OFF-TOPIC (17) Published Date : May 12, 2020 Author : amcgovern *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE OFF-TOPIC (16) Published Date : April 9, 2020 Author : amcgovern *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE KLAATU YOU (9) Published Date : February 26, 2020 Author : amcgovern One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite pre-Star Wars science fiction movies. * SILENT RUNNING | d. DOUGLAS TRUMBULL | 1972 I was raised on requiem; the entire 1970s, economically austere, militarily precarious, environmentally collapsing, felt like one long funeral for the future. At 7 or 8, I didn’t know the difference between bearing witness and merely watching, but endangered-species documentaries like Say Goodbye and extinction-themed full-length cartoons like Last of the Curlews kept me in a consistent mood of dutiful mourning. And none more so than the end-times sci-fi parable Silent Running. I can’t think of this movie without the first teardrop piano figure of Peter Schickele’s haunting score playing in my head; director Douglas Trumbull composes the movie in expansive sensory swaths — long takes, celestial vistas, often wordless — that soak into the mind on a lived-experience level. We’re walking the paths of a paradise which has itself been cast out: the last forests of our paved-over planet, shot into space supposedly for safe keeping, in vast biodomes floating in the outer solar system. Tended by naturalist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) and staffed by uncaring bros who symbolize everyone else on Earth, the balance is delicate, and then tips over when the order comes to simply nuke the trees instead of bringing them home to re-green the world. The story soon becomes a Last Man narrative, carried with heartbreaking conviction on Dern’s shoulders, when Lowell desperately kills his crewmates, fakes a disaster and looks after the one remaining dome while trying to convince Mission Control that the ship is stranded and should be heroically left behind. Seventies cinema often tried escaping to the past, in self-exiled mountain-man stories like Grizzly Adams and Jeremiah Johnson, but the world ahead of us has made Lowell such a misfit that he has to leave the planet altogether and take the wilderness with him. We know that the human race itself, and Lowell’s crusading type especially, is going extinct, and the film’s many lapses in logic (If the domes are pre-fitted for bombs as we see, why did anyone believe they were made to save the forests at all? If Lowell’s such a born gardener, why does he forget that plants need sun when the ship swings behind Saturn?) are swept away by the feeling of bad-dreamlike inexorability. The film saw forward and in some ways harkened far back. Lowell’s only companions are the two “drones” Huey and Dewey, who prefigure R2-D2 and all the other cute little robots (and arguably, anthropomorphized smart-home gear) that proliferated after him; Lowell’s disputes with his unfeeling or intimidated comrades, and his ultimate choice of sacrifice to his principles, can be traced back to Antigone (which also includes sacred duties involving soil). An uncomfortably males-only version, but perhaps advisedly so, for the feminine is a strong absence throughout the film: the snapshot of an unnamed young girl Lowell feels he’s fighting for (an abandoned daughter?); the astral voice of Joan Baez in two eerie rustic-future ballads; and of course the remnants of Mother Earth herself. The movie’s assault on nature felt all too familiar in the year I first saw it, but at least we could witness this deferred to a distant future. As I write in fall of 2019, the Amazon is burning, and kids like the girl in Lowell’s photo are taking over the streets to push that future ever farther. I’ll keep my eyes on it. *** KLAATU YOU: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Matthew De Abaitua on ZARDOZ | Miranda Mellis on METROPOLIS | Rob Wringham on THE INVISIBLE MAN | Michael Grasso on THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN | Gordon Dahlquist on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY | Erik Davis on DARK STAR | Carlo Rotella on THE OMEGA MAN | Madeline Ashby on KISS ME DEADLY | Adam McGovern on SILENT RUNNING | Michael Lewy on THIS ISLAND EARTH | Josh Glenn on WILD IN THE STREETS | Mimi Lipson on BARBARELLA vs. SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS | Vanessa Berry on THE FLY | Lynn Peril on ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN | Peggy Nelson on SOLARIS | Adrienne Crew on LOGAN'S RUN | Ramona Lyons on THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH | Kio Stark on THE STEPFORD WIVES | Dan Fox on FANTASTIC PLANET | Jason Loeffler on THX 1138 | Devin McKinney on IDAHO TRANSFER | Mark Kingwell on THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO | Judith Zissman on CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON | William Nericcio on DEATH RACE 2000 | Brian Berger on THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS | Gary Panter on ANGRY RED PLANET | David Levine on THE STEPFORD WIVES | Karinne Keithley Syers on ALPHAVILLE | Carolyn Kellogg on IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE | Alice Boone on CHARLY | Sara Ryan on ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN | Lisa Jane Persky on PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE | Luc Sante on THE TENTH VICTIM | Mandy Keifetz on TBD | Molly Wright Steenson on FAHRENHEIT 451 | Rob Walker on CAPRICORN ONE | Charlie Jane Anders on TBD | Lisa Kahlden on PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! | Sherri Wasserman on LA JETÉE | J.C. Gabel on INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS | Chris Lanier on IKARIE XB-1 | others TBD. MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW KLAATU YOU (2020 weekly): ZARDOZ | METROPOLIS | DARK STAR | SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS | SOLARIS | & dozens of other pre-STAR WARS sci-fi movies. CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2019): THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE | ROLLERBALL | BLACK SUNDAY | SORCERER | STRAIGHT TIME | & 20 other Seventies (1974–1983) action movies. SERIOCOMIC (2019 weekly): LITTLE LULU | VIZ | MARSUPILAMI | ERNIE POOK'S COMEEK | HELLBOY | & dozens of other comics. TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2018): LOONEY TUNES | THREE STOOGES | THE AVENGERS | ROCKY & BULLWINKLE | THE TWILIGHT ZONE | & 20 other Fifties (1954–1963) TV shows. WOWEE ZOWEE (2018 weekly): UNISEX | UNDER THE PINK | DUMMY | AMOR PROHIBIDO | HIPS AND MAKERS | & dozens of other Nineties (1994–2003) albums. KLUTE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2017): THE KILLERS | BANDE À PART (BAND OF OUTSIDERS) | ALPHAVILLE | HARPER | BLOW-UP | & 20 other Sixties (1964–1973) neo-noir movies. #SQUADGOALS (2017 weekly): THE WILD BUNCH | BOWIE'S BAND | THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP | THE HONG KONG CAVALIERS | VI ÄR BÄST! & dozens of other squads. GROK MY ENTHUSIASM (2016 weekly): THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LUNCH | WEEKEND | MILLION YEAR PICNIC | LA BARONNE EMILE D'ERLANGER | THE SURVIVAL SAMPLER | & dozens more one-off enthusiasms. QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2016): "Tainted Love" | "Metal" | "Frankie Teardrop" | "Savoir Faire" | "Broken English" | & 20 other Seventies (1974–1983) new wave singles. CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2015): DARKER THAN YOU THINK | THE SWORD IN THE STONE | OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET | THIEVES' HOUSE | QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST | & 20 other Thirties (1934–1943) fantasy novels. KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2014): ALDINE ITALIC | DATA 70 | TORONTO SUBWAY | JOHNSTON'S "HAMLET" | TODD KLONE | & 20 other typefaces. HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2013): "Spoonin' Rap" | "Rapper's Delight" | "Rappin' Blow" | "The Incredible Fulk" | "The Adventures of Super Rhyme" | & 20 other Seventies (1974–1983) hip-hop songs. KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2012): Justice or vengeance? | Kirk teaches his drill thrall to kiss | "KHAAAAAN!" | "No kill I" | Kirk browbeats NOMAD | & 20 other Captain Kirk scenes. KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2011): THE ETERNALS | BLACK MAGIC | DEMON | OMAC | CAPTAIN AMERICA | & 20 other Jack Kirby panels. OFF-TOPIC (15) Published Date : February 14, 2020 Author : amcgovern Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This time, a season-specific Valentine to one of pop-culture’s most meaningful missed connections… TERMINAL ROMANTIC Old loves can seem like much happier times in retrospect, and the labors of artist Jack Kirby — best known for defining the superhero form but just as significant for having co-invented romance comics — grow more cherished over time. Supposed commercial failures like his cosmic Fourth World cycle come to be revered as cultural milestones, so it makes sense that the comics he didn’t even get into print are considered lost masterworks. I for one have been waiting all my life for one of his legendary passion projects. Kirby had been trying to help comics grow up since the 1950s, when he and Joe Simon started a line of books in genres more familiar from grownup pop-media — Westerns, war, police-procedural and romantic soap-opera — for former boys who’d seen battle and former girls who were asserting the importance of their inner life. This venture was ironically swept under by a manufactured political panic over comics being a bad influence on kids. By the end of the ’60s when those kids had grown up to demand more substance in their leaders and more truth in their mass culture, Kirby attempted the “Speak-Out Series” of quasi-journalistic comics addressing social issues, marketed to 18-and-ups, and distributed with “real” magazines instead of on the comicbook racks. Once again, Kirby was looking beyond the borders of his medium’s frame of reference, like some newspaper cartoon-strip character become self-aware and peeking outside the boxes to the current events right next to him. The self-help era was in bloom and one of Kirby’s responses was a concept fated to be unrequited but fabled for decades thereafter: True-Life Divorce. This was not your parents’ romance comics — but for the generation that would have read it, it was your parents’ story. Regardless of Simon & Kirby’s ill-starred ’50s publishing venture, the Young Romance title they’d started for another imprint in 1947 was a sensation that spawned scores of imitators and kept the comics industry alive. Melodrama would recur as tragedy with True-Life Divorce’s tales of decidedly unromantic middle-age. But DC Comics left Kirby at the altar long before that story could begin. His vision of larger-sized, magazine-quality comics in full color and with high-end advertisers and other contributors from respected media like books and movies had already been downgraded to cheap black-and-white volumes produced by Kirby alone (to fill his own contract) and distributed almost nowhere and without even the DC logo on them. One issue each of In the Days of the Mob (about 1930s gangsters) and Spirit World (about paranormal activity) made it out, cancelled a year or two before The Godfather and The Exorcist movies would transform American pop culture; True-Life Divorce died on the drawing board. DC did try to rob its grave a bit, though. Kirby, the co-creator of Marvel’s Black Panther, had included one story starring African American characters in True-Life Divorce; the bean-counters picked this one out and put Kirby to work on a book’s-worth of Black-interest stories, with grandiose plans of involving pop-star Roberta Flack as a celebrity tie-in (“free giant poster!”) and their eyes on poaching some of the audience for Ebony and Jet. Kirby tried to back off and refer DC to promising Black comic artists he knew, but this inclusive outlook, now as commonplace as the novelists and TV-showrunners who regularly write comics, was just as alien to Management, and Kirby had a contract to be stuck to. In due course the powers that be deemed the characters’ faces “too realistic” and had them redrawn closer to acceptability and/or stereotype; Flack’s people enthusiastically passed; and Soul Love was shelved forever. But forever only lasts so long, and all existing remnants of both Soul Love and True-Life Divorce — as well as two never-published issues of another Kirby rarity, The Dingbats of Danger Street — have just surfaced in the loving reconstructions of Jack Kirby’s Dingbat Love from TwoMorrows Publishing (for whom, full-disclosure, I am a columnist — but not a fifth-columnist; I wrote nothing for the book). The Dingbats is a long story in itself; unlike the stillborn Speak-Out books, this was slated as an ongoing, conventional-format comicbook, but got caught up in a general contraction of DC and the industry in the mid-1970s. Still, it intersected with the kinds of issues Kirby’s cultural radar was always sweeping for; an update of another genre Simon & Kirby had brought to comics in the 1940s, the “kid gang” form (adapted from urban-urchin movie franchises like The Dead End Kids), Dingbats was about a band of homeless, squatter street-kids, getting into absurd scraps and living at the opposite dead-end of various traumas and abandonments. It was Kirby’s channeling of his own warlike tenement childhood, seemingly filtered through the sassy “delinquents” of West Side Story; a genealogy of slapstick tragedy left to fend for itself in the socially-unconscious mid-’70s. In Dingbat Love’s inspired curatorial design, these recovered memories of Kirby waver in and out of resolution; most of True-Life Divorce’s pages remain in their original, pure-pencil state of nature; some of The Dingbats is seen in its prototype pages side-by-side with counterparts fully worked up from the inks that were actually applied before the whole book went into hiding; Soul Love (perhaps judged the content needing most help) is reconstructed in a full simulation of what the first, high-end 1971 issue could have looked like. The True-Life Divorce pages are a fascinating chapter of missing history, at a crossroads between the authoritarian control-voice of pre-’60s society and the therapeutic inner voice of its “liberated” aftermath. In this higher-order form of storytelling, Kirby is astonishingly meta from the opening line, with a guide who seems self-aware of his nature as a narrative construct, counselor Geoffrey Miller: “I ask your indulgence in regarding me, merely, as an identity symbol of this media.” He’s a valuable counterbalance to characters who don’t even seem to know the details of their own story, let alone what tracks they’ve gotten trapped in. The erasures are disorienting, but seem advised — watching midcentury sitcoms as a kid, we made a running joke of the mysteriousness of whatever it was the dads actually did; fathers like Ward Cleaver were seen shifting paper at desks and sending commands into intercoms whose purpose was never detailed. Kirby, who went from poor slum kid and army draftee to a lifetime in precarious freelance art, seems to have