March 25th, 2009
I had a nickname at school; nothing insulting, embarrassing or derogatory, it was actually quite cute for a seven year old (which was around the time it started). But I’m not going to state that name here for fear of inadvertently resurrecting a meme that has taken so long to die. Even now, well entrenched as I am into my “middle years”, father of two, respectable professional etc, my Facebook wall (hey, remember when we all used Facebook) is regularly peppered with messages addressed to a name invented by children in a playground circa 1979.
Not that I mind, it’s kinda sweet really, but you have to be so careful with names, as the good ones tend to stick like tattoos. And now I have a second nickname, one which embarrassingly I have to take the blame for creating myself (is there anything less cool than the kid at school who made up their own nickname?). Sometime in 2000 I decided “zenbullets” would be a catchy little title for my homepage (hey, remember when we all had homepages). I’d lifted it from an issue of The Invisibles, which I was obsessed with throughout the last half of the nineties. But had I known that, 10 years later, I would be still be trading as zenbullets I might have given it a little more than a few minutes thought.
Personal branding is actually quite important in the crowded marketplace of the web, so there is a lot of value to having a memorable (and more importantly – unique) name. I could have done worse, and I don’t cringe too badly at it, but still I wonder if I can ever discard it now. I am well known, especially in Flash circles, by this moniker, and relatively unknown by my real name (which has it’s advantages too). So should I shed the name now, or just resign myself to being associated with a throwaway line in a comic book when I am in my seventies.
Of course, before I can shed one name means I first have to think up a better name to replace it. Which is an even more daunting task.
Posted in comics, computers ate my brain, introspection, tech, web |
November 8th, 2008
miffy at the gallery Dick Bruna 1997
Posted in art, bullets, comics, culture, fatherhood |
July 27th, 2008
Nemesis The Warlock – Pat Mills / Kevin O’Neill (2000AD Prog 520 – April 1987)
Posted in bullets, comics |
February 17th, 2008
Flex Mentallo #2 Grant Morrison / Frank Quitely July 1996
Posted in bullets, comics |
January 10th, 2008
Shade The Changing Man #22 Peter Milligan / Brendan McCarthy April 1992
Posted in bullets, comics |
January 10th, 2008
The very first post I wrote on this blog, long since deleted (yes, occasionally I prune this unweildy bush), was on the first issue of Casanova from Image Comics. This was back when I thought I’d be blogging mainly on the subject of funny books, which I seem to have wandered quite a distance away from over the course of only 18 months and 140 or so posts. It’s weird where the muse takes you.
Casanova is now on issue 11, and is still the best comic on the racks. And still I am unable to quite articulate what is so perfect about this little gem. Guttergeek took a rather good stab at it, and identified a lot of the things I hooked onto (the Morrison/Doom Patrol comparison particularly) and the babbling messiahs on the barbelith forum are trying their best too. But, if I were to attempt and boil it down to one thing, it would have to be this – it’s dense. In a good way. Dense with plot, style, cultural references. Dense. Oh, and it’s sexy too. Sexy and dense.
Back in 1988, there was another comic that had a very similarly feel to it – Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin’s Tank Girl (twenty years ago! shit), which ran in Deadline. It looks rather dated these days, but that’s okay, because it shows how much a part of the zeitgeist it was when it was being published. One thing I really loved about Tank Girl was the way you got a sense of what they were listening to as they were creating it (Morrissey, The Pixies, and the other great indie stuff of that period). You get this same sense with Casanova too, but with a wider range of cultural influences mushed in. And if you don’t, the creative process behind the issue is discussed in the back matter, which involves the reader even more. Tank Girl’s experimentation with the form is there too, breaking panels, subverting expectation wherever possible. In 1988 it all felt a little more anarchic, but after two decades of political correctness, Casanova’s slick storytelling can still feel like a shot in the arm.
