Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Suzanne Vega

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Like the others I’ve been posting, this review ran in Bitch back in 2007.

Suzanne Vega
Beauty and Crime
Blue Note

Tegan and Sara, Catpower, Joanna Newsome, Mirah —intelligent, heartfelt tweeness is as hip as its ever been. This is good news for Suzanne Vega, who, on her new album, comes across as oh-so-2007 without updating her sound at all. You expect well-crafted, shimmery pop from a Suzanne Vega album, and that’s what you get.

Which isn’t to say that the album is boring or monotonous. Vega doesn’t stray far from her formula, but she varies things enough to hold your attention. Her lyrical concerns range from dreamy nostalgia (“Ludlow Street”), to dreamy romance (“Bound”), to dreamy politics (“Angel’s Doorway”), to all three at once (“Pornographer’s Dream”). And she manages to be musically eclectic in a quiet way that’s thoroughly charming. You might miss it the first time through, but“Zephyr Street” takes its riff from “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; “Pornographer’s Dream” is bossa nova, “Unbound” is edges towards a club beat. .

My favorite song, though, is “As You Are Now.” Vega’s vocals are less mannered, and the production is a bit more polished, but otherwise it sounds like it could have come off her debut. Moreover, there’s none of the precious urbanity that mars some of her other tracks: no clunky references to Edith Wharton or Frank Sinatra or the World Trade Center, thank you very much. “As You Are Now” is a straightforward love poem. It’s still precious, of course (it’s Suzanne Vega, after all), but in a good way. “I will treasure all your teeth/your laughter and the pearls beneath/keep them in a cardboard box/through the tickings and the tocks.” Time’s hasn’t taken Vega anywhere, but it’s nice to think that the rest of us have caught up with her again.

Not Every Stone is Rollin’: Not Every Folk’s a Freak
Here Comes the New Boss: Same As The Old Waif

The Fogeys are All Right

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A version of this review of Merle Haggard’s The Bluegrass Sessions ran in the Chicago Reader earlier this year.

Of the extant viable American pop genres, country music is the most obsessively conservative. Not that it’s completely static, of course — Gretchen Wilson doesn’t sound much like classic Wanda Jackson, who sounded even less like Sara Carter. But country’s innovations always have to be justified or explained by pointing backwards, and, as such, the turnover in sound, and, especially, in marketing tends to be a lot slower than on other parts of the radio dial. Gretchen Wilson does, after all, sound a fair bit like Tanya Tucker.

Country’s obsession with an authentic rural past has often been the occasion for scorn — perhaps most effectively in Richard A. Peterson’s acid 1997 tome, “Creating Country Music.” And the mythologizing has undeniably had numerous bad effects. For one, though ‘30s and ‘40s country artists were able to assimilate jazz and blues, swallowing later musics has been increasingly difficult, which is part of the reason that country radio these days is so aesthetically bankrupt. Similarly, country’s humiliating paucity of black performers has everything to do with its fetishization of its own roots in an era of virulent segregation and racism.

Still, there’s an up side as well: namely, aging country stars aren’t contractually obligated to engage in extended acts of self-parody. Rock, pop, and rap stars are all about being cutting edge, dangerous, and rebellious in various combinations. That looks great when you’re in your twenties. Once you hit forty, or fifty, or seventy, though, you start to look like — well, like late Elvis Presley. Or Paul McCartney. Or Sting, or Michael Jackson…or, day I say, Madonna or Bob Dylan. All of these folks still make bucket-loads of money, of course,. But the cost, to them and their fans, is that they end up looking like greedy, tottering fools, the butt of the very jokes they would have told back when they were young and smart and talented and didn’t suck.

For country stars, getting old certainly presents cash flow problems. But it doesn’t create an identity quandary. Country doesn’t have an ideology of generational warfare, so its heroes have a lot more options when they start to go grey. They can, for example, dump the radio hits and head for bluegrass, as Ricky Skaggs or (somewhat later in her career) Dolly Parton did. Or they can go for higher gloss production and slip into New Age, like Emmylou Harris. Or they can hang out with the rock kids, like Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash. Not all of these choices result in great music. But neither are they embarrassing repudiations of the artists’ entire raison d’etre. Willie Nelson can make a bum album or two, but I’d still love to see him live. The Rolling Stones, not so much.

Of all the country greats, Merle Haggard is probably the one whose persona has aged most seamlessly. Haggard didn’t even release his first single until he was 27, but even then he had the attitude and fire of an especially cantankerous septuagenarian. Artists like Rod Stewart or Eric Clapton may put off the homages until their careers are in decline, but Hag had barely planted his feet before he started in with the roots explorations : a Jimmie Rodgers tribute in 1969, a Bob Wills one in 1970, even a tribute to little-known blackface performer Emmet Miller in 1973. So when in 2001 Haggard released *Roots*, celebrating classic honky-tonkers like Lefty Frizzell, or when he put out a standards collection (*Unforgettable*) in 2004, it didn’t seem like he was retrenching — just doing what he’d always done.

