere facilitator; Kidd does most of his work on one now, which prompted some mutual bemusement, but he still located common ground by recalling "happy accidents" that resulted from random quirks in Quark.

Of course, there's random chance and there is random chance, as one of Barry's stories underlines. She's lived in rural Wisconsin for years now; one relative of her nearest neighbours was a lifelong teacher with packrat habits, and when she died the cartoonist helped clear out the enormous mess that had piled up in her often-flooded basement. Wearing a toxic-hazards suit, Barry came across a massive stack of kids' school assignments, turned into a sedimentary hoard over the course of decades. The neighbours let her throw it all in a garbage bag, and now bits of that putrid junk are reverently reused in What It Is. It's fitting: from her goofy, forthright manner to the warm stream-of-consciousness encouragement she gave everyone getting their books signed, Barry came off as the best grade-school teacher I never had.

BONUS NOTEBOOK DUMP!

Barry was supposed to do the Little Women cover for that series of cartoonist-redesigned-classics ("They wanted a girl") but her embroidered-on-velvet design was deemed insufficiently "Lynda Barry" so it went to Julie Doucet instead
John Updike just rejected a Chris Ware cover. Someone's about to get shivved by Art Spiegelman!
The title of What It Is came from childhood pimp slang ("all of us wanted to be pimps when we grew up")
Canadians writers are predictably more mild-mannered about covers
The Barry-edited Best American Comics 2008 was supposed to include an excerpt from Paul Pope's Batman: Year 100 as a conscious response to comics' "lunchtable mentality" (DC are fine with that, I guess)
Shitty computer lettering "is the typographical equivalent of bad toupees."
"I want to make something so I can make out with guys."

A tumbleweed floats past

2008-10-25T05:14:00.002-04:00

Okay, it's been a while. But hey, I actually have a decent excuse this time: the backlight on my laptop has become inoperative, which drastically curtailed any internet timewasting (I'm hoping to get it fixed in the next few days and return to blogging on the regular). So what have I been doing in the meantime? I saw the otherworldly Sun Ra Arkestra (about which more later); I conducted this long interview with organizers of clandestine Toronto series Extermination Music Night, who're holding a fundraiser tonight; I moved. There's more catching-up to do (still want to respond to Tom Spurgeon's comics-collection meme), but the first thing I write about is probably going to be this Lynda Barry/Chip Kidd panel - and punctually!

Drinks at the Crucifixion: All-Star Superchrist

2008-09-28T03:39:00.005-04:00

My favourite response to All-Star Superman #12 thus far is Cole Moore Odell's. Not because I necessarily buy into his Luthor = Quintum theory - the evidence is all circumstantial, and it seems too obvious an understory to prompt one of those revelatory rereadings that Morrison loves - but because he cleverly dragged Paradise Lost into it.

Of course, using a blindingly obvious messiah figure as its protagonist doesn't make All-Star Superman a straight Christian allegory. You can go through the series picking out suggestive Biblical allusions (Samson, the struggle against a false solar tyrant, etc.) but I don't think that would illuminate much. Christ said the only path to salvation was through him, and Superman's purpose is an inverse one: working against time so that we can save ourselves once he's gone. He wavers ("When I'm not around anymore...can they survive their own self-destructive urges?") without ever losing the hope that earthlings will follow him into the sun. Morrison stresses our perfectible potential rather than ineradicable sin; he sees gods poised inside ordinary people, the most radical of humanists.

It neatly complements the recurring motif of quantum uncertainty. In issue #3 Lois Lane became both dead and alive at the hands of the Ultrasphinx, which mirrors Superman's situation not just in the opening pages here but all those turned before them. His sustained burst of legacy-building activity was interrupted again and again by living reminders of his mortality. Up in the stars, he looks down on his own memorial, and at the very end Quintum stands before a final unopened box.

If the prismatic philanthropist is Lex's reflection, Luthor ably fills the more familiar role of Superman's Satan. His charismatic genius is wasted on that narcissistic vendetta against a perceived interloper from above. The brilliance and the insecure chauvinism alike feel authentically, depressingly human. And for all the heat-rays and light, Morrison's Luthor is ultimately the same as Milton's Lucifer: a mere shadow trying to snuff out his sun.

Even that clash has its surprises, though. This story is both simpler and subtler than it first appears. Initially, racing through issue #12, I took Luthor's comeuppance as a variation on one climax from Mark Millar's risible, self-adoring Authority run - the Power of Love with intellectual pretensions. It's actually far more disarming than that. The baddie is undone not by a supercharged empathy for his fellow men but the sudden conception of how small and alone they all are inside a vast, pitiless system. And just to spread around the ambiguity, Superman waves away this tearful revelation before using the opportunity to beat Luthor up. If even Steve Lombard became a hero, can not the saviour of all the Earth fight dirty?

All-Spud Superman

2008-09-15T12:11:00.003-04:00

I should probably explain how I came to possess a potato personalized by Frank Quitely. Well, to draw upon harrowing personal experience, pretty much every mid-sized comics message board features at least one member with knee-jerk hatred for said Scotsman - usually expressed as "his women aren't hot enough" or "he gives everyone potato faces." A few years ago Quitely made a rare North American appearance at this awful clusterfuck, moving me to shell out fifty dollars for a shady San Diego clone without the traditions, atmosphere, good weather etc. Still, that was all worth it when he actually laughed at the explanation for this dumb joke, sketched in between my ravings about Flex Mentallo. The veggie itself is long gone, but I thought it'd be a suitably goofy way to celebrate this week's conclusion of All-Star Superman.

"The stage is life, music, beautiful girls...."

2008-09-12T06:38:00.003-04:00

vaguely Ditko-ish

Linden Renz just scanned many fantastical, evocative photos of American theatrical troupes from the early 20th century. Take a look.

Trondheim in Space

2008-09-10T23:00:00.004-04:00

Kaput & Zosky

This was published a few months ago by First Second (before my last post, even!). It represents a strain of Lewis Trondheim's work that we haven't seen much of in North America: the cartoonist has published over a hundred albums at breakneck pace in Europe, but most of the ones translated from French are either comic fantasy (e.g. the epic Dungeon series he created with Joann Sfar) or anthropomorphic autobiography (like this year's other Trondheim release, the excellent Little Nothings). Kaput & Zosky, however, is manifestly a children's comic, even moreso than his First Second debut A.L.I.E.E.N., which featured such delightful all-ages fun as sadistic eye trauma. This series, though - the adventures of two clueless would-be space conquerers - is composed of brief, gag-laden antics. It's something of a trifle.

But watching Trondheim negotiate these familiar conventions is revealing in itself. He's always been open to franchising and the compromises that attend collaboration (the latter half of these strips, drawn by Eric Cartier, were adapted from an animated tie-in), perhaps because his own idiosyncrasies tend to remain intact. The all-Trondheim bits here are deeply French, absurdist social satires driven less by frantic laser blasts than games of hopscotch and comical financial speculation. The funniest and most mundane story involves Kaput & Zosky trying and failing to enjoy a vacation, with Godardian asides like "They're paid to be submissive." On another planet, rooster-haired blobs follow the duo's every order in joyful, catastrophically literal servitude. I feel that Deleuze overlooked this particular upside to masochism.

Land of the Lost

2008-08-22T23:10:00.003-04:00

Suppressed Prince album...or Obsidian fighting Nebula Man during a solar eclipse?

The Milligan post is still coming (I radically overestimated my capacity for non-essential work during August, aka Laziness Awareness Month), but here's something looser while that particular brew percolates. I recently re-read this post by Jones of the Jones boys, a list of desirable comics that are currently unavailable in English, and it got me wondering: what are cartooning's equivalents of that moldy musical chestnut, the fabled lost record? Tantalizing works that remain unpublished, unfinished or unrealized potential? So here's a cursory list of lost albums BD. I can already see the obvious gaps (that final issue of Winter Men never actually materialized, right?), so feel free to expand on it in comments.

Big Numbers, by Alan Moore and assorted victims
Approaches the Beach Boys' SMiLE in both mystique and ambition, only with less cheeseburger consumption and no contemptible Mike Love figure for everyone to hate. Even though the series will probably never be completed in any form, I still hope that all the pages from its completed third issue are published some day - Frank Santoro makes the first two sound like a fascinating exercise in masochistic formalism.

Bizarre Boys, by Peter Milligan, Grant Morrison and Jamie Hewlett
Not much is known about this abandoned project, just that it was supposed to be published under Vertigo's Voices banner (a mid-90s bid to encourage more radical personal expression from the imprint's creators, which inspired Kill Your Boyfriend and two thoroughly obscure Peter Milligan one-shots before ending its brief life) and involve much Joycean metafiction in riotous style. But the lineup alone is reason to rue its dissipation. (There were once scans of some unreleased promo art to pine over right here, and they seem to have floated into the same void.)

"Doctor Strange," by Steve Ditko
In Blake Bell's excellent new study Strange & Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, he writes that a couple issues' worth of completed pages from Ditko's Doctor Strange serial went unpublished after the artist left Strange Tales and Marvel. My copy of the book is currently packed up in a box, but I'm pretty sure Bell also discovered that said art remains in Ditko's hands, so who knows when/if it'll see print.

Sweeney Todd, by Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli
I know nothing about this beyond the basic primer in Jog's essay on Taboo (where it was originally going to be serialized), and I'm lukewarm towards most of Gaiman's comics except Sandman. But I love musicals, and I'd probably agree with Terry Teachout, who called Sondheim's Sweeney the greatest post-WWII Broadway debutante there is. So how to deal with his shadow? Ignore the stage interpretation, ubiquitous as it is, or engage with it directly? A towering, operatic howl about capital's gore-flecked maw in the hands of Neil Gaiman...yeah, that could be an unintentionally hilarious debacle in the making. I'd still like to have seen how it turned out.

Tintin and Alph-Art, by Herge
Another famous example. I haven't read this either - the posthumously published versions are all incomplete sketches rather than finished work - but it sounds deeply weird. I don't know what represented a greater departure for Herge: dispatching Tintin to tussle with a sinister impresario in the world of, um, modern art, or actually having him meet a girl during the adventure. Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature contains some great theorizing about this book.

Until the Day of Victory, by Osamu Tezuka
There's probably enough unseen Tezuka comics to fill up a whole list like this. I would guess, however, that only one of them features Mickey Mouse machine-gunning Osaka in his adorable fighter jet. And it's apparently still extant. Can some swashbuckling manga scholar please bootleg this slab of genius?

I guess I'm young but I feel so weary

2008-08-09T05:43:00.005-04:00

not pictured: Him

This ramshackle joint was kindly linked to by a bunch of more popular blogs recently - the perfect cue to disappear for two weeks! I feel especially bad about disappointing Mr. Beast over at Mindless Ones; there's a film paper that needs to be written sharpish, so I won't be able to return to comics blogging for a few more days despite his generous praise ("as good a bit of blogging about comics as I’ve encountered in 2008"!). A very long post about Peter Milligan is pulling itself together, but in the meantime I thought I should collect all the non-comics music writing I've done lately:

Women - s/t

Bowerbirds - Hymns for a Dark Horse

Katy Perry - One of the Boys (probably the single worst album I've heard this year)

She & Him @ The Opera House, July 23rd

That She & Him live review is probably the highlight here. Its thesis is hardly radical, given the self-effacing nature of the band's own name, but I think it was executed well. And even if you disagree, it's definitely a good excuse to post pictures of Zooey Deschanel.

Night of the Purple Ray: Grant Morrison and Afrofuturism, cont'd

2008-07-25T21:59:00.007-04:00

I'm waiting to see this quote in its full context rather than a breathless, garbled con report, but Morrison himself apparently just endorsed my Kirby-meets-Delany interpretation of Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis:

"Once New Earth collapses, the entire multiverse collapses. Darkseid, when he falls backwards through time, it's the first time he's ever physically been here. Every time you've seen him, he's been a projection. I wanted to do Mister Miracle as 'everyone is all black,' I wanted to do Metron as Sun Ra. They shouldn't be white."

I have this mental image of Morrison continuing to rave about the Arkestra at unreasonable length, bringing the cosmic gospel to his flock of bemused cosplayers. He dances away as DiDio tries to wrest back the microphone...

....this is probably why I'm sitting at home with my cardboard belt instead of drunkenly trashing the Hyatt during Rom Spaceknight's direct-action protest.

This post has teeth in the mouth of a beast (an interview with Matmos)

2008-07-17T09:11:00.006-04:00

I swear, stuff actually gets done during these week-long disappearances. It's only rarely that I get wasted and pass out underneath a bridge. Last weekend, for example, I interviewed "pop-concrete" duo Matmos for EYE WEEKLY. You can find an introduction to their music in the article or at the pair's official website, but they've been amongst my favourite bands since releasing the witty and moving Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast in 2006 and I was bit nervous going in. Luckily, they're both mordant wits and total sweethearts. They're also playing at the Music Gallery on Monday night, so I command all Toronto readers to go there and buy Supreme Balloon (you could also buy Drew Daniel's new book). Our conversation went on for much, much longer than could possibly be included in that EYE WEEKLY piece (like, to the tune of 4500 words) so I'm posting the entire unabridged interview here for fellow Matmos obsessives and/or synthesizer fetishists. Posting about comics-related nerdiness will resume shortly...

***

CR: You’re on tour right now, right?

M. C. (MARTIN) SCHMIDT: We are. At the moment we’re driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles. We’ve been on tour since mid-May.

You recently moved from San Francisco to Baltimore, right? How’s Baltimore been treating you?

MS: I like Baltimore. Baltimore is poor and mostly black, so it’s very different from San Francisco, which is rich and, well, not so black.

I remember reading that one of the only significant minority populations in San Francisco – aside from the Asian one, obviously – is Armenian, for some reason.

MS: Wow, I had no idea of that.

I unfortunately haven’t been to the U.S. very much…my only real experience with Baltimore is from The Wire.

MS: Yeah, it seems like it’s fairly accurate, though not being a drug dealer, a policeman, a judge or a dockworker I don’t have too much personal – I don’t mix in those worlds much. But the landscape is dead-on, and there’s a lot of desperately poor people and they seem to buy and sell a lot of drugs and kill each other regularly. It’s quite sad - I don’t mean to sound like Sarcastic Fuckhead…I mean, honestly there’s a lot of very sad desperation that goes on ‘round there. From my moneyed white perspective it’s a sweet place to live because things are really, really cheap. We have a huge house whereas before we lived in a tiny apartment in San Francisco.

Being from Canada, I think people up here don’t have an idea of what happens in the inner cities sometimes…

MS: You know, I always thought that about Canada until we played in Vancouver some years ago, and they were going on about “oh, this club’s in a bad neighbourhood,” and I was sort of chuckling like “ha ha, bad neighbourhood, as if.” And then…it was really nasty! That neighbourhood in Vancouver is bad…So, I don’t know. You got your problems.

Yeah, in Toronto we seem to push the really desperately poor people out to the outskirts of the city. It’s like they’re even more invisible, which is obviously terrible…I want to talk about something less depressing.

MS: All right. Let’s talk about music.

One of the interesting things about the new album is that there’s no samplers--

MS: But there are. I don’t mean to sound like Correcting Correct Guy—

No, go ahead.

