The Brown Wedge

A Bite of Stars, A Slug of Time, and Thou - Episode 11

Victoria de Rijke joins Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to talk about “Aye, and Gomorrah”, a tale of sexless astronaut prostitutes and the people who worship them. I’m not making that up! It was written by Samuel R. Delany in 1966 and Elisha reads it at the beginning in case you haven’t. Music is “I Blood Brother Be” by the Shock Headed Peters.

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A Bite of Stars, A Slug of Time, and Thou - Episode 10

“Track 12″ by J.G. Ballard gets Slugged this week, with Richard Thomas joining Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to discuss it. Elisha reads this odd story of revenge via home recording in case you haven’t; music comes courtesy of John Foxx, Stero Total and Iannis Xenakis, and there’s a miniature laboratory cyclone thrown in for good measure.

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Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Crime/Suspense Thrillers

I usually start with my favourite work under consideration, but for the last entry in the series, I am saving the best for last. Crime is obviously central to countless comics, but I am not really talking about the superhero comic, not Alan Moore’s excellent Top Ten, a superhero Hill Street Blues, or even things like Ed Brubaker’s Gotham Central, which is still in that world, almost constantly conscious of the existence of Batman. Frankly, comics have given us very little centrally placed in the genre to match up to the many great crime novels or movies - though actually I have high hopes for Darwyn Cooke’s upcoming adaptations of some of Richard Stark’s tremendously hardboiled Parker stories.

Really, this heading is just for me to talk about one eight-page story, which only loosely belongs here. It’s widely considered the best short-story ever in comics - this may be a fair assessment, though I mention a couple of other contenders in the War and Koike & Kojima entries in this series. Whatever, ‘Master Race’ is a genuine masterpiece. You will often find no mention of the writer - it’s just discussed as Bernie Krigstein’s comic. The script in itself is daring: in 1955, the Holocaust was not much referenced in popular culture. I imagine it was still too raw, too hard to assimilate into anything but the most serious coverage, so writer (and editor of Impact, which ran this story in its first issue) Al Feldstein was taking a risk in including details of its horrors. Krigstein for once got permission to do things more or less his way - he had had regular battles with EC about changing the panel layouts he was given (EC habitually had the borders and copious caption text all set before the artists got at it). This time, he even got to stretch a 6-page script to eight pages, though I have seen it said that he had wanted 12. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Earliest Superheroes

Frankly, there wasn’t so much in the early years of superhero comics that holds up well now. Jack Kirby’s early work, including Captain America, is worth a look, but he got much better later on. There’s some good art on some of DC’s ’40s heroes - notably some early Alex Toth (Black Canary is his best of that era, I think), Joe Kubert and Carmine Infantino here and there, and some nice work from Sheldon Moldoff on Hawkman and Jack Burnley on Starman, for instance. Elsewhere, C.C. Beck’s childlike Captain Marvel comics, and Mac Raboy’s art on Captain Marvel Jr, hold up pretty well. These are all hard to find, as is Lou Fine’s lovely art on Doll Man or The Ray for Quality.

Lou Fine is the artist Will Eisner always talked about most - Fine had worked on Eisner’s The Spirit, which is perhaps the best comic work of that era. It ran in a newspaper supplement, 7-page strips from 1940-1952. Eisner was an immensely accomplished and expressive cartoonist, who also had a talent for memorable characters, including some femmes fatale to match Caniff, and tightly wound short stories, but I think his biggest contribution to the comics of the time was his sense of design, which was like nothing else seen in comics then, and rarely matched since. His splash pages in particular are often highly original and memorable. One warning: there is a comedy black kid in it, and Ebony obviously looks rather distasteful all these decades later. … read on …

Slugs on parade

The slugs of time ooze back onto your radio dials tomorrow night at 10pm! The frequency you’ll need to tune into is the perpetually double-booked Resonance FM 104.4 in London, which also does a live web stream. If you miss it however - FEAR NOT. After each show airs, we’ll be tacking these new episodes onto the podcast, which you can subscribe using either of these links (iTunes users should choose the iTunes link). You can also listen to them right from your web browser whenever you like.

For those unfamiliar with A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou, it’s an exhumation and revivification of old avant-garde and speculative science fiction short stories, hosted by MARK SINKER and ELISHA SESSIONS and a studio guest. Elisha reads the story for you at the front of the programme and then it gets talked about. Our M.O. is respectful frivolity and enthusiasm — we’re not sci-fi experts and we don’t need you to be either.

Our story this week is the frankly nutso “Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerley Dead”, by Robert Sheckley, written in 1972. Our guest is PETER BARAN (we warned you).

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/slugoftime

Comics as an instructional medium

I remember talking to comics giant Will Eisner a long time ago (1990 or so, I guess) about his experiences while working for the US army. He would produce instruction materials for soldiers in comic form. Every few years, a new boss decided he didn’t like that medium for such a purpose, and a new study was commissioned to prove that text and illustrations was the better approach - and every time it showed the exact opposite, that in fact comics were the best way to pass on information and instruction.

