Jane's Addiction
"Up the Beach"
from Nothing's Shocking
Warner Bros/WEA, August 1988
Buy it from Amazon.com

This right here is almost everything Jane's Addiction did well: a gooey Eric Avery bassline, a huge Zeppelin Over Sunset power-chord onslaught, Stephen Perkins's super-produced pounding, and Perry Farrell's otherworldly wailing, equal parts vulnerable and Valhalla, introduced by that perfectly intimate intake of breath. Atop this, Dave Navarro (who was the best starfighter pilot in the galaxy before he turned to evil) constructs these gargantuan spires of guitar, effortless edifices that majestically tower into the atmosphere and cascade back down into the surf. The funny thing is that the lyrics simply say "Here we go now--home," but there's nothing homey about this music at all--it's music of epic adventure and grandiose, self-consciously exotic beauty. The only conclusion that we're left to draw is that this is home for Jane's Addiction, a whole new concept of home constructed by Perry and company through sheer willingness to be weird outsiders and artists and hedonists. This song isn't a day at the beach at all, it's them welcoming you to their place and saying "Here, let me give you the grand tour."

Arrant: Becky Cloonan has stated that after doing an OGN, she liked doing serialized stories more because she gets more feedback and can talk about things longer. Have you thought about doing any serialized work?

Larson: I haven't seriously considered it, no. I'm not too interested in anyone's feedback except for my editor's; I'm not doing comics by committee. When I was involved with the Flight anthology that was very much the atmosphere, and it didn't much appeal to me. I tend to think that the more sources you solicit feedback from, the blander your end product will be.
I also don't think there's an acceptable vehicle to serialize the kind of work I do. The Internet's great if you're willing to hustle, but I'm not. And floppies...Well, what publisher would be willing to publish a YA girl story in a monthly or bi-monthly format? On top of that, the editorial relationship I want isn't possible if I'm not working on large chunks of story at a time. For me, short-form serialization -- anything under 100 pages or so -- seems like a lose-lose situation.

* Ron Rege Jr. says the first eight issues of his series Yeast Hoist are all going up on What Things Do. That's wonderful news--I've never seen this stuff before.

* Via everyone: You can download all four issues of Daniel Raeburn's seminal monograph series The Imp for free. One issue each on Daniel Clowes, Jack Chick, Chris Ware, and Mexican pulp comics. I'm looking forward to kicking around with these when I have a little more time.

* Tough to top this photo from an interview with retailer/blogger Chris Butcher of the Beguiling in the National Post. (Via Peggy Burns.)

* I think maybe my single greatest achievement as a comics collector is owning every issue of Acme Novelty Library, especially since I came late to the game (1999 or so) and the early issues are so hard to find and I had no idea just how worth owning they all were when I started getting them. Point is that even if you own Jimmy Corrigan, you wanna get one of the 20 copies of the out-of-print Acme Novelty Library #12 that Fantagraphics just found, if you can.

* Matthew Perpetua explains the methodology behind Pitchfork's Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s list. Very interesting, especially the fact that the decision to limit every artist to one song apiece came after the voting. I imagine I'd have voted a lot differently if that parameter were in place from the jump, or at least from after the compilation of the shortlist from which participants could select their songs.

* Even though I haven't seen the movie, this is just a lovely look at Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette by Jason Adams.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on bread pudding, Wolverine, and the perils of TMI.

* Barry Levinson is teaming up with the Paranormal Activity people to make a first-person horror movie about some kind of viral outbreak? Hmm.

* Johnny Ryan does a Pushead pastiche for a new t-shirt. Metaliban is pretty great.

* Real Life Horror: I assure you that you want to read the demands of the gunman who stormed the Discovery Channel's offices today:

Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

The humans? The planet does not need humans.

* Truly they were the Masters of the Universe. Man, there's nothing I love more than "third way" villains fighting the main villains.

* Finally, fuck it, I'm posting this John Romita Sr. drawing again. My Lord.

