29 May 2004
“we’re lost and we’ve missed telly!?”
= the forlorn cry (immortalised in family legend) of long-ago small-sinker woe, when a daytrip-by-car went awry…
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here i wz trying to think of something to say abt watching Transformers: BeastWars and Xcalibur back-to-back, and it jumped into my head: yes, *I’m* lost, and yes i’ve clearly missed the telly (possibly decades of it) required to make sense of Five’s current Saturday-morning fare, unfolding as it incomprehensibly does somewhere out between metal hurlant, robotoid computergame grafix (don’t ask ME to say which) and 19th-century post-preRaph kids fairystory illustration:
(that there’s Eleanor Vere Boyle courtesy www.surlalunefairytales.com, and Beauty and the Beast)
Of course I can tell you lots abt the latter – how this strain of art was an open portal straight into the weird-sex underside of the Victorian mind, all tanglewood backdrop, chix in clingy shifts and writhing erectile monsters… but BeastWars and Xcalibur (just for starters) present such an undergrowth of tired kidflick hand-me-down and startling image, confusion, war, sexlessness, senselessness, libido, manufactured archetype, cliche and i don’t know what else that i couldn’t guess where to begin
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in Do You See • No Comments
BRISTOL UPDATE
The fog of depression from earlier has lifted slightly although the muscles in my legs still aren’t working. The small press in the UK is vibrant and alive, with a hundred different kinds of animal battling in friendly competition to bring you the reader the greatest comics achievable by the hand of man. The ‘mainstream’ dealers huddle at the sides like mystery fish, unable to bring in the thrills, while the middle of the floor is reserved for the visionaries. Talks are sent to the Ramada, five minutes walk away, like lepers. SOLAR WIND in particular – ‘Yesterday’s comic today at tomorrow’s prices’ – is a delight to the mind. You can take a look at it here. Also, I suggest you take time to check out Arthur Wyatt’s doings – another small press guru who’s developing a network of all the people who should be in comics but aren’t. Go on! Order your copies!
Vic Fluro in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
BRISTOL: DAY ONE
I’m sitting in a Holiday Inn, staring at the screen of this god-damned bastard moneysucking internet VAMPIRE machine sat in the corner of the room trying desperately to remember the events of last night and failing.
I can barely remember who won what at the awards – Dom Reardon got something and THE LOSERS got something else, but I’m damned if I know what. Best Newcomer and Best New Series I think… Does it even matter? More kudos to them as they are Freaky Trigger massive whether they know it or not. The thing to watch at the moment is Dave Gibbons’ new hardback – (why these hardbacks? Who has the money for hardbacks? Is the average comic fan now a two-up-two-down-owning systems analyst from Surbiton with a Subaru who can afford such madness? Who are they aiming at?) – called THE ORIGINALS, a beautiful sci-fi take on Mod and all it meant. You heard it here last.
The other thing to watch is the death of the UK Comics Industry. Is this the hangover talking or was there a palpable sense of doom hanging like a terrifying pall over the whole thing last night? The creators and would-be creators seemingly outnumber the fans at the moment, and the general impression was some kind of boiling, bubbling cannibalistic soup, hundreds of beasts and creatures eating each other and themselves, not in some blood-stained nightmare of jealousy but in a bizarre love ritual from the depths of Coleridge’s worst imagining. It’s a truly beautiful thing but how long can we maintain?
And what mad superbeasts will be born – like the nine-headed creature of Revelation THE BEAST 666 – from the wreckage and mass of limbs? I’m about to find out. Here I go to tyhe main hall to find sweet goth girls, delicious bacon and the fruits of the New Uk Scene… the smell of xeroxed paper and mystery…
More later.
Vic Fluro in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
28 May 2004
Essential Daredevil volume 2 by Stan Lee and Gene Colan
This is mainly worth having for Colan’s lovely art. He doesn’t do the most dynamic and powerful action scenes, but he draws beautifully, and the quiet scenes are an absolute joy – although the inking in here is pretty undistinguished, so if what you want is great Colan art, you’re better off going for Essential Tomb Of Dracula 1+2, where he is mostly inked by the wonderful Tom Palmer.
But Daredevil is an interesting case study when assessing Stan Lee. Pretty much all of his other major work is with the world’s greatest superhero artists, who were also writers; Colan wasn’t a writer, so Lee is left to his own devices here, having to create all of the storylines and villains and so on all by himself. The stories here are pretty weak, especially the long-running one where Matt creates a groovy twin brother for himself to cover his secret identity – and no one ever seems to ask why Matt and Mike Murdock are never seen together. But an even more emphatic difference between this and Spidey, the Fantastic Four and so on is in DD’s foes. While the Ditko and especially Kirby titles got a great, memorable villain, who has stayed a major character for forty years, pretty much every other issue, Daredevil fought the feeblest and most unimaginative series of enemies any major comic has ever seen: Leapfrog (a man in a frog costume who can jump high), Frog-Man (another frog suit, less jumping, more swimming), Ape-Man (gorilla suit, strong), Cat-Man (cat suit, agile), Bird-Man (bird suit, flies), the Owl (looks a bit owly, also flies), the Matador (he’s a matador)… I’m not making these up. Stilt-Man (he has stilts) was probably the best of the megalame bunch, bar the odd second-rater borrowed from other superheroes (Mr Hyde, the Cobra, the Beetle, Trapster, Electro), and a dreadful Dr Doom tale, which shows how little grasp Lee has of this great character.