MS: The only rule for this record was that there were no microphones.

Right.

MS: We used samplers – in fact, we used our whole usual bag of tricks, except that we weren’t allowed to take anything that made sounds in the air. So everything’s synthesized or generated by things other than real things…God, that was eloquent. I’m being clowned by my vanmates right now.

I just listened to another interview where Drew said he had to learn what chords are for this album – not what they are, but how to use them.

MS: It’s true. Drew is a genius in many ways, but he has not bent his genius to learning the Western notation system. In fact I think he keeps himself a little bit ignorant on purpose.

I think that sort of adds to the concept of the album in a way, because the idea of setting yourself a challenge and obviously the sound of it is reminiscent of video games.

MS: Wow. What video games in particular do you mean?

Well, I’m pretty young, I grew up playing them before I actually listened to music seriously—

MS: You mean, like Dig Dug and Mario Bros. or Halo and Grand Theft Auto?

I grew up around the time the Super NES and Sega Genesis came out, so it actually sounded like…the stuff they used over in Japan was synthesizers, basically.

MS: Yeah. I mean, it’s a similar set of restrictions, and that’s our schtick, always…[static]…I think it’s a similar thing with videogames, they had to cram in as much music as they could. I think the programmers at Namco possibly did a better job than we did.

I was reading your voluminous liner notes/backstory for the album and Drew apparently used a video game controller to control chord progressions on one of the songs…

MS: It’s true! Do you want to talk to Drew about that?

Yeah, sure.

[the phone is passed over]

DREW DANIEL: Hi there.

Hi.

DD: Can you hear me?

Yeah.

DD: Yeah, I use a game controller…[static]…It’s ironic because I don’t play video games at all. Of the people in the band – Martin loves to play certain video games. He gets really obsessed with them and spends a lot of time online playing Halo with J Lesser and Kelley Polar…this weird clique of international electronic musicians that meet in virtual space and kill each other.

CR: [laughs] That’s amazing. That’s hilarious.

DD: It’s kind of funny…you can’t really imagine them all jamming together, but Kelley Polar’s quite a mean shot from what I understand. Yeah, I never play video games but I did use game controllers to come up with the chord progressions that I used for “Polychords”. I constructed a sort of – I guess I thought about how we started to write songs for The Civil War – having an autoharp was such a handy way to grow songs that were quote unquote real music because you can just sit there and come up with chord changes really quickly. I wanted to apply that same model to the early stages of Supreme Balloon, so I needed an autoharp. I [typed in] all the frequencies for the 88 keys of a standard piano and then figured out with a book I bought in a music shop which notes are held down to play which piano chords. And then I sat down with this game controller and just typed away with the chord progressions until I found something that I liked. While looking around for pop songs that use those same chords – apparently “Polychords” bears a certain weird resemblance to R.E.M.’s “Fall on Me”? I guess it’s sort of inevitable once you start playing around with chords, that there’s gonna be some other people that maybe have used B and A and C and A minor before, you know? It’s not the most original thing in the world ever. Maybe that says something about the labour-intensive nature of things, that I would use game controllers and laboriously reconstruct note by note in order to get at something that Joe Schmoe guitarist could probably just pick up a guitar and wham, there you go.

Mm-hmm.

DD: But, I mean, the good thing is that when you’re typing in all those frequencies inevitably every single one is slightly off, because I’m not doing it in the most precise manner, and all of those little mistakes add up to a tuning that is a little off and weird. So I like the results that happen when you sort of badly approximate something that’s real music. You tend to get a more interesting result sometimes than if you’re bang on it.

Could you guys tell me more about the equipment you used on the album? I’ve been reading the liner notes and there’s a lot of stuff I don’t recognize, these crazy antique machines…

It’s a mixture of things that if you were an assiduous prowler of junk shops 20 years ago you could get your hands on. Plenty of Korg MS-20s and Suzuki Omnichords…but things like the Coupigny you can only get if you do a lot of sweet-talking ‘cause there’s only one in the world and it’s inside a studio in Radio France. Its engineer built the Coupigny in 1961 and it’s one of a kind. It was used on, I believe, a lot of the GRM [Groupe de Recherches Musicales] records that sort of alternate between a musique-concrete tape-editing approach and electronic source material…Parmegiani’s Magnetic Fields uses it. More recently this woman from the Ukraine, Zavoloka, has also used the Coupigny on one of her albums, so I guess there’s a bit of a Coupigny renaissance going on right now.

Which was your favourite to work with?

DD: I think for sheer period-precise, ridiculous drips and draps and bleeps and blaps the ARP 2600 is pretty hard to beat. It’s definitely not something that you just walk up to and hey presto, out comes music. It’s a pretty recalcitrant piece of gear. I think in terms of the stuff that I like to hear Martin play the most – he’s so good with his Roland SH-101. And for the tour…we’ve had two of the grey models over the years and finally one has just no longer decided to stay in tune, it’s constantly throwing temper tantrums. So Martin bought a red one on eBay – we take it out of the box and we’re like “YEAH, nobody can fuck with us now! We’re always gonna stay in tune!” We turn it on: [droning teacher noises from “Charlie Brown”]. Of course it’s instantly going out of tune. Martin has a good triple-fingered whacking technique that he uses when we’re starting “Supreme Balloon” and out comes this horrible sour note. You feel weird if you’re trying to create this celestial experience and your synthesizer just wants to spank your mom.

[laughs]

DD: I’m going to give the phone back to Martin on that note.

MS: Hello again.

How are you guys transferring this to the live show? The last time you were in Toronto…I unfortunately couldn’t make it, but I understand that you shaved one of my friends’ heads and sampled that?

MS: Ah, that’s one of your friends, eh?

Yeah, Jonny.

MS: Oh, it was Jonny, right. I was thinking the guy that I spanked.

Maybe. I’m not sure who that one was.

MS: It wasn’t Jonny!

Are you guys playing some older songs as well?

MS: I must admit that this show is a little more of a placid, psychedelic sit-down affair than that one was. The concentration is on psychedelia and zoning out.

I saw Silver Apples play at the same venue fairly recently…[fruitless attempts to describe Simeon Coxe’s theremin device]

MS: I just hope people smoke a lot of hashish before coming…or LSD might be appropriate…if you watch the dot in the centre of the video the entire time I guarantee a transcendental experience.

[phone cuts out]

MS: How far did I get in that, anyway? You got the gist of it. I hope people are on drugs! Or that they’re really good at paying attention.

I’ll put out the word. “Bring shrooms…”

MS: Don’t drive. Cars kill. That’s the best advice I was ever given while taking psychedelic drugs. “Cars kill, Martin.” What I really mean is that it’s a more contemplative thing than the last one, not so wacky maybe. But a church seems like an appropriate place to do what we’re doing. I’m excited.

On another sort of local or nationalist theme…why is there a snippet of “O Canada” in “Exciter Lamp”?

MS: Well, it’s awkward for me to say because I kind of have to say it off the record. [mind-blowing secrets regarding the song’s precise connection to NFB animator Norman McLaren, who inspired it, were revealed here]. Do you know his work?

He was an animator, right?

MS: Yeah. I think originally he was from Scotland, but he did all his work in Canada, NFB-sponsored stuff. He developed the technique of painting on the optical track of film…

With that tribute to him, it’s like an echo or reverberation or whatever of the theme from your last album, the idea of cultural heroes.

MS: Yeah, a little bit. And I think he was a homo, too.

Actually – yeah, according to Wikipedia – I’m looking at it, that’s what it says.

MS: Excellent.

Wow, he was with his partner for 50 years.

MS: And it was never really mentioned, sadly. People just figured it out.

There’s another thing I wanted to mention about the last album and your earlier work in general, in relation to this one…I’m trying to phrase this in a way that isn’t stupid…

MS: Just go with it.

It seems like a lot of your work has been making electronic music physical. With the last album it was almost fetishistic, in multiple senses of the word…

MS: Yeah, definitely. With our previous records, we’ve been asked a lot about being gay and whether the music that we made was queer in some way. And really it wasn’t at all, and it kind of had nothing to do with anything we were doing and yet we got persistently hounded with these questions. People really want to make music this sort of personal expression thing, that has to do with your personal life and so on, but our songs were about objects before. So when we decided to make this portraits record we decided to just go all the way and “okay, we’ll do portraits of all these queer heroes of ours and get this out of the way,” and in so doing hopefully turn people onto the art of all those people that we did portraits of…Necessarily, when you’re trying to make an audio portrait of people we figured that it would be good to use objects from their lives. And, you know, homosexuality is largely about sexuality – then the objects that we end up using have to do with sex some of the time. We’re not dry academic art-makers, we do consider ourselves pop to a certain extent…you do stuff with sex and people look around and pay attention more than they might otherwise.

I think it’s also sort of fetishistic in an old-school sense – like, maybe not for everyone, but I’m sure that when some people listen to the songs it seems like these objects have a mystical quality.

MS: I would say that’d be in the eye of the beholder! What specific sounds do you mean?

I was thinking of the cigarette burns especially. It sounded like a cult initiation or something.

MS: There’s a story there. We just took that from the world again. The fans of the Germs did that, as a mark of initiation in the club of fans of the Germs. It was called a Germs burn and you could only get one from a member of the Germs. We’re big fans of the Germs and Darby Crash, so we thought that’d be a good thing to do. We found out where Don Bolles [the Germs’ drummer] lived, got in touch with him and explained our whole thing and he was more than happy to burn Drew with a cigarette. And we all became friends as well. We did it live a couple times, where he burned Drew again and we miked and amplified it live. He’s quite a performer, Don Bolles.

Even if someone doesn’t have some weird animist belief system or whatever, I think it works in a metaphorical sense. You’re bringing out qualities in these items that people haven’t really thought of yet.

MS: Good! Yeah, I think that’s part of the function of art, and certainly of ours, is to make people pay more attention to the things they take for granted in everyday life. I think the sonic nature of objects gets overlooked. I think there’s maybe too much attention paid to so-called musical instruments and not enough attention paid to the musical qualities of everything else. It’s sort of a defense mechanism, too. The world is a noisy place, and by taking it – well, to put it flatly, by controlling the noise of the world, I can deal with the world better.

I think a lot of people have this perception of experimental music or experimental art as being really cold and abstract and mirthless, and by being sort of playful and campy you refute that.

MS: It’s experimental music in the sense that we work with unusual objects and so on but I think the thing that makes it maybe more appealing is that we don’t just present the results of the experiment. I think that what makes true experimental music - if you do the experiment and it comes out bad, it’s still the result. And quite honestly, if we do an experiment and it comes out badly we throw it out. We only present the stuff that is good, for lack of a better term.

It’s like you’re using those methods for pop music…

MS: Yeah.

It reminds me of Stephin Merritt using these very formalist, ironic ideas, but basically putting them in the form of beautiful love songs.

MS: I like being putting in the same camp as him. I think his work is fantastic.

I was looking at another interview or something with him where he was – I think I actually read it in a 33 1/3 book [he didn’t], but when people tell him that they played “The Book of Love” at their weddings or something he’s horrified [an actual source for this statement is now eluding me, so I hope Merritt really did say something to that effect].

MS: [laughs] I had a woman in Ireland come up to me on this tour – I shouldn’t say that I was horrified because I was kind of gently moved and flattered, but she came up to me with such an intense look and said: “I listened to The Civil War all through my pregnancy. It’s the most amazing album. It was the only thing that would calm me down. And when my child was born those were the only songs that would make him stop crying, and we played your songs as the dance music at our wedding.” I think she meant a traditional Irish sort of wedding, and I was kind of blown away and moved by that. You really don’t think these things when you sit in your wretched little apartment making music, that it will move in the world the way it sometimes does. And it’s really an intense thing.

...So are you delighted when somebody actually dances to your songs?

MS: Sure. I mean, we make the stuff for pleasure – though certainly different people have different ideas of what pleasure is. Some people have pretty perverse ideas of pleasure and I’m down with that. I certainly do! It surprises me that someone could use our stuff for…I don’t want to say anything nasty and cynical, I think it’s lovely. I’m flattered, honestly. It’s fucking awesome that someone used our stuff for an occasion that brought them joy. I have my own opinions about Merritt and weddings, none of which are good, but it’s none of my business to tell people what they should like…

I wanted to ask about this again, because…Drew was telling me before that you play Halo? I don’t, but my brother does….I don’t do a lot of the online stuff...what kind of stuff do you play in general?

MS: You know, I’m not a huge video game player…part of my reason for playing Halo so much is the thing where you wear a headset and can talk to the people you play with...it’s a way to talk to J [Lesser], because he lives in Portland. And the game is fun too, but I think the connectivity aspect of it is enjoyable. I live in Baltimore now and I don’t actually have very many friends there, and it’s nice to talk to my buddies. I’m not a very good video game player. J’s killed me again and again and again and again. I worry that it bores him – in fact, I don’t worry, I know that it bores him after a point. But I think he comes for the conversation too.

I played them a huge amount when I was younger and then after going to university I’ve sort of tailed off a bit…

MS: The game part of video games is not all that fascinating to me. I’ve just been waiting the last 30 years watching video games and I knew that one day they would evolve to a point where they would become a virtual world that you can walk in and explore. It’s an awesome thing. I mean, it’s a new – I don’t mean to sound so fucking utopian and cosmic or whatever but it genuinely is a new, unprecedented artform. The idea that there’s a world you can walk into that has mountains and buildings and trees and you can go into a building and there’s different rooms…It’s an enveloping, experiential artform that has no precedent in the world. I don’t think a fuss is made about it in the art world. In fact it reminds me of how out-of-touch the art world is with the pace of entertainment technology. Have you read this book God Jr.?

No, what’s it about?

MS: Well, Drew would be better off talking about it, but it’s a super-interesting take on video games. Here, let him – he’s got a good rap about it.

DD: I just taught a semester with an introduction to literary study and I kind of have the gambit that the novel is a dying form and the video game is the form that’s rivaling a lot of its pleasures, a sequentially unfolding space that’s been authored to entertain. So there is a certain amount of overlap. And Dennis Cooper’s written this incredible novel God Jr., which is about a father mourning the death of his son by endlessly replaying his son’s favourite video game. And his son obsessed about a sort of uninteresting side detail of one of the landscapes in one of the levels of the game. And the father smokes a lot of weed and starts to dissolve the barrier between waking life and the video game and kind of works through his mourning for his son by clearing level after level of this game in order to figure out if the part that interested his son actually contains some special easter egg or if it’s just a boring shack on the edge of the forest…

People seem to be using the whole medium in conceptual art more and more.

DD: Are you thinking of somebody like Cory Arcangel?

Yeah, or the Paper Rad people.

DD: And it seems like it’s a touchstone for hipster graphic design, but I wonder if conceptualizing how narrative itself might work – I wonder if that’s something that’s gonna need a breakthrough in the gaming world itself to break the grip of certain basic scenarios on how people use these spaces and why. Maybe it’ll take a generation of people nursed on video games but also informed by ways of making art that are experimental with narrative itself. I’m looking forward to it.

Speaking of books, you wrote your 33 1/3 book – was it before you were working on this album or did it happen at the same time?

