I'm not sure if anyone actually reads my round-ups of weekly comics purchases, so maybe no one has noticed its absence. Whatever, it is now BACK!
Superman: World of New Krypton #5, by James Robinson, Greg Rucka, and Pete Woods
As you will recall, Superman has left the Earth and gone to live with a load of other superpowered Kryptonians on a new planet opposite the Sun. In this exciting episode, the sinister General Zod (Terence Stamp in Superman II) has him on trial for the capital crime of treason. Oh noes. Much of this title hangs on Kryptonian society not actually being that great, with Superman (or Kal-El as he now is called) being plainly of a superior moral cast to his fellows. The aspect of fascination is Kal-El's relationship with Zod, a much more ambiguous figure than the scenery chewing villain of the film.
There is little in the way of fites in this title, but plenty of thrill power, and a great OMG ending.
Does anyone reading this know if General Zod (and the lovely Ursa, and the brutish other guy, who both make appearances here) had a pre-existence in the comics before they appeared in Superman II? That would in any case have been pre-Crisis (?), so they would have to have been re-introduced at some stage anyway.
North 40 #1, by Aaron Williams and Fiona Staples
As a first issue fiend, I decided to check this one out. It is set in some hick American town where some unexplained event has happened that has suddenly made loads of weird things happen – people turning into monsters or becoming invulnerable, zombie & vampire invastions, that kind of thing. Lord knows where this will go.
The is a preview in the back of a potentially interesting new title called Red Herring by David Tishcman and Philip Bond. It seems to be an attempt to do a humourous series about conspiracy theories and stuff like that, and if it works I expect it to be driven by Bond's rofflesome art.
That's all for now, though I may yet play catch-up with the issues I missed over the last few weeks.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Eighties Coming Back
Unemployment reaching pandemic levels, people gathering at a tree-stump apparition of the Blessed Virgin, Eat the Peach remade – truly we are going back to the future.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Tesla Girls
Friday was the birthday of Nikola Tesla, the Serbian scientist. Tesla invented radio and alternating current, two things that transformed the world. Sadly, he never received as much credit for these as he should have done, with many still thinking of Marconi as the father of radio. Without alternating current (AC), electricity would be next to useless as direct current (DC) loses too much energy as it travels through wires*. Maybe the big problem with Tesla was that he was not up to much as a businessman, and he also spent much of his later life promising various outlandish inventions (death rays, free energy, that kind of thing) but never delivering on any of them. Anyway, the Guardian have an interesting article about him here: Happy birthday, Nikola Tesla: thanks for the electricity
Today, meanwhile, is the twentieth anniversary of the Detroit Disco Riots, when an anti-disco mob smashed up the 
White Sox stadium after a local anti-disco DJ Steve Dahl blew up thousands of disco records during a break in a baseball game. White racist homophobes across the USA still like to affirm that "disco sucks", with the terrible events of that day meaning that the later emergence of house music in Chicago would always be far more appreciated in Europe than in the country of its origin. See more on the BBC: Earth, Wind and Pyre
*I do not understand why this is the case - can any of my scientist readers explain this?
Today, meanwhile, is the twentieth anniversary of the Detroit Disco Riots, when an anti-disco mob smashed up the White Sox stadium after a local anti-disco DJ Steve Dahl blew up thousands of disco records during a break in a baseball game. White racist homophobes across the USA still like to affirm that "disco sucks", with the terrible events of that day meaning that the later emergence of house music in Chicago would always be far more appreciated in Europe than in the country of its origin. See more on the BBC: Earth, Wind and Pyre*I do not understand why this is the case - can any of my scientist readers explain this?
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Important Animal News
Friday, July 10, 2009
The Telescopes – Live in Glasgow
When I was in Glasgow over Easter I went to a concert by The Telescopes. Older readers may remember this band. They were one of the first of the post-My Bloody Valentine acts, so quick off the mark that the term shoegazing had not even been coined when they first treaded the boards. They were popular for a while, and then they faded away when people moved on from shoegazing to what ever the next big thing was (what was it again? Britpop? Grunge? Peruvian Anal Flute Music? It is so hard to remember). However, the Telescopes kept going in some notional sense, even as the popularity of their kind of music disappeared around them. You may remember me describing the time I saw them play Lazybird here in Dublin. By then they were something of a one-man band, with Stephen Lawrie of the Scopes playing on his own. He did not give us the muscular guitar work of yore but music based on textured electronics and that kind of thing. That is what I was expecting in Glasgow.