Snake Oil #5: Wolf
Chuck Forsman, writer/artist
self-published, 2009
20 pages
$4
Buy it from The Oily Boutique

I think there's something on the verge of being really, really good here. Forsman's wispy, hesitant line and Segar and Gray by way of Chester Brown and Sammy Harkham character designs can at times feel a bit unmoored against his backgroundless panels--I never quite buy their physicality. But it's a lovely style, one that makes his characters instantly sympathetic, particularly the hefty, good-natured title character with his wilted mohawk and Sears uniform, but also even the abrasive, adenoidal types with whom he interacts. And that in turn is key to making the umpteenth "'80s ennui among the Great American Nowhere's lower middle class" comic you've read feel, if not fresh, then at least deeply felt rather than a report from a rear-view mirror. Several of the moments Forsman selects to highlight in this day in the life are really astutely observed and wincingly sad, recognizable to anyone who's overstayed their welcome in suburbia with shit jobs, fast food, small-hours onanism, and well-meaning reprimands from the family with whom he's saddled himself. (Take that either way you want.) The ending in particular killed me, and I could return to the page where Wolf eats a burger and fries by himself over and over. Forsman clearly has enough control over line, pacing, and story that this is the sort of comic you read as much for the promise of future ones as for this one itself. I look forward to that future.

* Tom Neely presents Bound & Gagged, 72 pages of one-panel gag comics by Andrice Arp, Marc Bell, Elijah J. Brubaker, Shawn Cheng, Chris C. Cilla, Michael DeForge, Kim Deitch, J. T. Dockery, Theo Ellsworth, Austin English, Eamon Espey, Robert Goodin, Julia Gfrörer, Levon Jihanian, Juliacks, Kaz, David King, Tom Neely, Anders Nilsen, Scot Nobles, Jason Overby, John Porcellino, Jesse Reklaw, Tim Root, Zak Sally, Gabby Schulz, Josh Simmons, Ryan Standfest, Kaz Strzepek, Matthew Thurber, Noah Van Sciver, Dylan Williams, Chris Wright and more. Jeepers creepers!

* Now that I've started to "get" Gabrielle Bell, I'm enjoying her ongoing account of her trip to the San Diego Comic-Con. Guest-starring Michel Gondry, pictured here slapping Bell in the head. (Via Tucker Stone.)

* Today on Robot 6: Scott Kurtz on the Mark Waid/Sergio Aragones piracy/copyright kerfuffle;

* and C.B. Cebulski doesn't want to read emails from people named DarkLoganXX.

* Myyyyyy goodness, John Romita Sr.. My goodness gracious me. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

Usher feat. Nicki Minaj
"Lil Freak"
from Raymond vs. Raymond
LaFace, March 2010
Buy it from Amazon.com

It takes some truly breathtaking chutzpah to recast Stevie Wonder's epic, epochal social-awareness scorcher "Living for the City" as the "Kashmir"-style hook for a song in which the singer hectors a groupie into fucking another woman for his viewing pleasure. Even a guy like me, who's self-published his opinions on everything on a near-daily basis for the better part of a decade, can only glimpse that kind of ego from where I'm standing with the help of a Hubble-level telescope. Fortunately, Usher Raymond is just the creep for the job. The dour, diminutive man who would be King of Pop has no compunction tarting up that "la la la la" hook with exotica strings and deploying it as the backing track for a paean to fauxbianism that repeatedly features the phrase "You let her put her hands in your pants." The second it dawned on me that yes, that's what he's doing, I laughed out loud at its gloriously bad taste and thought "Oh, I'm downloading this, alright." Sacrelicious!

"Lil Freak" really has three selling points to overcome Usher's sunglasses-at-night anti-charisma. One, that huge, absurd hook in the chorus. Two, the subtle, atmospheric pulsing tone that by the second verse is pretty much the only instrumentation besides percussion--it's got this weird subterranean-lair vibe to it that suits Usher's sexual supervillain persona in the song. Third, guest rapper Nicki Minaj, the aptly named (I don't think I'd gotten the pun of her last name before just now) Harley Quinn to Usher's unsmiling Frank Miller Joker. I don't think Usher has any idea how ridiculous what he's up to with this song is, but Minaj certainly does--how else to explain a verse in which she lists all eight of Santa's reindeer, uses the phrase "tig ol' bitties," and barks "EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND!" in praise of her host singer with all the comical ferocity of that guy who refers to the Lord Humungus as "the Ayatollah of Rock 'n' Rollah" in The Road Warrior? Let this song put its hands in your pants.