DD: There was a certain overlap, yeah. And at times I definitely would pump the members of Throbbing Gristle for information about their signal chains and then hurry to the pawn shop, try to find pedals and approximate their signal chains. But I really held off on trying to do TG pastiche for this album even though the kind of celestial world of arpeggiating and endless synth runs in something like “Walkabout” isn’t terribly distant from the organizing principle of the song “Supreme Balloon.” But I don’t think it’s a case of directly biting TG so much as sharing a love of some of the same technology. It’s weird, y’know, there’s a lot that emerged from talking with TG that didn’t make it into the book, especially their fragmented relationship to genre - just down the road from where they lived was a dub reggae nightclub that had a really loud soundsystem, and the more I thought about how TG would show up with these custom-built giant bass amps and play these bassline-heavy, heavily processed forms of music…at a certain level of abstraction the TG approach and the dub approach are actually quite close. And I think with us as well in Matmos, the way that we sort of learn from the genre it often doesn’t sound like that genre, but in fact we’ve stolen some DNA and tried to grow songs out of that.

I want to ask about the sequencing of the album – there’s sort of five pop songs, at the length of a pop song as well, and then you have this huge 24-minute behemoth…and then one more after that…although I think there’s a different tracklist depending on the edition…

DD: The CD is really the original form of the album and it was modeled on LP side divisions…You have shorter pieces as a gateway drug and then once people have been tenderized and worked all the rhythmic wiggles out of their system, then you hit ‘em with the really heavy stuff. Maybe we wimped out, maybe we should’ve put “Supreme Balloon” first, but I’m pleased with the way that it goes. I think a certain set of people that like Matmos want to hear funky, shuffling snare and hi-hat patterns, and we like to construct those too, but…you gotta get all the nervous tension out of the way before you hit someone with a really long, heavy trip. Preschool teachers make all the kids shake the wiggles out before they sit down to do a lesson, and that’s kind of the way you have to approach it when you’re sequencing an album.

And then I guess “Cloudhopper” is the come-down or whatever.

DD: Yeah, and weirdly “Cloudhopper” was originally a floating melodic part that rode on top of an insanely manic and harsh Latin noise track that we made, that was, like, Latino rhythms and J Lesser’s beats and this guy Nate Boyce who’s our buddy – kind of O.G. noise dude who does great video graphics with a mixture of digital and analog processing gear, and he’s really good with this too. So we made this hellaciously harsh track and then it had this sort of beautiful floating layer of icing on top, and then when we were figuring out what would make this album click, and how we wanna send everyone off, we decided to just go with pure icing and remove all the harshness. I think for some people that might be a problem, but when you’re 37, or in Martin’s case 44, you kind of have less to prove in the macho “who can be the noisiest person in the room” sweepstakes. I have less to prove on that score. I mean, when we improvise on the radio we kinda tear it up and it gets very harsh and obnoxious. So I feel that I have those textures on tap if they’re needed, but in the case of this album that wasn’t really where we wanted to go.

Yeah. People sometimes seem to think that’s the only dynamic in noise music, “how loud can you make it?” You can smother people to death too.

DD: Yeah, I think it’s a valid form, and I’ve had a great time seeing a Masonna show or Merzbow, but Masonna plays for eight minutes and then he walks offstage and it’s totally punk and you just get it immediately. Whereas I’ve experienced hour-and-a-half-long shows where after 15 minutes you kinda hit a plateau where you’re not listening anymore. The dirty little secret about noise is that it’s ambient music. A lot of...Double Leopards records that are incredibly harsh if they’re cranked to the max become totally soothing if you just play them at a mellow level.

What was the inspiration for the title track? It sounds more like…a European art-porn film from the 60s or 70s…

DD: It has sort of two different origins. One is that when we were in Rome rehearsing to play “In C” with Terry Riley there was this world music shop across the street that sold a lot of Indian and Indonesian instruments and I went in there and got seduced by this tabla drum machine – from Radel, “Taal Mala” – and started to work with those patterns because the shape of the pattern is different from any that I would beat with and it’s good to cut loose your normal habit of working. And the other origin was sitting with all the synthesizers in the room chained together through MIDI and really getting into the Klaus Schulze era of endless staircases of arpeggiating patterns, going again and again and again and again and dee da la dee da la dee da la dee da la…you know. When we took those two halves and layered them on top of each other it just felt right, intuitively. It allowed Martin to go to a skill set that had been pretty much underused in Matmos for the last 12 years, but one that he has considerable chops in from all those years of smoking pot and listening to Vangelis. So it was all ready, we just needed to relax and stop taking ourselves so seriously.

Do you guys have any plans aside from the tour now?

DD: Oh yeah, there’s a lot to do. We are supposed to make a studio version of our cover of Robert Ashley’s “The Backyard,” and we are going to be remixing two of the string quartets of this amazing young composer, Jefferson Friedman, who’s based in New York City, who’s written some astonishing music…We have a commission from the Princeton Laptop Orchestra to create something for this, like, large laptop ensemble in Princeton next year. I’ve started figuring out what the next Matmos album will be. And then when we’re not doing that I have to give a talk on queer minstrelry, that is, the phenomenon of people pretending to be gay. I’m doing a talk on that at a conference in American studies, I’m doing a talk on suicide and martyrdom in Renaissance literature in December, and then I need to adapt my manuscript of my dissertation on melancholy in 16^th-century painting and literature into a book…so yeah, there’s a very great deal to be done. Oh, and before that we have to go to cooking school in Italy for 10 days. There isn’t a lot of hanging around and watching old Remington Steele episodes in our future.

Worlds of Otherness

2008-07-08T06:12:00.005-04:00

above: the Arkestra's uncredited Batman tie-in (seriously)

So I read this post by Douglas Wolk on Grant Morrison's lamentable use of a Magical Negro stereotype in the latest Batman right after I saw Carl Wilson mention Lil Wayne's use of an alien "Afronaut" persona, and now I think that lazy caricature Douglas rightly excoriates is extra-regrettable, because Morrison himself has recently drawn upon Afro-Futurism in a far more interesting way.

To paraphrase my comment from that Savage Critics post: "I think Morrison's use of black characters in Mister Miracle and Final Crisis is far more complex than the cliched trope in Batman. Their presence as the godly aliens' 'human shells' seems like a variation on the Afro-Futurism that Sun Ra and George Clinton invoked, flipping the exoticization of gifted minorities into a cosmology of black people as hyper-advanced beings." In the Mister Miracle miniseries heroes and villains are divided amongst various races (Metron, fittingly, appears in white and black incarnations). The earthly corruption that surrounds Shilo Norman does have a questionable hip-hop flavour to it (~~Missy Elliott~~ Granny Goodness proffering the Apokolips equivalent of video models, a drug called "flat" that makes people plastic), but my hunch is that this was Morrison's somewhat glib, heavy-handed attempt at foregrounding a favourite theme: baddies who lurk behind every facet of society, whether pop or psychology. Using "the techniques of the healer" to inflict pain; transmuting hate into "pure beat." Of course, with Morrison the conspiracies rarely remain that simple. Although Sun Ra did demand cultlike asceticism from his Arkestra...

And there's other parallels. Like our Glaswegian magician, Herman "Sonny" Blount recounted a life-changing abduction, when aliens took him to Saturn and revealed the hidden truths of the universe (unlike Morrison, Sun Ra eventually claimed an origin there). It's hard not to hear an echo of the Arkestra's astral Egyptology when Shilo's friends complain that he's "living like some modern pharaoh...was it really the smartest idea to tell the newspapers you'd been contacted by aliens?" When he tells Desaad that "down in the dirt there was brotherhood and community and a vision...like human life, all human life, was so precious...and every individual human story was worthy of mythology," Morrison's utopianism sounds similarly spacey.

He also seems to be avoiding the mistake of many college kids and swing-loving hippies, who treat Sun Ra as "some sort of jazz Dr Seuss." Afro-Futurism means so much more than that. It's entwined with the chains that bound blacks in America: slave ships preceded rocket ships. And I think Morrison realizes this. He's channeled it before, for one thing, with The Invisibles' Jim Crow and "the empire never ended." It's a recurring theme in black SF: "There was a war in heaven, and evil won." Armageddon been in effect. Reviewing the first issue of this mega-crossover, Douglas wrote that "Morrison's described Final Crisis as a take on the eschatology of this cultural moment, which seems about right." I agree - and that take is seemingly adapting these afrofuturist ideas as an integral part of its address. Look at Darkseid's herald, Libra: the scales-tipping arbiter in a moral universe that always bends towards injustice. Or consider the reimagined Anti-Life Equation - a meme that "teaches" its victims to be "stunted slaves."

Not to mention the more obvious presence of Shilo Norman, who appears to be playing a central role in this conclusion to Morrison's long storyline. "Avatar of freedom" and civil rights, he triumphantly escaped death itself at the end of Seven Soldiers. That page could be the cover to a Sun Ra LP Jack Kirby never drew. In Reading Comics' chapter on the maxiseries mothership, Douglas wrote: "The implication of Seven Soldiers is that you become a superhero by evolving beyond your cultural context," and Carl links those alien personae with liberation from it - into the supercontext, perhaps. Maybe I'm engaged in an epic misreading here, or maybe Morrison will devolve towards more dodgy characterization of minorities, but what if Mister Miracle is the Afronaut who ends up freeing all of us, everywhere? Forget the Anti-Life Equation. Like the man from Saturn said: we came from nowhere here, why can't we go somewhere there?

Ditko Redux

2008-06-25T22:15:00.003-04:00

So my review of Blake Bell's Strange & Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko appears in this week's issue of EYE WEEKLY here, but it had to be somewhat shortened for space - the final version contains less specific criticisms of Mr. Bell's book to accommodate the necessary work of informing a general audience who the hell Steve Ditko is. Thanks to the internet, however, I can ape repackaged, inappropriately-named superhero comics and offer...a director's cut!

***

He co-created one of the most recognizable and lucrative characters on the planet, but today Steve Ditko lives off meagre pensions, still virtually anonymous outside of comics. That’s partly by design. A profoundly shy and private man, the cartoonist has forsworn photographs and interviews for 40 years, not long after abandoning his most famous creation: Spider-man. Now, with Strange & Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Fantagraphics, 217 pages, $39), Ditko expert Blake Bell offers an overdue appreciation. Part oversized art book, part biographical sketch and part career retrospective, the text teases few revelations about its subject’s secret identity; its real strength is Bell as critic, passionately celebrating the artist’s work.

Ditko was raised by working-class immigrants in depression-era Pennsylvania. "He preferred the company of his immediate family,” Bell writes, “and was uncomfortable with outsiders, even his cousins, in the home. His bedroom never changed, remaining the same as it was before he entered the Army.” There are occasional revealing anecdotes like that one, but the author can only spin a limp web from Ditko’s unavoidably patchy biographical details.

However, once Ditko embarks on his career (drawing everything from Westerns to romance for ad-hoc publisher Charlton, who only printed comics because “it was less expensive to keep their presses running than turn them off and on”) Bell’s nimble, unadorned prose seems to find its purpose. In the late 1950s Ditko started working for Marvel Comics in tandem with huckster/editor Stan Lee. It was the beginning of his creative prime, and the chapters devoted to this period – monster stories, Doctor Strange, Amazing Spider-man – are packed with insights that arrive almost off-handedly. Many, many writers bang on about how the “Spider-man Shrugged” sequence from ASM #33 (five pages of Peter Parker struggling then finally succeeding to dislodge a crushing pile of machinery and save Aunt May) is a formal masterpiece and incredibly influential and so on, but Bell circles back to the end of the previous issue, explaining how Ditko used an innovative deep-focus angle to magnify the hopeless enormity of his hero’s plight.

The critic fruitfully compares Ditko to fellow Marvel legend Jack Kirby: where the latter’s stories focus on majestic battles and trippy cosmic grandeur (his final major series was about warring planets populated by literal gods), Ditko dwelt on scrawny angst and street-level realism. Peter Parker was “the first person whose life actually got worse after becoming a superhero,” a wallflower whose new powers exacerbated his problems. He and his foes were rendered freakish in an ordinary way, distinct from the grotesque glamour of a Joker. Bell gets a perfect quote from one younger cartoonist: "I acknowledge that Kirby is the King, but when you draw Ben Grimm reaching for the salt with the same intensity as you draw Armageddon, it lacks the impact Ditko could create." Although Ditko and Kirby would both leave Marvel over its greedy denial of their artistic control and creators’ rights, the former’s adoption of Objectivism spurred him to walk away first.

Ditko's increasingly Manichean adherence to Ayn Rand’s altruism-scorning philosophy only makes this story more tragic. Bell is obviously sympathetic to the moral conviction that inspired his subject to create ideological mouthpieces like The Question -whose very mask, a blank face, elides all ambiguity and nuance - but at the same time he uses exacting reproductions to exhaustively document Objectivism’s debilitating effect on the comics. Drifting towards the margins of a disreputable medium, Ditko subsisted on vague hackwork for mainstream publishers (reduced to illustrating a Transformers colouring book in 1985, the pathologically humble master shrugged that “Work is work”) while self-publishing didactic Randian tracts.

The latter are often brilliantly designed, experimental and independent before those adjectives became cartooning movements, but they’re also maddening to read. At his book’s recent Toronto launch, Bell related a ruefully funny anecdote about his apologetic pilgrimage to Ditko’s NYC studio, having upset the old man by publishing an imaginary tale that involved him. Displaying the same easygoing sense of humour that once moved him to draft a six-page memo explaining why The Question would never use sarcasm, subject informed biographer that “historical fiction is an oxymoron.” Ditko has become an inverted Vertov, rejecting characterization and even drama itself to broadcast his Truth. It’s sadly ironic: Bell’s rousing critique shows that the recluse created his greatest strips in collaboration.

Like Mr. A, But Crazy

2008-06-18T22:39:00.003-04:00

Staunch Objectivist that he is, I doubt Steve Ditko believes in divine intervention, but there must be some mystical power looking out for him in the aether. The material in Cat Yronwode's nascent Ditko biography was lost along with much of Eclipse Comics' back-issue stock during a mid-80s flood, as if disturbing one cartoonist's privacy invites supernatural wrath. Blake Bell's managed to get an excellent new Ditko monograph on store shelves without being turned to salt or contracting the plague; still, even his Toronto book launch featured some spooky glitches.

Presented by The Beguiling in Lillian H. Smith Library, Wednesday's event was split between a survey of the master's career (unfortunately, I arrived just in time to hear the last sentence of this) and the first-ever Canadian showing of Johnathan Ross' BBC documentary "In Search of Steve Ditko" (that is, unless you're some kind of piratical, non-producing looter). We were about 15 minutes into the latter, following an effusive Ross into New York as his quest began, when...the DVD froze up. Both of them. "Blame Joe Quesada," Chris quipped.

Happily, Blake Bell leapt to the rescue, fielding a brace of further questions from the audience even as he lamented the sorry state of British workmanship. Bell has a relaxed, quick-witted presence, and in person he actually abandoned one of my few quibbles with Strange & Stranger - a reverence for the subject that occasionally leads him to, say, inflate minor slights into injustices on the scale of Marvel withholding page after page of Ditko's own art. On Wednesday, however, he described much of the 70s Charlton work (Ditko's non-ideological bills-paying) as "near-worthless" and told funny, self-deprecating stories about his own tangled history with the wary old legend; introducing himself at that studio-sanctum after publishing a particular offending piece, Bell watched the gears turn and said "I don't think that's a good memory you're dredging up, Steve." He still came off as the insightful expert, but one whose passion is tempered by a healthy and long-suffering awareness of Ditko's prickly peculiarities.

