Joshua Malbin

How could I not get the comic called CBGB OMFUG with a cover by Jaime Hernandez? How could you not get it?

Okay, so Jaime Hernandez didn’t do anything on the inside. Doesn’t matter.

What is inside are two vignettes, each written and drawn by a separate pair of creators, about the early days of punk at CBGB. I’m guessing that since this isn’t advertised as a one-shot, each new issue will bring us a new pair of vignettes and the series will build up a local history of punk.

The first story tells about the club’s first days, in 1974, and features a music historian and a mythologist as dueling ghosts of punk past. The mythologist argues that CBGB was punk’s birthplace, while the historian claims it’s more accurate to say it arose in several places independently. It’s the kind of argument that’s pleasant to overhear because it doesn’t really matter.

The other vignette, set in 1979, has a teenager learn from the CBGB bartender that his recently deceased uncle was “The Helsinki Syndrome,” a one-man band that played one show—the single most “punk fucking rock” show the bartender had ever seen.

I like that BOOM is letting journeyman writers and artists create these things. None of them necessarily has the polish of a Jaime Hernandez, the One True Comics Bard of punk’s allure. (Who does, though? Seriously, there’s something wrong with you if you can read early Love and Rockets and not want to join Maggie and Hopey’s band.) But it’s more punk fucking rock that way.

PDF preview here.

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The other day in the comic book store I overheard a guy saying how it’s not fair for Alan Moore to complain about other people being unoriginal when he’s spent his entire career making new works with other people’s characters or by reworking other people’s tropes.

I’d never thought of it before, but it’s completely true: Watchmen, Miracleman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Swamp Thing, Supreme, Tom Strong, Lost Girls, Skizz, even to a certain extent From Hell. Which isn’t to say that this isn’t a stunningly original body of work (or that in other books, like V for Vendetta, Promethea, and Top 10 he hasn’t also shown he can invent whole-cloth with the rest of them). But for the most part he’s made his bones showing just how much you can do with recycled material.

In 2004 he applied himself to H.P. Lovecraft with The Courtyard. It was an interesting, slim book in which an unapologetically racist FBI agent tried to crack an impossible set of murder cases and was exposed accidentally to the underlying grammar of the universe, which happened to be written just like Lovecraft’s vowel-less gibberish. This destroyed his mind and he ritually murdered his neighbor in just the manner of the murders he was investigating.

Neonomicon, the new series of some undisclosed number of issues, begins six years later as a new pair of FBI agents undertake to investigate that same set of murders—along with the three committed by the agent from The Courtyard. They start their quest by attempting to interview him in a criminal psych hospital, but he only answers them in Lovecraftian grunts. Then they try to track down the dealer he’d been chasing when he went mad, but the guy slips away from them and escapes into a mural.

One of Moore’s great strengths, as always, is in the way he fleshes out his borrowed elements (and I haven’t read my Lovecraft, so I can’t pinpoint what’s borrowed and what isn’t) with original character details, communicated through dialogue. In this case, for example:

“Get the fuck out of here. You got job-related stress. You didn’t carve people into fucking tulips.”

“Well, it wasn’t all job-related, I had a lot of personal issues to work through…”

“What, you were dating too many guys, you were drinking a little, it’s not the same thing…”

“Listen, I had problems. The sex-addiction thing…”

“Merril, if that was a real illness everybody over thirteen would be in a hospital.”

Later, Merril’s superior asks how her leave went, and then tells her that it’s great she’s sorted things out, and if she ever wants to go back to how things were, she should let him know, huh?

If I was one of those screenwriter bloggers, this is where I would write something like “That, kiddies, is how you lay pipe,” as part of an ongoing pretense that you can reduce creativity to mere craftsmanship. But what’s impressive about Moore isn’t the craftsmanship. It’s the bottomless originality.

Preview here.

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I’ll be reading for about 10 minutes as part of this multi-writer event in Greenpoint on August 12. It’s at Word Bookstore (7:30 – 8:30) then Shayz Lounge (8:30 – 10:30). 126 Franklin Street (Word) and 130 Franklin Street (Shayz Lounge). Come!

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This interesting Ta-Nehisi Coates article got me thinking about another meaning for the term “leaker”.

I vaguely remembered learning about a 19th-century intentional community with a strong operating tenet of free love. Birth control was done by men holding in their ejaculation, a learnable practice. Men who weren’t as good at this as the others, according to one of my AmStud professors, were known as “leakers.”

A little googling and I refreshed myself that the practice is also known as coitus reservatus, the intentional community was (of course!) Oneida, and that another notable sex practice there was this: “Postmenopausal women were encouraged to introduce teenage males to sex, providing both with legitimate partners that rarely resulted in pregnancies. Furthermore, these women became religious role models for the young men.”