(via Matthew Perpetua)

* This oughta be fun: Pitchfork counts down the Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s. Only one song per artist, which makes it something different than a real Top 200 Tracks countdown, but different doesn't necessarily mean "worse."

* Ron Rege Jr.'s Yeast Hoist #1: Now appearing in its entirety at What Things Do. What a treasure that site's turning out to be.

* There used to be a review of the script for Guillermo del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness adaptation right here, but now there's not. Not sure what that means, and god knows you can't trust these sorts of things anyway, but it sure sounded like the creature-feature action flick you were worried it was gonna be, and I don't trust del Toro not to screw it up just that badly. (Via Jason Adams.)

* DC's Source blog reveals the division of labor for the Batmen starting this fall: Dick Grayson will star in Tony Daniel's Batman, Scott Snyder's Detective Comics, and Peter J. Tomasi's Batman and Robin, while Bruce Wayne will star in Grant Morrison's Batman Inc. and David Finch's Batman: The Dark Knight.

* I'm quite pleased that the time differential between the release of a new Jason comic in Europe and the States is now on the order of two months.

* My friend Zach Oat loved Neil Marshall's Centurion, which now that I've seen Scott Pilgrim and The Expendables is solidly on top of my to-do list. (Sorry, Inception.)

* Nice, chewy posts on a couple of comic-art traditions from a couple of talented comics artists: Frank Santoro on naturalism and Tom Kaczynski on melodrama.

* Today on Robot 6: Cartoonists and the Criterion Collection: perfect together! Featuring Matt Kindt, Scott Morse, Jason Latour, R. Crumb, Adrian Tomine, Jaime Hernandez, Bill Plympton, Frank Kozik, Seth, Scott Campbell, and more.

* Jiminy Christmas, look at the Eric Vincent colors on this old Love and Rockets collection. This is what I want the '80s to look like.

* A giant-monster movie made on the cheap called Monsters? Sure, I'll eat it.

* Robyn covering Bjork's "Hyperballad." Oh my goodness. (Via The Missus.)

* I'm quite late to this party I know, but you certainly want to watch director John Hillcoat's video for the Nick Cave outfit Grinderman's "Heathen Child." It's the sort of video where when the chorus kicks in, the tits come out. It's like, wait, the people who made this crazy thing, which looks like the work of people who've watched nothing but True Blood and Tim and Eric for the past three years, made that tedious, polite adaptation of The Road and recorded its generic-Oscar-bait score? Can we swap out that version of them for this version of them and try again?

Set to Sea
Drew Weing, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, August 2010
144 pages, hardcover
$16.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com
Read it for free at DrewWeing.com

It's an odd little notion, the idea that you've lived a better, fuller life for having killed people. That's probably a somewhat unfair aspect of Drew Weing's good-natured, lushly drawn storybook (that's the term the comic practically demands I use) Set to Sea--a tale of a big lummox of a poet whose lackluster verses about life on the open sea are given new verve when he's shanghai'd into service on an actual ship--for me to seize on. After all, Weing's bigfooted style and inviting rather than intimidating illustrative chops place him squarely in the adventure-comics tradition of Carl Barks and Jeff Smith. Why be churlish and begrudge its central character's baptism by fire? Well, because it really is the central, transformative moment in his story. Before the pirate raid that he ends up beating back pretty much singlehandedly by slaughtering dozens of buccaneers and beating their captain to death in a rage, he's miserable aboard his new home--complaining about the work and the rations, literally tossing his notebook full of unfinished poems into the ocean. Afterwards, he's accepted by his shipmates, elected third mate, introduced to a world of beauty and adventure around the globe, and filled with enough genuine insight into the sailor's life to become a hugely popular poet back on the mainland. At first I was impressed by how wordlessly nasty that central fight got, how Weing was unwilling to neuter the violence of this world. But by the time we get to the end of the book, with the now-respected poet/sailor, bearded and eyepatched, reclining by the fire of the pub from which he was once forcibly ejected, thinking back on a life well lived...well, this isn't like Bilbo Baggins, forever trying to recapture his combat high, or Frodo Baggins, forever damaged by the horrors he witnessed and endured. It's a dude kicking back saying "Yeah, it was all worth it." I wish Weing had examined that assumption a little more closely.