The best story, though, involved someone asking the cartoonist what he thought of Watchmen. Supposedly Ditko had no idea what the guy was talking about until Rorschach was mentioned, prompting the reply: "Oh yeah! He's like Mr. A, but he's insane!" One man's freedom fighter...

p.s. I have a review of Strange & Stranger coming up next week (I think). Preview: it's great, and gorgeously produced. Buy it!

p.p.s. I might just be saying this because the DVD self-destructed right after she appeared (or, uh, because she reminds me of my most recent ex) but Flo Steinberg was kinda cute back in the day...

Things I wish I had written, no. 1

2008-06-17T10:00:00.003-04:00

'Not to put too fine a point on it, but whenever I see a comic book proclaiming itself a "Director's Cut" when there's no director, nothing to cut, and no changes made to the content of the core work so as to analogize the effort to a movie-style Director's Cut, I just mentally substitute "Director's Cut" with "OH PLEASE GOD WE WISH WE WERE WORKING IN A DIFFERENT MEDIUM WE WISH WE WISH WE WISH."'

*************

'"Radio Nowhere" appears to be one of those songs in which an artist takes the diminished size of their broadcast royalty checks as a sign of the irreversible unraveling of the social fabric.'

*************

'It makes me imagine a fable ending with this dialogue:

"I miss the tyrant," the old hero sighed.
"But you killed the tyrant!" his young disciples cried.
"At least under the tyrant," he replied, "we all knew who needed killing."

Okay, a fable or maybe a prog-rock song.'

Confronting our own mortality on 4/28

2008-05-31T18:30:00.005-04:00

The comic's called All-Star Superman, but this penultimate issue is nearly stolen by the hero's starkest and most malignant reflection. "He stinks of the irrational" - that opening sneer illustrates the fundamental tragedy of Lex Luthor as well as anything. He's a genius who wastes his intellect on vindictive grudges and self-aggrandizing boasts rather than humanity's common good, a Super-adolescent and not a man. It reminds me of a line by Shaw about handing power to the irresponsible rich: "like giving a torpedo to a badly-brought-up child to play at earthquakes with."

The story does lag a bit once Luthor's rampaging pique actually takes effect. I agree with Jog that the all-caps foreshadowing and awkward revisit of New Powers during the battle with Solaris are at fault, although said villain works okay on the page for me; the Tyrant Sun is, of course, our big bad's solar counterpart, so what would be more fitting than a ranting Squaresoft boss? And in an issue marked with even more background details than normal (check out the Nietzsche bust in Luthor's lair) the "black eye" Superman gives Solaris just before punching him out is a special delight.

There's just the one dance through this hall of mirrors left, and I'm betting Morrison and Quitely will render it in high style. Superman's showdown with his ultimate opposite is only two months away, dear reader...60 days closer to our own inevitable deaths!

Bombs under Baghdad

2008-05-22T17:03:00.007-04:00

Taste the noble IED, taste it, taste it

See its terrifying blast, taste it, taste it

Taste it and feel its pain

And see what my fire can do, taste it, taste it

From a violent Sadrist hand

Taste it, taste it

The above is apparently just one of the hot Sadr jams punctuating explosions in Baghdad this season. That NPR piece posits that "it's hard not to draw parallels to the aggressive, testosterone-driven lyrics of some American rap songs," which seems too easy: misogyny is no more resistant to formalization than any other act, and like daddy issues in the superhero movie, macho swagger is now a hip-hop genre convention. Sexism doesn't become harmless in the signifying hands of a gifted musician, but nor does your typical MC earnestly extol pimping women as a career path. Conversely, Ali Delfi actually is agitating for Iraqis to blow up American convoys for real. Sure, the Sadr City scene uses drum machines and sampled Kalashnikovs (maybe they dig M.I.A.?) but militant politics or overt nationalism only rarely intersect with rap's creative zenith these days. To me, this stations the bombers' bangers - with their near-total reliance on rhythm plus massed chorus - in that undying genre of war chants and marching songs. The playlist clicked onto an old Ex single this morning:

They cannot just sit and talk, they need a revolution
Guerrilla-war is not the problem, it’s the bloody solution

War is over if you want it: weapons for El Salvador
War is over if you want it: weapons for El Salvador

Pacifism is bullshit talk, destroy the way the fascists walk
Guerrilla-war is not for fun, the only way to get things done

War is over if you want it: weapons for El Salvador
War is over if you want it: weapons for El Salvador

I doubt they would identify with the radical resistance this time around, when American policymakers are using their own innocent grunts to shield a weak government with dubious support from the decidedly conservative head of a popular movement rather than farming out the job to murderous death squads. And Maliki hasn't helped himself by making like Tipper Gore. As with most problems in Iraq, this one would probably be easier for all parties to solve if the occupiers left, local mixtape scene be damned.

(Via)

This is exactly why McGovern lost

2008-05-16T14:51:00.006-04:00

And people call the politics in Dark Knight Returns groundbreaking. Not even Batman could save the New Deal coalition from...Nixonland.

Comics Award Shows Touch Our Lives

2008-05-01T01:53:00.000-04:00

I'm absolutely swamped with exams and other, similarly nerve-shredding Life Stuff so I am shamelessly ganking a post by Alan David Doane and posting fanciful Eisner Awards picks. Mine are sprinkled with pointless commentary, though!

Best Short Story
* Book, by Yuichi Yokoyama, in New Engineering (PictureBox)
* At Loose Ends, by Lewis Trondheim, in Mome #8 (Fantagraphics)
* Mr. Wonderful, by Dan Clowes, in New York Times Sunday Magazine
* Town of Evening Calm, by Fumiyo Kouno, in Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Last Gasp)
* Whatever Happened to Fletcher Hanks? by Paul Karasik, in I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! (Fantagraphics)
* Young Americans, by Emile Bravo, in Mome #8 (Fantagraphics)

[Mr. Wonderful just edges it over the, uh, abstract New Engineering, which was still less weird than Dan Clowes doing straight romantic comedy.]

Best Single Issue (or One-Shot)
* Amelia Rules! #18: Things I Cannot Change, by Jimmy Gownley (Renaissance)
* Delilah Dirk and the Treasure of Constantinople, by Tony Cliff (self-published)
* Johnny Hiro #1, by Fred Chao (AdHouse)
* Justice League of America #11: Walls, by Brad Meltzer and Gene Ha (DC)
* Sensational Spider-Man Annual: To Have or to Hold, by Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca (Marvel)

Best Continuing Series
* The Boys, by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson (Dynamite)
* Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, by Joss Whedon, Brian K. Vaughan, Georges Jeanty, and Andy Owens (Dark Horse)
* Naoki Urasawa's Monster, by Naoki Urasawa (Viz)
* The Spirit, by Darwyn Cooke (DC)
* Y: The Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, and Jose Marzan, Jr. (Vertigo/DC)

[Ennis' Punisher really should be here in place of The Boys, essentially a Preacher retread with the vulgar comedy transmuted into tired schtick and the sentiment into goopy mawkishness. Nostalgia it is!]

Best Limited Series
* Atomic Robo, by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegender (Red 5 Comics)
* Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born, by Peter David, Robin Furth, and Jae Lee (Marvel)
* Nightly News, by Jonathan Hickman (Image)
* Parade (with Fireworks), by Michael Cavallaro (Shadowline/Image)
* The Umbrella Academy, by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba (Dark Horse)

Best New Series
* Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, by Joss Whedon, Brian K. Vaughan, Georges Jeanty, and Andy Owens (Dark Horse)
* Immortal Iron Fist, by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, David Aja, and others (Marvel)
* Johnny Hiro, by Fred Chao (AdHouse)
* The Infinite Horizon, by Gerry Duggan and Phil Noto (Image)
* Scalped, by Jason Aaron and R. M. Guera (Vertigo/DC)

[Occasionally a tad too cute and photo-referenced for my liking, but this is still good pulp. It's too bad the creative team never got the chance to explore the full breadth of their chosen genre - the last couple of issues, for example, were just beginning to dig into its political implications (historical or otherwise). At least that non-annual one-shot united kung fu and Wild West for possibly the first time since The Stranger and the Gunfighter.]

Best Publication for Teens
* Laika, by Nick Abadzis (First Second)
* The Mighty Skullboy Army, by Jacob Chabot (Dark Horse)
* The Annotated Northwest Passage, by Scott Chantler (Oni)
* PX! Book One: A Girl and Her Panda, by Manny Trembley and Eric A. Anderson (Shadowline/Image)
* Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, by James Sturm and Rich Tommaso (Center for Cartoon Studies/Hyperion)

[Kind of overlooked last year, I thought...]

Best Humor Publication
* Dwight T. Albatross's The Goon Noir, edited by Matt Dryer (Dark Horse)
* Johnny Hiro, by Fred Chao (AdHouse)
* Lucha Libre, by Jerry Frissen, Bill, Gobi, Fabien M., Nikola Witko, Herve Tanquelle et al. (Image)
* Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories, by Nicholas Gurewitch (Dark Horse)
* Wonton Soup, by James Stokoe (Oni)

Best Anthology
* Best American Comics 2007, edited by Anne Elizabeth Moore and Chris Ware (Houghton Mifflin)
* 5, by Gabriel Ba, Becky Cloonan, Fabio Moon, Vasilis Lolos, and Rafael Grampa (self-published)
* Mome, edited by Gary Groth and Eric Reynolds (Fantagraphics)
* Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened, edited by Jason Rodriguez (Villard)
* 24Seven, vol. 2, edited by Ivan Brandon (Image)

Best Digital Comic
* The Abominable Charles Christopher, by Karl Kerschl
* Billy Dogma, Immortal, by Dean Haspiel
* The Process, by Joe Infurnari
* PX! By Manny Trembley and Eric A. Anderson
* Sugarshock!, by Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon

[I haven't read any of these. But at least none of them is PVP.]

Best Reality-Based Work
* Laika, by Nick Abadzis (First Second)
* The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, by Ann Marie Fleming (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group)
* Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, by James Sturm and Rich Tommaso (Center for Cartoon Studies/Hyperion)
* Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm, by Percy Carey and Ronald Wimberly (Vertigo/DC)
* White Rapids, by Pascal Blanchet (Drawn & Quarterly)

Best Graphic Album--New
* The Arrival, by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic)
* Bookhunter, by Jason Shiga (Sparkplug Books)
* Essex County, vols. 1-2: Tales from the Farm/Ghost Stories, by Jeff Lemire (Top Shelf)
* Exit Wounds, by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly)
* Percy Gloom, by Cathy Malkasian (Fantagraphics)

[I could improvise yet another half-assed rave for this, but I'll just say that Percy Gloom and Lemire's books are both worth a look as well (haven't gotten around to The Arrival)]

Best Graphic Album--Reprint
* Agents of Atlas Hardcover, by Jeff Parker, Leonard Kirk, and Kris Justice (Marvel)
* Godland Celestial Edition, by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli (Image)
* James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems, by James Sturm (Drawn & Quarterly)
* Mouse Guard: Fall 1152, by David Petersen (Archaia)
* Super Spy, by Matt Kindt (Top Shelf)

[The revelation for me here was not "The Golem's Mighty Swing" but "The Revival", where Sturm's uncharacteristically loose lines give his God-haunted characters a starved physicality.]

Best Archival Collection/Project--Comic Strips
* (The Complete) Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, by Winsor McCay (Ulrich Merkl)
* Complete Terry and the Pirates, vol. 1, by Milton Caniff (IDW)
* Little Sammy Sneeze, by Winsor McCay (Sunday Press)
* Popeye, vol. 2: Well Blow Me Down, by E. C. Segar (Fantagraphics)
* Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, by Frank King (Sunday Press)

Best Archival Collection/Project--Comic Books
* Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus, vol. 1, by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (Marvel)
* Apollo's Song, by Osamu Tezuka (Vertical)
* The Completely MAD Don Martin, by Don Martin (Running Press)
* Daredevil Omnibus, by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson (Marvel)
* I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! by Fletcher Hanks (Fantagraphics)

[I hate to choose anything over Hanks, whose book was a deserved, canon-prying phenomenon, but these are some of the greatest comics ever drawn.]

Best U.S. Edition of International Material
* The Arrival, by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic)
* Aya, by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Obrerie (Drawn & Quarterly)
* Garage Band, by Gipi (First Second)
* I Killed Adolf Hitler, by Jason (Fantagraphics)
* The Killer, by Matz and Luc Jacamon (Archaia)

Best U.S. Edition of International Material--Japan
* The Ice Wanderer and Other Stories, by Jiro Taniguchi (Fanfare/Ponent Mon)
* MW, by Osamu Tezuka (Vertical)
* Naoki Urasawa's Monster, by Naoki Urasawa (Viz)
* New Engineering by Yuichi Yokoyama (PictureBox)
* Tekkonkinkreet: Black & White, by Taiyo Matsumoto (Viz)
* Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, by Fumiyo Kouno (Last Gasp)

[A pound of my flesh for a three-sided coin! OK, as much as I love Matsumoto's punk rock shonen and seemingly everything Taniguchi draws, I will ultimately settle on the Yokoyama book. Who knew manga could be this delightfully alienating?]

Best Writer
* Ed Brubaker, Criminal (Marvel)
* James Sturm, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow (Center for Cartoon Studies/Hyperion)
* Brian K. Vaughan, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Dark Horse); Ex Machina (WildStorm/DC), Y: The Last Man (Vertigo/DC)
* Joss Whedon, Astonishing X-Men (Marvel); Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Dark Horse)
* Brian Wood, DMZ, Northlanders (Vertigo/DC); Local (Oni)

Best Writer/Artist
* Jeff Lemire, Essex County: Tales from the Farm/Ghost Stories (Top Shelf)
* Rutu Modan, Exit Wounds (Drawn & Quarterly)
* Shaun Tan, The Arrival (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic)
* Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library #18 (Acme Novelty)
* Fumi Yoshinaga, Flower of Life; The Moon and Sandals (Digital Manga)

Best Writer/Artist--Humor
* Kyle Baker, The Bakers: Babies and Kittens (Image)
* Fred Chao, Johnny Hiro (AdHouse)
* Brandon Graham, King City (Tokyopop); Multiple Warheads (Oni)
* Eric Powell, The Goon (Dark Horse)
* James Stokoe, Wonton Soup (Oni)

Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team
* Steve Epting/Butch Guice/Mike Perkins, Captain America (Marvel)
* Pia Guerra/Jose Marzan, Jr., Y: The Last Man (Vertical/DC)
* Jae Lee, Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born (Marvel)
* Takeshi Obata, Death Note, Hikaru No Go (Viz)
* Ethan Van Sciver, Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps (DC)

Best Painter or Multimedia Artist (interior art)
* Ann-Marie Fleming, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group)
* Eric Powell, The Goon: Chinatown (Dark Horse)
* Bryan Talbot, Alice in Sunderland (Dark Horse)
* Ben Templesmith, Fell (Image); 30 Days of Night: Red Snow; Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse (IDW)

[The best thing that happened to my ancestral town since Kenwyne Jones.]