Beware, young bros at Pasadena’s Vertical Wine Bar. You might catch a nasty case of religious instruction.

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I can’t remember if it was Dan Fienberg or Alan Sepinwall who pointed out that one major difference between The Wire and Treme is that The Wire, with a few details shifted, could have been set in any of a dozen cities, while Treme was very specifically about New Orleans and unimaginable set anywhere else.

Sweets wants to use New Orleans the way The Wire used Baltimore, as a source of coloring detail rather than an integral character. That’s the most interesting thing I can think of to say about it, and it’s not really about the comic.

It’s competent detective fiction (though I think Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans may have ruined the city for fictional detectives for at least the coming decade). There’s nothing overtly wrong with it.

But when in the author’s notes section at the end writer/artist Kody Chamberlain tells us that he’s been working on this script for years, I want to seize him by the t-shirt front, shake him, and demand to know why.

I feel bad about feeling this way. The guy’s currently trying to raise a small amount of money to promote the five-issue series, like $3,000. This must be a labor of love.

It makes me feel worse, though, that I got on Scott Morse yesterday for producing something I didn’t fully connect with. At least it was clear Scott Morse had something he wanted to show us that no one else was doing. Kody Chamberlain, what made you labor with love over this story?

See, it was fine that The Wire wasn’t about Baltimore the way Treme is about New Orleans because it had a lot of other big, important things to say. Sweets doesn’t seem to, at least not so far. It’s got an Angry Police Captain, a spree killer, and a cop battling drink and a broken marriage. If that’s what I’m getting from the plot, I need more local flavor than just pecan pralines and a mausoleum in place of a grave.

Especially from the art. The final page is a lovely landscape of a city street, but it’s in no way a recognizably New Orleanian street, plus it’s one of only a handful of exteriors in the whole issue. If you’re going to bill something as “a New Orleans crime story,” then I kind of want to see more of the city than the insides of offices, cars, and labs.

Katrina is ominously offstage, though. I may keep buying the series to see where things go after the storm hits.

Preview here.

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“It’s a dream, Alex. You can do anything you want in here.”

–Dreamscape (1984), the second or third PG-13 movie

Inception has a few good things going for it. Spoilers ahead.

(continue reading…)

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I strongly respect the throwback spirit behind Strange Science Fantasy #1. Nearly every page is split into three panels, top to bottom, with text in between. The style of the text is clearly meant to evoke both sci-fi B movie posters and the teasers from sci-fi movie serials of the 1950s and 1960s. The art looks just like the covers of sci-fi pulp novels and story magazines from the same era.

But as author/artist Scott Morse allows the experiment to run its course, it begins to run into problems.

The main one is that you can’t create characters this way. You can describe action in broad strokes, but even move serials stopped with the CAPITAL LETTERS SUSPENSE and gave audiences ten minutes of one-dimensional-character-based action before returning to CAPITAL LETTERS to tease the next episode. If there’s nothing but teasers, the audience gets bored. I could hardly be bothered to figure out what was going on after a certain point.

Now, each issue is going to be a “seemingly stand-alone tale,” according to the sell copy on the IDW website, so perhaps we’re just supposed to enjoy each one as a fun pastiche object. But what does “seemingly stand-alone” mean? Are they not really going to stand alone? I’m confused.

A lesser issue is that for some reason the narrative is largely written in the subjunctive or the conditional past or something. Maybe Scott Morse thought it sounded more portentous that way. Anyway, this is distracting:

THIS MOTORCADE OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM WOULD CHARGE SIDE-BY-SIDE WITH THE GEARHEADS.  HOWEVER, THE “PEACEKEEPERS” OF THE PLANET WOULD TURN A DEAF EAR TO THE TRUMPETS OF CHANGE.

What’s wrong with good old past tense for that? Dude, don’t make me want to copyedit you while I’m trying to read your comic. I wouldn’t have noticed you started a sentence with “however” if you hadn’t used the weird conjugation.

Preview below the fold.

(continue reading…)

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I wouldn’t ever have seen Scarlet #1 if there hadn’t been a mix-up with the comics my local store was supposed to hold for me over vacation. I suspect that that mix-up was partly my fault and said so, but nevertheless they gave me Scarlet as a throw-in to make up for it.

“You’re going to love this,” they said.

And they’re pretty much right. I do love it. It’s by Brian Michael Bendis, writer of my #9-favorite-of-the-decade series Powers, breaking a whole new set of conventions.