seen the corporate work of the conformist 1950s and ’60s as an interchangeable blank that masses of people sleepwalked through; in True-Life Divorce’s first story, “The Maid,” suburban husband Don has “quit the rat-race” and lingers in his bathrobe while wife Myra has “taken a job with a large firm”; Don is waiting for a “deal” to work out, and later his “proposition” is accepted, but Myra is absorbed with her executive position, “the ‘log jam’ that tied us up in conference all day,” and a “plan” which then “goes over big.” The dreamlike lack of detail, though, gives Kirby the space for sharp insights into changing human circumstance and unchanging human nature; Don is aware that Myra’s job has “given her challenges she never had as a housewife,” and Kirby (or, y’know, “Geoffrey Miller”) is aware of Don’s self-deceptions: shortly before making a pass at the couple’s 22-year-old cleaning lady, Ingrid, a caption observes that “Unlike Myra, Don treated Ingrid as a friend rather than an employee. He was at war with the status game -- and Ingrid was his way of proving it! At least, this was Don’s rationale at that moment…” The crisis of Myra coming home with her boss as a houseguest as she’d told Don in a phonecall he wasn’t listening to (or was he?) and catching Don and Ingrid making out cuts right to Don in Miller’s office, post-divorce. Miller reminds him of Myra’s feelings and Don acknowledges their mutual parting of life ambitions (“We both became different people… what each of us wanted, now, outweighed what we once had at the beginning!”). Kirby, scarred for life by memories of war, had no appetite for the ones then said to be going on between the generations and the sexes; Miller, bald, slim, a tabula rasa of pure intellect, is a genderless entity seeking balance — though it’s noticeably the men who are the problem in each of these “cases.” In “The Twin,” suburban husband Harry’s projection of his desires and anxieties onto women, no matter their interior life, is made manifest when his wife Edna’s identical twin Charlotte comes to stay over unannounced. She reminds him of an earlier, adventurous Edna, unnerving him with a material fantasy of the past. He’s jittery as she exercises in the living room with Edna and shows off her new body to her sister (“I’ve been a widow for three years, and it’s time to be a woman again!” — the female sexuality in all these stories is remarkably unashamed, and un-shamed). When he comes home late from “work” one night (once again, at who-knows-what), he walks in on Charlotte making out with a date, and assuming she’s his wife (or does he?), starts beating up on the guy. When Charlotte shows herself capable of decking Harry instead (before Edna gets home and breaks it up), it starts to be clearer why DC’s old guard couldn’t comprehend what they were reading in 1971. Two more men seek to hold onto youth with more devotion than they show to any actual person, in “The Model” and “The Other Woman.” “The Model” is married to a classic Peter Pan who wants to blow all his money, and hers, on expensive toys and entertainment, while the sickly daughter she wishes to move to the country languishes in their unhealthy city apartment. Christine, working for a fledgling modeling agency, is the only character in all of True-Life Divorce whose occupation we actually know, and her self-centered husband devalues it. Or as Miller tells us in deliciously Ed Wood-ian dialogue, “The future of her marriage and her child hung upon the predictable, irrevocable path taken by a husband on an age-old ego-trip!” Equally fiery language opens the next story: “This case concerns that classic principal in every marital triangle brought to judgement! -- She is the one most deeply involved! She is the one who stands alone in the naked light of the arena to face the wrath of moral society! You’ve seen her -- but do you know -- THE OTHER WOMAN!” The latter story is the best of the bunch, with a twist premise too good to spoil here. “The Model” was the one that got carved off to be the seed of Soul Love; destiny (and the carelessness of vintage DC editors and greed of collectors) has done this tale the further indignity of leaving one early and two middle pages un-rediscovered, and missing from this volume. But the melodrama is easy enough to follow, and though Kirby’s ear for contemporary Black speech is just as good as he tried to warn his publisher of, the circumstances ring true and the characters’ portrayal is remarkably free of condescension. (Its context among White comic writers of the time, convinced of their relevance and benevolent intentions, brimmed with stereotype, self-consciousness and -congratulation.) In fact, my biggest surprise in finally reading the full Soul Love was how less jive it reads than I had expected. (The only time I had to hide under my seat alone at my desk was the misidentification of Bessie Smith as “Bessie Jones” in a photo-caption for a historical article added by the current book’s producers.) “Fears of a Go-Go Girl! (Can Come True)” is top-drawer all-that-glitters soap opera (with, again, zero condemnation of the title character’s occupation), colored with suitable psychedelia by Tom Ziuko (Soul Love got closer to publication than True-Life Divorce, so the stories were already inked, mostly by Vince Colletta and one by Tony DeZuniga). DeZuniga’s inks make “Diary of the Disappointed Doll!” look especially lovely, as do Glen Whitmore’s vibrant, modern colors; in this harmless (though again pretty tin-eared) farce about the then-novel phenomenon of “computer dating,” Kirby’s intro-text even veers into a brief seizure of what seems like proto-rap: “Cupid plays it CUTE when he decides to REFUTE what the computer COMPUTES!” “Dedicated Nurse,” about a caregiver who falls in love with an elderly patient’s son and fruitlessly implores him to go back to the law studies he abandoned to look after the old man’s health, has a horrid leitmotif of fat-shaming at the nurse’s expense (Kirby was clearly not clued into the standards of body-type and beauty outside the you-can-never-be-too-thin-and-white world). Though at the end we get a bizarre and almost-heartwarming look into Kirby’s code of cross-gender fairness: Nurse Aleda, broken-up with her beau Slater and rotated off of his dad’s ward for two months, has dropped half her weight to show Slater that change is possible and he can leave his day-laborer job for law school. Back in Aleda’s arms, Slater exclaims: “You went into the sweatbox for ME! You starved yourself for ME! What could I do for YOU, except to love you and just let you run my life!” A maybe more well-adjusted pact closes out “Old Fires,” in which two long-ago lovers wonder if they can pick up where they left each other years before. Regrets and recriminations fly between Cleve and Clara in a secluded nature setting made for romance, until they leave with their issues unresolved and Cleve saying, “Come on! This place wasn’t made for fighting or talking! But if we can make it beyond that -- we’ll be back!” A closing caption from Kirby, who endearingly signs the last panel, tells us, “It could happen, good friends! It could happen to any couple that takes their leave -- holding hands!!” Open-ended and real, Kirby’s basic ethic of equal footing, between man and woman, Black and White, human and human, may save Cleve and Clara’s love — and almost saves even Soul Love. [caption id="attachment_137232" align="alignnone" width="550"] Whiteout conditions: production art shows extensive erasures and overwrites[/caption] Giving him help, John Morrow’s brilliant page design, period-perfect logo and convincing production values and replica ads and articles elevate the enterprise and illuminate what could have come of it. “The Teacher,” by far the lamest story in the entire book, is wisely left outside this fine facsimile edition in its drawing-board form to display, among other incriminating artifacts, the grotesque whiting-out and redrawing of almost every face’s features. [caption id="attachment_137234" align="alignnone" width="550"] In an alternate timeline where Soul Love was released to a valued audience and entrusted to skilled creators of color, it might have read a lot like Roxane Gay & Ming Doyle’s gripping generational romance/heist The Bank$, from TKO Studios, 2019.