Best Cover Artist
* John Cassaday, Astonishing X-Men (Marvel); Lone Ranger (Dynamite)
* James Jean, Process Recess 2 (AdHouse)
* J. G. Jones, 52 (DC)
* Jae Lee, Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born (Marvel)
* Jim Lee, All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder (DC); World of Warcraft (WildStorm/DC)

[Dude racks up more Eisner than a lazy New Yorker editor.]

Best Coloring
* Jimmy Gownley, Amelia Rules! (Renaissance)
* Steve Hamaker, Bone, vols. 5 and 6 (Scholastic); Shazam: Monster Society of Evil (DC)
* Richard Isanove, Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born (Marvel)
* Ronda Pattison, Atomic Robo (Red 5 Comics)
* Dave Stewart, BPRD, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cut, Hellboy, Lobster Johnson, The Umbrella Academy (Dark Horse); The Spirit (DC)
* Alex Wald, Shaolin Cowboy (Burlyman)

Best Lettering
* Jared K. Fletcher, Catwoman, The Spirit (DC); Sentences: Life of MF Grimm (Vertigo/DC)
* Jimmy Gownley, Amelia Rules! (Renaissance)
* Todd Klein, Justice, Simon Dark (DC); Fables, Jack of Fables, Crossing Midnight (Vertigo/DC); League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier (WildStorm/DC); Nexus (Rude Dude)
* Lewis Trondheim, At Loose Ends, Mome 7 & 8 (Fantagraphics)
* Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library #18 (Acme Novelty)

Special Recognition
* Chuck BB, Black Metal (artist, Oni)
* Matt Silady, The Homeless Channel (writer/artist, AiT/PlanetLar)
* Jamie Tanner, The Aviary (writer/artist, AdHouse)
* James Vining, First in Space (writer/artist, Oni)

[No "Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton", but a solid "Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident".]

Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism
* Comic Art #9, edited by Todd Hignite (Buenaventura Press)
* Comic Foundry, edited by Tim Leong (Comic Foundry)
* The Comics Journal, edited by Gary Groth, Michael Dean, and Kristy Valenti (Fantagraphics)
* The Comics Reporter, produced by Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael
* Newsarama, produced by Matt Brady and Michael Doran

[Thank god Comics Comics was snubbed. I mean, a four-way tie?]

Best Comics-Related Book
* The Art of P. Craig Russell, edited by Joe Pruett (Desperado)
* The Artist Within, by Greg Preston (Dark Horse)
* Manga: The Complete Guide, by Jason Thompson (Del Rey Manga)
* Meanwhile... A Biography of Milton Caniff, by R. C. Harvey (Fantagraphics)
* Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, by Douglas Wolk (Da Capo Press)
* Understanding Manga and Anime, by Robin Brenner (Libraries Unlimited/Greenwood Publishing)

[That theoretical opening half is slightly underwhelming for various reasons, but the heartening one is that - as the remainder of essays demonstrates - Wolk is amongst the best critics writing about comics.]

Best Publication Design
* (The Complete) Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, designed by Ulrich Merkl (Ulrich Merkl)
* Complete Terry and the Pirates, designed by Dean Mullaney (IDW)
* Heroes, vol. 1, designed by John Roshell/Comicraft (WildStorm/DC)
* Little Sammy Sneeze, designed by Philippe Ghielmetti (Sunday Press)
* Process Recess 2, designed by James Jean and Chris Pitzer (AdHouse)
* Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, designed by Chris Ware (Sunday Press)

Hall of Fame
Judges' Choices
* R. F. Outcault
* Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson
Nominees (4 will be selected by voters):
* Matt Baker
* John Broome
* Reed Crandall
* Rudolph Dirks
* Arnold Drake
* George Evans
* Creig Flessel
* Graham Ingels
* Mort Meskin
* Tarpe Mills
* Gilbert Shelton
* George Tuska
* Mort Weisinger
* Len Wein
* Barry Windsor-Smith

[The time has come for a Baker revival. 100% SERIOUS.]

We're gonna commandeer the local airwaves

2008-04-17T12:13:00.002-04:00

I was on CBC Radio One today, talking about comics piracy in a piece I helped put together. The broadcast itself just returned to the aether, but you can download a podcast.

Descending into our own private hell on 4/9

2008-04-09T23:44:00.004-04:00

Criminal Vol. 2 #2
Not that much to dig into here, since Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are still filling in their world's fossil record with some particularly brutish dinosaurs; the new storyarc proper begins next issue [EDIT: nope, it's actually the issue after that]. Craft abounds, though. You can't waste a title like "A Wolf Among Wolves", and they don't: when the face of protagonist Teeg Lawless does shift to something other than a variety of cold slate, it's usually to bare his teeth. The use of blank black panels when he's blind drunk is nicely done as well. Even better that they disappear when the really bad shit goes down - Lawless is still boozing, but he also knows exactly what he's doing. And a potential spasm of mawkishness at the end - thinking of his sons' innocent eyes etc - is cruelly and casually revealed to be no consolation at all. If Phillips hadn't drawn this, you could almost call it unpleasant.

A BLOG IS INTERNET SLANG FOR A LOG

2008-03-30T20:17:00.003-04:00

I was tardy in picking up this week's comics from the Beguiling today, so it's lazy linking instead of actual reviews/criticism/concrete poetry: Prodigy is blogging for Vibe.com during an extended stay in jail, presumably because some suicidal fools persist in questioning his trendsetting. Or because the cats in Bohemian Grove are ramping up their vast, owl-worshipping conspiracy, I'm not sure. The only consistent thing about P's posts is his use of caps lock.

Interview: Paul Pope

2008-03-20T21:34:00.002-04:00

Conducted last summer for an EYE WEEKLY profile/TCAF cover story (currently missing from their site, unfortunately) and now punctually edited into this transcript for yr perusal. Even timelier: Eric's Trip reference!

CR: You were just in San Diego, right?

PP: Yes.

How was that?

Well, I think it was...I think it was a bit overwhelming, but good overall.

Yeah, I haven’t been – I know guys who were there and they say it’s like a huge media thing now. It’s not even about comics anymore.

Well, I wouldn’t say it’s not about comics anymore. I think if anything comics is really the medulla of the show. You know what I’m saying?

Yeah.

Comic Con is basically a landlocked cruise ship, half of which is overtaken by Hollywood…the other half is the reptilian brain.

[laughs] OK, so, this is for a profile, so I guess I should start at the beginning…the start of your career? You dropped out of college and then started self-publishing, right?

Yep.

And how was that experience?

Well, I mean, the dropping out of college part kinda sucks but when you get to the point where you’re in your eighth year of school…you’re in advanced Japanese immersion, you’re looking at your possibilities in academics realizing that you’re probably going to make more money than your professors if you go into comics. The writing’s on the wall, man. This is the 21^st century, I don’t think it’s necessary. And I’m all in favour of education, don’t get me wrong on this. I’m a total classical humanist when it comes to this stuff. The measure of man’s mind is everything in the world. However, in my case, it was the best thing to do.

When did you hook up with Kodansha, a few years after that?

That’s the reason I’d been immersed in Japanese. Yeah, it was my last year. Basically I could be a full-time artist or a full-time student. So, that’s where I was. 1995.

And how did they – I assume they approached you, right?

Well, even though the term “synergy” is overused it was basically a synergistic experience. Believe it or not I was at Comic Con for the first time, I was living in San Francisco and I had been to Japantown…I saw Japanese comics there. And I was just fascinated by it on a number of levels. And so, the stars aligned – I managed to meet editors from Kodansha without even really realizing they were hiring. I just began to ask formal artistic questions the way that you would if you were doing a critique in school. You know, composition-wise, everything. Long story short, within an hour they asked “are you interested in working in Japan?” I was like “oh shit, they’re hiring!”

They didn’t actually end up publishing a lot of what you – I was reading through P-City Parade, and they didn’t publish most of it, right?

No, it’s true. The analogy I make is to…they wanted a hit single out the door, because Japanese mainstream manga publishing is intense competition. They need to know if you’re going to do well right away. It’s comparable to pop music. They wanted a Top 40 hit right away. They were willing and able to develop talent – in my case, I work with them for five years, they published a little bit of stuff…halfway through my tenure in Japan they changed the top editors, which basically meant starting over again. And meanwhile, the irony is that it’s the equivalent of grad school education, because I learned so much over there, even though they published very little of it.

I think that’s a good analogy, actually, the pop single thing, because comics are read openly by a more diverse strata of society there. Like, they have comics marketed towards middle-aged women and businessmen and...

Yep.

And a lot of sports comics, for some reason.

Dynamic action. Does the same thing superheroes does.

Are you gonna have any of the stuff you did there published? I heard some of it was in Pulphope…

Yep, some of it is. The only problem with that stuff is that it’s a bit spotty. It’s basically demos, it’s like manga demos. It’s like demos and a couple of wholly-recorded pieces, like, the full Phil Spector treatment. It feels like that if I were to publish a book like that it would be this processed book and I’d have to really frame it. So I’m a little leery about publishing it now. And also I feel like the material’s time-sensitive. The important thing is having developed this skill set which is unique for a Western artist and to bring that back on top of a foundation in European comics. What I’m doing in mainstream comics in the States is what I would’ve been doing for the Japanese.

Right. Another thing in P-City Parade – the essays in there – where you talked about how you started off trying to unify American and European comics, and then you discovered manga, the emphasis on characterization and the really deliberate pacing, and tried to assimilate that into your work.

That’s the frontier for comics now.

Oh yeah, that’s the stuff that sells here, to kids at least.

I guess it’s a little bit of a concern to people who work in mainstream comics, because the audience for manga, as far as I can tell, is an entirely different and new audience. And that’s very exciting.

Tons more women or girls, the young kids…I was talking to Chris at The Beguiling, and that’s a huge part of their business.

Oh yeah. In fact when I was in Japan, if you went into any random bookstore there’d be a number of kids lined up sitting on the floor, reading the manga. Like in a library or something. And that’s the way it is here now. We’ve just caught up to them. That’s the way it was ten years ago in Japan. It’s very exciting.

I actually didn’t know you lived in Toronto for any period of time until I started talking with people about this…um, when was that and how’d you find Toronto?

Well, I grew up in Northern Ohio…you know how there’s the Rust Belt and the Bible Belt? I kinda feel like there’s also a Rock Belt. For me…Chicago, Cleveland—

Detroit.

Toledo – Detroit for sure – Windsor, Toronto…and maybe Montreal. That’s the Rock Belt. I grew up with that in my history, and also, I realized at a certain point that I had so many friends up in Toronto, it’s a place I wanted to live.

Was that in the late 90s, or…

Mid-to-late 90s, yeah. ’96 to ’98.

The Rock Belt thing is interesting because I know some guys who’re a fair bit older than me who were in the music scene here in the 90s and it sounds kinda brutal.

Oh, but there was great talent though, man. Neko Case…Eric’s Trip, which became Elevator, one of my favourite rock bands…

They’re playing here in a month, I think. Eric’s Trip.

Oh man. Really?

Yeah, they do occasional reunion shows.

That’s interesting. And Sloan was big too, come to think of it. Danko Jones was…I don’t know where he’s at now, but he had a bit of a career there. You know, there was a music scene.

Yeah. Um, Batman: Year 100…was that something you pitched to DC, or did they sort of suggest “hey, do Batman!”?

It was a little more subtle. They were like, “what would you do if we gave you Batman?”

[PHONE CUTS OUT]

I was going to say, Year 100…it is sort of a futuristic dystopia, but Batman is this silent-movie vampire in the middle of there…he’s this guy who’s out of time.

Oh yeah. It’s interesting too because a lot of my friends here are performers, burlesque or musicians, some circus performers, and I’m really fascinated by this idea of setup/cleanup. You know, Batman in a sense is a production – to be able to pull off a superhero, that’s gonna require a team of people. So that’s why I wanted to go with the whole superstition angle. I think the best thing to play off high-tech is superstition.

I was just reading – I was reading your blog post about iPhones, and how they were basically “retarded Motherboxes” and that tomorrow is being reverse-engineered from Kirby. The psychedelic futurism. And I think there’s a lot of that in your own work as well, stuff that looks futuristic but weirdly anachronistic at the same time.

Yeah. Well, you look at what’s important is – the sensation of new things. The first time I saw an iPhone, my visceral response was “it’s a retarded Motherbox”. I honestly didn’t know what this thing was, and I have a ton of friends who work in high-tech…you know, advertising, creative consulting. But I have this very ambivalent relationship to machines. I use them a lot, but I’m a little disturbed by how they distance us from each other. So, yeah, I feel like the kind of commentary I’m able to bring in is a bit of a skeptic – not really a gadfly point of view, just sounding a warning once in a while.

In the 90s, you were working with a lot of odd formats, in terms of size and design, and you seem to have moved back to traditional books…is that just a side effect of working with Vertigo and DC, or was it a conscious thing?

Well, I think when you start playing with the majors, so to speak, you are limited by format.

There’s another thing from P-City Parade I wanted to bring up – you said you intended to split all your future projects into “serious” and “frivolous” work? Is that still the case?

[PHONE CUTS OUT AGAIN]

No, the unfortunate thing about growing up in public is that you often say things in print – there has to be a provision to this stuff, because you don’t really know what the future’s gonna bring. I mean, the new crop of work I’m doing now is intended for a young audience. But I wouldn’t consider it frivolous. In the 90s I was looking at a very superficial side of manga where I was interested in doing work that was very playful and cute, and I kind of got it out of my system, you know what I mean? We’re kind of on the music analogy tonight, so it’s like the three-minute pop song. I’m done with it. I’m ready for the seven, ten-minute pop song, or freeform jazz. Whatever it might be beyond this.

Yeah, I totally get it. Actually, I want to know – tell me about Battling Boy. I remember being in the room at the last TCAF, when you were sort of dropping hints about it...

Well, I think it’s a strong story ‘cause I can sum it up in two or three sentences. Basically, it’s a story intended for children. It’s a story of either a young god or a young superhero, who’s on sabbatical from Mount Olympus, and his job is to clean up this giant city called Monstropolis, which is this huge city and it’s overrun with monsters. That’s the root of the story right there.

I remember there was something about magic t-shirts.

Yeah. Well, you know, the Twelve Labours of Hercules, he has twelve t-shirts, each with a different animal totem. When he wears them he has different attributes of the animal that he wears. It’s a device in the story that helps to move it along, but it’s interesting because – without revealing where the story goes – the idea of a sort of talisman is endemic to mythology. I wanted to find a way to make that exciting. History’s so…not only exciting to me, but it’s important. And I feel like if we can take these classic ideas and make them new again – that’s the idea of oral tradition, right? Maybe it’s comics tradition now.

Totally. That’s sort of like THB as well. There’s a lot of – not stuff that’s old, but there’s a lot of early American science fiction, like Heinlein. Especially with the libertarian themes. I actually wanted to ask about that too: how do you approach the political stuff in your work?