The same could be said of his latest album, “The Bluegrass Sessions,” which was recorded, naturally enough, on Del McCoury’s label. Admittedly, bluegrass has never been one of Haggard’s primary influences — he’s always worked in the more urbane styles of honky-tonk, and the California Bakersfield sound. Still, as this album demonstrates, those traditions have many of the same forefathers, from the famous Jimmie Rodgers to the less well known Delmore Brothers. As it happens, Haggard cannily includes covers of both of these performers. On “Jimmie Rodgers Blues,” he interjects Bob Willsesque asides between the bluegrass solos, and it works perfectly — as well it might, given the debt that both bluegrass and western swing owe to early jazz. Similarly, on the Delmore Brothers’“Blues Stay Away From Me,” Haggard’s plaintive, almost-yodel points towards the keening of Bill Monroe, while the crack band (led by Marty Stuart), plays low-down blues as if they’ve been doing it all their lives. Which, of course, they more or less have.

Neither do tunes from Haggard’s back catalogue suffer in their new setting.
“Big City,” a 1981 track about escaping urban life, actually makes more sense with a smaller, more rustic-sounding acoustic band. Haggard’s voice has aged, and he no longer has the unerring control that was once his trademark. But he’s learned a trick or two from Willie Nelson, and uses the new waver in his singing to project vulnerability and emotion. His phrasing is smart and affecting, as always, and lonesome harmony vocals by Alison Krauss (on “Mama’s Hungry Eyes”) and guitarist Carl Jackson (everywhere else) fit snugly over his lead.

Still, this can’t be said to be one of Haggard’s best albums. Revisiting one of his old gems would have been nice; four, though, starts to seem lazy. The limited instrumentation also becomes a bit monotonous — by the end I was missing the occasional horns which enliven many of his sets. And, perhaps most importantly, his new songs here generally lack the bite of his best work. “Pray,” and “Momma’s Prayers” are, as the titles suggest, maudlin and moralistic — a strain always present in Haggard’s work, but not one I like to see overplayed.

“What Happened?” though, is the low point, with Haggard rotely complaining about high taxes, high gas prices, and the country generally going to hell. Again, one can’t blame this on Haggard’s getting crotchety in his old age— he’s been bitching about those darn kids for forty years now. But his classic songs in this vein, like 1969’s famous “Okie From Muskogee,” use humor and specific details to open the song up to audiences of all philosophical persuasions. “What Happened?” lacks that depth, substituting an irritating querelousness that reminds me of Lou Reed’s lesser work.

But just because this isn’t Haggard’s high point doesn’t mean the next one won’t be. His albums have always varied in quality, and he’s done some spectacular work in the oughts: *If I Could Only Fly,* from 2000, is probably one of his two or three greatest ever. And even his lesser efforts have their virtues. Like, for example, the one great new song here, “Learning to Live With Myself,” a weary reflection on aging and loss. “It’s hard to face up to the mirror/Leave all the habits on the shelf/Till he gives me my call/The hardest of all/Will be learning to live with myself.” Keeping up an identity can be a bore and a burden–especially when your identity is that of a pop singer. But, whatever his worries, Haggard wears his skin more comfortably than just about anyone else in the business.

Alison Krauss anthology

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This review originally ran in Bitch Magazine in 2007.

A Hundred Miles or More: A Collection
Alison Krauss
{Rounder}

Alison Krauss isn’t the first performer to transform bluegrass from a high, lonesome phallocentrism, filled with instrumental solos and sin, into a polished, gynocentric dream of New Age sentiment and tasteful accompaniment. Emmylou Harris did the same thing on 1980s “Roses in the Snow” — an album that combined matchlessly evocative singing, idiosyncratic song-selection, and a spirituality that packaged blissed-out hippies for God-fearing millenarians, and vice-versa.

Unfortunately, though Krauss’s version of bluegrass/folk/pop has been hugely successful, it has little of Harris’ charm. That is as evident on this collection of duets, movie soundtrack recordings, and bric-a-brac as it is on Krauss’s more coherent releases. When Krauss tries for high spirits ( “Sawing on the Strings”) she sounds like a public television talking head being interviewed about mountain humor. When she tries to mimic the frozen, keening vocal style of traditional singers (“Jacob’s Dream”), she just sounds politely disengaged. And when she tries for eclectic, she comes up with an egregious remake of the saccharine 80s lite country smash “Missing You.”

Worst of all, though, is the production. Mainstream pop uses its over-slickness as a hook, filling up its echoey spaces with layers of processed bleeps. But country is still (barely) wedded to its authentic past. As a result, all Krauss’s studio wizardry does for her is to make every acoustic “plink” sound like the product of a week-long focus group. It’s only when she simplifies — as on the acappella choral version of “Down to the River to Pray” — that she captures some of Harris’s old-timey grace and grandeur. There aren’t nearly enough of such moments, though, to justify this 76 minute slog.

Bill Monroe + Joni Mitchell =: Garrison Keilor

Bela Fleck X James Taylor =: Muzak, but without the conviction

———–

I have some more recent thoughts on Alison Krauss here.