[/caption] At the end of “The Model” Geoffrey Miller had admonished us, “It is the children who are the pawns in this emotional chess game -- they feel the slings and arrows and bear the unwarranted scars!” Childhood trauma was a preoccupation of Kirby’s, and to round out his dramas of self-help and social-service in this volume, The Dingbats #2 starts by saying of its stars, “Each of them has a story to tell about the strange and sinister things that can happen to the young.” These were Good Looks, Krunch, Non-Fat and Bananas, four “forgotten and unwanted” lost-boys whose respective real-life superpowers were handsomeness, muscles, anorexia and insanity. The series’ one published issue had been a more madcap actioner, but bad memories start surfacing in the second and third, with Good Looks confronting the mob enforcer who killed his parents over a debt (and doesn’t know the boy survived), and Krunch being kidnapped back by the legal guardian whose dungeon he fled and who wants to finish driving him mad so he can claim the rest of an inheritance Krunch doesn’t even want. There are some grim, grand panoramas of the kids’ “Danger Street” locale (of which the book provides gorgeous foldouts), and the crowds and situations seem to have converged into the urban landscape from as far back as Dickens’ London to as then-recent as Kirby’s Lower East Side and as far ahead as struggling 2000s Detroit; by its 1975 publication the Dingbats’ world was both antiquated and eternal. Kirby was superimposing his own formative hardship on the present day; whatever was behind him in time was right with him in his mind — not for nothing is the Dingbats’ town called “Inner City.” Some times, trials, hopes and testaments make a mark so indelible they can never truly be gone. Once in a fortunate while a compendium like Dingbat Love helps make sure that they also can’t be lost. *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE OFF-TOPIC (14) Published Date : February 6, 2020 Author : amcgovern Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This time, an attempt to learn the lessons of what we’re never taught… TO SERVE IN HELL History is erased by the winners. The truest heroes get no monuments, but their shadow has already been cast. Sometimes, though, it may not fall for decades. Many Americans are so used to combat being out of sight, that when it comes right to our doorstep it remains outside our visible spectrum. Few Americans remember, or even noticed at the time, when a Philadelphia mayor dropped a bomb on the headquarters of a dissident group and took out an entire city block in 1985; to many Americans it was national news, a century after the fact, when the Watchmen TV-series centered on the militarized white-supremacist rampage that obliterated the self-determined Black community of Tulsa in 1921. By the time that story was told, the country seemed uncommonly ready to listen to it. Maybe we’ll be ready to listen to Big Black’s story too. As with Watchmen, the truth may come by way of a comic book, seeping in through popular narrative the way that official accounts seldom allow. The Attica Uprising was neither erased like Tulsa nor ignored like Philly; the state of New York tried to bury it with lies, litigation, division and doubt. In 1971, human-rights violations at the prison in Attica, NY had grown so unendurable that inmates rebelled, taking over the site and demanding reforms; the standoff became a battleground in the culture-war of racial inequality and the competing agendas of liberation and authority, and the conflict ended when Governor Nelson Rockefeller sent in NY State Troopers to massacre indiscriminately. But the story of Frank “Big Black” Smith — and the ordeal of Attica for him and others — was far from over. A former highschool football hero and military drill sergeant, Smith was partway into a 15-year sentence for a first offense (ineptly holding up a local drug-dealer’s dice game) at the maximum-security Attica fortress when the prisoners rose up. A natural leader and fatherly figure, he’d been football coach for the inmates and then was chosen as the rebellion’s chief of security, making sure that no one came to harm and that the guards and staff who’d been taken as hostages were treated well. He kept activists and officials safe as they came in and out to negotiate with the prisoners — until the Governor’s troops moved in, killing over 40 inmates, hostages and staffers. Big Black was then beaten and tortured at length by guards in reprisal, while the state claimed (and the media amplified) that hostages who’d been shot multiple times by troops had had their throats slashed, or in one case been castrated, by inmates — and tried to discredit the medical examiner who found (and announced) otherwise. Black survived, and made parole two years later; testified (unsuccessfully) against Rockefeller’s appointment as Vice President; and in a unanimous jury verdict was awarded the largest damages of all time ($4 million) in a suit against the state (which was set aside). In the meantime he had become a drug counselor (kicking his own addiction), an advocate for his fellow survivors and other prisoners, as well as surviving hostages and the families of killed guards who’d been lied to and silenced by the state, and an investigator for defense attorneys. He had nightmares and PTSD for the rest of his life, and met the love of it, Pearl Battle Smith, marrying in 1983; he died of cancer in 2004. Which is where his story begins again, and is told in full for the first time, in Big Black: Stand at Attica, a graphic novel debuting February 18th of this year, written by Frank and Jared Reinmuth, and drawn by Améziane (from Archaia/BOOM! Studios). This is partially Reinmuth’s life-story too; his stepdad, Dan Meyers, was an attorney in the “Attica Brothers”’ 26-year class-action suit against New York; Reinmuth started assisting the case in his youth and, in 1997, interviewing Big Black. The two got the idea to work Black’s oral autobiography into a movie, to show America what it hadn’t been told; the book’s creative consultant, comic-scholar and convention-organizer Patrick Kennedy, convinced Reinmuth that “A movie costs 50 million; we can make a graphic novel for 50K.” When Stand at Attica was still a screenplay, Kennedy told me, “Jared wrote the original draft while Black was fighting cancer”; he did not live to see the book come out or know that there would be one, but “Black’s wife Pearl read the original screenplay to him on his deathbed.” Now both the story, and in some ways Frank Smith, have been reborn. Big Black: Stand at Attica is the pop-cultural milestone of 2020, an astounding work of psychological biography and people’s journalism. Black and Reinmuth's text has an ear for honest speech and authentic moments that's supernaturally clear, and the art by Améziane (a French creator known for bio-comics of other African American heroes Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis) has