Not that you even need to know this, but the plot is that Sly and his fellow mercs, to whom we are introduced during an in medias res rescue of hostages from Somali pirates (conducted with rather callous disregard for the hostages, I must say!), are hired by a mysterious company man (that's Bruce Willis's cameo; Stallone's group takes the gig when Arnold Schwarzenegger passes on it) to depose the military junta ruling a tiny island nation in the Gulf of Mexico. Stallone and Jason Statham (there really is no point in using their character names--Stallone and Statham are their character names) scout the place with the help of the rebellious daughter of the ruling general, who refuses to leave with them after they're discovered. Touched by her loyalty to her people and her home, , Stallone overcomes his reluctance to take a surefire loser gig like this, and he and his team travel to the island, murder its entire armed forces, kill Eric Roberts and Stone Cold Steve Austin (the rogue spooks secretly running the show), leave the daughter in charge, and go have beers with Mickey Rourke. Cue both "Born on the Bayou" AND "The Boys Are Back in Town," The End.

Alright, so with a little effort I can make it sound coherent, but you've got to cut a buncha subplots to do it. Dolph Lundgren is featured as a member of the team who goes Section 8 during the pirate attack and is kicked off the squad; having read the location of Sly's next gig over his shoulder, he presents himself to the island junta and leads a team of assassins in a fleet of SUVs to take out Stallone and Jet Li (here playing a character called, no I'm serious, Yin Yang). Just before he can kill Li, Stallone shoots him, and in his dying breath he gives Sly the entire layout of the presidential palace they'll need to raid. Only he's not really dying, he actually gets better, and in the final scene all is forgiven and he's having drinks and riding motorcycles with the gang again. Phew! Meanwhile, Charisma Carpenter is briefly poured into a minidress and paraded around as a Lifetime Movie-worthy domestic-abuse subplot so that Statham can pound the shit out of her asshole new boyfriend and his pick-up basketball playmates during his off-hours as a way to show her what she gave up by dumping him. Li wants more money for his family, which he doesn't actually have, and he's angry because as the shortest member of the team he gets shit-on a lot, and all his fights are so choppily edited you're left to wonder if they were removing his walker in post. Mickey Rourke, team member turned team manager, runs a tattoo parlor or an auto body shop or both, enjoys sex with anonymous women, and cries because this one time in Bosnia he could have stopped a woman from killing herself but didn't. Next time you see him after that he's whooping it up with the team with John Fogerty chooglin' in the background. The general who rules the island nation is chafing at having to take orders from Roberts and Stone Cold and this other British merc with a Fu Manchu mustache, and he's a painter, so he has all his goons paint their faces like scary warriors, so Roberts shoots him to death in front of all his men; none of this changes anyone's behavior in the slightest.

Again, not a huge surprise that an action movie consciously constructed as a throwback to the '80s heyday of its writer/director/star and several of its supporting cast members and cameos was going to feature a lot of cliched go-nowhere barely-sketched-out subplots featuring characters for whom the jump from one- to two-dimensional constitutes an arc. The really shocking thing for me was how incoherent the basic stuff of storytelling was here. Remember in Tango & Cash how nearly every line of dialogue was a one-liner, and after a while it felt almost absurdist, like there was no real connective tissue between any of them and Sly and Kurt Russell were just taking turns spouting zingers from some sort of checklist they had? This was like that, only the zingers had no zing. I'm finding this so difficult to describe...it's like, you'd see a reaction shot from Stallone when one of his teammates said or did something, he'd be smiling and he'd make some wisecrack, but nothing that the teammate said or did actually merited the specific thing he said. They could have said or done something totally different, or nothing at all, and it would have had the same bearing on what the next line was. This black-box-theater experimental-theater tone carried over into the lines of dialogue that actually purported to have some sort of import for the story: After Sly pops Dolph during his heel turn, he asks him "Who sent you?", and then before Dolph even answers he asks "Is the girl still alive?" as if he already knew the answer. During the climactic raid on the presidential palace, Stallone announces that the team has three minutes to infiltrate the place and do...something, I forget what, but it doesn't matter, because we never learn or are shown why there's this three-minute time frame--nothing happens three minutes later, there's no timers involved in the explosives they're planting, there's not some big event the general is launching in three minutes, the plane's not taking off in three minutes, nothing. Like, you can poke fun at the motivational shortcomings these movies always have--for instance, Stallone being so moved by the daughter's courage and loyalty to her nation and people, something he'd apparently never encountered before despite alluded-to adventures everywhere from Bosnia to Nigeria--but it's the fundamental disconnect between any two points in the film that's the real marvel here. It's Mystery Science Theater 3000-level material at times, even aside from Stallone and Rourke's Rondo Hattonesque visages.