It’s funny. If you’ve read any of my early stuff, I think I come from a much more earnest and very didactic side of expressing ideas. I sort of realized at a certain point that it’s impossible to betray your values if you really know what you think and believe. And what’s really more important in fiction, and particularly pop fiction, is to entertain people. You’re not gonna be able to betray yourself, so have the faith to write what you believe. But do it in a way that is story structure. So it isn’t…you know, I’m not a politician, it’s not necessary to go out and change people’s minds so much. I sort of pulled back off that.

I think there are some playful moments there, like when she yells out “Walt Disney!” to the bugfaces.

Oh yeah, for sure. And I hope it can make it to the final cut – let’s wait and see – but Walt Disney in THB is this symbol of rebellion. The term, the name Walt Disney, is used by a number of characters. And in fact there’s a ton of Disney references in THB. It’s something that I want to keep because it has a certain strength in this day and age.

Are you going to put all the material in there or are you gonna cut some of it? There is some that’s sort of crazily formatted, the really big stuff.

Yeah. Well, actually it’s exciting for First Second, because they’ve wanted to try something format-challenging for awhile. So what we’re working on now is initially a series of four or five trades in full colour, paperback edition like the rest of the First Second line, but they want to do a - we haven’t come up with the right term yet, but director’s cut or something, the version I want, which is oversized, the old Giant THB format. 13 inches tall, black and white. That’s more of a collector’s edition thing.

That’s awesome. You also have La Chica Bionica coming up, right?

Yep.

From – from Dargaud? The French publisher?

Well, it kind of began as my take on Barbarella. It’s very farcical, it plays with a lot of 60s pop icons, recombines them in a way. Has a lot of action, it’s very fast-paced. One of the best things I learned from Batman was how to edit myself. I’ve managed to make a pretty lean story.

One of the great things, I think, about Year 100 is that there’s a part that’s basically this huge fight scene, but it’s really well-paced. It doesn’t seem bloated or anything at all.

No. No, in fact I think – if you think of competition, comics have to compete with games and movies now, so I want as much space to tell the most visually dynamic story I possibly can. The one thing that drawing has that film doesn’t have is a certain individual dynamic. A magic, if you will, that comes across in the style. And if you’re able to tell a story in pictures well it has this weird energy that’s unlike anything else. The further we’re into this digital world we’re getting this has become more and more important. To me it’s a very aggressive frontier for comics. That’s why I’m hand-lettering stuff. It’s a real bitch to hand-letter but it’s become important.

And with comics is that there’s no budget. You can do stuff that would only be possible in a $50 million video game or a blockbuster movie and it doesn’t cost anything.

Exactly. And you also don’t have a team of people. Having worked in film for a bit, that’s a very hierarchal situation. Very slow, collaborative. Comics isn’t like that. If you’re able to turn off the machines and shut the door…maybe put on some nice music, make some coffee, that’s about it.

Even with the largest number of people, in the assembly-line model, it’s like a band.

Comics has the same sincerity as music. That’s one thing that’s really cool about it, it’s got that, like, guy-with-an-acoustic-guitar thing. A brush is like a guitar. The way you can get a message across simply and briefly – doesn’t require tons of bells and whistles. That’s what’s awesome about it. In fact at TCAF I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some amazing self-published minicomics.

That’s one of my favourite things about going to conventions. It is sort of like a rare 7-inch or something. There’s a design thing but a nerdy collector thing there as well.

Mm-hmm. Which is awesome. It’s complete, it makes you whole. It’s like graphically being filled by food or something.

I was going to ask what kind of comics you’re reading, but now I want to ask what music you’re listening to right now…

I’m really into this band Darker My Love. Have you heard of them?

I don’t think so.

I don’t know where they’re from, but someone recommended them to me this week. I’m into a band called the Hungry Goats, from Australia. I’m into the Drones from Australia. What else…I’m into Black Angels, if you know them…they have a record coming out, I’m psyched about that. I love Motorhead. I listen to a lot of jazz. I love John Handy and John Coltrane. I love Hawkwind. Peter Gabriel, stuff like that.

Yeah, I dig the Motorhead. I am down with that.

I listen to a lot of stoner rock. Hypnotic, Black Moses, Queens of the Stone Age…I love a lot of that stuff. I love Kyuss.

Better late than etc. (3/5 reviews)

2008-03-12T02:12:00.003-04:00

Justice League: The New Frontier #1: Buy the DVD! Actually, I may just do that - it was playing in the Beguiling last Wednesday, and someone apparently tried to erase one of the original's biggest flaws by giving the villain an actual personality this time - but this is a nice little package either way. Cooke's selective nostalgia is still weirdly fascinating. He treats post-war America with justified ambivalence (Ike himself orders the hit on that fifth columnist Batman!) but when the 60s dawn it curdles into Camelot hagiography, as if Arthur Schlesinger had been scripting Superman on the Beltway rather than pocketing names. Somewhere an unsuspecting young man is one ill-advised bong hit away from writing his term paper on Uncle Ben as JFK figure (the Green Goblin being McNamara, ho ho). However, the main story here mostly eschews that sort of reverence in favour of two-fisted action and nifty gadgets and predictably gorgeous, impeccably composed artwork. The backup strips are equally lighthearted - hell, the second is just one gag, though I like that Jayne Mansfield and Gloria Steinem have both entered DC continuity (and drawn by J. Bone). Anyway, worth the cover price for Cooke's pages and their unfussed, Cadillac-stylish intrigue alone. Why bother with Hal Jordan, Square-Jawed Moral Beacon when King Faraday's sneaking around?

Among the swee'peas

2008-02-28T13:29:00.003-05:00

I wrote about the second volume in Fantagraphics' ongoing collection of Thimble Theatre for EYE WEEKLY and you can find that punch-drunk review here. A return to actual substantive blogging...is coming.

I made it through town somehow, but who's gonna save me now?

2008-02-23T00:08:00.004-05:00

I'm juggling multiple comics-related pieces (and for multiple mediums!), but in the meantime I thought I'd link to a bunch of recent music criticism I wrote for EYE WEEKLY:

Vampire Weekend live review

ditto for Super Furry Animals + Times New Viking

Mahjongg - Kontpab

No Kids - Come Into My House

The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride

The Mountain Goats review was understandably edited due to my interminable rambling about how great it is. There will probably be more of that to come on this blog, but for now here's my original version of that review:

Fanatical Mountain Goats followers (perhaps the only kind) have disagreed on John Darnielle’s move away from no-fi boombox recording, a few regarding the recent use of a band and actual studio as apostasy. Well, they’re wrong. Heretic Pride is a metal album in spirit, and that calls for some excess. The extra instrumentation marshaled by producer John Vanderslice (even backup singers!) girds Darnielle’s poetic lyrics with new weight and drive, so that his anthems for nihilistic losers and harried outcasts are more urgent still. His pulpy influences are obvious: there’s the tiniest, moving crack in that voice as the wonderful “San Bernardino” ends, but it begins over gentle guitar picking with lyrics like “Flaming swords may guard the garden of Eden/But we consulted maps from earlier days,” “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” understands that the incomprehensible horrors its namesake conjured up were born from a fear of human intimacy the song’s protagonist shares. There is cancerous self-hatred too: the narrator of “Autoclave,” the most danceable Goats track yet, mutters “no emotion that’s worth having could call my heart its home.” Triumphant defiance is the main obsession, however, and "Heretic Pride" celebrates it best: burning at the stake, the title track’s heathen yells “I feel so proud to be alive/And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives,” Even at the mouth of hell, Darnielle throws up the horns.

Steve Gerber

2008-02-14T01:19:00.002-05:00

Tom Spurgeon eloquently examines the man's life; I couldn't better Comics Comics in advocating for his work. Gerber arrived early, of course, not just as a staunch and prickly defender of creators' rights but also as a forerunner of those idiosyncratic, meta-inclined auteurs who now rack up plaudits in the medium. His death is far more untimely. RIP.

Ragged Handclaps

2008-02-05T00:09:00.000-05:00

Saw Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten on the weekend, and I liked it a lot. As directed by Julien Temple, chronicler of the Sex Pistols, it takes a standard bio-doc template and proceeds to scribble beyond the margins. Strummer's art is used as animated interludes, but the most radical move is Temple's decision to leave every interviewee unidentified. It's fittingly equal-minded and disarmingly informal, though occasionally problematic; spotting Martin Scorcese or Jim Jarmusch amongst the talking heads is easy enough, but Topper Headon now looks more like my dad than the skeletal smack addict of his youth, and it took me a while to figure out who he was.

Of course, Strummer had a similar dilemma. Old friends movingly describe the pain caused when "Woody" abandoned his hippie squats to become a punk, sometimes going decades without meeting each other again. His allegiances always seemed to be emotional ones, whether in music or politics - Strummer's leftism was infectiously romantic, the kind that would rather wear the Sandinista scarf than read Fanon - and love affairs can hurt. But The Future is Unwritten also attests to his instinctual generosity and open curiosity. My favourite moment in the whole movie might be Grandmaster Flash's short cameo: opening for the Clash, he was showered with punks' boos until Strummer shouted at them to fuck off and give the man a chance. More than makes up for the Bono appearance (he was downright tolerable in this doc, actually, but I still laughed when the guy behind me muttered "oh, fuck" at the sight of World Saviour).

After the Clash break up the film moves on to familiar "wilderness years" material, and I couldn't help thinking of Walk Hard ("This is a dark fuckin' period!"). What makes the portrayal of Strummer's uncertain searching so poignant, however, is that it had nothing to do with the cliches of rock mythology. He didn't slide into addiction or run off with a hated spouse. His life was just utterly consumed by music, and when his band broke up he wasn't sure how to spend the rest of it. Temple's conceit of sitting his participants around campfires (because Joe came to see those flickering circles as humanity's ideal state, you see) comes off as hokey and contrived, but using one of his subject's final BBC broadcasts as a framing device is inspired. At his best, Strummer was a vessel for the same virtues as great radio: rousing rhetoric, a spirit of wandering discovery, the notion that dancing and democracy are inseparable. We were poorer for all of them when he joined the grand parade.

Took you long enough (best comics of 2007)

2008-01-31T01:27:00.000-05:00

Saying an explanation's in order would be a understatement. So: what the hell happened to the past month? Well, after banging together lists + comments for both the Idolator and EYE WEEKLY polls I unwisely decided to compile a whopping 27 Best Comics of 2007, writing about each and every one of them. The combination of school and paid freelance commitments has mocked that bit of hubris, but anyone who's still reading this blog might be interested in the list itself (I excluded most "reissues", with a couple basically arbitrary exceptions on the grounds that the comics therein were unseen by 99% of readers). Normal service will resume in the next few days. I swear. For real this time.

27 COMICS THAT MADE 2007 RULE

Achewood by Chris Onstad
Acme Novelty Datebook, Volume 2 by Chris Ware
Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot
All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
Apollo's Song by Osamu Tezuka
Casanova by Matt Fraction and Fabio Moon
Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Dragon Head by Minetaro Mochizuki
The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu
Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan
Hate Annual #7 by Peter Bagge
House by Josh Simmons
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! by Fletcher Hanks, ed. Paul Karasik
The Ice Wanderer by Jiro Taniguchi
Laika by Nick Abadzis
Maggots by Brian Chippendale
Micrographica by Renee French
Mister Wonderful by Dan Clowes
New Engineering by Yuichi Yokoyama
Powr Mastrs #1 (of 6) by CF
The Punisher MAX by Garth Ennis et al
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together by Bryan Lee O'Malley
Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
Speak of the Devil by Gilbert Hernandez
Storeyville by Frank Santoro
Tekkon Kinkreet by Taiyo Matsumoto
Trampoline Hall (October 22, 2007) by Various

(The best prose book of 2007? I, Tania by Brian Joseph Davis (ECW). Read it!)

EDIT: God, and I called Beto "Gabriel" in my first pass at this post. Blogging is hard!

Like a preemie out the womb

2007-12-31T20:40:00.000-05:00

A more detailed "best comics" post will be along shortly, but for now I'll just post some music lists:

1. Sandro Perri - Tiny Mirrors
2. Future of the Left - Curses
3. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
4. Battles - Mirrored
5. Brian Joseph Davis - The Definitive Host
6. Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm
7. Jay-Z - American Gangster
8. Dirty Projectors - Rise Above
9. UGK - Underground Kingz
10. Joel Plaskett Emergency - Ashtray Rock
11. M.I.A. - Kala
12. Cephalic Carnage - Xenosapien
13. Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover
14. Kids on TV - Mixing Business With Pleasure
15. Rihanna - Good Girl Gone Bad
16. Ghostface Killah - The Big Doe Rehab
17. Junior Senior - Hey Hey My My Yo Yo
18. R Kelly - Double Up
19. Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris
20. The New Pornographers - Challengers

And 10 favourite tracks I submitted to Idolator:

1. Rihanna [ft Jay-Z] - "Umbrella"
2. UGK [ft Outkast] - "Int'l Players Anthem (I Choose You)"
3. Justice - "D.A.N.C.E."
4. LCD Soundsystem - "Someone Great"
5. Sandro Perri - "Love is Real"
6. The New Pornographers - "Go Places"
7. Jay-Z - "Fallin'"
8. Avril Lavigne - "Girlfriend"
9. Kids on TV - "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off"
10. Grinderman - "No Pussy Blues"

And finally some reissues:

1. V/A - The Very Best of Ethiopiques
2. Sly and the Family Stone - Stand!
3. V/A - Summer Records Anthology (1974-1988)
4. Pere Ubu - The Tenement Year
5. Betty Davis - They Say I'm Different

I've already written a lot about some of these albums (like the beautiful, melancholic Sandro Perri record) and I have to do it again in the next few days. It's the singles that seem more vivid during these artificial stock-taking exercises anyway, having formed pungent associations with this person or that memory over the previous 365 days.

Not that all of them do. Sometimes it's simply uncomplicated thrills, Girlfriend. "Fallin" hits so hard precisely because Hova mythologizes his fuckups as much as his successes. I was surprised, actually, by the unhappy bent of those tracks, sad by design ("Love is Real"), thanks to events (UGK) or just seething with blue-balled frustration ("No Pussy Blues"). None of it seems to reflect my 2007 - well, okay, sometimes that last one did, although one of the best jokes in married Cave's dirty-old-man lament is that, if the girls I know are any indication, his louche creep persona would still have a lot of takers.

That may just echo general uncertainty as we head into the new year, whether within the music industry or the world as a whole (right now I'm more optimistic about the latter). But maybe not. I turned twenty this year, and even when you struggle valiantly against assuming any adult responsibilities aging simply flanks you in other ways. I haven't gone through anything close to the severed-limb breakup "Someone Great" documents, but that kind of experience is more comprehensible by the day; like the song's narrator, I can see it coming. Maybe that's why "Go Places" was my favourite song from Challengers - a combination of gorgeous melody and naked sentiment wherein Carl Newman finally abandoned the cryptic riddles to get down on one knee and take his woman's hand. That Neko Case actually sung the thing (because he didn't think his voice was good enough) only makes the awkwardness more charming.

There was a bit of that in the killer "International Players Anthem" too, with twee, metre-mangling Dre declaring his lurve before UGK extol a slightly different ideal of romance. But even though those two like their girls dirty and paid by the hour, they all got each other's backs anyway, and that message of fidelity was all the more affecting after Pimp C's untimely death. "Umbrella" is similarly loving and loyal underneath those cold trance synths. Rihanna's against-all-odds ditty stood apart from a blob of pallid R&B ballads this year by facing encroaching doom with a defiant shrug, and that's why it's my song of the year when Father Time may be delivering a new one full of trying times. It's not the flimsy canvas that matters when the rain comes down but the people underneath it with you.

