Not a real post

Just so you don't think I'm dead or something:

Buzzcocks - Ever Fallen In Love
Uploaded by LeBalayeur

Stiff Little Fingers -Nobody's Hero-TV80
Uploaded by LostPirate77

The unifying theme here? Punks worth listening to weren't afraid to dress like idiots. Today's children could learn something from these videos. Jake Burns looks like he's wearing an impossibly bad toupee, for chrissakes.

Oh, okay, here's a Stiff Little Fingers clip where they aren't lip synching:

Stiff Little Fingers- WASTED LIFE -1979
Uploaded by LostPirate77

I can't believe he still has any voice at all, yet I know that he does because SLF still tour. I wonder what it's like, singing these songs of youthful rebellion when you're pushing 50. And it's not like their political songs have aged particularly well, either.

Tell me what I want to hear

-Dirk vs. Heidi now looks something like tenured professors debating the similarities between Dutch and American Quaker abolitionists. (History quiz: anyone know what I'm referring to right there?). There's something important buried underneath all this, but I'm not really eager to dig it out. I need more personal invective or denunciations of each other's approach to journalism. Implications of ethical shortcomings would also be welcome.

But wait! McDonald's response broadens the scope of the argument to manga vs. non-manga (she's calling them "Occidental" comics; I'm going to stay away from that terminology cause it seems problematic in a way that I can't quite put my finger on at this time). But then the scope of the argument narrows again at the end to something along the lines of "Dirk Deppey is prejudiced against non-manga comics, to the point of denying their apparent success." I do take issue with this, however:

"I’m all for a return in Occidental comics to accessible, populist work that is driven by a single creator’s vision."

I don't know. This seems to be setting up a golden age* that didn't actually exist. My understanding is that DC's editors always had a pretty heavy hand in plotting, while at Marvel Stan Lee was both editing AND plotting. Plus all these comics were collaborative. I guess McDonald could be referring to newspaper comics or Underground Comix, but I have the sneaking suspicion she's actually referring to Jim Starlin or something.

*By which I don't mean THE Golden Age.

-Do we really have to call non-comics readers "civilians?" I think I've heard Brian Hibbs use this term as well. It's just so haughty-geeky. Can't we call them "normal people" or "squarejohns" or something?

-Something about linking to comments I made on other blogs strikes me as unhealthy, but here we go. Greg Burgas wanted a bit more detail on my complaints about Andy Kubert's art. My poorly-worded thoughts are in comments 14 and 16.

-Great tragedy we can do nothing about of the day which has nothing to do with comics: I've been listening to a lot of Dils lately, wishing that they'd managed to record better versions of their best songs in the studio. Their best studio work was probably the "I Hate the Rich"/"You're Not Blank" single, but this was recorded before they had matured into a really great band (their later re-working of "You're Not Blank" is far superior to the original, for instance). I love the existing live material, and after listening to it for 10 years I can almost imagine what they would have sounded like if they were playing in a venue with better sound and actual monitors. There are a few existing studio tracks from their later period, but they lack the energy of the live material ("Red Rockers" is probably the best of the bunch, maybe their best studio recording aside from "You're Not Blank"). And there's no studio versions of "Give Me a Break" or "Tell Me What I Want to Hear," at least as far as I know. It just doesn't seem fair, especially when I remember that there are enough terrible UK Subs studio albums to fill a small record store.

-I try to stay a little updated on manga, but the title to this post (NSFW) looks like it was written by someone doing the 22nd century equivalent of text messaging.

Because nobody demanded it

Here's one of the playlists I made for playing Saint's Row on the X-Box 360. I've got another one, but I can't easily list all the songs on it. I guess it's similar in spirit to this one, only less prog rock/British folk rock and more early rock and roll/punk. "The Girl Can't Help It" by Bunker Hill is the perfect soundtrack for pointless chaos, BTW.