First up, though, was a band called something like St. DeLuxe. You know the way sometimes you see bands that are almost good but not quite? Well this lot were a bit like that. They obviously knew how to play, and had some good ideas what to with their skills, but they did not really have any good songs. Also, their singer's vocal stylings did not really do it for me. They got a bit better as they went on, mainly by louder, but they were not a band I thought I would ever want to see again.
Then Stephen Lawrie came on. This time he was not doing funny electronic stuff, but playing solo acoustic guitar versions of various Telescopes classics. Having seen Mark Gardner in Nottingham a while back, I am familiar with acoustic versions of shoegazing music. It works better than it ought to, and I think maybe Lawrie's version of it worked better than Gardner's. Obviously, if you know the old songs, you do a bit of joining the dots, but Lawrie had a certain something that made the tunes work on their own terms. I actually found this concert pretty intense, with Lawrie's focussed delivery accentuating the way most of the tunes plainly had lyrics about drug addiction or mental illness, something not quite so obvious when the vocals were buried in walls of feedback. I seem to remember hearing somewhere that Lawrie has had his problems with stuff, so there was a bit of an edge to his delivery here. Of course, maybe he is a totally happy camper who just can act well, but the effect was the same.
Stephen Lawrie's one-man Telescopes experience played a relatively short set, and then he left the stage, to some applause. After that St. DeLuxe came back to the stage – WTF them again???? But as they took to their instruments, suddenly Lawrie reappeared, and it hit me what was happening – they were going to be Lawrie's backing band. I said to my beloved: "I think this could get quite – " VAAMMMMMMMM! We were blown to the back of the venue by the band launching into a version of 'The Perfect Needle'. Suddenly I was back in 1988, in a backroom of the Camden Falcon. Great moment.
They only played two songs this way, before letting the gig end. A shame really, it would have been an amusing art experiment to play the same songs acoustically and then with a full band, but we got the idea.
So yeah, the Telescopes. See them live, who knows what you might get.
First up, though, was a band called something like St. DeLuxe. You know the way sometimes you see bands that are almost good but not quite? Well this lot were a bit like that. They obviously knew how to play, and had some good ideas what to with their skills, but they did not really have any good songs. Also, their singer's vocal stylings did not really do it for me. They got a bit better as they went on, mainly by louder, but they were not a band I thought I would ever want to see again.
Then Stephen Lawrie came on. This time he was not doing funny electronic stuff, but playing solo acoustic guitar versions of various Telescopes classics. Having seen Mark Gardner in Nottingham a while back, I am familiar with acoustic versions of shoegazing music. It works better than it ought to, and I think maybe Lawrie's version of it worked better than Gardner's. Obviously, if you know the old songs, you do a bit of joining the dots, but Lawrie had a certain something that made the tunes work on their own terms. I actually found this concert pretty intense, with Lawrie's focussed delivery accentuating the way most of the tunes plainly had lyrics about drug addiction or mental illness, something not quite so obvious when the vocals were buried in walls of feedback. I seem to remember hearing somewhere that Lawrie has had his problems with stuff, so there was a bit of an edge to his delivery here. Of course, maybe he is a totally happy camper who just can act well, but the effect was the same.
Stephen Lawrie's one-man Telescopes experience played a relatively short set, and then he left the stage, to some applause. After that St. DeLuxe came back to the stage – WTF them again???? But as they took to their instruments, suddenly Lawrie reappeared, and it hit me what was happening – they were going to be Lawrie's backing band. I said to my beloved: "I think this could get quite – " VAAMMMMMMMM! We were blown to the back of the venue by the band launching into a version of 'The Perfect Needle'. Suddenly I was back in 1988, in a backroom of the Camden Falcon. Great moment.