Make Toys, Not Art

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Tucker Stone has a column up on Comixology about marketing and managing the Bat-brand. It feels a bit like a continuation of our back and forth about Bob Haney’s Batman, so I thought I’d continue the continuing continuation. Or something like that.

Anyway, Tucker says in part:

Now, if The Shield had operated the way the Batman comics do—what would have happened to it? Say that Shawn Ryan only decided to write specific episodes of each season that had to do with his overall idea of a long-ranging “important” story, he’d only vaguely described it to the other writers, and they’d decided to just insert various one-shot stories that didn’t match up to the ones surrounding them—characters had sex and then never mentioned it, dead people showed up alive and well with no explanation (just an assumption that the viewer would “figure it out”) and each and every episode was directed by directors of varying talent and wildly divergent style, like Yasujiro Ozu for three episodes and Michael Bay for a couple of bookends…..

It seems to me that you can’t get to that point where you can create great art while operating in a controlled environment until you quit pretending that you’re in the same business that companies like Picturebox or Image Comics are in—super-hero comics, the ones the big two publish, aren’t what people crave when they go looking for art. You stop hiring big name writers and telling them they’re free to do whatever they want, and you instead figure out how you get to the point where you’ve got the people who go into the comic shop every week buying every new issue that has their favorite character in it. It might be fun to cater to the 40,000 of us who want to keep up with Grant Morrison or Paul Dini. But you’d be better off figuring out how you cater to the millions who just like Batman.

Basically, Tucker’s arguing that, if Batman comics are going to be either good or successful, you need to treat them as corporate product, rather than the genius effulgence of individual auteurs. Individual auteurs can do interesting stuff occasionally…but the relentless demands for more product, and the exigencies of a corporate character, mean that all-auteur-all-the-time is going to inevitably involve a lot of auteurs who don’t know their auteurish asses from a whole in the ground, and so you’ll get a lot of dreck. As an added problem, the inconsistency in the vision makes the stupdendously popular property unmarketable to everyone but a small group of cultish fanatics.

There’s definitely something to this. My son has been watching the Batman animated series with some eagerness…as for that matter has my wife. I’ve watched a few of the episodes too, and they do seem to be pretty much exactly what a Batman series should be. Each episode is self-contained; they do have very limited continuity — characters (Superman, Green Arrow, what have you) recur, but not in such complicated ways that you can’ t figure out what’s going on. The style is…well, stylish, and it’s consistent — Batman and Robin look the same in every episode, though I’d doubt it’s the same team of animators working on every single one. The villains are colorful and a little scary, but the episodes are definitively kid friendly — people aren’t getting killed or raped; Batgirl doesn’t get gut-shot and crippled. They’re clearly inspired somewhat by the TV series, somewhat by silver age stories…they’re nice. They’re professional. They’re well done. And you do look at them and say, these must have a larger audience than the shambolic, incomprehensible, bloody-minded comics. These are, overall, better than the shambolic, incomprehensible, bloody-minded comics. Why don’t they make comics like this (of course, there have been comics based more or less on the animated series…but why isn’t that the standard rather than a sort of bonus sideline?)

So there’s that. But then, on the other hand, you’ve got manga, which are each (generally) by one creator, but which often have spin-off which carefully follow the original vision. Nana for instance; the movie version is very faithful to the original, and I think there’s also a faithful anime, not to mention music and other marketing. Yet the fact that the series are, in some sense, often the basis of marketing empires, and the fact that the creators are auteurs, doesn’t put them in the same mess as American comics, either in terms of sales or in terms of aesthetic inconsistency.

One thing is for sure, though. American mainstream comics have somehow reached a point where they can neither effectively market the amazingly popular characters they own to a mass-market, nor can they figure out how to create appealing new products for a mass market. If they’re lucky, they can sometimes get a hit out of their back-catalog, like Watchmen, but that seems to be the extent of their powers. If they were deliberately choosing to forego mass success for individualistic aesthetic excellence, that’d be one thing — but I don’t think anyone would claim that that’s the case. As it is, you just have to shake your head and wonder how on earth they’ve arrived at this pass…and how much longer they can keep it up.

The Cowardly and the Castrated: Part the Eighth, in Which We Are At Last Unmanned

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This is it: the frightening and bloody end. Tucker Stone and I have waded through the entire Showcase Presents: Brave and the Bold volume 2. For the complete experience of the Cowardly and the Castrated, read part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, and part six.

Then read the first half of the final, pulse-pounding conversation about all things brave and a few things bold between me and Tucker at his blog, The Factual Opinion. Then, come back here and read the second half right below.

Whadaya want, it’s a crossover event. You’re lucky we didn’t have variant covers.
***********************


cover for Brave and Bold #106 by Jim Aparo

Noah: I did want to ask you…in your review of the Metamorpho one, at the end of it you mentioned that comics aren’t really made this well anymore. You’re way more tuned into the current mainstream stuff than I am, but I feel that way too…especially in regards to the art. I know that Aparo, Cardy, and Adams are all very highly regarded…but even Ross Andru and Bob Brown have a level of professionalism — they can put a story together in a way that’s easy to follow, at least, and which has some sense of consistent, workmanlike style. What happened to that? Or am I just being horribly unfair to contemporary mainstream illustrators?