It’s impossible to read this and believe that Lee had anything much to do with creating all those great FF (etc.) tales and characters. Having said all this, the style is here, and I think that was a very important factor in Marvel’s success, all the groovy, palsy, swinging language that he added to all their titles, giving a consistency and a feel like nothing before them, making an audience feel special and part of it all. This contribution shouldn’t be understated – but it’s hard to stay balanced when Lee claims so much credit that plainly isn’t his.
Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
White Apples by Jonathan Carroll
He’s an odd writer. I like his ghost stories, none of which seem quite like any other stories I’ve ever read, as if there is an endless series of different ways of handling this old genre. But are these variations much worth having? I’m not sure. The story this time is full of cosmic nonsense that seems vague and rather pointless, and it seemed a bit pleased with itself with all its ‘God is the cosmic mosaic’ wittering. Also, it builds up dangers well, then pulls rabbits out of hats to dispel them in rather lame ways.
The characters are good, fresh and mostly likeable, as is most of the writing (though he does write the odd rotten, clumsy sentence, and mystifyingly leaves them in), but the praise he gets seems a little out of proportion. One review compares him to Raymond Carver on acid, that tiredest modern critical trope, and Carver is surely in a very different league. I like him, and will keep reading him, but I really can’t see that he is as special as many people claim.
Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
Avril Lavigne: Under My Skin
Avril returns with a patchy kind of album, a busy mid ’90′s indie rock affair. The songs are a little difficult to remember, perhaps they should have been allowed to breathe and develop at a gentler pace (Rockist Bible 2001). At the worst of times she comes across as Alanis’s mini-me, wallowing far too much in teen angst and meeting the wrong guy (over and over), you wish she’d through in something a little more joyful, there’s no Sk8er Boi’s here. It’s not all disappointing, the best songs are the single “Don’t Tell Me”, “How Does it Feel” and “My Happy Ending”, which all have an anthemic feel that I like, and allow Avril to go through all her vocal styles.
The album tails off quite badly, from one mangled powerchord gloomfest to another, the last song proper is quite a nice ballad about loss and is only the real departure from a pre-occupation with ‘relationships’, and there is a UK bonus track “I always get what I want”, a laboured attempt at punk attitude, which really could have been left off. Overall, I want to like this more, “Let Go” seems a much more accomplished album in comparison.
Sacking the band and going blue grass would probably be a good career move at this point, or you know just trying to write some happier songs with sing along choruses. I?d really like Avril to cover Alice Cooper’s “How You Gonna See Me Now”, it would surely rock, or you know sit Avril down and play her some Journey, Cheap Trick and Heart.
james in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
A satire? On the fashion industry? Well that must be pretty redundant.
Yes. It is. Which is exactly why Zoolander is good. Writer/Star/Director Ben Stiller realised that turning a one minute VH1 Fashion Awards (!) joke into a fully fledged film had to do something else on the side. What usually happens here is fleshing out of secondary characters, complex plots and so on. But wait, the secondary character is also a male model, not much for contrast. And the plot is some guff about ex-models being used as assasins against regimes that want to get rid of sweat shops*.
No the space was filled up with some tremendously stupid jokes. Models are stupid is the joke: as proved when we see four go up in flames after a perfectly choreographed petrol fight. We have the juxtaposition gag – Derek Zoolander as a coal miner. We have the conspiracy theory gags. And out of the blue we have strangeness about Frankie Goes To Hollywood, illiteracy and the inability to turn left. Mainly though the film coasts on the goodwill caused by finding the double act of our generation. Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson have the easy camaraderie that is impossible to fake in movies, and (as recently shown to too much effect in Starsky & Hutch) can talk about almost anything together and be funny. Zoolander goes the extra mile because it is also remarkably stupid.
One should never be surprised by an unexpected David Bowie cameo in a film, the man is a media whore after all. But Billy Zane. Genius.
*The lack of political earnest on this plot line is also a joy to behold.
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
#104, 30th July 1960
Of all Cliff’s No.1s, “Please Don’t Tease” is the one where he tries hardest to be a ‘British Elvis’. Even Elvis at this point wasn’t really doing Elvis, and Cliff’s weedy glottals certainly don’t do the job. Everything you have ever suspected or heard about British pop’s lack of fire is on shame-faced show here: Cliff sings “You love me like a hurricane” with no indication that a hurricane might be any different to a mild breeze off the Isle Of Wight. His “doggone” is embarrassingly vicarish. It’s left once again to Hank Marvin to salvage something from the track, and even his perfunctory solo is clumsy. This milky trundle was selected as a single by a fans’ poll, and I’m sure they were delighted with it.
Tom in Popular • 1 Comment
Corporate duty took me to Opium on Dean Street last night. A bar-cum-’club space’ it was visually opulent but thematically hi-tack, a mishmash of orientalist cliches. Here was some Indian beer; there was some (frankly glitch-prone) ‘world fusion’ music; everywhere there were arabesque drapes; the rather good food was roughly Thai – and look! a belly dancer! Two!
The question of belly dancing in bars is not one I thought I’d have to deal with on the Publog. Basically I’m against it – it looked skilful but was a bit of a conversation killer, and at one point a gyrating odalisque positioned herself right between me and my drink. But belly dancers who used their sinuous skills to collect empties – now there would be a thing!
Tom in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
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