They only played two songs this way, before letting the gig end. A shame really, it would have been an amusing art experiment to play the same songs acoustically and then with a full band, but we got the idea.
So yeah, the Telescopes. See them live, who knows what you might get.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Don't Be Afraid of the Robot
In my SF book club a couple of months back we read Isaac Asimov's Foundation. I found it good and bad. I liked its enormo scale and its attempt to base the story on ideas from the social sciences. I also found that the book cracked along, with Asimov having a writing style that made his book hard to put down. On the downside, the characterisation was pretty hopeless – it seemed like the same character kept showing up with different names. Some of the social science ideas deployed also seemed a bit clumsy. Everything seemed rather telescoped, with societies forgetting technology or adopting crazy new religions more or less over night.
For all the problems with Foundation, I liked it enough to want to read more Asimov. The library did not seem to have any copies of its sequel, Foundation and Earth, but it did have The Naked Sun, one of Asimov's books about robots. I read it today, and my initial impression is that it is total genius. It has the readability of Foundation, but a far more coherent plot and much more convincing characters. The story follows a detective from Earth (where everyone lives in crowded underground cities) who is for mysterious reasons called in to investigate a murder on one of the outer worlds, where a small human people live on the surface with millions and millions of robots doing all their work for them. The book plays on the detective's agoraphobic reaction to the openness of the colony planet, and his gradual understanding of just how odd the human society on it is, with the robots an all-pervasive and generally creepy presence. I helped this by imagining them all as looking like the ones in Doctor Who classic Robots of Death.
There was a thread* on ILX once where people were invited to think up offensive terms that in the future will be used for robots. After a series of posts threw out such classics as skin-jobs, metal mickeys, tin dicks, and many more, some people became very offended (as is the way of ILX). This was not because they were robots themselves, but because they reckoned that in SF robots are basically analogues for black Americans; in coming up with offensive terms for robots, people were basically engaging in a safe form of racist dialogue.
At the time, I considered such thoughts to be the usual kind of ILX taking-everything-a-bit-too-seriously mentalism. Actually reading one of Asimov's robot books, I am not so sure. It is noticeable that the detective keeps addressing robots as "boy", while they call him "master". The society on the robot planet is reminiscent of the antebellum South, with a lazy elite living in rustic mansions while slaves (in this case, obviously, robot slaves) work away for them, and the humans keep underestimating the robots, just as whitey underestimates black Americans. Whether it is actually racist to come up with slang terms for robots is something I will leave to you, but it is hard not to think that Asimov had race in mind to at least some extent here.
*I can find no trace of this thread. If you know where it is, post a link.
For all the problems with Foundation, I liked it enough to want to read more Asimov. The library did not seem to have any copies of its sequel, Foundation and Earth, but it did have The Naked Sun, one of Asimov's books about robots. I read it today, and my initial impression is that it is total genius. It has the readability of Foundation, but a far more coherent plot and much more convincing characters. The story follows a detective from Earth (where everyone lives in crowded underground cities) who is for mysterious reasons called in to investigate a murder on one of the outer worlds, where a small human people live on the surface with millions and millions of robots doing all their work for them. The book plays on the detective's agoraphobic reaction to the openness of the colony planet, and his gradual understanding of just how odd the human society on it is, with the robots an all-pervasive and generally creepy presence. I helped this by imagining them all as looking like the ones in Doctor Who classic Robots of Death.
There was a thread* on ILX once where people were invited to think up offensive terms that in the future will be used for robots. After a series of posts threw out such classics as skin-jobs, metal mickeys, tin dicks, and many more, some people became very offended (as is the way of ILX). This was not because they were robots themselves, but because they reckoned that in SF robots are basically analogues for black Americans; in coming up with offensive terms for robots, people were basically engaging in a safe form of racist dialogue.
At the time, I considered such thoughts to be the usual kind of ILX taking-everything-a-bit-too-seriously mentalism. Actually reading one of Asimov's robot books, I am not so sure. It is noticeable that the detective keeps addressing robots as "boy", while they call him "master". The society on the robot planet is reminiscent of the antebellum South, with a lazy elite living in rustic mansions while slaves (in this case, obviously, robot slaves) work away for them, and the humans keep underestimating the robots, just as whitey underestimates black Americans. Whether it is actually racist to come up with slang terms for robots is something I will leave to you, but it is hard not to think that Asimov had race in mind to at least some extent here.