a style and structure that looks like an old newspaper page come to life and enacting a truer story. Reinmuth’s script moves with Black’s memories, starting with the atrocity at the center of his life and circling through his promising start, rough upbringing and later triumphs, the life-lessons flashing back and monstrous suffering stabbing through with the random rhythm of trauma (and redemption); the scene shifting between home, hell, and halls of power like lost libraries sifted through. On pages with the tone and texture of yellowed newsprint, “Amé”’s art puts us in the midst of the events — and the characters’ psyches — with utter immediacy. His expressionist use of emotional coloring and photojournalistic specificity of rendering portray the reality of a man, a community and a nation’s existential ordeal in a way that is unsparingly horrifying and impossible to turn away from — you need to get through this with Big Black, and live to know what it meant. Kennedy brought me together with Reinmuth and Amé to discuss what it was like to spend time with this story — and it was as if Big Black were in the room too. To my astonishment, this trans-oceanic skype talk was the first time that scriptwriter and artist had ever spoken… AMÉZIANE: So many comic teams never meet. I remember, 100 Bullets, Azzarello & Risso, for three years, never spoke to each other. And I always wondered, how could they do that. REINMUTH: We did exactly that! AMÉZIANE: Two years apart, it was magical, I was amazed it could be possible. To be close and never talk to each other. REINMUTH: Things that I had maybe edited out, or I thought I wanted to add to the script but I just [could] not quite [fit] in, Amé magically came up with these things, completely independent of me, and put them in. I think specifically of that scene, the “White Power!” scene [in which this cry goes up from a crowd outside the prison], that comes from the Kuntsler documentary [William Kuntsler: Disturbing the Universe, about one of the Attica Brothers’ legendary lawyers]. I had wanted to include it but never really felt like I had found exactly where; all of a sudden one day, he’s like, “Hey, I found this image that I really feel is powerful and I’d love to use,” and I was like, “You gotta be kidding me, I wanted to do that; okay, let’s figure it out and put it in.” Things like that, just kismet all over the place, so when I say this guy is my other brother, he truly is. HILOBROW: Jared, what changes did you make to the structure of the storytelling, shifting from screenplay to graphic novel? REINMUTH: First of all you have the person who, number one, came up with the idea of envisioning it as a graphic novel, realizing it as a graphic novel: Patrick, who looked at me one day and said, “I know you have your heart set on a film, but we could get this made as a graphic novel, and then we can make a film.” I could not sleep that night, I knew he was so right. And he put me through the paces, and he turned me on to some great graphic novels. Like Coward, from Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips… because of that, I allowed myself to add the Big Black character-voice into the script; it had never been with that first-person commentary. And when I was doing that, when I was reading those comics, I realized that I had to go back and just bring everything I remembered that Big Black said. HILOBROW: When the book starts we’re right in the traumatic aftermath of the uprising; these are all things that recur, more in sequence, later on — you may have been guided by the priority these things had in Big Black’s own mind… REINMUTH: I think honestly, the first thing I ever learned about Attica, with Big Black, was that image of him on the table [being tortured], I always thought of that moment of him, clinging to life, as he’s fighting for his life, and he’s holding on for his life, and — how does he do it, how does he get out of that moment? And [how do we] give you a safe way to take you through the story — and he was a person that always made you feel safe — and then go back and give this biography, which is a truly American biography. So many of the hallmarks of the African American experience; being born in a cotton field with no medical care, the son of a sharecropper, no birth certificate. Coming up, migrating to the North, getting involved in the criminal justice system very early, and then growing the sense of conscience through that. HILOBROW: We’ve talked about the magic of what it was like for you and Amé to collaborate, what was it like for you and Big Black to collaborate? REINMUTH: Again, an amazing story. I met when him I was about 10 years old, and he was of course just a hero to everyone in our family. When I went to assist my stepdad during the trial, in 1997, he had just gotten his $4 million judgment. And so we thought for sure it would be a Hollywood thing, and he asked me if I would write down his words, so he would have something to shop around, and hopefully maintain some control over that side of things. So we used to ride around during the day, go to soul food restaurants in Buffalo, and then I would go back to my hotel room, and I would write, and then I would go to his hotel room, and I would read it — I mean I’ll never forget the first time, he just got this faraway look in his eyes and he looked like he was transported. And I was scared to even speak, of course, and all of a sudden he looks at me and he goes [using Jared’s childhood nickname], “Damn it, Joey! You got all that?!” It was one of the proudest moments of my life. HILOBROW: I’m interested that it was he who envisioned this as a possible movie, so obviously he was conscious of media and what media can do — did he have a sense that the best way to get this story told at that point was through dramatization? REINMUTH: Yes. He was also of the oral tradition; you’d just be mesmerized as he spoke. And he did realize, he was such a fan of movies. Believe it or not he was a huge fan of the Western; he loved Shane. It just made sense that it had to have some art in it, that’s the way he told his stories, and that’s what he was thinking. We assumed that someone in Hollywood would be like “Hey, this is great, give this to me and I’ll make it into a screenplay.” And I couldn’t get people to read it, I couldn’t get the momentum that I got once we started the graphic novel. With Amé already beginning to pump out pages, then people really could see it, but for some reason [before], they just wouldn’t take the time to read it. AMÉZIANE: This guy did what he had to do, and suffered like many others [before him], and many more [after], and never backed down. That’s why it’s called “Stand at Attica.” That’s what Big Black did. That’s something I respect profoundly. And I wanted to try to give the reader the maximum proximity to him, to show the maximum of him I could. And thank god there was a voiceover in the book, so I had many thoughts I could dramatize; I could show him at different times of his life. It helps, because when he suffers, I tried to make us suffer with him, because it was a very hard story. [On jobs in the past], what I said to my friends was always, “Eh, it’s not hard to draw, it’s not like a prison riot.” And the first thing Jared proposed to me to do? A prison riot! I opened the story, and this guy is tortured in the yard, naked, spread-eagled, and when I saw that I said, “We will never get a publisher.” This was hardcore, at the beginning. So I tried not to tame it down, because Jared said, “We will do it all the way.” And we suffered for that — we had to make it