One of the breaks is small, but has a big effect: rather than have the red-headed twentysomething main character tell her story in narration, she addresses the reader in speech bubbles. Many comics have characters reciting voice-overs to the ether, but few I can think of address the reader in the second person with text like:

I’m sorry to be right in your face like this. I know you were looking for a little diversionary fun. I know you were subconsciously hoping you could just watch without any of it actually directly involving you. But what’s going on here requires your involvement and attention.

The other break is larger, perhaps, though handled more subtly. This is the first issue of what seems to be a new superhero story, of a kind anyway, so Bendis gives us an origin. But the hero doesn’t have any superpowers, so what she acquires in her origin—in which her boyfriend is murdered by a corrupt cop and then framed as a drug dealer to justify the killing—is a new moral outlook.

Everything is broken. You realize that, right? You know it … deep down. And you’re saying to yourself: girl, bad things happen to good people every day! And I am saying to you … yes. But that’s the proof. Don’t you see?

Of course this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a comic about an otherwise non-superpowered person who has a trauma and becomes a vigilante as a result (see Batman, the Punisher). What I find interesting about Scarlet is that her moralism is far more total than those earlier heroes, who pursued a version of revenge against criminals alone.

Sure, she beats up a bicycle thief and executes a crooked cop in the opening pages, but it’s not yet clear that these are anything more than vigilante acts of convenience. When she climbs to a rooftop with a sniper rifle at the end and tells us, the readers, that we’re going to help her do something about the broken world, I have no idea what’s coming next and want to know. Which for issue #1 is just about right.

(Bendis says it’s a revolution. Nice.)

Alex Maleev’s art looks a little like what happens when you paint in color on black-and-white photographs. It has that underlying realism of form and posture combined with the loss of fine detail that comes when you reduce the available gradations of shading. It makes Scarlet’s face hard to read, which I think works here. If I had a complaint it would be that Scarlet herself is just too damn sexy, but hey, boys buy comics.

No previews, sorry.

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“If I was not who I say I am, I could have easily overpowered you already. You have just seen how I willingly gave the Ring back to your master. In fact, if I wanted to kill you all, I could do it — NOW!”

He stood up, and suddenly seemed to grow taller and well-muscled. In his eyes gleamed a light, keen and feral. Throwing back his cloak, he laid his hand on the hilt of a long sword that had hung concealed by his side. Sam stared at it, horrified.

“But I am the real Strider, fortunately,” he said, looking down at them with a suddenly kinder eye. He smiled. “I am already betrothed to an elf-maid, and I have no need for the power of the Ring. I am Aragon son of Arathon; and if I can save you from your own stupid mistakes, then I will.”

There was a long silence. Pipsqueak and Morrie stared at Strider with new-found respect at this revelation of his state.

–The Fellowship of The Ring, J.R.R. Tolkein

In this Funny or Die video, Jewel dresses up as a Woman in a Grey Flannel Suit named Karen and, shyly persuaded to sing by her fellow “conventioneers” (“She only sings at the Christmas party”), blows the crowd away with a couple of Jewel songs.

She then comes back out and does an encore as herself.

This is terrible. Karaoke is the exact wrong place to stage what tvtropes.com calls a King Incognito moment. That works in two situations: where the king needs information that he won’t get if he asks people who know who he is (consider Henry V walking among his troops on the eve of the attack, or, for a variation, Zeus rewarding mortals who treat him kindly not knowing his identity), or when, as in the excerpt above, the king must travel for his own safety.

Karaoke has an exact opposite mythopoetic gesture. We’ve all been to the bar where amid the drunk jocks and party girls (bless them) moaning through “Light My Fire” or “Lady Marmalade” there’s a shy, old man, talking to no one, who reveals as golden a throat as ever ran with the Rat Pack. Karaoke is a scene where an ordinary person can reveal talent that only celebrities are suspected to have.

By mixing with the rabble and then revealing her powers, Jewel sucks the fun out of karaoke. The message of this video is that, actually, most people can’t do the things celebrities do, that privilege follows a natural order, and there’s no point in trying to join the elect if you’re not already in it.

Jewel’s own life story is one of rags to riches. What an awful revision this gives it.

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At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok pulls this quote from Bill Hayton’s Vietnam: Rising Dragon:

It might seem strange, given the system’s surveillance and security networks, but the Communist Party is wary of high-profile law enforcement campaigns.  Failure would be worse than embarrassing for a party which is supposed to represent the people’s will.  Such campaigns are only ever risked at times and in ways which demonstrate the Party’s continuing hold on power.

In this country, we have the exact inverse — high-profile law enforcement campaigns fail all the time, with the only consequence of expanding the Party’s continuing hold on power. For Party read law enforcement narrowly, or the State if you’re like that. Consider the War on Drugs, a failure by any -on-drugs standard but a huge consolidation of police power and imprisonment.

Somebody oughta tell the Vietnamese.

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