But the action is fabulous, I'll give it that. Not necessarily the hand-to-hand combat scenes: There are some memorably brutal bits toward the end with one of the key goons getting his neck snapped back with a downward kick, and Statham is a joy to behold in close-quarters brawls as always, but for the most part these are old men, and Stallone Christopher Nolans the bejesus out of their fight scenes just to make them look like fight scenes. The firefights, on the other hand? Wow. Stallone announces his intentions here from the start, when a "warning shot" at the pirates from Lundgren literally blows a man in half, sending his entire torso splattering against the wall behind him. Stallone's a poet with CGI splatter, and the big battles make the most of this by combining it with novel weaponry--Terry Crews's automatic shotgun gets some real animated-GIF-worthy killing done, while Stallone and Statham's "well, while we're here, we might as well..." biplane strafing run against a dock full of army dudes had me laughing and cheering. There's even one memorable bit seen through heat-vision goggles, great gouts of yellow blood spraying everywhere like the Sesame Street Chain Saw Massacre. I've often said that the great '80s action movies treat the action like a Busby Berkeley dance number--it's spectacle, and the spectacle is pretty spectacular here once it gets going. Problem is that when no one's getting killed, the movie's nearly unwatchable.

* Recently on Robot 6: A first look at Hope Larson's A Wrinkle in Time.

* Wait--a new THB issue from Paul Pope and AdHouse? Whaaaat? (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Returning to it a couple days later--like flying over a still-gushing oil spill--I find it hard to overstate what a trollish, narcissistic, pointless disgrace the Comics Journal's roundtable on Ben Schwartz's Best American Comics Criticism became.

* Speaking of! The programming slate for SPX has been announced. I can't go this year, and even though this is because of entirely pleasant personal reasons, I'm still bummed out because I'd give my eye teeth to be able to participate in the Critics' Panel again this year, or even just attend it: Johanna Draper Carlson, Gary Groth, Tim Hodler, Bill Kartalopoulos, Chris Mautner, Joe McCulloch, Ken Parille, and Caroline Small. Sparks really could fly at this thing, and ought to. At the very least, allow me to beg someone to record it! (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Here's a fine David Bordwell essay (is there any other kind?) on coincidence in film narrative. Read the whole thing, just for the pleasure of having done so.

* A lot of people got really excited to see Kevin Huizenga's story "Time Travelling" go up on Jordan Crane's webcomics site What Things Do, and I don't blame them, but mostly it makes me think of how many people I'd kneecap to get Huizenga's "A Sunset" online. It's from Or Else #2 and I'm reasonably sure it's the best short comic story of century so far.

* Jason draws Darth Maul, Batman, and a Teletubby WHOOPS a Moebius character (LOL! thanks Jog), Jason-style.

* Wow, "Always Loved a Film," the most straightforwardly fun Underworld song ever, now has the most straightforwardly fun Underworld video ever!

* There's no way to say this without coming across like a complete tool, but since it's not like it'd be the first time, here goes. Tomorrow is apparently Read Comics in Public Day. I know that everyone's heart is in the right place, but every day is read comics in public day for me because I'm a grown-up who owns his life choices. It's no big deal.

And it was naturally funny, too. I think one thing that gets lost in discussion of co-writer/director Edgar Wright's genre send-ups is how much of the humor has little to do with riffing on Night of the Living Dead or Bad Boys or whatever the case may be and stems instead from the effortless interaction of characters who've gotten to know each other, play off each other's insecurities, and draw out each other's funniest stuff. In that sense Scott has a lot more to do with Shaun of the Dead than with Hot Fuzz in that it's about a group of young, slightly directionless young people who've mostly been friends forever--there's that same sense of people putting on their roles in the group like a pair of comfortable shoes and kicking around their affection for and annoyance with one another like a soccer ball. So for all the screwball pacing and dialogue it had a...laconic feel to it, I think I wanna say? Like, it was super-easy to slide into the group and laugh at Wallace's knowingness and Scott's blithe sleaziness and Julie's GTFOness and Knives's head-over-heels-ness and Young Neil's wannabe-ness and Kim's grumpiness and Stephen's panicked ambitiousness Stacey's annoyingly right-ness and so on and so forth, like we'd known these folks all our lives.