Tucker: I think there’s a level of unfairness to that, sure–there’s plenty of comics I don’t particularly find enjoyable to read, but it’s not because of any particular lack of artistic consistency–but there’s something definitely missing. I don’t know what you can attribute that too–obviously, these Brave & The Bold’s were all bi-monthly, so it can’t be filed under the now-common complaint of missed deadlines. I’d argue that it’s more of a problem of scripts–there just aren’t that many scripts that hit all the beats well, and I think that’s what is most valuable about the best of these Haney stories. Each issue doles out some type of plot, some type of villian, some type of action, and some level of humor and emotional content.

Most of the stuff that’s out today–and this is “intentionality” again–relies on the longer arc to deal out all that sort of stuff. A six-issue mini-series delivers what might be a more heightened version of all of those things, but it takes so long to get to it–six months, if the team is on time–that everything depends on the reader caring about what is, at the core, a repetitive form of plot and story. Very few of these–even the bad ones, like that Wonder Woman thing–don’t move forward in consistent fashion, and that makes them easier to swallow.

I think guys like Stuart Immonen (Ultimate Spider-Man, Nextwave) or Dustin Nguyen (Detective Comics) have an interesting style that works with the script, makes it stronger, and helps to make it more readable.

But yes, there are people who just can’t. Tony Daniel–he’s responsible for most of the art on Grant Morrison’s Batman run–can’t draw a decent fight scene to save his life, he can’t pull off an iconic splash page, he can’t even make it look like somebody is talking to another person without a lot of work on the part of the reader. Ed Benes, who handles the Justice League, is just as bad.

Noah: Fair enough on the art…though is there anyone in mainstream you like as much as Aparo or Cardy or Adams? (You’re going to say Eduardo Risso just to irritate me, aren’t you?)

Tucker: Well, it’s a different skill set with Risso–I liked his run on Batman well enough, but Aparo’s work is far preferable. But yeah, I don’t think Aparo could pull off 100 Bullets–he has a problem doing male faces and making them look distinctive. Lemme think for a second! That’s a good question.

Alex Maleev–he did the art for Brian Bendis run on Daredevil–I loved that. It’s nothing like Aparo, but it’s fantastic stuff. Guy Davis–he does the B.P.R.D. series for Dark Horse. And I’ve really enjoyed keeping up with this lesser known guy named Tan Eng Huat–he did this Doom Patrol revamp years ago, and now he’s exaggerated his work even more, and is currently doing Ghost Rider for Marvel. He’s too weird to get a standard gig, but he’s got a style that’s pretty unique for super-hero books. Michael Allred/Cameron Stewart and Darywn Cooke also did this great tag-team work on Catwoman for a while, until DC threw that book into the toilet.


cover for Brave and Bold #108 by Jim Aparo

Noah: On the story; I think these are obviously aimed at a more general audience, right? I mean, there’s a sense in these that somebody who doesn’t necessarily define themselves as a comic-book fan might pick one up…say, from a 7-11 rack (which is where I got my comics way back when.) Haney clearly, clearly, doesn’t give a crap about continuity…which is pretty darn funny considering this is a team-up title. Today, I think writers tend to aim their work at people who they figure are already invested; if you’ve got the comic in the first place, then that indicates a certain level of knowledge about the DC universe, and a willingness to follow a series month after month after month. That makes it possible to attempt more complicated stories, which can be great at times (Swamp Thing, Animal Man, etc.) But I think though it can be great, there are diminishing returns at some point, mainly because super-heroes really weren’t ever originally intended for that kind of story. It’s a silly idea, when you come right down to it, and there’s only a certain amount of mileage to be gotten from debunking or complicating it. I think we’ve passed that point, myself.

I haven’t seen any of those artists you mention, alas…except for Darwyn Cooke…who I like all right…. Would you agree at all that contemporary mainstream art is generally not as good as the older stuff, or is my whole thesis misguided?

Tucker: ….off the cuff, I’d agree, sure–but then again, there’s such a massive amount of stuff that i’ve got zero relationship with. If it’s reprinted–and as much I’ll joke that everything is reprinted, that’s not really true–then it’s got to have some potential value to it. There’s a ton of comics that get mentioned in Haney’s interview that I’ve never seen available except in the quarter bins, and I’m sure there’s got to be a lot of crap there, you know? It’s sort of unfair to use some of Jim Aparo and Nick Cardy–while they were at work on a successful title, which B & B was–to showcase how bad the art is on Uncanny X-Men.

Noah: Oooh…here’s some Maleev. Very nice.

Tucker: At the same time, fuck comics. Old stuff > new stuff. I don’t think you have to go to the Library of Congress to figure out if that’s true or not.