*I can find no trace of this thread. If you know where it is, post a link.
Monday, July 06, 2009
The music of the spheres
Here is an interesting article about Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon: Who is Neil Armstrong?
I was particularly struck by the music he chose to bring to the moon.
In other news - hello. One of the great polite fictions of blogwriting is the idea that people actually read what you have to say, so I have this delusional idea that several people out there have been feeling all puppy sad because I have not been posting. The lack of posts stems from the lack of Internet in the new Panda Mansions, but I have now discovered that my iBook can pick up the wifi at the local library. Winner. So stick around, I hope soon to have some amazing new posts here for you.
I was particularly struck by the music he chose to bring to the moon.
In other news - hello. One of the great polite fictions of blogwriting is the idea that people actually read what you have to say, so I have this delusional idea that several people out there have been feeling all puppy sad because I have not been posting. The lack of posts stems from the lack of Internet in the new Panda Mansions, but I have now discovered that my iBook can pick up the wifi at the local library. Winner. So stick around, I hope soon to have some amazing new posts here for you.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
The Shangri-Las "Myrmidons of Melodrama"
I have for some time now been thinking that I needed to get some Shangri-Las into my life. Finally I stumbled across a compilation that did not look like it had been put out by Honest John's Cheap And Cheerful Records-U-Like. This compilation (on the RPM label) seems to have been put together by people with genuine love for the band. It comes with extensive sleevenotes. It includes well-mastered versions of all the band's key tunes. You may only know one Shangri-Las tune, with that tune being 'Leader of the Pack (Vroom Vroom)'. It is a great song, laying down the template of the Shangs sound – conversational inserts, sound effects, doomed love, astonishing production, and sudden melodramatic death. Sometimes people do not die in the songs, but every day crises (a boy says he loves you, and then proves untrue) are still presented as the most terrible of events. Hence, I suppose the title of the record.
Doom is never far away in the world of the Shangs – young lovers elope but then die in car crashes, mothers die of grief when their daughters run away, boys prove unfaithful (or worse). One track I found particularly striking is 'Past, Present, and Future', a track mainly comprising Mary Weiss talking over a setting of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. The lyrics are pretty oblique, but they do refer to a love affair that seems to have gone horribly wrong; the sleevenotes' reading that it is a song about date rape is not contradicted by the song, though it is not the only interpretation. The song was not a number one hit.
There are some happy tunes here, of course – 'Give Him A Great Big Kiss' is all about how the singer is in love (or L.U.V.) with another long-haired dodger, but it all seems to be working out fine, perhaps because the young gentlemen in question is "good bad, but not evil". Nevertheless, the track still has its transgressive quality, with the band coming across like junvenile delinquents. Maybe it is all down to lead singer Mary Weiss's voice, both when she sings and when she converses with the others. She does not sound like a good girl.
A lot of the tunes here were written by some fellow called Shadow Morton. It is funny to think of the Shangs not writing them themselves, they seem really to inhabit the tunes. Oh well. They probably made no money whatsoever out of music in the long-run, such is life. I have heard, though, that on the road they were out of control, with concert promoters everywhere relishing the money they would bring in but fearing the chaos they would leave in their wake. Live fast, die young. If you have only heard the odd Shangri-Las track or two here and there then srsly, seek out this record. No one with ears could fail to enjoy it. As a special treat it comes with some bonus tracks of radio ads the Shangs did at the height of their fame. Hearing Mary Weiss giving us tips on dating courtesy reminds once more what a performance genius that young lady was ("Don't put out on a first date – oral is more than enough to keep him coming back", she does not say). You get the picture?