1. Nick Lowe - Marie Provost
2. Gentle Giant - The Boys In the Band
3. Dick Hyman - Blackbird
4. Mekons - Last Dance
5. Music Machine - Talk Talk
6. Exuma - Damn Fool
7. Genesis - I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)
8. Pink Faries - I Wish I Was a Girl
9. Amon Duul II - The Return of Ruebezahl
10. Dovers - Your Love
11. Pavement - Silence Kit
12. Kinks - All of My Friends Were There
13. Dinosaur Jr. - Almost Ready
14. Strawbs - Benedictus
15. Mott the Hoople - All the Young Dudes
16. Slade - Everyday
17. T. Rex - New York City
18. Sepultura - Ratamahatta
19. Hollies - Sorry Suzanne
20. Hackamore Brick - I Watched You Rhumba
21. Dovers - What Am I Going To Do
22. Rabble - Candy
23. Velvet Underground - Stephanie Says
24. The Nazz - Open My Eyes
25. Richard & Linda Thompson - When I Get to the Border
26. Leatherface - Not a Day Goes By
27. Ian Hunter - Once Bitten Twice Shy
28. Neil Young - Too Far Gone
29. Undertones - Teenage Kicks
30. Barclay Jame Harvest - Taking Some Time On
31. Neil Young - Like a Hurricane
32. La Peste - Better Off Dead
33. Pretty Things - The Letter
34. Sweet - Action
35. Harmonia - Sonnershein
36. Hollies - Jennifer Eccles
37. Elastik Band - Spazz
38. Dovers - I Could Be Happy
39. Lazy Cowgirls - You're Gonna Miss Me
40. Motorhead - Overkill
41. Germs - Now I Hear the Laughter (This was a mistake; I meant to have ripped "Not All Right," but my finger must have slipped or something. "Now I Hear the Laughter" is not on the short list of Germs songs I can tolerate, much less the extremely short list of Germs songs I like.)
42. Kinks - Wicked Annabella
43. Caravan - Golf Girl
44. Meat Puppets - New Gods

The gift that keeps on not shutting up

-Hate poll still in action. At the time I'm writing this, it's still pretty close.

-For those expecting a volcanic eruption re: everyone blogging about Captain America, I'm just not feeling it. I wish people would have been a bit less spoilery in the titles to their posts--some of us don't read the New York Daily News or visit Yahoo--but that was all rendered moot by the loudmouth in my LCS who complained about the spoilers, thereby revealing them to everyone in earshot. As for the blog entries, overall they seem to be settling into two categories: (1) You know they'll bring him back, and (2) What does this tell us about America? (There are a handful of entries in a third category, Fuck you Joe Quesada, but most eventually reveal themselves as variations on category 1.)

My analysis? The first category is obviously "duh" level material, and seems mostly driven by bloggers' apparent sense of obligation to say something about the situation. I don't really have anything to add. The second category also yields rather "duh"-ish results, typically "Marvel doesn't have a message other than money is good," with a strong undercurrent of "We trust Ed Brubaker to tell a good story". I can't argue with these sentiments either.

(For those looking for something related to the business side of things, Heidi McDonald contends that the media blitz will pay modest returns and Brian Cronin speaks about the speculator market which, against all logic, has emerged due to a fairly mild shortage problem. Anyone desperate to get your hands on this issue: I'll sell you my copy for $40, postage paid.)

-What the hell is going on with this Clifford Meth/Dirk Deppey thing? Yesterday at the Newarama Blog, Chris Mautner printed a statement from Clifford Meth (which contained all the candor and wisdom I've come to expect from him, but that's not the point). Apparently someone left some untoward comments, cause JK Parkin came in at 9:22 EST/6:22 PST to say:

"The sex lives of the folks involved really aren’t relevant here … posts have been deleted. Please don’t make me shut the comments down."

I've got a pretty good idea what this means, but I'm holding out some hope that the deleted comments were ruminations on Meth's sex life--sexy ruminations, I'm sure. But in all likelihood, it's something far more troubling--and, sadly, kind of predictable. Peter David, you're a pretty liberal guy. Couldn't you stand out on Mr. Ellison's balcony and address the hordes? Maybe speak to them in your common language, by comparing the situation to that episode of Star Trek with the guys painted black and white? Or maybe the one with Abraham Lincoln? You know best.

-Did anyone try that recipe from yesterday? It really is pretty good, I promise.

-Jacob Covey celebrates Estrus and Art Chantry (shouldn't there be an "Esquire" appended to that?) at the Fantagraphics blog. I was a huge garage-head about ten years ago--yes, it curiously coincided with my decision to go vegetarian--and I had my share of Estrus albums. This, in turn, meant I also had my share of albums with covers by Chantry. I have to be honest--I never much cared for Chantry. I think it gave all of Estrus' releases an irritatingly consistent look, which didn't help my impression that most of the bands on Estrus kind of sounded the same (Untamed Youth and of course Teengenerate were cool, though). Plus Estrus, along with Gearhead, seemed like part of a goofy tough guy/retro car culture scene which consistently rang false to me. (Side note: Was it Kozik who drew the cover to that issue of Gearhead with all the Confederate troops on the cover? That issue pissed me off--why do a bunch of guys from California (as Grant Morrison would say) feel the need to appropriate the symbols of the slavocratic Old South? As someone who actually grew up in the South (and not as the son of transplants--my ancestors arrived at Jamestown, dude, and they never left), I thought it was stupid and offensive.)