Noah: All right; well a slightly different tack…what do you think the best stories in the volume were? We seem to be agreed Deadman was the best; I think my second favorite is probably that Black Canary one from #91, mainly because of the great Noir art…but the story was also pretty fantastically preposterous from beginning to end. After that maybe the insane Phantom Stranger one with the paranoid covens and Batman killing his godson and not really giving a crap. What do you think?

The evil Mormons and the crazy Adam Strange evil-future-Batman and the one with Flash where Batman becomes an obsessed, possessed paranoid nutjob were all great too…but the art kind of drags them down a bit….

Tucker: My favorite panel in the entire book was the guy going off the bridge “nononononon” in the Black Canary story. That’s my number two as well. After that, I’d probably go with the Sgt. Rock story–the violence, the Alfred kills the dude ending–I just loved everything about that one. It also had “Bat-Hombre” which is something I’d sort of like framed in my home. No love for Metamorpho? I loved that there was no real team-up, and that Metamorpho didn’t seem to have any interest in doing anything but saving his lady. Bad guys? Rex doesn’t care. Rex just likes saving that girl and punching that monkey.


from Brave and Bold #91, art by Nick Cardy, story by Bob Haney

Noah: That panel is amazing. And the Dinah Lance cheesecake. The Sgt. Rock one didn’t do as much for me, though your review did make me appreciate it more. I think, though, that I liked the depressed Plastic-Man as noir avenger more than you did; that was just so, so wrong I had to love it.


from Brave and Bold #91, art by Nick Cardy, story by Bob Haney

Tucker: Well, the Plastic Man went for that whole “hangs-on-a-spoiler” thing that just…I just can’t do it anymore. Keyser Soze, heads in boxes, that Shamalame guy and his dead people–I’m just tired of “you’ll never guess what comes next” kind of stuff. It wears me out, and while I had some appreciation for the weirdness of Plastic Man continuing to maintain his false identity months longer then sanity or logic required, that story was a spoiler end, and that part of me is just dead in the ground.

Noah: But it’s such a stupid spoiler…don’t you want to be meta? Sigh. I guess post-ironic irony is dead….

Tucker: I don’t know what those words mean!

Noah: Anyway, I wanted to ask you too what you made of the whole Haney-intentionality quandary I wandered into. Especially in relationship to that Deadman story. Is Batman in that supposed to come off as an unfeeling cad, do you think? Does it matter? It seems to me like he had several modes; one where the story was just completely off the wall and running in every which direction (Adam Strange, both Phantom Strangers, the beginning of the Sgt. Rock one) one where you basically get a fairly straightforward adventure story (Metamorpho, Green Arrow, etc.) and then the Deadman one, where it’s just a brilliant noir plot. It’s awfully hard to resolve all of that into some kind of auteur function. I wonder how much of the scattershot quality, in every sense, is the result of just having to grind out so much material….?

Alex Maleev is the Kabuki guy! I do like him…though possibly not as much as Aparo or Cardy. There’s a bit of slickness in his realism that sets my teeth on edge…I haven’t seen the Daredevil stuff though. He’s obviously extremely talented, in any case.

Tucker: It’s difficult for me to reconcile Haney into the category of a guy who was just working to finish product, just grinding out scripts to meet deadlines. At the same time, i think it’s difficult because I don’t want to believe that people go into the creative field–any creative field–and do that. (But that’s an optimistic, unrealistic fantasy, and it’s just as likely that comics writers end up doing the same kind of grunt work that people do when they work on Gray’s Anatomy, so on.) Of course, some of them go on to do good work–Shawn Ryan, who did the Shield, always talks about the time he spent on Nash Bridges as being an excellent writing/creative school. The thing is that with comics guys you’ve got evidence of their actual goal. Brian Azzarello (who i know you don’t like) did these really terrible Comico books, and then he did short stories for Vertigo, and then he got the freedom to do 100 Bullets.

Haney doesn’t have that in his catalog. He was a comics guy who did comics-as-product.

Sometimes he did them really well, but his limitations were vast. He couldn’t do a four-issue Noir Batman story, because that wasn’t what he was hired for.

He had to make do with a bunch of titles, different art teams, and an editorial group he doesn’t seem to have had much love for. So sometimes he could take shit and make it fly–like Deadman, where he made the story the primary engine–or he made do with letting the heroes carry the weight, like he did with the Bat-Metamorpho story.

I went a different way with your question: I think Haney felt that he was free to do with Batman whatever he needed to so he could fit his story. More and more, the problem is that comics writers seem to worry that they’ll “break” Batman, and they cater the story to fit in with his ridiculous “mythos” or whatever.

We’d be a hell of a lot better off if Batman was just left as more of a reactionary force, which is pretty much what he is throughout this entire series.

Noah: I don’t think grinding stuff out has to necessarily be a sign of bad art or anything. There’s not necessarily any correlation between how something is made and whether it’s good. Philip K. Dick basically wrote as fast as he could type, and that’s how his books read…but they use that, too, and they’re incredible. Haney sometimes seems to be doing something a little like what Dick did; all that amnesia, storylines that can’t stay straight for more than a panel, Batman going off the deep end again and again; it’s pulp crap as metaphor for the way the world falls apart if you look too closely at it. At the same time, you never get a moment where he manages to make that explicit, the way Dick frequently does.

