Tom Ewing
28 September 2011
Detective Comics #1 (2011) (DC Comics)
When superhero comics artists decide to become superhero comics writers it can go one of three ways. One is that they’re good at it. The second is that they decide to be “writerly” and you get flowery stuff like the old Todd McFarlane Spider-Man comics. The third is that they write impatiently, wanting the words to get out of fun’s way.
I have never minded this. If a superhero comic feels like the crude overheated frenzy of kids playing with action figures it’s surely doing something right or at least seems well-pitched to appeal to said kids. I got that feeling from Detective Comics #1, written and drawn by Tony Daniel. The dialogue is all foreshortened, bare minimum stuff – even his Joker is tersely mad, never witty. If you’re a 10-year old boy playing Batman you don’t fuck around with “plot” or “set-up”, you have Batman fight The Joker and then after that you have Batman fight The Joker. more »
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17 September 2011
Applied to pop, this question – discussed at some length in the pub last night – proves surprisingly complex. “Dylan” was everybody’s obvious answer* but the more we thought about it the less sure we were about this. So I throw it open to the Freaky Trigger readership and wish them joy with it. more »
Tom in FT • 84 Comments
15 September 2011
#680, 19th September 1992
Has an album ever spawned a weirder set of singles than Boss Drum? You got hands-in-the-air club confectionery (“LSI”), moody tribalism (“Boss Drum”), a twenty-minute spoken word piece by Terence McKenna – honestly, “Re:Evolution” alone would make it a contender. And then there’s this career-defining novelty, a cheeky but woeful pun stretched to song length, inventing Dickensian rave (and possibly more) along the way. more »
Tom in Popular • 87 Comments
13 September 2011
#679, 8th August 1992
If you were to make a Eurodance drinking game, “Rhythm Is A Dancer” would have you under the table in one track. There’s Turbo B making a ninny of himself, of course, but also the wordless chanting, the house piano break, the echoed disco drums, the garbled english on the chorus, the vague mysticism, and most of all the general stateliness and spaciousness of it. Some dance music – the following Number One, for instance – sounded congested, like a party you’re having to shoulder your way through. But Eurodance always carried a sense of enormous vaulting spaces, the club as cathedral. That was the case in the Italo era – where the sparsity and echo in the track were often the source of cosmic or sci-fi metaphors – and it carried over into the lusher likes of Robert Miles. House music was just another ripple in that continuum of kitschy vastness. more »
Tom in Popular • 81 Comments
30 August 2011
On holiday last week I read Grant Morrison’s Supergods. It’s an odd book: a cocktail of blazing-eyed fandom, autobiography and critical history. It’s great at the first two of these, quite poor at the third – a possible problem since the critical history (of superhero comics, and the wider idea of the superhero) is what the book’s built around.
The good stuff first: Supergods is at its best when Morrison is intoxicated by comics, which he is a lot. He riffs creatively on the contrasting covers of Action Comics 1 and Fantastic Four 1, but his best material here is less concrete. Talking about his boyhood favourites – John Broome’s Flash, Weisinger-era Superman, Roy Thomas’ Avengers, Kirby’s New Gods, and Starlin’s “cosmic” Marvel stuff – Morrison’s writing goes into thrilled meltdown. He talks in the acknowledgements about the hard process of editing the book but these sections read like sheer first-draft enthusiasm. I can’t think of anything I’ve read which captures so well the mind-exploding power of comics when you’re the right age to really get hit by them. more »
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#678, 18th July 1992
“Ain’t No Doubt” plants its emotional flag in territories claimed and mapped by Phil Collins – that master of gangrenous wrath and bitterness lurking below blokery’s rumpled jacket. It’s break-up pop of the shabbiest kind; lies, quarrels and wilful miscommunication played out raw in front of us. On TV Nail played hard bastards, for laughs or drama or both – some of the intrigue of his pop career must have been seeing a more sensitive element in him, but I doubt the straight-talking, bullshit-calling narrator of “Ain’t No Doubt” came as much of a shock to the fanbase. more »
Tom in FT /Popular • 98 Comments
24 August 2011
#677, 13th June 1992
I’ve always found it hard to get a handle on Erasure. I end up filing them in the same headspace as ELO: remarkably successful, remarkably long-lived pop craftsmen who are generally – as here – enjoyable but only very rarely hit any sort of emotional or even conceptual payday. After playing all four ABBA-esque covers I couldn’t help myself: I cued up the Pet Shop Boys’ “Where The Streets Have No Name / Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” medley and had forgotten anything I might have liked about Erasure within ten seconds.
But they were never a poor man’s PSBs – there was something intriguingly different about Erasure, the way their two halves never quite gelled: Vince Clarke’s sleek, tidy, heads-down synthpop and Andy Bell’s roaming, reaching vocals. On their best singles the clash was productive – a track like “Drama” seems lopsided and unwieldy but it absolutely works: both men are fizzing and they end up going in the same direction. More often the potential was missed: on their worse tracks one or the other seemed bored. more »
Tom in Popular • 56 Comments
15 August 2011
Hello everyone – a six-week hiatus is no kind of way to treat a blog, let alone one with such a strong and interesting community as Popular. There are plenty of factors here – family illness, a summer of dramatic and distracting events, changes at work (of which more below), paid writing, and more. Something had to give: Popular was it. Hopefully it won’t happen again: even writing about a song as piss-weak as KWS reminded me how much I enjoy doing this.