Back Like That

2007-12-21T11:47:00.000-05:00

Sure, everyone else in the "comics blogosphere" might have signed off for the week, but my whole extended family seemingly lives in the GTA so it's not like I have traveling or...anything else to do. I'll probably do a real post no one will be around to read on the weekend (best-of lists also to come!), but for now I hope you'll be contented by my contributions to the first part of Eye Weekly's end-of-year roundup. Okay, I'll throw in maybe the best album cover of the year too:

Service Advisory

2007-12-05T11:16:00.000-05:00

The combo of schoolwork and end-of-year music-crit stuff has built up into an insane work avalanche, so I don't think I'll be able to post much of substance until next week when U of T breaks for the season. Hopefully things will be back to a normal schedule then. In the meantime I might reheat some Eye Weekly stuff that's been taken offline, or just try some quick and dirty reviews, but I promise unseen drawings by the likes of Stuart Immonen in...The Future!

Penny For Your Scotts

2007-11-29T03:36:00.000-05:00

Okay, they unwittingly used a title that's already been applied to Scott Pilgrim a hundred million times before, but otherwise I really like the way my review of the new book for Eye Weekly turned out. It's too bad there wasn't enough space to be more critical of the book - even though I love the series and think this is the best one yet, there's a couple issues that nag at me - but I hope that piece at least demonstrates why it's great without just writing KIM PINE KIM PINE KIM PINE 200 times.

The Abysm of Time

2007-11-27T01:30:00.000-05:00

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

Well, it's not like The Tempest had much of a plot either. Slack story beats aren't the only parallel: like Black Dossier, that play had a sense of finality that wasn't quite borne out (though this magician must have something better up his sleeve than Two Noble Kinsmen) and drew upon several existing sources despite its status as one of Shakespeare's "original" works. On the other hand, where The Tempest obeys the three unities of classical drama (Dogme 95 B.C.), Moore and O'Neill careen across whole centuries of fiction. Also, Black Dossier has a lot more fucking.

That was one enjoyable crumb I took from the disappointing "main" story - that Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain would love to just travel around meeting various analogues and occasionally shag one of them. Unfortunately, too much of the tale is larded with domestic minutae and expository trivia. Moore is exceedingly clever here, as ever, but too often the cleverness is all; I wish there were more scenes in this book like the small betrayal of Greyfriars' pathetic caretaker, which impresses not just with its allusive brilliance (Mother = Bob Cherry + Harry Lime X Kim Philby) but also its emotional impact.

In fact, I wish they'd chucked out the connecting thread and made the whole thing a companion book, freed from the demands of any sustained narrative. The "supplementary" bits are easily Black Dossier's best. They're hilarious, for one thing - that Orwellian porn is locked in an epic struggle with the Wodehouse/Lovecraft combo for the title of World's Funniest, and the demented Beat prose isn't far behind. They also make Moore's sweeping case far better than his pedestrian main story, as when he uses a Shakespearean fragment to both fill in backstory and ably masquerade the Bard himself (unhelpful, indolent doormen, filthy wordplay about naughty bits).

Kevin O'Neill is a great partner for him, a master chameleon in his own right. Sure, O'Neill brilliantly embodies period styles, from the painterly swashbuckle of 50s historical comics to vulgar 18th century political cartoons, but his likenesses are equally exact: look at the Blackadder cameo during the Orlando sequence, or Joan Crawford's hushed-up blue movie, looking like it came straight from Hollywood Babylon. His precise hand with lines gives this crabbed Britain the dilapidated verisimilitude Moore's script glosses over.

Still, a couple of the new characters make their mark. Moore deftly implies that Orlando's kaleidescopic sexuality can impose and seduce all at once; desire animates both fighters and lovers. And Bulldog Drummond is the best example yet of a peculiarly parochial concern amidst League's vast scope - Britain's troubling relationship with its national heroes. Yeah, Bulldog might be a vicious, reactionary bastard, but he's our bastard. At least he's got beliefs, even if they include a diverse multitude of bigotries. But the loyalty and spirit of Fair Play that heroes like Drummond represented really are compelling, which makes it all the more sobering to see them blown away by an amoral operator with nostalgia for nothing.

God save the village green and roll on the Century, then (Pirate Jenny!). This time Prospero's valedictory speech opened doors rather than close them; it's a declaration of limitless potential, and I'll indulge any of Moore's parlour games if he'll put that grand theory of fiction into practice with narrative and emotional heft. A good library dwarfs any dukedom, and this book has so many romances left to be spun.

On Countdown #23

2007-11-20T10:12:00.000-05:00

quimper23: what the fuck is wrong with this comic

Crandle: maybe the next issue of Countdown will be devoted to the violent rape of Doiby Dickles

quimper23: tawny talky will be given PCP and forced to eat little children's genitals

Crandle: Snapper Carr waves his useless, broken hands in agony

quimper23: sugar and spike, brides of satan

Read Downcounting, kids!

Superheroes and gore-splattered revenge, in adorable capsule form this 11/14

2007-11-16T05:52:00.000-05:00

I finally picked up Micrographica this week. Way to make me feel like even more of an idiot for not reading The Ticking yet, Renee French! A review of the former should be coming up in the near future, an apertif before I try to write something comprehensible about Black Dossier. "COMIC SO GOOD" is not very insightful.

All-Star Superman #9: The impending denouement of Morrison and Quitely's 12-issue run doesn't feel so disappointing now. They're still producing the best superhero series I can name: Morrison dusts off motifs from Superman's long history and imbues the fanciful weirdness with his own modern sophistication while Quitely draws spindly people and jaw-dropping landscapes. But hopefully the ticking clock will inspire a great climax rather than more issues like this one - high-quality filler, but filler all the same.

Nothing in this issue is a departure from previous stories - all the familiar story beats are in place. They just feel unusually straightforward and pat. Superman is once again faced with a dredged-up Super-concept, but Bar-El and Lilo lack the colourful personality and poignancy of Morrison's other refurbishments, coming off as a cross between your typical haughty alien overlords and asshole hockey parents. Even the way our hero saves the day is perfunctory.

Of course, this is Morrison and Quitely we're talking about, so nifty little moments still abound: look at the scratchy prisoners of the Phantom Zone cheering on Bar-El as he beats the crap out of Superman, or how Clark and friends' eyes nervously interlock after he sets the office jerk's hairpiece aflame. Maybe Morrison and Quitely could squeeze in an issue of water cooler comedy before the senses-shattering finale.

The Punisher #52: Well, holy shit. I don't think "Long Cold Dark" is Ennis' final storyline on this book, but with the way things are shaping up I certainly wouldn't be disappointed if it was. Air of inescapable doom? This comic's thick with it. The essence of parenthood: existential terror! Behind-the-scenes machinations are again hinted at - even in a Garth Ennis comic where the fighting men are remorseless murderers, his ultimate target is still the bastards who greased their descent into hell. And Barracuda is no longer the bloody right hand of respectable white-collar criminals nor a wisecracking gringo mercenary having fun at Latin America's expense: shorn of everything but that maimed ego, he's developed an obsession of his own, the hate a white-hot pinpoint where the Punisher's is all-encompassing. Another killer resigned to fate. And geez, that last page...Like Jog said, everything about the staging screams fake-out, but Ennis has taken this series so far into the shadows that I can't write that with certainty, or begin to guess where he'll go from here (except that gallons of bodily fluids will be involved). His characters, well, they ain't got long to go now at all.

Interview: Adrian Tomine

2007-11-06T15:30:00.000-05:00

One grey and ugly morning during October's International Festival of Authors I visited a waterfront hotel room and talked to Adrian Tomine about an artist's development, the Ramones and shame. He's affable and laid-back and has a good beard. I had the beginning of a cold.

CR: Shortcomings is longer than stuff you’ve done before – was that an unconscious progression, or a conscious decision?

AT: Yeah, I’d say it was a conscious decision. It was…however many years ago when I started doing it…I was just feeling like I’d been working in the same framework of the short story for a number of years and I had this urge – I still have it, it’s more of an ambition than an accomplished goal – this urge to push myself a little bit, force myself to do stuff that’s not just new for me but would also distinguish me a little bit from the artists I basically learned everything from as I was growing up. I think if I could’ve just waved a magic wand or snapped my fingers and had a completely different drawing style that would’ve been my ideal choice, but failing that I just started to think “okay, I’ve been working in this really constricted structure of short story writing for a number of years, now let me try and throw myself into the waters of writing something more loose and expansive.” And the same thing was true of the subject matter too. It’s not a huge leap, it’s not like I’m suddenly doing a Civil War epic or something, but I wanted to take on some topics I hadn’t before and that sort of all came together with this book.

I remember seeing an interview where you said you were “terrified” of doing a longer book, but I think the lack of narration captions and things like that is actually really confident.

I guess that’s the trick you try to pull off, to make the struggle be as invisible as possible. Sometimes it’s great when you can tell that an artist is really killing himself over something, sometimes you just want to be pulled effortlessly into the fictional world. That was my goal with this overall, and that relates back to not having the captions or the thought balloons and keeping the layouts really simple. Every decision was sort of guided by trying to keep the focus on the content and the characters. As far as being terrified…I’ve been doing it enough years that I know how to draw comics, I know how to physically make them. But the thing that was terrifying was more of a mental thing, sustaining my interest and motivation on one story, because I’d never attempted something like that and I had a lot of fears about – I’m sure novelists have these all the time – going down a path into the wilderness a little too far and being trapped.

There’s this Chris Ware quote – it’s not exactly representative because he’s always self-deprecating, but he said something like “every day I wake up and wonder ‘why am I doing this?’”

Yeah, I believe it. Fortunately his self-doubt doesn’t really relate to his actual accomplishments because what he does is so valuable and so great, but I guess I relate to the emotion that he has, and whether what you’re doing is good or not you still always risk that feeling of…getting out your calendar and looking at how many days you’ve been working on this and how many you have to go.

From my experience with cartoonists, I think a lot of them sometimes sit back and say “Jesus, why have I spent years drawing a hundred pages?”

Yeah. I mean, the problem with doing a long comic is that – at least if you’re working in the style that I did for Shortcomings – there’s no way to have a burst of productivity. A novelist might sit down at his computer one day and bash out ten pages and feel really proud of himself, but there’s a physical limitation to how fast you can produce comics so even when you’re working at your best it still feels like a very measured pace.

Have you gotten a lot of reaction about the racial theme of the story?

That seems to be one of the main things people are responding to.

What have other Asians said?

Well, it’s been sort of a mixed response. As with everything I do, I get a lot of strongly worded letters sent to my PO box, both positive and negative. There’s a lot of people who really related to some of the characters in the story. What it comes down to is the reaction people have on an aesthetic or an artistic level, they think “oh, I didn’t think this was a successful work of art,” or “I thought it was really good.” Then there are other people who react to it on a much more personal level, they either relate to these fictional characters in this way or they dislike them as if they were real people.

I like that you still get the letters. I really lament the death of the letter column.

Yeah, most cartoonists are just working in a book form now so that kind of stuff doesn’t really have a place.

I think you said somewhere that you were going to rejig Optic Nerve…

I haven’t really figured it out yet. I think…if I had my way I would just keep working in the way that I have been, where I put out the issues whenever I’m ready and they exist in a cheap, disposable format and at some point are collected into a nicer book form. I’m going to see if that’s still a viable way of working, but at this point it starts to feel like the comic books themselves are kind of an extravagance on my publisher’s part to make me happy just because I want to see it. It’s not a lucrative endeavour on their part.

What’s your process like? What kind of tools do you use, what’s your typical working day like?

Well, the tools…since finishing Shortcomings I’ve tried to let the pendulum swing in the other direction and just use different materials and try out new things, but for Shortcomings I was into this system of working and it’s very typical things: bristol board, some technical pens, mostly a brush…nothing too unusual. There’s nothing much to say about my typical work day, only that it involves slogging through whatever’s ahead of me, usually while my wife is at her day job. There was a long preparatory period where – yeah, I guess I was sort of writing it. Sketching out the comic in little thumbnails and refining the dialogue and getting a lot of that squared away in advance. Making notes. To me that felt like the real creative part of it, and then there was the drudgery.

Do you have a different mindset when you’re doing an illustration job?

Oh yeah, definitely. Doing illustration work sort of necessitates a different mindset because I’ve been so spoiled by my working relationship with Drawn & Quarterly, where I really can do whatever I want and I’m unimpeded by any editorial input. It’s just complete freedom. And then you have to be able to switch over to being an employee for illustration work. For a while it was really hard for me to make that transition and I would sort of bristle whenever an art director would make what I thought was a bad choice about how to change something. I think there was a point of my life where I was thinking that these were two careers of equal importance to me, cartooning and illustration, but now my heart is in cartooning and the illustration is just a luxurious and fortunate way to make some money and meet some people. It presents a lot of interesting opportunities for me, but it’s never in danger of overtaking my interest in cartooning. Having that realization allows me to be a lot more simpatico when dealing with advertising agencies or editors or whatever and if it comes down to a real disagreement I’m happy to just lay down and say “okay, whatever, let’s make the deadline and move on.”

I think a lot of people are assuming Shortcomings is autobiographical or semi-autobiographical and grumbling “another fucking autobio comic,” but all those things – I don’t want to say “false”, but they had the appearance of being autobiographical when they aren’t. Was that also a conscious decision, or…

My original impetus was just to write a completely fictional story. That was another step I wanted to take, to invent plotlines instead of transcribing things from my real experience. Along the way, for whatever reason, I started to throw in little details that might seem like they’re autobiographical. I think it’s something critics or journalists might be able to analyze in a more interesting way that I can, but there was a part of me that was trying to play with that perception that everything I do is autobiographical. On the plane last night I just finished reading Philip Roth’s latest novel and I had that same feeling of wishing I could know how much of this was autobiographical but then in the end realizing it doesn’t really matter. It’s just a great story and if I went down this checklist asking “did this really happen to him?” it would shatter the illusion of the story anyway.

Your comment about critics was interesting because I’ve been reading a few comics critics recently who are attacking the field of “literary” comics, which is what your work is usually slotted into, and…I don’t know, what would your response to that be, that it’s too minimalist or realist or too much like New Yorker short stories?

I guess I don’t really have a response. I mean, I don’t think those are invalid – I don’t even think those are controversial statements. That is an apt description of this book of mine. As far as someone trying to advocate which direction all comics should move in or not, I don’t understand that. I don’t feel that way towards any artform. I don’t listen to one kind of music or see one kind of movie…I wouldn’t want someone who dabbles in all aspects. When I want Gary Panter I’m going to go look at Gary Panter. If you want to hear the Ramones, you go all the way and listen to the Ramones for an album, you don’t want to listen to some band that does an acoustic ballad afterwards.

It is especially strange because of the origin of comics as gutter culture, and now there’s classy anthologies, there’s long New York Times Book Review articles…it’s like seeing a wino in a tuxedo and I think that makes people go a little crazy.