hard for us to do it, too. We can’t take the easy way, and I don’t believe we did. HILOBROW: Not at all, it feels like you’re experiencing it yourself as the reader. We know Jared’s very personal background in this story; was there anything about your own background that drew you to, or moved you to identify with it? Or is it just more like, Big Black’s bravery is the kind of thing that can move anyone? AMÉZIANE: I like the ’70s for many reasons, but one of the most is the political rising of the minorities. At that time, minorities could [claim] the right to be able to say, “You can’t treat me like that anymore.” And that’s very close to my story. I’m of Italian background from my mother, my father is Algerian. So, in France, I’m not really one of the “Frenchmen,” I’ve got not one drop of French blood. I’m always in the middle. I’m a Mediterranean guy, part African, part European, [it’s] always awkward to see where I can stand. I saw racism — for me, it’s “You’re a White guy, why do you feel racism?” But the other White guys don’t feel me as a White guy, they always feel me as something different. So it was in one sense, racism by default: “you are different, I will treat you different.” What I experience is one-tenth of what other people can feel, but that one-tenth gives me the [courage] to say, “When I am an artist, I have a microphone, I can tell what I want.” I can tell about space-opera, I can tell about spandex-guys, or I can tell about something that’s close to me. I like to have fun, I like to do thrillers and crime stories, but most of my work now is political, historical stuff, because it’s the life of real people. HILOBROW: Jared, in the graphic novel you print what the prisoners’ demands in the Attica uprising were; when I looked up the demands of the 2018 national prison strike they were depressingly similar, which makes you think how little has changed. Do you think that a book like this can help change things, or is it more a matter of, there are missing pieces in the stories that this country tells itself, and the role that this book can play is filling out Americans’ understanding of their own country? REINMUTH: It’s my firm hope that we’re all able to jump into this conversation and bring this sensibility. What I wanted was to give prisoners a role model in Big Black, that they could see themselves [in], today. And realize that he was where they are, and they are where he was, and we’re gonna find a way forward somehow. We have to. We cannot continue mass incarceration. Mass incarceration, as I think everyone on our side of it understands, is just the extension of Jim Crow, the extension of slavery, and we’re abolitionists. I think we’re all abolitionists; I can only speak for myself, but, and that’s why in the dedication I say “that this book may inspire a spirit of abolition.” That is my firm hope; that we give inspiration, and maybe even some comfort to people who suffer in this horrifying system. [Stay aware of Stand at Attica through its Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts] *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE OFF-TOPIC (13) Published Date : January 3, 2020 Author : amcgovern Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This month, we open one of vintage sci-fi’s favorite years by recalling one of its most perceptive prophets, with one of his most imaginative interpreters… JUST THE MADMAN Old heroes don’t fade away — they were like that to begin with. A mythic golden age of rockstar gods, Hollywood giants, immortal superbeings and legendary real-world leaders shone out to my generation through the haze of graying newsprint, creased and crumpled photography, scratching popping vinyl and film, and posters ripped and repasted over from before we were born. Psychedelic color-spirals in print ads for record-clubs you couldn’t order from anymore, dogeared comics from older siblings, echoes of political martyrs our parents could only try and tell us about, the inconceivable phantom-land of hand-printed rock posters and molding album-covers. Ziggy Stardust himself struck a defiant stance amid anonymous alleyway garbage, in a photo portrait tinted to look like off-register industrial printing, ancient before it started. And thus eternal. Ziggy’s creator, David Bowie, had earlier sung about mystic tomes found in the future by the young; the remnants left behind by truly advanced humans — prophets, the framers of nations or pioneering artists — make you feel like you are the missing, next piece. [caption id="attachment_135535" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Two slices of life from Allred’s Madman[/caption] Artist Michael Allred was one of those kids who inherited a slightly-used future and carried it away to form a new world. His signature comic, Madman, rebirthed the groovy heritage of midcentury youth-culture while drawing in influences and sending out ideas that were of-the-minute and always five ahead. His innocent, insightful pop-art progressed through a definitive run on the cosmic divinity Silver Surfer (with Dan Slott), the medium-changing supercelebrity farce X-Statix (created with Peter Milligan), and the cult-famous, seen-on-TV iZombie (created with Chris Roberson). The personas of Bowie in particular hovered like an interplanetary patron saint over all of Allred’s hip, ever-evolving work, and perennially in it, especially the rock-space-opera epic Red Rocket 7, shaped like an old-school vinyl LP and starring a redheaded musician from beyond. This was one of the ghost-Bowies that have inhabited Allred’s books, and in the graphic biography BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns & Moonage Daydreams (debuting a day before what would have been his 72nd birthday from Insight Comics), the man fully materializes. Co-written with respected fantasy and sci-fi comics author Steve Horton, drawn by Michael and rendered in larger-than-living color by Laura Allred, the book is a euphoric hallucination of history, a dance into the cartoon-world of rainbow glam and hi-res fantasy. Covering the climb and dive of Bowie’s Ziggy alias, it’s like being jacked directly into, not Bowie’s memories or even legend exactly, but the shared dream — his own and the one he instilled — of what this wild ride would be like. Up to now Allred’s had a starman waiting in the sky, and we sat down to discuss what has happened since he finally came to earth. HILOBROW: In the book’s “Afterall” you describe the inspired call-and-response by which you and Steve Horton duetted on this book. How much (and what kind of) space was left in his script for your imagery to “tell”? ALLRED: I knew we had around 160 pages to play with, and what Steve presented would have made for several more full-page illustrations. I felt there was so much more that needed to be included in the period, and wanted the book to feel richer, more dense, and as definitive as possible. So I listed additional events and milestones that I wanted added in. Stuff like the girl who gave Bowie the “Ziggy haircut,” Suzi Fussey, and how she ended up marrying his guitarist Mick Ronson. Or how he ended up shaving off his eyebrows, and as many threads of celebrity interconnectivity as possible. I dug up everything I could and then went about cutting off the fat. I needed to find the balance of rich content but also letting it breathe. And then of course musical interpretations, which is the trickiest thing because it can be so personal. In fact, the earliest dispute Steve and I had was how we interpreted a song. The imagery that a song inspires can be so varied. It’s easy to assume we’re seeing the same thing when