Some good news, though: from October I’m switching to working four days a week, leaving a day entirely free for writing (paid, unpaid, long-term projects). If nothing else, that should stablilise Popular – hopefully it’ll lead to other interesting things too.
In the meantime, I hope you’ve had a good Summer, and see you here for the rest of it.
Tom in Popular • 9 Comments
#676, 9th May 1992
It’s hard to muster much love for “Please Don’t Go” – a barely adequate trot through a good song. “Begging” has never sounded so thoroughly rote. It’s a good example, though, of one of the nineties least-regarded, most revival-immune style, the generic dance cover version.
Dance music is notorious for its stylistic interbreeding, its rapid mutation: a music constantly in flux. Tracks like “Please Don’t Go” are what happens when dance stands still: the basic chassis of house music turned into a plastic mould that can be applied to any old song. From KWS to Mad House’s Madonna versions, any given 90s chart seemed to have a handful of these things in it. Pundits now complain about the effects of instant access to (almost) anything on popular culture, but let’s not forget that when people can remember something and not access it, the resulting gap doesn’t always produce productive mis-rememberings. It also produces cheap knock-offs. “Please Don’t Go” isn’t quite as deathly as the king of the dance cover version, Undercover’s formica take on “Baker Street”, but it’s never memorable. That this nullity got five weeks at the top says more about the immobile singles chart than any double-digit run.
A quick shout-out, though, to its notional double A-Side, the unremembered “Game Boy”, which is as near as we’re ever going to come to a hardcore track in Popular. As ‘ardkore goes, it’s poor, a collection of five years of weary dance tropes in search of even one good hook – Beltram-style hoover noises, house piano, cut-up vocal samples, a dubby bassline, none of them sticking around long enough to make an impact. It reminds me more of cover-mounted CD-Rs (“100 Banging Sounds”) on computer music mags than any kind of clubbing experience. But it’s there.
Tom in Popular • 175 Comments
28 July 2011
Martin Skidmore, our friend and long-term Freaky Trigger contributor, died of cancer on Wednesday. He was 52.
There is an awful lot you could say about Martin. He was a terrific fellow – even he didn’t seem to realise how kind and smart he was. So if I dwell here on his writing and online presence it’s because that’s how I knew him first and best, not because it’s nearly the most important thing about him. But even in that, Martin was remarkable. He was a genuine polymath, interested in almost everything. If you click on his author page and look at the most-read pieces he wrote here, you’ll see him talking about comics, soul music, football, crime novels, japanese art, food art, films, porn, and Joyce Carol Oates. He was proud of his Comics: A Beginners Guide series, but everything he wrote for us was as thoughtful and useful.
Then bear in mind that the stuff he wrote here was probably a tenth of a hundredth of the stuff he wrote, full stop – on his LiveJournal he reviewed everything he read, on the Singles Jukebox he reviewed everything he heard, he ran sites dedicated to comics and Japanese arts, and every time you met him he’d talk about five other things. The last time I saw him, when he’d been ill for a while, we watched cricket together and he patiently answered a bunch of newbie questions I had. He hadn’t watched cricket for years, he said. He still knew everything about it.
These days everyone’s an online omnivore, of course. But Martin was the real thing: he had an endless, unshowy curiosity, a frank and level judgement, and the depth of experience to give that judgement weight. When he said that something – Tezuka’s Phoenix, for instance – was among the art he loved best in the world, you listened, because you knew he never said that kind of thing lightly. And though he was humble and good-humoured, he was also quietly and rightly proud of the Japanese arts project and the work he’d done for the British comics industry through Trident Comics and the FA zine.
He was absolutely right about these – I’d heard of Martin long before I’d met him, and knew he was genuinely important to the development of British comics fandom and the comics industry in the 80s: other people will tell that story, I hope. I also had a collection of second-hand FAs which were packed with argument, incident, and lively ideas: like a lot of good zines, they were a model for the kind of online communities where we eventually bumped into one another. Martin was the kind of contributor every community wants – quick to say something welcoming or smart, slow to anger, possessed of a working bullshit detector but enough of a gent to use it wisely. ILX would never have been any good without him and others like him in its early stages.
And, of course, he was excellent company in the pub, unfailingly generous with his time and hospitality, and – as the last few months of his life showed – remarkably brave. He was a lovely man and I shall miss him tremendously. There are lots more stories about Martin to tell, and hopefully we’ll have an opportunity to get together and tell them soon.
RIP Martin, and thankyou so much.
Other tributes/obituaries/threads: Ned Raggett, MJ Hibbett, The Singles Jukebox, ILX, Momus, Down The Tubes Comics, Tom Murphy
Tom in FT • 25 Comments
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