Tucker: Don’t get me wrong–grinding it out isn’t indicative of bad art. But if we’re talking about what Haney’s intentions are, it’s hard to reconcile “intention” with “finish this comic and get it to the artist and get my paycheck for this comic.” There weren’t opportunities in comics for the kind of creative freedom that Image or some Vertigo titles allow. Haney was in a one-job market, and what he wanted was never going to be met by what was available.

Noah: I agree that the Batman mythos has become a problem. Again, it’s that comics cater more towards a specific community; consistency is much, much more important. Haney’s Batman is way more flexible; he isn’t just a reactionary force right? I mean, sometimes he’s a mad scientist, sometimes he’s an advocate for teens, sometimes he’s dumb as dirt, sometimes he’s a murderer…and my point is there’s something a lot more realistic there than having him be a consistent archetype.

Tucker: I couldn’t agree more. Having a flexible Batman opens the gates for more stories.

Just “more” though. Not necessarily “better.” Grim and dirty bludgeon for justice though–that’s getting old.

Noah: Which suggests that Haney did in some ways have more creative freedom than someone like Grant Morrison or Frank Miller, who, despite having more control over plot and length of story and so forth, have to fulfill these expectations for the character that are quite, quite strict.

Tucker: Yeah, I don’t think that’s what you’d be saying if you were reading Batman RIP. Grant’s got all kinds of freedom there, and wow. Not great. He’d be better off if he did have some type of Denny O’Neill controller making him hit some beats, deliver some payout. Haney though–I just can’t see the creative freedom thing. He could improvise, sure, but the level of improvisation was limited to this story, which is why so many of these stories are so widely divergent in level of quality. Guys like Grant and Frank–they have open contracts to do what they’d like. Haney was working in a shop where he knew he could lose his books, because he took those books from the guys who lost them. Did you read how Levitz ran him out of hte store? They clearly didn’t give a shit about him..

Nowadays, after the Alan Moore debacle, you know DC has to worry about burning bridges. They can shit on Chuck Dixon, but they know that Frank Miller, Jim Lee–guys like that could sell Aquaman. They have to keep them relatively happy, even though the real draw might be Batman.

Noah: Well, once again I will defer to your willingness to actually read all this stuff. Still…I don’t know. Frank Miller clearly doesn’t feel he can, or isn’t able to see his way clear to, or just doesn’t want to do anything else with Batman than what he’s done already. There’s a way in which…a small, focused, in-group audience — a real fan base — can be the ultimate creative trap. I mean, yes, you read that stuff about Haney was treated, and those people were obviously (at least in this way) evil corporate drones who didn’t care about him at all. But there is some kind of freedom in that. Nobody cared about him. He had to put Batman together with some other DC hero. After that…he could have Batman kill people. He could have him suffer a mental breakdown. He could have an entire robot liberation movement for an issue. He had to deliver payout, but if he did, it didn’t really matter much how he treated Batman, or even that the story made logical sense. There’s maybe a little bit of an analogy with exploitation films, where you had to have the T, you had to have the A, and you had to have the violence, but after that there was really a surprising variety of things you could do precisely because nobody was really paying attention. In comics now, people are really paying attention. Morrison and Miller can do what they want…but they write in a way and for an audience that brings a ton of expectations to their work. That’s part of why Alan Moore’s career has been so interesting to watch; he’s been desperately trying to jettison expectations. It hasn’t exactly worked, but I think the impulse makes sense. I think…it’s a little like why rock bands have trouble not sucking after the first couple of albums. There’s an intensity of attention which is strangling.

Just as an example…could you have Batman walking down the street in broad daylight admiring pretty girls in a comic today? That seemed totally like a personal touch by Haney…and I wonder if you could get away with it now.


from Brave and the Bold #102, art Jim Aparo, story Bob Haney

Tucker: Again…there’s little there I can argue with. No, you couldn’t get away with a lot of what happens in these stories. (Of course, that’s part due to the popularity of those writers to meet expectations, like you said.) But still: is that all Haney wanted? One-shot stories?

Noah: Yeah…I mean obviously, the gig sucked. He was treated like crap. I would love to know what Haney would have done with the gloves off (Metamorpho is a taste I think.) At the same time, artistic freedom…there’s some sense in which it’s what you make of it. You look at alt comics autobio stuff, where personal vision is the buzzword…and then you look at Jack Hill’s women-in-prison movies where he has to hit trope after trope…and the one that seems more free isn’t that one where the creators are doing whatever they want.

Tucker: Oh, there’s definitely a lot of truth to that. I think improvisation language works well–the way guys like Meisner defined it was that it would always work best within a forced structure. My problem with painting Haney as a free spirit is just that he didn’t have the wide range of time to operate with–it was all these closed chapters. There’s a lot of horrible shit about serialized stories that never end–see super-hero comics as an example–but sometimes that long-form range works. Animal Man–Swamp Thing–to some extent, even something like Punisher MAX. Haney didn’t get that opportunity, and I’d kill to see what he did with it.