listening to a song. It’s wild to learn how very different our filters see something. Bowie’s lyrics can be very detailed and specific. Or so you’d think. They are wide open to interpretation. HILOBROW: This is one of the most lush comic experiences I’ve ever had — very much feels like poring over an old-school gatefold record-sleeve full of imagery, only for 160 pages. How do you achieve that luxurious overload from a process of decision-making about each piece of it? ALLRED: This project is just so very personal for me. My passion for it was unbridled. I very much tapped into that enthusiasm I had as a kid when I spent all my money building my record collection. I’d drink in all those super cool album covers, often copying them, or photos from rock magazines, or just let my imagination run wild and just let my pencil go insane from all the imagery that was rolling through my brain. I knew this was my chance to spill all of that into this beautiful production. Rocket fuel! HILOBROW: You use a very new style for this story — as if all reality is cast in a filter of those color-hold shadings from ’70s poster-art. (This approach provides a particularly fitting platform for a whole new level of Laura’s modeling of light and color too.) And yet meticulously rendered also — as if this is how life looks within a 1970s poster. What does this say for you, about the vividness of legend and the elusiveness of memory? ALLRED: Laura and I talked about approach constantly, and the opportunities we had to play and pull and push. After I locked down the final script it all just kind of flew from there. I committed to hand-lettering the pages to pull the layouts together and help give it a hand-crafted structure. By the time I started inking and throwing pages at Laura we were in the zone, and everything after ran on pure energized instinct. I look at it now printed up and I barely remember drawing most of the pages. Laura says it’s like giving birth, almost forgetting the labor, and just holding the baby, drunk with love. HILOBROW: In a fascinating way you move from homage to re-creation — all the album-covers and other ephemera are note-perfect yet clearly the work of a natural hand. It’s the kind of thing that many artists might just collage in from photographic/reproduction references. Did you feel this was the best way to bring Bowie’s world back to life from the atomic level on up? ALLRED: Absolutely! I wanted everything documented to have that rush of affection that you’d find in a fanzine, but with my accumulated professional skills and experience “turned up to eleven.” [caption id="attachment_135540" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Earlier visions of guitar-godhead, from Allred’s album-cover for his own band, The Gear, and his tables-turning star-rock saga Red Rocket 7[/caption] HILOBROW: The way to depict music in the visual artfom of comics has been wrestled with in many different ways. You use a technique I don’t think I’ve ever seen, the pictorial montage of scenes suggested by a song rather than necessarily including any of its words (let alone sound, which is less possible). You’ve created comics on musical themes many times; how did this mode of expressing it come about? ALLRED: It was important to us to let it be open to discovery. The images need to stand on their own and be interesting to look at, but at the same time, be recognizable. I’ve already heard from folks who are going to discover Bowie for the first time through this book beyond a peripheral accidental knowledge. I hope this will take them on a thrilling journey of discovery with my imagery filling in the blanks when they take that deep dive. But more likely the experience will be fans who will recognize the references. Maybe sometimes too obvious and on-the-head, like showing Bowie literally kissing a viper’s fang. Fortunately, I’ve been doing this enough, most of my life as a crazed fan, and professionally, like in Red Rocket 7, to have a pretty good understanding of what works and maybe more importantly, what doesn’t work. HILOBROW: There are only hints of “backstage musical,” with the Spiders’ growing discontent and Bowie’s less-than-perfect management style. It only pokes through the surface occasionally. We see even less of Bowie’s thinking on this, though then there’s that remarkable part where you isolate his singing of the word “sorrow” in a single panel during the serial death of the Spiders in a handful of one-off concerts and TV shows. Did you and Horton want Bowie’s interior to be something we have to look for? ALLRED: Speaking for myself, I did. If someone wants to dig for ugly, they are welcome to it. You can come at it from the anger of drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey, or the complete avoidance and isolation of David Bowie, who was being placed in a bubble of ignorance, which he may have been fine and comfortable staying in. And he eventually paid for it mightily himself. But that’s the sequel. Ultimately, for me, this is a ridiculously elaborate love letter, not a hit job. But at the same time, some things cannot be avoided, and I think we struck the right balance for each reader to put the pieces together and choose different perspectives. HILOBROW: In general, the book seems to follow an arc from the mind of Bowie to his surface –—the song-montages feel like the raw material of his thoughts, but as of the Ziggy era these mostly evaporate as we’re caught up in the external whirl of his concerts and exploits and costumes and guises. Did you and Horton mean to trace a kind of closing-in of Bowie the person? (I guess we do see his future self breaking through those walls at times…) ALLRED: That’s the whole driving force, right? The surface personas, the trademark changes, are the only constant thread through his career, right? We see the “real man” in the first chunk of the book take shot after shot after shot after shot at stardom, at any kind of success. We see his influences as puzzle pieces, and he puts all the pieces together through his mixer. Alice Cooper was a huge breakthrough for him in creating an alter ego for the stage. And like all of Bowie’s influences he amped everything up. When superstardom finally hits he consumes it in full, and we present it as a series of thrilling rapid-fire images. He quickly discovered that he could maintain a personal mystique by creating facades for the public, and be more interesting than David Jones, the real man. HILOBROW: I love the signaling of character through style — like the way Tony Defries’ face is always the same rubber-stamp-like mask. Almost like a visual equivalent of how grownups’ voices sound in Peanuts TV specials. Does the repertoire of graphic possibility give you the tools to tell a story like this most fully? ALLRED: It does. There are so many tricks you can collect in your bag over the years. Shortcuts to storytelling clarity. My presentation of Tony Defries suggests he has a mask of his own. A dull, predictable, shallow mask of deception. You think you know what you’re getting with the one face, but his agenda is his own, and it’s hidden behind that mask of reliability. HILOBROW: There is no account of Bowie’s life that has as few explicit, or even passing, references to his non-normative sexuality as this book. In the period it covers, male lovers including Lindsay Kemp and Ken Pitt are a matter of record or at least reasonable surmise. On the other hand, of course Bowie’s flamboyance and androgyny are on full display — even fuller than in real life sometimes; I love that you have David be the mum in illustrating “Life on Mars?”