Myrmidons image (follow link for awesome footage of the Shangs on some US TV programme)
Leaders of the pack
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Comics Round-up 27/5/2009
Four Eyes #3, by Joe Kelly, Max Fiumara, and Nestor Pereyra
You remember this one? It is the infrequent Image title set in the Great Depression, only with dragons that people make fight in the ultimate unsavoury bloodsport. The protagonist is Enrico, the very young son of a guy who used to capture wild baby dragons so that they could be used in the cruel sport. In the first episode, the father was killed while stealing a baby dragon from its mother; since then the son has sought to become a dragon hunter, as a way of avenging his father's death. Perhaps down the line he will see that the real villains are not the dragons, wild creatures who seem mostly inclined to leave people alone, but the human monsters who seek to prey upon them. Anyway, in this episode, Enrico joins a team of dragon hunters, basically as dragon-fodder there to distract a mother dragon while the more skilled hunters snatch its eggs. The creeping awfulness of the cave environment is very well evoked, as is the general air of desperation surrounding the Depression-era setting. The strange angularity of the art adds greatly to the atmosphere. I recommend this title highly.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Century: 1910, by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
If you have read this far then you are probably sufficiently engaged with the world of comics to be aware of this popular title, in which Moore and O'Neill plunder the work of other writers to combine the characters of various authors into one narrative. My researches on the internet suggest that this Century run is a three-issue story, of which this is the first part. That said, this is sufficiently chunky that it could count as a "graphic novel" in and of itself, and it certainly feels sufficiently self-contained to be such.
Most people love The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I am a bit more ambivalent. It is always nice to see Kevin O'Neill art, but the storylines can tend towards Alan Moore showing off how clever he is, and it does all call to mind his general inability to generate new characters of his own. This seemed like a particular problem with the first League series – it had its moments, but at the end of the day it was all a bit meh. The second series, in which the League (a group led by Mina Harker from Dracula and also including Captain Nemo, H.G. Wells' invisible man, R.L. Stevenson's Mr. Hyde, and Allan Quartermain from King Solomon's Mines) found themselves up against the Martian invaders of The War of the Worlds packed a serious thrill-powered punch. My initial reading of this issue suggests that Century falls more towards the first series in quality, though it has its moments.
This time the fun seems to come from introducing various characters from the Threepenny Opera, which may explain the tendency of characters here to keep breaking into song. Singing in comics may sound strange, but it has been done before – memorably by Alan Moore himself with David Lloyd in the cabaret sections of V for Vendetta. The all time greatest ever musical comics episode is of course the National Song Year storyline in 2000 AD's Robo Hunter; this is not even remotely that good.
I must also confess to a certain uncomfortableness with titles such as this that use gang-rape as a plot device. That is an odd thing about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - all three* series so far feature scenes of sexual violence against women. In the first series it is done for laughs (a bit creepy in retrospect), in the second it is pretty chilling but works well in context, but here it just seems a bit gratuitous.
*I am not counting the Black Dossier for mysterious reasons.
You remember this one? It is the infrequent Image title set in the Great Depression, only with dragons that people make fight in the ultimate unsavoury bloodsport. The protagonist is Enrico, the very young son of a guy who used to capture wild baby dragons so that they could be used in the cruel sport. In the first episode, the father was killed while stealing a baby dragon from its mother; since then the son has sought to become a dragon hunter, as a way of avenging his father's death. Perhaps down the line he will see that the real villains are not the dragons, wild creatures who seem mostly inclined to leave people alone, but the human monsters who seek to prey upon them. Anyway, in this episode, Enrico joins a team of dragon hunters, basically as dragon-fodder there to distract a mother dragon while the more skilled hunters snatch its eggs. The creeping awfulness of the cave environment is very well evoked, as is the general air of desperation surrounding the Depression-era setting. The strange angularity of the art adds greatly to the atmosphere. I recommend this title highly.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Century: 1910, by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
If you have read this far then you are probably sufficiently engaged with the world of comics to be aware of this popular title, in which Moore and O'Neill plunder the work of other writers to combine the characters of various authors into one narrative. My researches on the internet suggest that this Century run is a three-issue story, of which this is the first part. That said, this is sufficiently chunky that it could count as a "graphic novel" in and of itself, and it certainly feels sufficiently self-contained to be such.