Noah: It’s funny we were talking about Haney not having any control over what he did or how…and here’s Morrison, who’s got all this creative freedom, and what he wants to do with it, is he kind of wants to be Haney. Bring back all the goofy silver age stories, nut-job plots, etc. etc. Except it’s all wrong precisely because he *wants* to do it, which means he’s reverent of the material in a way Haney never would be. I mean, Haney would never write a story just to say, “There will always be a Batman.” Why would it occur to him to do that? Batman’s not an icon; he’s a steady paying gig.
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And that’s all she (or in this case, we) wrote. Thanks to all of you who read and/or commented; it’s been a blast.

One More for the Hood

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Eagle-eyed readers will notice that we’ve added another blogger. Miriam Libicki (aka Miriam Beetle) is the creator of jobnik!, a comic about her experiences in the Israeli Army. She’s also a longtime reader of this blog, where her comments have, with some regularity, been more interesting than my posts. We’re very pleased to have her join us as a regular blogger. Good to have you aboard, Miriam!

Xoth — The Intro

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Stefan Dinter, the man behind German comics company Zwerchfell Verlags, got me to write an intro for Xoth –The Unspeakable City, a new Lovecraft pasticheby Anna-Maria Jung. Here’s a bit of press info about author and book:

On ANNA-MARIA JUNG:

Anna-Maria Jung was born in Graz, Austria, where she started to draw comics during her teens. She started to study Multi-Media Arts, then went on to work at Bill Plympton‘s animation studio in NYC (for the short film
»Shut Eye«). Returning to Austria, she began to to write her master‘s thesis in Multi-Media Arts at the Fachhochschule Salzburg on the theme of »The Creation of a fantastic world, based on H.P. Lovecraft‘s Cthulhu Myth«. The Thesis deals with, amongst others, »background information on the author, the cthulhu myth and the meaning behind the stories, as well as examples of lovecraft-inspired media and a discussion of how these different kinds of work deal with Lovecraft‘s stories«. During the work on the thesis, Anna-Maria started to work on conceptional artwork for a fictional city named XOTH and its inhabitants, inspired by Lovecraft‘s creations. From this grew the idea for a comic book – XOTH, The unspeakable city.

On XOTH:

On one of his many uneventful, boring evenings, Jacop O‘Damsel, freelance nerd, drunkenly decides to fall asleep in a back alley. Bad timing, since an intergalactic Dimensional Shambler apears right there and then. And before Jacop gets the faintest chance to even be hung-over, the thing whisks him away.

Jacop awakens in XOTH, a strange world full of weird creatures – or are they unutterably blasphemous? Anyway, there are also the »Humanists«, a gang of stinky fisheads whor worship Humans and need Jacop for a certain – if unspecified – mission. And if that wasn‘t madness enough, Mayor Cthulhu orders his best killers, Nub and Shang to rub Jacop out of existence. Thanks be to the Old Ones, because Jacop finds Yen Niggurath,a nice goat-girl, who decides to help the hapless human. Together with
her, Jacop will get to the bottom of the »Ordus Humanus« affair, since – Cthulhu‘s fat ass! – he‘s in no mood to run for his life forever.

Set against the background of H.P. Lovecraft‘s Cthulhu Myth, Anna-Maria Jung tells a tall tale full of monsters, nerds, monstrous nerds and nerdy monsters. And the man from Angell Street is in there, too.

XOTH! Die unaussprechliche Stadt, an 80 page hardcover with a foreword by ill-tempered critic Noah Berlatsky is published by Zwerchfell Verlag. more on http://www.xoth-comic.net/ and http://zettgeist.blogspot.com/

——

…and because I’m a lame-ass American monoglot, and can’t read German, you now know about as much about Xoth as I do. Luckily, Stefan wanted the intro to be an intro to Lovecraft rather than to the comic per se. So anyway, the intro is below…and if you buy the book, you can see it in German too! (Which I think may be my first translated work!)

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Horrid Replication

H.P. Lovecraft loathed and feared degeneration with an intensity hardly distinguishable from lust. With obsessive, leering repetitiveness, his stories imagine man as a kind of vulnerable waxwork, constantly in danger of melting into a suggestively amorphous travesty of itself. In Lovecraft, there are no sexual references, no women, and virtually no dialogue. Every man is trapped in his own skull, quivering with impotent emotion as gaping atavisms engulf him, swallow him, have their way with him and discard him, leaving behind as progeny an animalistic cannibal, an undead zombie, a croaking brachian, a friable gray powder, or a slithering mass of protoplasm. Lovecraft in his actual life had very unpleasant racial views, and the spectre of miscegenation, of impure violation and alien congress, slithers through every page he wrote. Behind his constant use of adjectives like “nameless”; “unspeakable”; “inexpressible”; “indescribable” it is hard not to see a massive, leaden repression. Like the devolving narrator of “A Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Lovecraft’s horror shades ominously into fascination — a desire to slough off humanity altogether, and bathe in defilement for all eternity.