Heck, even the most potentially problematic character in this regard, literal dream girl Ramona, was played pretty much straight--Mary Elizabeth Winstead's comparatively flat performance vs., well, everyone else in the movie could be seen as a mistake, but to me it was the perfect way to thwart any potential Manic Pixie Dream Girlisms. Indeed, that character comes across like a point-by-point refutation of the MPDG--dry rather than manic, she makes Scott's life a disaster rather than an adventure, and the only whimsical thing about her, her hair, is treated like a sign of emotional problems and an intimidating obstacle to be overcome. Most importantly, the whole point of the movie is that her life existed in and of itself long before she entered Scott's. She's got a long, troubled history and a rich emotional life--she's an agent, not an object. If anything, it's Scott who's Knives Chau's Manic Pixie Dream Boy, transforming her life into a swoony spectacular with his carefree indie-rock lifestyle and heretofore unchallenged ability to ignore and deny anything troubling in his own past and emotional life. And of course we see just how far that gets everyone involved!

Narratively bold and inventively staged in all the ways that O'Malley's comics are, and very very very funny, Scott Pilgrim was basically a killer little movie that could easily have felt forced and over-impressed with itself. If anything, it was a little slow at times, which is the last thing I thought I'd be saying. There was no sense that the movie was desperate to bring its material to you, you know? There it was, and you could come to it at your leisure. I wanna play it again!

Second Thoughts
Niklas Asker, writer/artist
Top Shelf, March 2009
80 pages
$9.95
Buy it from Top Shelf
Buy it from Amazon.com

A sexily drawn story of how hard it is for sexy young people with glamorous careers in the arts to really connect with one another? Sure, I'll eat it, though I'd understand if you'd prefer to pass. Second Thoughts isn't exactly the sort of tear-down-the-sky take on this well-trodden slice-of-life litcomix subgenre that might cause you to reevaluate it if you'd grown tired of it in the past. What it is is an extremely well-executed example of it, with a surprising degree narrative complexity, subtle enough to be imperceptible to me until I read the back-cover copy after finishing my first read.

In retrospect, Asker tips his hand by first introducing Jess, one of the book's two main characters, this one a writer struggling with a project and making a long-distance call to a touring musician girlfriend who's clearly cheating on her. Jess then meets cute at the airport with John, a music photographer on the outs with his touring musician girlfriend and on his way out of town for good who not-so-surreptitiously snaps a photo of Jess as she waits for her girlfriend to return. Jess's girlfriend texts to say she missed her flight in, John's flight out gets cancelled, and the two go their separate ways, not meeting again until they both end up in bed together--but neither in the way you're thinking now, nor in the way I thought when I first read that scene. Along the way a few of the character names change from one thing to another, and that's all I'll say about that.

Second Thoughts's primary selling point is Asker's luxurious, inky art. He's working in a style that will be familiar to fans of Paul Pope or Farel Dalrymple, but ratcheted down in a realist direction, evoking, say, some of Craig Thompson's Blutch-ier stuff. Everything's dark and shiny, the characters are all attractive in the sort of way that leaves you idly daydreaming about what it'd be like to make out with them...the book feels like the sort of thing meant to be read at night in an apartment in the city with cigarettes and a glass of wine--the sort of thing meant to be read by the characters involved, in other words. Which ends up being really fitting, because the whole idea is the way the mysterious glamour of attractive strangers enables us to conjure up whole lives for them in a way that is really more a commentary on our own lives than on theirs. It's a nice place to visit.

The Moody Blues
"Question"
from A Question of Balance
Threshold, 1970
Buy it from Amazon.com

The Moody Blues are best known for orchestral prog-pop slow burners like "Nights in White Satin," as love-it-or-hate-it an affair as rock's baroque period ever produced. To me that song's a real killer--I dig the application of Lord of the Rings instrumentation and atmosphere to a love song right off the bat, but beyond that there's real pain in the way Justin Hayward holws "Oh, how I love you!" over that barely human-sounding chorus of high keening backing vocals. In other words it's the urgency of the song that sticks with me rather than the quiet groove of it.