Most people love The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I am a bit more ambivalent. It is always nice to see Kevin O'Neill art, but the storylines can tend towards Alan Moore showing off how clever he is, and it does all call to mind his general inability to generate new characters of his own. This seemed like a particular problem with the first League series – it had its moments, but at the end of the day it was all a bit meh. The second series, in which the League (a group led by Mina Harker from Dracula and also including Captain Nemo, H.G. Wells' invisible man, R.L. Stevenson's Mr. Hyde, and Allan Quartermain from King Solomon's Mines) found themselves up against the Martian invaders of The War of the Worlds packed a serious thrill-powered punch. My initial reading of this issue suggests that Century falls more towards the first series in quality, though it has its moments.
This time the fun seems to come from introducing various characters from the Threepenny Opera, which may explain the tendency of characters here to keep breaking into song. Singing in comics may sound strange, but it has been done before – memorably by Alan Moore himself with David Lloyd in the cabaret sections of V for Vendetta. The all time greatest ever musical comics episode is of course the National Song Year storyline in 2000 AD's Robo Hunter; this is not even remotely that good.
I must also confess to a certain uncomfortableness with titles such as this that use gang-rape as a plot device. That is an odd thing about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - all three* series so far feature scenes of sexual violence against women. In the first series it is done for laughs (a bit creepy in retrospect), in the second it is pretty chilling but works well in context, but here it just seems a bit gratuitous.
*I am not counting the Black Dossier for mysterious reasons.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Comics Roundup 21/5/2009
Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandos #1 (of 1), by Jesse Alexander, John Paul Leon, & John E. Workman
This is a somewhat silly comic set in the Second World War, one of those stories where today's writers get to write old-school stories of start characters of yesteryear, in this case this is, you know, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. In this story these guys parachute into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia and basically take on and defeat the entire German army (and a Nazi robot panzer storm trooper), capturing a Japanese submarine while they are at it. It is not quite as much fun as that makes it sound, and frankly this is a lot less entertaining than the Sgt. Rock story of a couple of years ago,but it does have nicely kinetic art, even if the artist seems to think that the Messershmidt Bf 110 has three engines.
The Unwritten #1, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
This is a new Vertigo ongoing title. The main character (one Tom Taylor) is this bloke whose father made a fictionalised version of him the lead character in a highly successful series of fantasy novels (kind of like if J.K. Rowling had a son called Harold, an especially apt analogy given how the fantasy novels here are clearly modelled on her books). Then the title starts suggesting that actually the main character is not actually the (vanished) author's son, but the actual fictional character somehow brought into the real world. Or maybe something else. By the end of it, Tom Taylor is somewhat bemused to find himself the centre of a new world religion, albeit one whose core membership is the kind of saddos who take fantasy novels that bit too seriously.
God only knows where they are going with this, but for the moment it seems like one to watch. Carey and Gross have form as the creators of the Lucifer title, one of those comics that I never read but always thought sounded like a good idea.
This is a somewhat silly comic set in the Second World War, one of those stories where today's writers get to write old-school stories of start characters of yesteryear, in this case this is, you know, Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. In this story these guys parachute into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia and basically take on and defeat the entire German army (and a Nazi robot panzer storm trooper), capturing a Japanese submarine while they are at it. It is not quite as much fun as that makes it sound, and frankly this is a lot less entertaining than the Sgt. Rock story of a couple of years ago,but it does have nicely kinetic art, even if the artist seems to think that the Messershmidt Bf 110 has three engines.
The Unwritten #1, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
This is a new Vertigo ongoing title. The main character (one Tom Taylor) is this bloke whose father made a fictionalised version of him the lead character in a highly successful series of fantasy novels (kind of like if J.K. Rowling had a son called Harold, an especially apt analogy given how the fantasy novels here are clearly modelled on her books). Then the title starts suggesting that actually the main character is not actually the (vanished) author's son, but the actual fictional character somehow brought into the real world. Or maybe something else. By the end of it, Tom Taylor is somewhat bemused to find himself the centre of a new world religion, albeit one whose core membership is the kind of saddos who take fantasy novels that bit too seriously.
God only knows where they are going with this, but for the moment it seems like one to watch. Carey and Gross have form as the creators of the Lucifer title, one of those comics that I never read but always thought sounded like a good idea.
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