Whether Lovecraft actually desired such a fate, he’s certainly achieved it. Perhaps more than any other twentieth century writer, his work has inspired, not reverence or criticism, but twisted doppelgangers. All art tends to propagate itself, of course, whether in homoerotic Star Trek fan fiction or Jane Austen movie adaptations. But even by these standards, Lovecraft is something else. Whether you’re Stephen King, Alan Moore, or …well, me, in some of my earliest and most benighted prose efforts, the allure of Lovecraft is infinitely irresistible. Cthulhu pops up incongruously in comics, books, movies — for that matter, I’ve even got a plush Lovecraft monster doll (it’s starfish shaped, with too many eyes, and it kind of scares my four-year old.) To merely glance through one of the man’s unholy books, it seems, is to want to create a blasphemous imitation.

There are lots of reasons why it’s fun to steal from Lovecraft. His unwieldy vocabulary is addictive. Once you’ve been introduced to “Cyclopean,” “opalescent”, “bizarrerie”;” and “Archaen,” — all on one page, no less — you’re bound to start using them yourself. Similarly, his invented, unpronounceable neologisms — Cthulhu, Yog-Shothoth, Necronomicon — are both so instantly recognizeable and so ill-defined that you can’t help but want to make them your own.

Indeed, even in Lovecraft’s own stories, the names of these creatures are dropped with such forced emphasis that they seem borrowed — as, indeed, does most of the prose and plot. His tales are a glutted agglomeration of incoherent genres; faux anthropological treatises, swipes from Poe, shock-twist endings more hoarily ancient than his own Elder Gods; all tied together with looping strings of polysyllables, leaden pacing, and a keen disregard for characterization, narrative tension, or consistency. Original Lovecraft feels remarkably like pastiche, and the most perfect Lovecraft parody is simply Lovecraft — which is what makes Lovecraft parody so hard to resist.

And yet, despite their silliness, the best Lovecraft stories have a submerged emotional coherence — a deep pool of hysteria and anxiety which, at moments, overpowers the clumsy, plodding structure which seems designed more to contain than to explicate it. The narratives are filled with horrors unspoken, revelations half-revealed. In “At the Mountains of Madness”, Danforth looks back from the plane and sees something — we aren’t told what — which causes him to shriek aloud “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” This is a decidedly goofy reference to Poe. And yet, at the same time, there is something meaningful and affecting in the glance backwards that causes madness. The nonsense noise and the literary reference almost seem designed to bury the core effect — the evocation of a mythical primal scene, that turns men to weeping children.

Or look at the following passage, in which, Lovecraft describes one of his patented monsters; a shoggoth.

Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes — viscous agllutinations of bubbling cells — rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile — slaves of suggestion and builders of cities — more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative —Great God!

There just isn’t anything especially frightening about a rubbery fifteen-foot spheroid — I mean, what is it, a gigantic football? But preposterous as the start of the quote is, the end has an evil lyrical force in its nightmare vision of slave uprisings, of rightful rulers overthrown by indistinguishable, ungrateful, utterly unhuman underlings. It’s like a more repressed, more foaming version of Carlyle’s French Revolution.

Lovecraft (suggestively) hated Freud. But what is most compelling about his narratives is the sense that they are unavoidably Freudian — that the story’s thin, precarious consciousness is stretched above an unexplored abyss. Like Lovecraft’s characters, his readers and imitators are drawn on by the allure of undiscovered truths, unexplored passages, unnamed horrors. The stories resolutely refuse to explore their own implications; their meanings don’t reveal themselves easily or naturally, but rather slither out, half-formed, oozing a foetid miasma, before lurching back, half-seen, into the blackness which spawned them. Did you really see that? Did Lovecraft?

Perhaps…or perhaps not. Certainly, few writers have written so obsessively about the desirability of ignorance — and, especially, of self-ignorance. Anna-Maria Jung hits on something profound in Xoth when she switches the brains of Lovecraft and a Yithian. Not that Lovecraft’s work is especially alien, but it does sometimes seems written as if it’s author had deliberately asked his brain to leave the room. The stories seems disavowed by their creator — which is why so many other people have tried to claim them.

The result is invariably, to quote the master out of context, “degenerate work…coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail.” But, as Lovecraft knew ( or, perhaps, tried not to know) degeneration has its own perverse attractions. So prepare to enjoy the debasement that is Xoth — and I hope it inspires you to explore the debasement that is Lovecraft as well.

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If you want to read more of me on Lovecraft, you can check out my review of the Eureka’s Graphics Classic comics adaptation of some of his stories. (I believe Stefan read this review, which is why he asked me to do the intro for Xoth.)

And if you’re unholy yearning is still not sated, you can see some of the art I did for an exhibit based on quotes from Lovecraft’s Commonplace book which is still shuttling around Europe as we speak:

More here and here and here. Oh, and also here.