At the time, I lumped Estrus together with several other labels specializing in garage: Sympathy for the Record Industry, Telstar (which also released vintage material under the Satan imprint if I'm not mistaken, most notably comps like What a Way to Die and Get a Board), and Dionysus.* But to me, the clear alpha label was Crypt, which split its releases between active bands (like the New Bomb Turks and Teengenerate) and several legendary compilation series (most notably Back From the Grave, but also Strummin' Mental, Garage Punk Unknowns, and Sin Alley). While Estrus always had very slick packaging for its releases, Crypt's records were packaged in sleeves that I could have produced with Corel Draw back in high school (for all I know, Crypt founder/owner Tim Warren had some teenage neighbor designing his CDs for $20 a pop). While Estrus had hip guys like Chantray and Kozik providing them with art, Crypt had former Cracked editor Mort Todd drawing the covers to its signature Back From the Grave series. This was a longstanding gig for Todd--he provided cover art for all eight volumes, dating back to the 80s. Some of those covers were really dated by the time I was buying them--one of them takes aim at Boy George and Cyndi Lauper, for instance. And these covers were ugly. Many of them drew from a very limited palette of colors. Garish magenta, murky blue-ish purple, and a whole lot of white were pretty common.

And yet I thought Crypt was much cooler than Estrus because they consistently released better albums. These albums looked like shit, but that impressed me in a way; Tim Warren seemed to be saying that his records were so good that they didn't need competent design or attractive art. Estrus, on the other hand, seemed to rely on their packaging to a much greater extent. I can't say this realization caused me to develop a Crypt-like aesthetic; whenever I encounter a product with laughably amateurish packaging, I tend to question the quality of the goods inside (nobody wants to buy food with misspelled words on the label, right?). But I'm also skeptical of a product with packaging that's just too slick; I wonder what it's trying to hide.

My favorite Art Chantay cover, BTW, is Thee Headcoats Conundrum. Not the one that show up on AMG, either--I'm talking about the version I have. But that's not nearly as good as Covey's design for Fantagraphics' first Popeye volume. Even though Covey credits Chantry as a major influence on his work, I think he's clearly the much greater talent.

*Bomp/AIP were also around, but nobody seemed to be talking about them at the time. And Tim Warren was always dissing Greg Shaw, which made him seem incredibly uncool and irrelevant to me back then.

My favorite Adam Warlock supporting cast member

-Most of you probably already know that Dirk Deppey eviscerates Clifford Meth's speculative piece on Fantagraphics' insurance situation in today's Journalista. I already addressed Meth's article in the comments to an entry from earlier this week, but let me add this: the reason the accompanying photo of Meth robs him of credibility is primarily due to his resemblance to this fellow. That is all.

-Parts of this satirical piece by Mike Sterling (specifically the bits about Magic: the Gathering and the selection of independent books) reminds me of previous experiences in a certain comics shop located in the South with strong ties to the blogosphere. I haven't been in there in a couple of years, though.

-I agree with this sentiment. That fight was cooler than anything happening in comics right now.

-Saw this linked on When Fangirls Attack:

"Instead of marginalizing women further by creating a comics-line ghetto of 'girls’ books,' try making mainstream comics more female-friendly. Maybe if rape wasn’t a universal part of superheroines’ backstories, or if you treated female characters as more than a superficially scripted set of tits, women would be more interested in your books."

No one in their right mind would argue that Marvel and DC are doing all they can to attract female readers to their superhero titles. Getting rid of the rape and objectification would certainly help. But thing is that some--maybe most--women aren't ever going to be interested in superhero comics. It's not a gender thing, it's a human nature thing--most men aren't interested in superhero comics, either. I don't think that the Minx line is going to attract a lot of casual male readers, but there are certainly quite a few men out there who would be more interested in those comics than Justice League. I don't really agree that a line targeted to young girls is necessarily a "ghetto" (as this would imply that reading superhero comics is normative, when clearly it is not), but maybe it would seem less so if DC started a new line reaching out to male readers who aren't interested in their current offerings (ie, superheroes, soft sf, light horror, and fantasy). Maybe that's what Vertigo is trying to do with 100 Bullets and The Other Side, but I'll always associate that imprint with stuff like Sandman and Y the Last Man. There is an ocean of male readers who have no interest in that kind of material. If the Minx line is a success, maybe DC should try courting these readers.

In other words, I hope DC (and eventually Marvel) try to publish more comics in a variety of genres, so that attempts to engage a new demographic won't be interpreted as ghettoization. (And yes, both companies should try to eliminate all traces of misogyny from their work, but that kind of goes without saying.)

-I think Jack Kirby is more like Marc Bolan, but the analogy falls apart when you actually start to think about it. Nevertheless, if you're going to compare Kirby to some musician and/or songwriter, the person(s) you're comparing him to had better be associated with loud electric guitars. Kirby's action scenes are not the stuff of string sections.