comicbook - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

By this point, 2016 has started to develop its true character, mainly based on famous people dying and political and religious extremism: halcyon days! Ah well, never mind, I’ve listened to, looked at and read lots of things which passed the time pleasantly and helped to block out the nasty stuff: so that’s nice. Re those things, more below…

Sweatshop by Peter Bagge (Fantagraphics Books)

At first, Sweatshop feels more like one of Peter Bagge’s more lightweight, knockabout strips like Batboy or Studs Kirby, and compared to the brilliant Woman Rebel it is, but there’s more substance to the characters in Sweatshop than you’d think. This is perhaps because the situation (a group of ambitious young cartoonists working for a grouchy, reactionary, but famous old cartoonist to produce his well-known but trivial newspaper strip) is one close to the hearts of Bagge and his own team of artists. It’s funny and silly, but also well plotted and with some sharp observations about the world of cartooning as well as human relationships etc; a good book in fact.

Various short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The selection I have was collected by Penguin Classics in Bernice Bobs Her Hair and other stories) I first read Fitzgerald’s short stories when I was a teenager and have gone back to them every now and then. I’m always surprised by how funny and sad they are. I bought Bernice Bobs Her Hair because of the beautiful photo of Louise Brooks on the cover and I’m glad to see Penguin are still using it for a similar book of Fitzgerald’s stories.

Anthrophobia by Godhole/Crozier & Godhole’s s/t EP (Mind Ripper Collective)

I had already heard both of these great releases but when I saw that Mind Ripper were selling them on vinyl 7″s ridiculously inexpensively. Anthrophobia is a brilliant meeting of two very different musical personalities, with Godhole’s intensely emotive and strangely catchy powerviolence being distorted almost to the point of non-music by Crozier’s harsh noise; it’s bracing and not at all pretty, but it has a real impact and is worryingly addictive. The same is true of the Godhole EP, although it is relatively more disciplined insofar as it sounds like a band, rather than a catastrophic nightmare.

Islands by The Cosmic Array (Folkwit Records)

For 99% of the time, a complete contrast with the above (though the second half of Drones is surprisingly noisy and atonal), I was especially impressed by the forthcoming Cosmic Array album because I didn’t expect to like it at all. “Alt country/Americana”, ‘immersive and cinematic’ or not, is not really my thing* but in fact this album brings together a beautifully peculiar space-age melancholy that has (to me) hints of the Flaming Lips, Spacemen 3, My Little Airport and even the BMX Bandits and a sound that is a hybrid of UK indie and alt country (Fire Up The Sky is, strangely, almost shoegaze-alt country; actually, Moose’s XYZ was a great shoegaze/Americana album, so maybe not so strange?). Anyway; the songs are catchy and nice, Paul Battenbough and Abby Sohn are really good, expressive vocalists and it really is a big, widescreen cinematic sound as advertised; so put aside anti-country prejudices (if like me you have them) and give it a listen.

*BUT: check out Hale (2012) by The Sterling Sisters if you’ve never heard it: great

Gensho by Boris with Merzbow

From mellow Welsh-American music to Japanese heavy noise; Gensho includes a cover, swathed in echo and delay, of perhaps my favourite My Bloody Valentine song, Sometimes and that kind of sums up the album; it’s beautiful and haunting and harsh and (only occasionally) nearly unlistenable, but it’s great. Merzbow’s harsh, but essentially malice-free abstract noise takes (to say the least) the slightly saccharine edge off of the more pop/shoegaze direction Boris has been making over the last few albums and Boris’ essential musicality makes Merzbow feel less like an experiment to test the capabilities of your speakers/ears; less background/white noise-like. It’s a great partnership and I’d like them to explore it further.

Changeless by Gail Carriger (2010)

A lightning-fast re-read for possibly my favourite of Gail Carriger’s brilliantly witty and tongue-in-cheek steampunk novels concerning the soulless heroine Alexia Tarabotti; I don’t really believe in having crushes on fictional characters, but if I did, I would. I think it was at the end of this book that I realised how much feeling I had invested in the characters. Although she is often compared to PG Wodehouse (fair enough in a way), I’d say (if forced to compare) that for me, Gail Carriger combines the lightness of tone and depth of feeling that I find in two of my favourite ever books; The Rock Pool by Cyril Connolly and Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell.

