Vom Marlowe, a frequent commenter here and a fine writer in her own right, has agreed to join us as a blogger here on HU. Some of you may possibly remember her as one of the contributors to the Gay Utopia: her trans/slash/spy story is here.
So give her a warm welcome to the blog, y’all.
I’m very pleased to announce that comics critic Ng Suat Tong will shortly be blogging with us here at HU. Suat has done a lot of writing on comics, both for the Comics Journal and more recently for the Comics Reporter. (You can read one of recent essays here. )
Welcome aboard, Suat!
Here’s the playlist for this week.
1. Country Gentlemen — Where No Cabins Fall (Calling My Children Home)
2. Aborted — Odious Emanation (Slaughtered & Apparatus: A Methodical Overture)
3. Vader — Testimony (The Ultimate Incantation)
4. Enslaved — Heimdallr (The Forest Is My Throne)
5. Satyricon — The Forest Is My Throne (The Forest Is My Throne)
6. Drudkh — The Distant Cry of Cranes (Microcosmos)
7. Six Organs of Admittance — Invitation to the SR for Supper (Six Organs of Admittance)
8. Sian Alice Group — White (Troubled, Shaken, Etc.)
9. St. Vincent — Just the Same But Brand New (Actor)
10. Mandy Moore — Everblue (Amanda Leigh)
11. Ciara — I Don’t Remember (Fantasy Ride)
12. Ruby Vass — The Old Gospel Ship (Southern Journey vol. 4, Brethren, We Meet Again)
Download: The Old Gospel Ship.
Album titles are in parentheses so you can purchase the whole thing if you like a song and feel so inclined. Also, if you enjoy the set (or loathe it), do let me know in comments. Middle-brow snobs thrive on positive reinforcement.
A while back there was a large blogosphere feeding frenzy when I (A) expressed dislike of 100 Bullets and (B) mistook Dave Johnson for Eduardo Risso in the course of dissing a cover. Anyway, Dave Johnson himself just found the critique, and stopped by to tell me I’m an idiot. If you share his opinion, or just want to see some trollish bad behavior from various parties, the back and forth starts here.
I’m actually doing a bit of catch-up here; I’ll have at least three and maybe four Bound to Blog posts up this week. Starting with:
Yep, it’s just like the teaser says: Wonder Woman in Shamrock Land. And while I love that cover — complete with bizarre scale variations, weird amorphous clover blob, bright yellow background, and a guy cut off at the waist in the best spirit of constructivist design — the story isn’t maybe as good as it might be. Part of it is the villain— the well-dressed cropped guy on the cover there. He’s called the Gentlemen Villain or something, and he’s so bland that I can’t even remember his name even though I just read the thing. He performs all the usual Marston villainy (forcing women to serve him, throwing around grenades — Marston loves grenades) but it feels pretty rote — perhaps in part because it’s mostly just in the interest of stealing stuff. I’ve seen some writing on this series that’s suggested that Marston was freed up by the end of the war…but there’s definitely something to be said for evil Nazis as enemies.
Or, you know, maybe Marston just wasn’t feeling all that inspired. Or maybe leprechauns just don’t hold that much appeal for me. I don’t know. I even felt like a lot fo the art wasn’t really all that exciting, especially compared to Peter’s ravishing work last issue.
Not that the book doesn’t have its moments. This is a great panel.
Marston definitely joins R. Crumb in having a thing for piggy-back rides. I assume it’s the masochistic implications that make it appealing for both of them; getting a piggyback is infantilizing and polymorphously (rather than explicitly sexually) intimate. WW emphasizes the mother/child aspect by calling him “funny boy” too. Their expressions are both priceless; Steve looks like his eyebrows are going to attain independent lift-off, and WW looks genuinely cranky.
Here’s a queasy moment as WW flirts with a leprechaun who has captured her:
Ick.
I like the fact that this looks more like Steve is being showered with bubbles than like he’s being buried alive:
I love the scribbly halo of WW’s lasso in this one:
And here’s the valentine day’s card. Steve has an opportunity to make WW kiss him since she’s trussed up in the lasso…and oh, she wishes he would…but he’s just too galant. It’s both romantic and fetishistic, innocent and winkingly kinky, in a way that reminds me of a certain amount of shojo:
This is a bizarre bit: are the Irish especially well known for throwing bricks? Or is this just something Marston made up?