That's why I've gotten so into the band's up-tempo singles from its late-'60s/early-'70s peak, "Question" being foremost among them. Lyrically it's a very of-its-time blend of the personal and the political, assembled from two separate unfinished songs "Day in the Life"-style: It kicks off and ends with a breakneck attack of horns and acoustic guitar over which Hayward demands answers for his "thousand million questions about hate and death and war," sandwiching an AM-radio-worthy ballad in which he says "I'm lookin' for someone to change my life." This is a not-uncommon lyrical ploy for songs from that era, I suppose--the Moodies did it again, albeit in a slightly less bifurcated fashion, with "The Story in Your Eyes" the following year. It's the sort of thing that's quite easy to write off as everything wrong with that entire generation, an implicit belief that achieving personal happiness is sufficient answer to the world's ills, but so what? Isn't that as far as most of us are gonna get anyway? I can't find fault with someone for seeking refuge, and there's something so sincere in the way Hayward's quavering tenor expresses both rage and yearning.

But what interests me more about "Question" is the production, and not just how the frantic pace of the opening and closing crashes in and out of the gently strummed central section. For a song that was supposedly recorded live as a band in part as a response to how difficult all their previous material was to play while touring, there's some bonkers production work going on here. In the galloping fast sections, instruments will abruptly fade in and out of the mix, either highlighting or shoring up Hayward's vocals. The acoustic guitar that forms the backbone of the piece sounds like it's being strummed about four inches away from your ear. The drums are absolutely overpowering, at least until they suddenly drop out of the recording altogether--a bassless pounding. The bass guitar is responsible for the melody. There's this huge sinister hum that tracks the "ahhhh-ah-ah-ahhhh" vocals from what sounds like deeper brass instruments but I suppose could be some crazy low-end Mellotron sample. And of course there are the call-to-arms trumpet blasts that really launch the song and also announce the start of its final section. "Question" could have been a fairly straightforward, if compositionally sectionalized, rock song, but the band decided to play with dynamics to a pretty much unnecessary degree. But all great spectacles, of course, are characterized by being unnecessary.

* and Gary Groth says "My God, what have I done?"

* Re that post, some amazingly naked hostility being thrown around in the Comics Journal roundtable on Ben Schwartz's Best American Comics Criticism that it links to--not a huge surprise whenever the Hooded Utilitarian gang is involved, I know, but it's a surprise to see Jeet Heer come out swinging nonetheless.

* The State's album Comedy for Gracious Living is coming out on September 14, over 14 years after it was recorded. Like Ryan Penagos, I really hope they also re-release the State's book State by State with the State--someone stole my copy during my senior year in college, which is not at all surprising.

* Mike Barthel points out something I'm apparently too dopey to have comprehended on my own, which is that Pitchfork's Top 50 Videos of the '90s was a one-man affair, not the usual "as voted by the staff" thing, which I think explains a lot--it does feel more like someone's list than those things usually do. It spurred some interesting thoughts on irony from Barthel and Nitsuh Abebe; I particularly liked Abebe's distinction between '90s altrock irony and '00s electroclash irony, which Mike follows up on. ("Sometimes I kinda think [electroclash] deserves a little more respect"? C'mon, we can do better than that! You got a problem with me? You should get your ass off of Avenue D!)

Artichoke Tales
Megan Kelso, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2010
232 pages, hardcover
$22.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
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Over a decade in the making, and it shows. This is far and away the best comic I've ever read from Megan Kelso, succeeding on almost every level. Her clear-line style gives an airy ease to her often detail-heavy drawings of nature and the people who inhabit it; similarly, her complex exercise in fantasy worldbuilding--and I don't mean detailed maps with funny names, I mean real worldbuilding, constructing cultural and religious and economic structures rooted in environment and history and exerting macro and micro influence across the lives of all the characters involved--is subsumed into an absorbing, briskly moving house-divided family soap opera. So many elements in her tale of a land divided between its agricultural South and industrial North jumped out and demanded to be contemplated and enjoyed: Those appealing artichoke-head character designs. The Queen who fails her people in disastrously bloody fashion despite the good intentions of an entire system dedicated to her success. The way Kelso tells a byzantine multigenerational tale replete with flashbacks and jumps back and forth in time and space and the age of the characters involved while hardly ever telegraphing any of it, creating the impression of a tapestry of inescapable memory and history always influencing the present. The thoughtful, almost cerebral treatment of attraction, sex, and marriage. Heck, even the de rigeur fantasy trope of placing the actions of singular actors at the pivot points of world history is made to feel here less like the denial of the huge impersonal forces that drive human events more often than not than as some a logical, representative outgrowth of them. And man, that clear line is just sick. I dug this book to a degree that surprised me and look forward to returning to it. It's a rich vein of alt-fantasy being tapped here.