Bacteria Cult by Kaada/Patton (Ipecac Recordings)

The third collaboration between Mike Patton and John Erika Kaada is, despite the ominous title, an extremely wide ranging and often light-toned (if moody, in the film-soundtrack sense) collection of dramatic and sometimes operatic (but not always melodramatic) pieces, ranging from the strangely Tom Waits-like Papillon to the Morricone-ish Black Albino. It’s a perfectly judged album, Mike Patton’s voice(s) interweaving with the orchestra to create individual pieces that are at the same time short and vast;too involving to be ‘background music’ it really does sound like an epic soundtrack in search of who knows what kind of film.

I also rediscovered to mix CDs (never sounds as good as ‘mixtape’) made for me by a friend years ago which embody all that is great about a classic mixtape; I didn’t know all the songs (or bands) before I heard them and I didn’t end up being a fan of everything on them, but there’s something about a home-compiled (nowadays people would probably say ‘curated’) tape of someone else’s music that is fascinating and entertaining, plus these have fantastic collage artwork. I hope the ‘youth of today’ still makes these kinds of things! Anyway, offered here as a kind of playlist not of my making: much of which is recommended –

WEIRD MIX

VHS or Beta – Heaven
Toadies – Possum Kingdom
This Mortal Coil – Holocaust
Thee Headcoats – I’m Unkind
The Locust – Skin Graft At 75
Strung Out – Tattoo
The Specials – Too Much, Too Young
Sneaker Pimps/Portishead – Water
An Albatross – The Great Sarcophagus
At The Drive In – This Night Has Opened My Eyes
The Buggles – Video Killed The Radio Star
Billie Holiday – On The Sunny Side of the Street
Billy Bragg/Wilco – Ingrid Bergman
Blondie – One Way Or Another
Bouncing Souls – Break Up Song
Bright Eyes – Something Vague
Cat Power – Where Is My Love?
Cranes – Lilies
The Faint – There’s Something Not As Valid When The Scenery Is A Postcard
Fugazi – Waiting Room
Go-Gos – Lust To Love
The Mars Volta – Son et Lumiere
Mates of State – I Got A Feelin
Mates of State – I Have Space
The Misfits – Scream
Screeching Weasel – Zombie

STUFF + THINGS

Bright Eyes – The Calendar Hung Itself
Gogol Bordello – Bulla Bulla
Ima Robot – Dirty Life
Ima Robot – Twist + Shout
Frou Frou – Breathe In
Placebo – Blind
Devandra Banhart – My Ships
Devandra Banhart – Legless Love
The Cramps – Eyeball in my Martini
Nightmare of You – Thumbelina
Nightmare of You – In The Bathroom
Jets To Brazil – Chinatown
Sleater Kinney – Funeral Song
Sleater Kinney – Dig Me Out
Sonic Youth – 100%
Tegan and Sara – Walking With A Ghost
Tiger Army – Never Die
Tilt – Libel
The Weakerthans – Wellington’s Wednesdays
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Date With The Night
William Shatner – I Wanna Sex You Up
The Smiths – The Boy With The Thorn In His Side
Scarling – City Noise
Roy Orbison – In Dreams

and there you have it: March 2016 – onwards!

Problem: It’s the 70s, you are editor-in-chief for Marvel Comics, the biggest (or joint-biggest) comicbook publisher in the USA. Your readers are mostly fairly young; you want to move with the times. Your top titles regularly receive mail from female readers who want to feel represented, not just as a sidekick or team member, but as a bona fide title character.

DC has Wonder Woman after all, and for all her old-fashioned qualities, she is iconic. Marvel doesn’t (yet) do ‘old fashioned’. Simple; except for the fact that the majority of the readership (and indeed the vast majority of comicdom’s creators) is still male. By and large, these young men and boys are okay with empowered, intelligent and charismatic women. They do want them to be sexy though. After all, to be ‘an ordinary person’ is kind of not what superheroes are about, and in the comicbook universe of the time (and even now, mostly), the superheroine is ‘feminine’ (ie curvy), athletic and fond of tight clothing, where her male counterparts are musclebound and fond of tight clothing. So…