And this is probably the best panel in the issue; I love the designs on the wall there, and the way the Princess Elaine looks impossibly diminutive. The white curved lines of the couch are really nice too; the ones to the right of Elaine almost seem like motion lines, actualy, giving the whole panel a sort of fantastical energy and motion.
The enormous bee as design element here is pretty great:
And the weird inky shadows here are very nicely done; it gives it almost a noirish feel, which is unusual for Peter (I wonder if he used a different assistant on this one or something?)
Oh, man, I’d almost forgotten the flying pigs. That pig looks so happy….
Men! They hate roses and make you sew!
Also… this is an oddly suggestive panel.
The way WW is arched with her arms thorwn back, and the energizing effects of the motion lines… And then you’ve got those weird veiny, phallic trees beneath her — we’ve definitely wandered out of Leprechaunland for a moment and into a Freudian dreamscape. And, of course, in the next panel, the excess of passion has given her amnesia. (I can’t actually remember if she’s gotten amnesia before, but it seems like a natural kink for Marston, fitting in nicely with the mind control and the dominance (fetishizing the obliteration of personality and the sense of control.))
So yeah, there’s a lot of individual things that work great; just overall it doesn’t quite fit together as well as it might. Thinking about it a little more, I think that maybe the Irish mythology just isn’t as well integrated as the Greek myths he sometimes uses, or as the more fantastic mole men or seal men or whatever settings. He seems to mostly see the Irish myths as an opportuniy for slapstick, maybe; in any case, it doesn’t jibe with his cosmic gender interests the way Mars and Venus and so forth do. The loss of the war setting also makes the whole thing seem a little directionless; instead of an epic battle between good and evil, it’s just some thieving schmo wandering around doing bad. I think the WW run really benefits from having the contrast between Marston’s set-in-stone binary crankitude and his scattershot, anything goes scripting (much the way that Peter’s art has a tension between extreme stiffness and extreme fluidity.) Marston’s ideology is certainly still present here (there’s a lot of mention of loving submission,) but it never solidifies thematically the way it does in many of the issues. But so it goes; they can’t all be gems, I guess. Hopefully Marston and Peter’ll be back on their game next issue.
This has got to be about the most fucked up thing I have ever seen in my life. A 1969 Japanese film directed by Teruo Ishii, it starts out with the protagonist in an insane asylum…then he escapes and meets a circus girl who shares a strange past with him, until she’s weirdly knifed…then he sees his picture in the paper, but it’s not really him, but some guy who just died…so, naturally, he digs up the corpse, put on the grave clothes, and takes the guys place, sleeping with his wife and mistress…till the wife dies…and he goes off to this island where his web-fingered father has collected monstrosities, keeping his wife in a cave where she eats crabs off the corpse of her dead lover…and then the detective solves everything, except for the fact that the protagonist has committed incest with his sister…so her throws himself on top of fireworks and in the end we see his severed body parts falling out of the skywhile he and his sister/wife shout “Mother! Mother!”
And no, I haven’t even come close to describing how weird it is. It sounds like an art movie, obviously, and it’s got a lot of arty touches; much of the movement, especially of the insane web-fingered father, seems like it must be taken from traditional Japanese drama. But it’s also got pulpy exploitation instincts; as I mentioned, there’s a detective savior right out of the pulps, and the twisty suspense plot keeps trying to pry itself out of the aesthetic morass. It’s weird to say about a Japanese film, but it’s so Freudian; the family seems like this inescapable twisted mound of flesh, that is constantly being forgotten and constantly consuming; passion is all turned inward, and every character seems more or less constantly engaged in stumbling upon various primal scenes. The detective who supposedly solves all with lucid rationality at the end actually only casts a harsher light on the ongoing perversions. The main character never so much develops a personality or a past as he is husked out, revealed to be nothing but a pallid vessel for other family members psychodrama.
What’s maybe weirdest, though, is that it reamains banned in Japan. I mean, yes, there’s some bare breasts and some disturbing imagery and it’s affecting — but it’s hardly X-rated. Why ban this and not Tetsuo the Iron Man?
Ah, well…I can’t really understand my own culture; guess there’s no reason why I should understand theirs.
In the Reader I’ve got a brief review of a Midwest-themed art show upcoming at the Smart Museum.