* This teaser for an upcoming arc of Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard's The Walking Dead looks very, very promising if you like zombies. The series goes so long without zombies becoming a genuine threat to the cast other than isolated fuckup-based incidents that when the threat re-emerges, it's usually stunning.

* Speaking of The Walking Dead, here's the trailer for the 90-minute pilot episode of Frank Darabont's adaptation of the series for AMC, which will debut on Halloween.

A few quick thoughts: 1) I'm surprised they kept the coma/hospital opening, which was written before Kirkman had seen the very similar opening of 28 Days Later; 2) Modern slow zombies just look like Improv Everywhere zombie-flashmobs to me anymore; 3) The music cue in the back end of the trailer is to me by far the most unexpected and interesting thing about it. But as always, trailers are meaningless and we'll see how the show is.

* Brand spankin' new Jordan Crane comics! Where the hell is this thing headed?

* Brian Chippendale and C.F. are doing a little book tour together in November. Be on the lookout for two ragamuffins who make good comics. Wait, does this mean Powr Mastrs 3 is seriously coming out by November?

* Bobsy of the Mindless Ones makes the case against Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver's S.H.I.E.L.D. I must admit I've dialed way back from my initial enthusiasm for the book. It's great to be in love with ideas, but it helps if the ideas aren't so familiar, and if the ideas are happening to actual characters rather than sort of vague gestures in the direction of character. The critique Bobsy goes with is one I hadn't even really considered, which is that an alternate history of a fictional world whose history is constantly altered loses the impact of good alternate history. In a way it reminds me of Brian Michael Bendis's similarly conspiratorial/revisionist Illuminati project, which also missed the point of conspiracy fiction by taking a bunch of supergeniuses and attributing to them all the icky aspects of being the world's secret puppetmasters with none of such organizations' efficacy. (They couldn't stop Secret Wars 2 from happening, so what good are they?) Personally, my biggest problem with S.H.I.E.L.D. (and, it would seem, Fantastic Four, into which Hickman has drawn some of his key S.H.I.E.L.D. concepts) is that by turning Iron Man and Mister Fantastic's dads into members of an elite secret society that's been saving the world from Marvel's alien villains since ancient Egypt, modern-day Marvel has turned yet another pair of Stan Lee hard-luck heroes into destiny-driven Chosen Ones. The appeal of virtually every Silver Age Marvel character is that they were all varying stripes of self-centered asshole who fell bass-ackwards into their lives as superheroes, and indeed had to make the choice to live those lives that way. They're not the culmination of centuries of machinations by spider-gods or Leonardo da Vinci, they're just folks. Genius folks in some cases, but still just folks.

* Tom Spurgeon ponders DC management.

* In this gutwrenching post on a) the death of his father and b) the music of Hole, Matthew Perpetua drops a throwaway notion that I'm stunned had never occurred to me before: Perhaps the reason there's so little in the way of genuinely tortured-sounding rock music today is because labels can no longer afford to babysit crazies and junkies. Rattle off a list of a dozen of the mid-'90s big alternative artists and surely at least half had weapons-grade heroin habits, alcohol addictions, or other debilitating mental illnesses. With sales levels today being what they are, who can afford anything other than consummate professionals? (I suppose you could argue that the incarceration rate of today's rap superstars gives lie to this, but incarceration is a step in the right direction from "getting murdered by your/your rival's former label head.")

* Real Life Horror: I can't even imagine swimming in Loch Ness, let alone swimming Loch Ness. When I visited, I'm not sure I even touched the water. Just in case!

* Congratulations to this list of Democratic officials who've stood up for civil rights, American values, and basic human decency. Short list.