Ms Marvel – whose name alone is strongly redolent of the 70s – was one of many comics launched by Marvel in that period to cash in on (or, more charitably, to fulfil a recognised demand for) a specific phenomenon or corner of the comics market hitherto neglected; at the high end of the scale, they attempted to redress the racial balance of their output a little with Luke Cage; Power Man (and, a few years before that, the superior Black Panther) and far further down the ladder of actual relevance, Captain Britain was launched as part of the then-new Marvel UK imprint (and, several leagues of magnitude more trivial even than that, with the great Dazzler they cashed in on the disco craze), but Ms Marvel was all about a very glamorous, Charlie’s Angels*/Cagney & Lacey, 1970s version of feminism. Despite the disclaimers around their creation, there’s a lot to be said for these kind of characters; comic readers are used to different artists/writers stamping their personal style on Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, Spider-man & co; but anything perceived as messing with an icon (witness the Supermullet fiasco of the early 90s) does not go down well. These kind of less venerable characters are far more flexible; writers and artists can experiment with them, change them with the times and, if the central core is strong enough, all is well (which is not to say people don’t have their favourite teams/stories etc; see below).

*she even borrowed Farrah Fawcett’s iconic hairstyle, albeit in a manner more suitable to gymnastic crime fighting. Unlike the Angels though, she had no ‘Charlie’ pulling her strings…

joe — a typical moment of Ms Marvel Mayhem

In the original Ms Marvel series, Carol Danvers was a successful journalist who, in a moment of slightly uninspired (but damn it, still brilliant!) Stan-the-Man-ism became a female version of Marvel B-list superhero Captain Marvel (himself rather uninspired & definitely not to be confused with the legendary golden age Captain Marvel later known as Shazam.)

As a Marvel title in its own right, Ms Marvel didn’t run for long, but at its best it is pure entertainment with a slightly compromised but definitely not half-hearted message of female empowerment. Although (naturally) a sexy superheroine, Carol Danvers was the usual put-upon Marvel character, endlessly worrying about work deadlines, angry bosses etc. However, her insistence on her equality with (or her evident superiority to) her male colleagues (leotarded and otherwise) and her general lack of husbands or steady boyfriends – though old news in the world of actual real people by 1977 – was refreshing in the muscles and capes world of the Marvel Universe.

Mainly written by the eternally underrated Chris Claremont, the comic had heart and action aplenty, although at times the superheroics (Ms Marvel battled an endless list of Marvel’s more ridiculous non-iconic villains during her brief run) get in the way of the rather more fun soap opera-like elements of the strip.

mooneysinnott — Mooney & Sinnott make Ms Marvel look good

The nearest thing the book had to a regular art team was Marvel greats Jim Mooney and Joe Sinnott, perhaps not as glamorous as John Buscema or Jack Kirby, but with their own stylish, hard-edged approach, which in the early issues gave the series a bold, dynamic feel in keeping with its forthright character. Although other artists were to draw Ms Marvel, it is undoubtedly the Mooney/Sinnott team (like the individualistic work of Mike Vosburg on the generally quite comparable Savage She-Hulk around the same time) that gives Ms Marvel its vibrant character.

shulk — Mike Vosburg’s individualistic She-Hulk

The only ‘star’ artist to ever draw Ms Marvel in her original 70s series was the great (and sadly now late) Carmine Infantino, who gave her a finely detailed, subtle sparkle very different from the feel of the classic issues, but it was too little, too late and shortly after premiering a new, vastly less good (though at least not second hand) outfit (which however seems popular with cosplayers, which is something), the comic was cancelled. Ms Marvel herself continued (and continues) to pop up all over the Marvel universe,* but it’s the Claremont/Mooney/Sinnott issues that have that special something missing from many a ‘better’ comic series.

*2019 update; she finally got her own movie, kind of. Captain Marvel wasn’t quite Ms Marvel, but it was good

It’s easy to mock the sometimes clunky melodrama of Ms Marvel, but in fact the book is absolutely typical of Marvel comics in the late 70s, regardless of gender. Her outfits (especially the original/best) are no skimpier than most Marvel heroes, and her domestic woes are absolutely on the same level as Peter Parker and co, and in that sense Ms Marvel; glamorous, tough, funny and hard-done-by, is a true feminist icon of her era; albeit one designed to entertain while reflecting the changing social landscape, rather than actually challenging the status quo. It’s just a shame, though not a surprise, that in the 70s, no woman actually got to write or draw her strip.

Tag: comicbook

The Third Monthly Report: March 2016