So a friend lent me a copy of the Essential Luke Cage Powerman phonebook. I was pretty hopeful; I’ve watched a fair bit of blaxploitation over the last couple of years; I think it’s a pretty interesting genre, and one which seemed like it should have the potential to make for interesting comics. Or, you know, at the very least, clueless white comics guys writing about gritty urban race drama seemed like it might make for a few good laughs.

There are a couple of laughs, I guess. Mr. Fish has to be one of the least propitious villain names in the history of comicdom, for example. But overall, the thing is simply unreadable. Even skimming it, as I did, was a serious chore. Don McGregor, the writer on much of the early part of the volume, has a weakness for portentous, purple prose ” “The wide sidewalks wait to receive his body. Before the new workday, the bright red that gives blood its vibrant message of life will have turned a dull brown.” Panel after panel of that. I guess it’s supposed to be gritty, but it just sounds like he’s a 15-year old copying clueless hacks copying Dashiell Hammett.

Things improve somewhat when Marv Wolfman takes over the title…it stops being excruciating to read and just becomes dull. McGregor tried, and failed, to make use of pulp grit and the comic’s ostensible gheto setting. Wolfman settles for hacking out standard super-hero adventures, with Cage fighting one boring villain after another.

And lord, the art is horrible. I’ve argued at various points in the past that mainstream comics art has dropped off a cliff in recent years; this volume seems designed to make me eat my words. Frank Robbins and Lee Elias are the main artists in the run, and there’s just nothing to like about either of them. Bizarrely distorted faces, awkward poses, an utter lack of style or design sense; it’s just page after page of ugly, mediocre dreck. A few of the fill-in artists (Sal Buscema, Bob Brown) are somewhat better, but none of the drawing is what you’d call enjoyable until John Byrne (with Chris Claremont in tow) comes in for the last two issues. Not that John Byrne is my favorite artist or anything, but in comparison — well, this volume makes quite clear why he was hailed in some quarters as a demi-god.

As I’ve said before, comics today know too well who their audience is; they pander remorselessly to the addicted fanboys who just want to see continuity clusterfucks and the banal defacement/updating of characters from their childhoods. They’re incestuous and insular and completely uninterested in a broader audience. Power-Man has the exact opposite problem; it’s creators seem to have no idea who their audience is. Who is reading this? And for what purpose? In theory, you’d assume it was an effort to reach out to a black audience…or at least to a white audience interested in the accoutrements of black culture. In practice, the title is too timid to even gesture in the direction of the kind of seedy viciousness, or racial consciousness, which made blaxploitation so appealing. Instead, you’ve just got a standard issue super-title with a second string hero and a rotating series of disengaged, second-string artists, presumably dispatched by an editorial office that had no idea what to do with the title.

On second thought, maybe Powerman does presage the mainstreams current aesthetic difficulties. Marvel at this point was trying to reach out to a new audience — and this series painfully demonstrates how ill-equipped they were to do so. Multiply that failure by another twenty or thirty years, and maybe you end up where we are now.

Just as a recap in case folks missed it:

I wrote a long series of posts on Wonder Woman’s various incarnations.

Tom posted a great essay about what superman’s superness means, partially in response to my essay about All Star Superman,

Miriam talked about Rogue of the X-Men as feminist icon.

Bill talks about why adaptations based on manga are better than the original manga itself.

Next week, if all goes well: a roundtable on the gentle post-apocalypse manga YKK; Power-Man, Alan Moore’s Future Shocks, Nana #15, and who knows what else….

Noah has caught it. So has John Cornyn, junior senator from Texas. Cornyn is circulating a petition that says shame on Obama’s White House for plotting to put Rush in the spotlight. It’s “an outrage,” it “reeks of hypocrisy,” White House staff should not be involved in politics (what?).

Bong Crosby, a loathsome alt band and retro lounge act.

I’ve been listening to Hasil Adkins, a crazed, low-fi rockabilly performer; sort of sounds like Elvis crossed with a rusty robot bullfrog and dropped down a deep well. At the same time, I’ve been listening to the Swans — crazed, low-fi, goth performers, sort of sounds like teams of robots sloooowly bashing their brains out against infernal machinery at the bottom of a deep well.

As the description suggests, the two acts are coming from similar places. Goth in general is pretty obsessed with rockabilly, and I find it hard to believe that the Swans weren’t active fans of primitive rockabilly like Adkins and Link Wray. By the same token, I think it’s pretty clear that trudging seminal doom outfits like the Melvins are indebted to the Swans. Which means that Khanate’s 35-minute sludge opuses with some maniac shrieking “Trying….is not…enough!” have a pretty direct link to 2 minute Elvis tracks about blue moons and milkcows.

All of which is to say, screw Faith Hill and Travis Tritt; I want to hear a doom metal Elvis tribute album. I know Harvey Milk would do a bang-up cover of Mystery Train, damn it.

Tom’s been talking a bit about the flap over falp over Rush Limbaugh as head of the Republican party. As a liberal Dem, I’ve been following the story too, with mingled joy (hey, look, the Republican party is eating itself!) and horror (well, ugh…shouldn’t that be done behind closed doors?) (If you want to participate in the repulsion/attraction, try listening to this exchange between AM conservative personality Mark Levin and broad-party conservative advocate David Frum.)

Anyway, one of the things that is interesting to me about the kerfuffle is the extent to which it centers around aesthetics. This is more or less unacknowledged; supposedly, the fight is all about politics. But Limbaugh isn’t a politician; he’s an entertainer, which is to say, an artist (of some sort, and with no qualitative assessment implied.) People listen to his show for the same reason they watch “Lost” or read a comic-book; they’re passing leisure time.

That’s not to diminish Limbaugh’s influence; on the contrary, as you’ll discover if you sneer at Art Spiegelman in public, people take their aesthetic choices very, very seriously. What you like, listen to, watch, read, is central to how you perceive and define yourself — often moreso than what you do for a living (this causes Marxists endless frustration.) Limbaugh’s fans are fans, and they react to attacks on him much the way that other fans react to attacks on their aesthetic taste — that is, they take it personally, and they get really angry.

But if that’s the case for Limbaugh, isn’t is also the case for all politics? How is the identification as “Democrat” different from the identification as “comics geek” or “Buffy fan” or whatever? The answer is, I don’t think it is all that different. Politics and aesthetics are really closely linked, not because given pieces of art have particular political stances, but because politics is itself a branch of aesthetics. Politics is basically a leisure activity which people follow like they follow a favorite TV show or piece of serial fiction. And like aesthetics, politics works through communication and symbols; it’s about manipulating perceptions, creating narratives, or poetry, or emotional reactions. And it has its own genre rules and measures of success. The big problem with Limbaugh, form the perspective of the Republican party, is that, while he’s an extremely good radio show host, he’s a lousy politician. The same skills that serve him well in the one arena (vituperation, for example) don’t work at all in the other. It’s like watching an academic poet try to write a popular TV show without changing his style.

One criticism often leveled at critics is that they’re essentially talking about nothing; or nothing that matters, anyway. Why bother saying that Watchmen the movie is bad? You like it or you don’t like it — why spoil it for other people? For me, anyway,the “why” is at least partly that aesthetics are actually important. They’re part of the way the culture runs itself. Political loyalties and cultural loyalties are aesthetic loyalties, which is part of what makes talking about aesthetic interesting.

So this post is all about strident self-justification, basically. I like to think Rush would appreciate that.