This point hasn’t been picked up an awful lot, but now we have as high a profile use of that idea as I’ve ever seen. Google has just launched a new browser, which looks pretty impressive. To explain it, they brought in the perfect choice for the job: Scott McCloud (who I happened to cover in the context of his great comic Zot! a few weeks back)(and he even responded!). I assume his Understanding Comics, a comic explanation of the medium, showed them how useful this approach was. He’s produced a lovely, clear and highly readable comic explaining and promoting it, explaining new features and elements of its internal architecture superbly. I have no idea if Chrome is as good as this makes it sound - new computer software is never bug free, and the potential problems from browser bugs can be huge, though it sounds as if they have taken sensible decisions to minimise the hazards - and this isn’t any kind of endorsement of the browser, which I haven’t tried, just an expression of delight that they chose this method, and the perfect person to execute it. I can’t imagine how many people will see this, but I hope it inspires others.

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Humour Comics

Although those who know it in recent years might be surprised at this, most of the best humour comic artists link back to Mad. Don’t let the formulaic banality of so much of the recent material deter you. Mad was started by EC Comics in 1952 - I’ve mentioned their horror, SF and war comics elsewhere in this series. The editor was Harvey Kurtzman, one of the greatest cartoonists ever, and featured art by EC regulars such as Wally Wood, Jack Davis and Will Elder. These early issues were terrific, with some extraordinary strips - there’s an unlikely and jaw-dropping appearance by Bernie Krigstein (who’ll come up again in a couple of entries).

Kurtzman’s humour material is almost all well worth finding: Hey Look! and Help! are erratic but never less than magnificently executed, but his best comedy is in Goodman Beaver (beautifully inked by Elder) and especially The Jungle Book, one of the all-time great comics, it comprises four parody tales - a private eye story, a business satire, a cowboy tale and a Southern sheriff strip. It’s genuinely funny, and, for me, a genuine masterpiece of cartooning. (I would recommend skipping Kurtzman and Elder’s long-running Playboy strip, Little Annie Fanny, lovely as it looks.) … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Adventure Comics

Who is the greatest comic artist ever? Obviously that is unanswerable, but my top choice would be Alex Toth. This is partly because he was magnificent in every style he used, and he did it all - superheroes, romance, horror, funny animals, war, SF, westerns, pirates and anything else you can think of. I think his heart was most in swashbuckling adventure, harking back to Flynn and Fairbanks. He did great work on various such comics, and his fine Zorro work is collected in a couple of volumes, but I guess the work to point anyone to is Bravo For Adventure, starring dashing aviator Jesse Bravo. This is collected in one mag, which you might be able to buy if you’re lucky. The first story is particularly astonishing - for 16 of the 17 pages Jesse is unconscious, and in pages with three tiers of two panels each, Toth shows off his mastery and brilliance with a series of breathtaking black and white compositions and the best grasp ever of where to put in detail and where to go minimal. It also features a small tribute to Hugo Pratt (see below). Absolutely anything by Toth is worth grabbing when you see it - even on the most throwaway pieces of work, his peerless craft and compositional ability is unmistakeable. I’ve never really been interested in buying original comic art, but if there is one page I would choose, it would be this from a car story in DC’s Hot Wheels. There are a couple of lovely art-book format collections of some of his work, if you can find them, but it’s not always his best. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Westerns

I can’t say this is a genre that I think has seen many of comics’ great peaks - some of the best comes in bits and pieces here and there: old stories in comics by various publishers by Alex Toth and Jack Kirby and the like. Frankly, even then the stories are mostly inconsequential, and they aren’t terribly easy to find.

I’m not a big fan of Moebius’s SF, but I do like his art on the Lieutenant Blueberry series (pictured). It’s written by Jean-Michel Charlier, and drawn under Moebius’s real name, Jean Giraud, and the feel is more like a classy late Clint Eastwood than any earlier US or European westerns. The angle is interesting: our protagonist is a Southerner who fought for the North in the Civil War due to his conversion to anti-racist beliefs, and the stories focus on this. They are compelling and muscular, and Giraud’s art matches this - none of the flash of his SF, just superb comics art. There are lots of volumes in English - the series names are varied (Lieutenant, Marshall, Young…), but the word Blueberry is your clue. … read on …

the 2012 london olympics opening ceremony

question: who should create and direct it?

preamble: the chinese capitalised (er haha) on A: a known gift for fireworks, B: a known gift for people prettily running with flags, C: spectacular oriental spectacle, D: a population as numberless as the pixels in the ocean — and the Brits limp far behind on all counts; my suggestion is that we should make a virtue of necessity and scrobble our counter-spectacle up round the sense of grumpy, lumpy, stubborn, dry-witted, weird-crop SMALLNESS, the aesthetic legacy of a small crowded windy greenfield crag dropped into the north sea

hence my answer: … read on …