The plot is basically cross-dimensional sci-fi super spies, pure comics in a Silver Age style, but with a very modern sensibility. Imagine James Bond, or The Man From UNCLE, on drugs, naked, snogging their own sisters, and you’ll be getting close.
Incidentally, it’s funny what you can get away with in a three colour book. If you’d got Adam Warren or Frank Cho to draw this amount of nudity and perversion in full colour, the book would be just porn. But with the abstract lines and limited colour palette used by Gabriel Ba, and more recently his brother Fabio Moon, this becomes something much more lighthearted and groovy. Ba, incidentally, is now working on The Umbrella Academy, which may just be the second best comic on the racks right now.
Matt Fraction, the writer, is starting to make a name for himself at Marvel, so it is only a matter of time before he sells out and wastes all his crazy ideas writing nothing but X-shite for a living, so we should enjoy this book while we’ve got it. I urge you to give it a try. There is a hefty hardback of the first seven issues available, but this is really one that makes more sense in singles. Issue 1 is still available free online here, so make your own mind up and let me know what you think.
And if Cass doesn’t do it for you, or you need other suggestions of something to read, check out Mighty Matt Brady’s picks of 2007. He’s a man of taste.
Posted in comics |
December 16th, 2007
Doom Patrol #52 Grant Morrison / Richard Case Feb 1992
Posted in bullets, comics |
November 9th, 2007
Madman Atomic Comics #4 – Michael Allred, Sept 2007
Posted in bullets, comics |
October 13th, 2007
Post-modernism means never having to say you’re sorry. Translation: you can basically get away with the most deplorable, un-reconstituted behaviour, as long as you do it under the guise of irony.
The 80’s ‘new man‘ part of me wants to be thoroughly appalled by Adam Warren’s work, with it’s fun filled depictions of hopelessly beautiful women and equally hunky men, losing their clothes in a ‘Carry-On‘ style, frolicking sexily through their cosmic adventures. But there’s another laissez-faire part of me that thinks, ‘hey, it’s just drawings’. How can anyone be offended or exploited by a few well placed sweeps of line on paper? Surely no-one screamed misogyny at Betty Boop?
But they did of course, and still do. Issues of misogyny in comics have always been around and are unlikely to go away. Comics, superhero comics in particular, have traditionally been aimed primarily at teenage boys, and there’s very little on the planet hornier than a teenage boy, so it might be unsurprising that their depiction of women lack sophistication. But now comics are meant to have grown up; they are an adult medium. Unfortunately there still seems to be a generous supply of scantily clad, ridiculously proportioned female forms on offer to the fanboys. Might this be that, despite the maturing of the medium, a significant proportion of the adults reading comics are the teenage boys who never grew up, forever hormonally challenged. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on the scantily clad, ridiculous proportioned muscle-men that the fanboys seem to like too.
You may say this is unfair upon the many serious creators working in comics
today, Adam Warren included. You might argue that Adam Warren is not just a T&A artist, because he uses his writing to question his representations. With, say, J Scott Campbell, or Frank Cho, it is easier to play the misogyny card, as they don’t have the wit to justify their art. But ultimately, isn’t a degrading image of a woman still a degrading image of a woman, even if you’re making a joke about it?
I’m desperately trying not to have to answer that question in deciding if Adam Warren’s latest release, the Empowered Vol 2 collection, is any good or not, but I just can’t get away from it. Warren’s art is very gorgeous, and I’d like to think you’d forgive a talent like his just about anything. His stories are funny, albeit in a knowing, nerdy way, and decent humour in comic books is actually a surprisingly rare thing these days.
But despite all this I still can’t quite buy into this ‘post-modernist’ excuse for the nudity, bondage and degradation that is the core of his comedy. Didn’t we do all that post-modernism crap back in the nineties? Ultimately, Empowered is just a one joke comic, and the joke is probably (hopefully) a little anachronistic by now. Mr Warren, please use your talents to draw something else.
[this was originally published last week as a review of Empowered Vol 2 over at blogcritics.]
Posted in comics |
Subscribe in a reader