Yeah, although I don’t think it’s necessarily very productive to just spit in the face of that change. I know there are some cartoonists who by choice or by circumstance have been excluded from that development and are kind of giving the finger to that way of working. And in a lot of ways I don’t really see the point of that either, that always has a bit of a sour-grapes feel to me.

When did you first start reading comics?

Before I could actually even read I was looking at comics very closely and reading them visually. I’ve got an older brother who was a comics reader when we were kids and he was the one who brought them home.

What is it about Tatsumi’s work in particular that appealed to you, or does?

Um…boy, there’s a lot about it that appeals to me. I like the realism of it – there’s certainly melodrama to it, but it’s all wrung from very small everyday circumstances. That certainly appealed to me. There’s a real brutality to a lot of it that I think is really great. That was stuff that appealed to me when I first discovered it, when it was like “oh, this is really different from Spider-man,” and I still appreciate those qualities. Now, the more I work on those books and have gotten to know Tatsumi, I also admire…the artistic attitude that goes through all his work, which is just really not caring what anyone thinks. He’s not pandering to any audience, he’s not concerned how people are gonna react to him as an artist – I get the impression that a lot of these stories did not go over very well in Japan and there’s certainly Americans now who are not reacting well to them. And I think if there’s been any benefit to him having worked a little below the radar for a number of years, it’s that any time he puts his pen to paper he’s not thinking about how people will react or what kind of approval or disapproval he’ll get.

The depiction of post-war Japan was really fascinating to me as well because you almost never see that here in the West.

Yeah. I think that’s a really unpopular element of his work, both to Americans and to Japanese readers, and to me that’s one of the most interesting things. The upcoming volume of Tatsumi stories gets more explicitly into the post-war, post-Bomb stuff than any of his other work, and it’s really, really disturbing. Especially in the West, it’s not a historical tragedy that’s been examined at great length the way others have been.

There was that one story that was almost a horror story, with the woman in the pit…is the next one more like that?

There’s some of that. I feel like as time went on he got into this unusual style of mixing very current realism with this gothic, Edgar Allen Poe horror quality - which, you know, like the best horror writing or films, there’s a subtext, there’s a reason why they’re going into this gruesome territory. And I think the connection between that and atom bombs is pretty easy to figure out.

When is that coming out?

We’re still working on it now. It’s going to be a bigger book and I think it’ll probably be 2008.

I think there was originally only three of them planned – would that be the last one?

Well, it’s the last one in this series for now, the historical things, because the next project we’re working on is something he’s been drawing more currently and that’s his autobiography. That’s a big project. I think it ended up being a thousand pages long, so that’s going to keep us busy for a little while.

What do you have planned – I remember there’s a story in that ridiculously huge Kramers Ergot you’re working on…

Yeah, that’s done, and I don’t know when that’s going to come out, but Buenventura Press is going to publish that I guess sometime next year. That was the first thing I jumped into after finishing Shortcomings and it was the perfect antidote to working in this very proscribed way for the last several years. I did it in full colour, with all different art materials, I drew it huge and in a more cartoony style and put in thought balloons and sound effects and all the things I had sort of ruled out in Shortcomings. So that was fun for me. And I’m learning now that as comics have become more of a viable commodity, what we’re doing now has become part of the job, which it never was before. You used to just put out a comic and get back to work on the next one. Maybe someone on a message board will say something about it, but that’s it. And now it’s like this is my job, at least for the rest of the year. Just traveling around and promoting this book. I’ve got several directions that I might go in with my next personal work, my next Optic Nerve kinda thing, but I haven’t quite decided yet.

[the interviewer has a coughing fit while babbling incoherently about music]

It is a part of the working process, but a lot of the work has to be done in silence. All the writing, all the thought process, generally it’s done in silence or with some instrumental music in the background. In general I feel like I’m not the same person I was when I started doing the comic, and I think there was a part of me when I was in my early 20s or mid-20s that almost…idolized that world of music and musicians and their fame. And that’s definitely diminished over the years. I’m 33 now and if I go to one concert per year it’s a miracle and I usually end up wanting to leave after a few minutes anyway [laughs]. My whole involvement with that and my interest level in the latest band has diminished, and if anything my enthusiasms are drifting back in time…which seems to happen to people as they get older anyway.

I said before there weren’t any extravagant panels in Shortcomings, but there’s bits where you can glean things about the characters just from who or what they’re looking at—

Yeah, that was sort of my equivalent of the big Marvel Comics double-page spread punch-outs – these changes in facial emotions. It’s the most stripped-down version of it. But that physical communication that comes through in some of those tiny details is something that I definitely worked at.

One thing I wanted to bring up was the ending – I was just reading this essay by a literary critic about Chekhov and “negative endings”. What made you wind up the story there? It’s a natural ending point, but it’s also in the middle of a thought, almost.

That’s a good way of putting it. I think as with a lot of the construction of the story, it was more intuitive than by design. It wasn’t like I had some code, like I had all these very specific meanings that you’re supposed to get from the ending and then I clouded it in ambiguity. It’s more of a meditative state where I’m sitting there just trying to envision things about these characters, and I have that image or sort of envision it as a scene in real time and think for some reason that’s what I want this story to lead up to. It doesn’t help, and often makes it worse, if I start to analyze it too deeply and think about what the implications could be and map out all the possibilities. For me sometimes it works better just to trust that same instinct. For some reason this occurred to me, for some reason I keep coming back to this scene, and even though that last scene just seems so minute and almost as if nothing is really happening for some reason I feel like that’s where the story should end up. I know that it’s frustrating to some people, but to me this felt like such a realistic…There’s something of a plot but it’s still kind of a slice-of-life, and I felt like to impose a very conclusive, tidy ending upon everything, whether it was upbeat and positive or negative, didn’t feel like it would be in line with the ninety pages that lead up to it.

I think it’s an ideal of that kind of negative ending. In Summer Blonde there are stories that basically end in the middle of a scene, but this one definitely has more finality to it.

Yeah, and the nice thing about having this…not even secondary but another lead character in Alice Kim, I was able to give that character some of the qualities that didn’t feel right for the main character’s path. So she ends up with a fairly traditional happy, romantic ending.

I think she’s actually the most likable character you’ve ever created.

That’s what I’ve heard. I didn’t quite know what her function in the book would be originally, but as it moved along it ended up being really useful to have someone who’s sort of an antidote to the lead character.

She humanizes him as well, I think, because if she can tolerate this guy there must be something decent about him.

Yeah, that was one intentional aspect of putting her in the story. People make all kinds of irrational decisions about their romantic relationships, people stay married to abusive people for years and there’s no explaining it. But with a friendship you figure it’s more rational than that. There must be something she gets out of calling him up and wanting to go hang out with him. And I hoped to show that at least with her he can be a little more self-aware and have a sense of humour.

Could you see yourself doing a full-on comedy? Maybe not outright farce, but…

Sure. My own personal mood is definitely affecting by what I’m working on, and I know that when I’ve done lighter or more jokey kinds of things the process is actually a little more fun for me. And it’s nice to see that sort of immediate reaction from someone, like if my wife comes in and looks over my shoulder and sees something that’s funny and chuckles or something. That’s a lot more satisfying than “Mmm…interesting.” I don’t know if it’s in my ability, it’s something I’d have to test out, but sure.

Well, the new Dan Clowes serial appears to be a neurotic romantic comedy played completely straight, so anything’s possible.

I think he did a great job of – that’s probably the most mainstream audience he’s ever had, it’s a huge audience and mostly non-comics-readers, and he found a way to do his version of what they’re familiar with.

And he’s still doing some formal play in there, with the word balloons covering each other…

Mm-hmm. I can’t recall exactly where he’s up to in the printed version but he’s way ahead of schedule on the actual artwork and last time I was in Berkeley I was looking at it and it definitely gets crazier as it goes on. I admire that. There’s totally a place for going nuts and doing a Fort Thunder avant-garde kind of work, but I also really admire when someone can say “here’s the structure I’m forced to work in, and I’m going to do the best I can with that.”

Fort Thunder is interesting because there’s a big avant-garde element but at the same time a lot of their stuff is…their memories of 80s pop culture.

Yeah, and a lot of those guys from what I’ve heard are basically fans of mainstream comics. That sort of clicked for me when I heard that.

I think Gary Panter loves superhero comics as well, and he’s sort of a spiritual forefather of that subgenre or scene or whatever you want to call it.

I think the great thing about that whole school is that but there’s no shame in anything. If they want to say they really love Spider-man, that’s fine. They’re not going to be embarrassed into hiding that fact. Some of those guys apparently love Image comics, like Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane, and they’re not allowing the critical tone of our times to prevent them to embracing that. That’s definitely commendable.

Your generation of cartoonists in general, I think there isn’t that resentment of superheroes at all. You don’t really address them in your work, but there isn’t the reaction against them that people like R. Crumb had, or even, say, Dan Clowes or Chris Ware where they were used as sad, nostalgic symbols. With the guys in their 30s and 20s it seems like they’re either celebrating them or just ignoring them.

I feel like I’m probably the most – not the most, but the more resistant side of the scale. It’s still a little too close for me to either swing back and be nostalgic about it or to still be a fan of it. I feel like I’m still getting over that period in my life. But I know I’m sort of the oddball because there are a lot of people who’re my age, other cartoonists I talk to, and they still love American Flagg or these things that I certainly loved when I was younger but haven’t quite gotten back to yet. I think people who can still embrace everything regardless of its regard in our social hierarchy or whatever are probably just a little more fully evolved. They don’t care what people think and they like what they like.

Ben, you're always running here and there

2007-10-25T00:15:00.000-04:00

My review of Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings is up at Eye Weekly's site. Non-specialized periodicals that'll regularly publish hundreds and hundreds of words about comics and allow references to something called "Needledick the Bugfucker" sail through unedited are still a rare find. It looks like I'll also be interviewing Tomine this weekend during IFOA, which bodes well for fans of self-consciousness and negative endings.

"I'm sorry that there are so many unpleasant people in my book"

2007-10-23T05:57:00.000-04:00

So said Rutu Modan, self-effacing and charming at Harbourfront's International Festival of Authors on Saturday. IFOA has been inviting cartoonists for a few years now - the first appearance I remember was Art Spiegelman in conversation with Seth in 2004, and that was almost fascinating enough to atone for In the Shadow of No Towers. Granted, this is still a festival dominated by modern literary fiction, so a certain feeling of tokenism is hard to shake, but the young-adults authors and Ian Rankin don't seem too insecure about that. More problematic for me is the narrow focus on a single bloc of cartoonists. Not to replay that last dumb internet fight or anything (and hey, all three cartoonists at this year's IFOA have just published books featuring all-important fictional characters, though the Committee has not yet ruled any potentially counter-revolutionary use of formalism), but this is very much an event for "Graphic Novelists". You'll find plenty of cartoonists who've been written up in the New York Times Sunday Magazine or illustrate for classy magazines; Johnny Ryan or Paper Rad or Taiyo Matsumoto, not so much. Still, this is a great opportunity for the artists involved (the festival holds free dinners for the year's authors! every night!) and credit is due the organizers at IFOA who continue to include them. Seeing Michael Ondaatje walking around before readings by Rutu Modan and James Sturm made my day all by itself.

Well, the event was billed as readings; in reality it was more like a presentation on process, as Modan and Sturm showed pages of comics and talked about their work. Modan revealed that Exit Wounds' plain-faced Numi was conceived in reaction to mainstream comics' pneumatic pouters. She'd based her heroine on a girl Modan had grown up with, the daughter of an Israeli beauty queen and a business mogul: "she looked more like her father than her mother." Sturm dug up some nuggets of his own. The thematic links he outlined between "The Revival" and "Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight" aren't exactly opaque, but I was intrigued by the "clumsy, awkward" frontier drawings he claimed as an influence on the latter. Can't believe I didn't pick up on the Wandering Jew motif in "Golem's Mighty Swing," either. Both cartoonists spoke too briefly for my liking: this was clearly an event aimed at curious newcomers, unlike Dupuy & Berberian's chat with Seth last year or the Chris Ware/Charles Burns/Chip Kidd roundtable in 2005. On the other hand, students get in free. That's a compelling counterpoint. And there's still an interview with Adrian Tomine to come on Saturday, conducted by the lovely and talented Sheila Heti. I'll link to my imminent Shortcomings review later this week.

Exhuming McCarthy

2007-10-18T00:30:00.000-04:00

The first post of the week about Peter Milligan and/or America...but not the last!

The Programme #4 (of 12)

If nothing else, Milligan keeps me on my toes with each new project these days. Will he write an absurdist satire a la X-Statix that handles those favourite themes of identity and madness with the deft hand of his best work, or just bury them beneath a conventional modern superhero comic (see Toxin, that X-men run and most of his equally undistinguished recent stuff), a bit of deadpan dialogue occasionally sticking out from the dirt like a rotting toe? The Programme has held my attention this far simply because I can't tell which way it'll go.

Of course, it may just stagger onwards in its current form, an uncertain amalgam. As Jog noted, the series is basically a hyperbolic soap opera about superheroes and Cold War politics, and it stumbles when moving from the over-the-top action of the former to the humdrum humans of the latter. Artist C. P. Smith's ultra-dramatic facial expressions and exaggerated body language lend that superhuman silliness (this issue, for example, opens with a man who thinks he's Joe McCarthy shooting laser beams from his eyes to blow off someone's arm) suitably ludicrous bombast, but when applied to the domestic melodrama and political intrigues past and present they just look stilted, unintentionally absurd. Similarly, if Milligan's characters are growling things like "Just where do your political sympathies lie, boy?" or muttering "American spies lurk everywhere, tempting the Russian soul with spurious offers of freedom and consumer goods," his script's dynamite; unsubtle announcements that, hey, post-Soviet Russia is kind of shit just like the bad old days, not so much.

Another issue, another set of crossed wires. Still, with the last page dangling an encounter between our burnout pinko hero and a Tailgunner Joe who packs heat vision, Milligan's roped me in for at least one more month. Dare I hope for a team-up?

Our Mission Statement

2007-10-16T23:38:00.000-04:00

I've never been much for manifestos. I didn't start this blog to knock a bunch of applecarts into the gutter, cackling with glee as I stomp on everyone's fruit; I just read too many damn comics and had too few chances to write about them all. My goal is simply criticism at its best: clear, knowledgeable and graceful, moved by pluralistic enthusiasm and unafraid to throw the occasional well-constructed bomb. There's a few examples of that to your right - the likes of Douglas Wolk and Comics Comics invariably inspire me - but the medium needs more of them, even if they're the sort of amorphous, baggy catch-all this one will probably end up as. I'll ramble on. Chops will get busted. We'll have a blast, at least until Tom and Daisy fuck everything up.

And in case you have no idea who the hell I am (and you probably don't) here's a few clippings: I reviewed the Paul Karasik-edited Fletcher Hanks book for Eye Weekly here and wrote a cover story about Paul Pope for the last Toronto Comic Arts Festival. The bulk of my published work has been music writing, though, and that will definitely crop up here as well. I'm probably still proudest of this piece, but as long as we're talking hubris, here's two thousand words about soccer and music.

Introduction's made. There's still some housework left to do - those links are a work-in-progress, and the place could really use a fresh coat of paint - but enough about me. Coming soon: content!