. In fairness he changed his story several times over the decades (which you do depict), and the LGBTQ community has gone back and forth about how much to claim him and how much he truly embraced them… and as in all your work, the male face and form are presented at least as joyously, erotically and idealized as the female. What was the thinking on how to address or incorporate queerness into this telling? ALLRED: I wanted it to be as matter of fact as possible. Given the time, the early 1970s, it was incredibly ballsy to make the statement he was making. Even cynically, or exploitively, it was potentially a very dangerous thing to do. Certainly there was no model of success to follow. A seemingly happily married man with a child casually claiming to be gay was an astonishingly bold statement to make. Even today it would spin heads around. Though today, arguably, more accepted by the masses. That it created a sensation of confusion may be the controversy. That it was a lie or thrown out with the intention of creating headlines would certainly be upsetting to people who try to live an honest lifestyle without the perceived protection of wealth and celebrity. But David had yet to solidly acquire either. It could easily have been the final nail in the coffin of his career. From my perspective, it drew a line in the sand that I fought, literally, to cross. When I discovered Bowie and became completely intoxicated with his music and the idea of a Rock Star from outer space, I was completed surrounded by dolts who would have you believe that being gay was the worst thing you could possibly be and should have the crap kicked out of you if you were. Choose your insult, but any gay slur thrown at you was an instant fighting word. Throw down and start swinging or you were what you were being called. Being told he was gay was supposed to make me give him up. Not gonna happen. I was a massive Bowie fan, gay or not. So, at twelve, I learned about homophobia, and the seeds of tolerance were planted. If he was in fact a homosexual, or bisexual, or cosmicallysexual, it was A-okay with me. I didn’t and still don’t care. He carved out his happy place. Good for him! I even had to ask myself if finding him fascinating and drawn to his imagery made me a homosexual. A powerful thing to be confident in your sexuality. To acknowledge that beauty and/or attraction can be found in anyone. I found my perfect partner no question. I see a beauty inside Laura that will never fade. An ageless attraction. And I’d wish that for anyone, no matter their sex. Now I haven’t had to struggle the way folks in the LGBTQ community may have, so I’ve no right to say whether they should embrace or claim Bowie as a groundbreaker of acceptance. But again, from my perspective, he inspired me to want anyone and everyone to be who they want to be and be with who they want to be with. I’d like to think I’m a better person because of that kind of thought-provoking inspiration. HILOBROW: Has there been any response from Bowie’s family, or any of the other people portrayed here? ALLRED: Honestly, the most heartbreaking criticism I could imagine from this project would be harsh criticism coming from David Bowie’s family, so I’ve not for a second entertained presenting it to them out of pure fear of rejection. But just last week a troll on twitter threw a “twitter rock” at an artist friend who was lovingly praising the book. And Neil Gaiman, who I know is friendly with David’s son, Duncan Jones, stepped up in defense with the glorious statement, “The Bowie Estate love it. It’s made by craftspeople who are all Bowie fans.” Meant the world. *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE OFF-TOPIC (12) Published Date : December 13, 2019 Author : amcgovern Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This month, we close the year in digression with a mind’s-eyewitness account of two revered and remote artists’ collaborative friendship… SHE HAD SOME HORSES What’s never been seen before was created with no model to work from, and artist/playwright Ran Xia turns her gaze away from the artifacts of existence to the vivid, vibrant void. Her new play In Blue, a conjectural biography built from vestiges of the painter Franz Marc and poet Else Lasker-Schüler’s lives, shows us none of Marc’s canvasses, and centers on Lasker-Schüler’s search for the one that nobody now can see. The Tower of Blue Horses got mounted in the Nazis’ “Degenerate Art” exhibition until military veterans complained that, since Marc had died in WWI, he was a patriot, so it was removed; but since the “curators” thought Marc’s friendship with Lasker-Schüler made him a Jewish sympathizer, the painting disappeared altogether. Xia looks through the empty frame at the friendship the two maintained, echoed in the words of their deep (often epistolary) relationship, Lasker-Schüler’s aching, sublime verse, Marc’s letters from the battlefield, and the fertile, intensely felt spaces between every line. Marc was a painter of subjective, mystical scenes of nature, usually totemic animals in a visionary, psychological palette; carved from the elements, faceted like the rainbow light cast from jewels. Graphic, jagged planes, otherworldly veils of mist, and quantum/cubist segmentation of space were passed on his perceptual journey, which ended at age 36 when shrapnel killed him instantly. Lasker-Schüler was a figure of legend in Expressionist Berlin, acclaimed in her lifetime as the greatest of Germany’s lyric poets, and gifted in visual arts herself, with a wardrobe of public and literary identities, a lifetime of loss and an oeuvre of wrenching insight and cosmic perspective; a single mother and singular independent female presence, she would lose her son to TB and her country to fascism, dying at 75, impoverished and obscure, as an exile in Jerusalem. Lasker-Schüler and Marc corresponded in-character, she as “Yussuf, Prince of Thebes” and he as “The Blue Rider”; they investigated the mysteries of each other as Xia folds back the layers of time and awareness between our reality and theirs. The private Lasker-Schüler matches her serial loss with an incantatory repetition; when alone, calling for the “five missing horses” in the painting first sent to her as a study on a postcard, it can seem a mad echo; when addressing questions to the Franz of her relived past (or personified contemplation), as in her recurrent question, “Why horses?”, it represents Marc’s unreachable secrets and her unquenchable inquiry — there is a different, valid reason each time, and in lives of limited length this can’t bring contentment. Finn Kilgore is radiantly contained as the earnest, searching Marc, and Alyssa Simon outsize in life-performance and heartbreaking in personal solitude as Lasker-Schüler; a lone cellist, Luke Santy, provides counterpoint, with somber classical intonations and spectral, processed effects. As much of Xia’s work remains submerged as visible; script directions prime the canvas in swaths of emotion rather than specifics, as when the actors are advised, “FRANZ paints a stroke of blue. It blossoms, like bloodstreams on a sheet of glass. They watch.” — we can guess at the iceberg underneath these characters’ narrow peak of common ground, but we aren’t meant to know everything, or think everything can be known. I got in touch with Xia to talk about the scenes painted and evaporated nightly on her story’s stage. HILOBROW: Your script and direction take consideration of the visual in ways that are exceptional — that marvelous phrase in the script, “The decorations are austere. It should seem as though there’s something incomplete about this picture,” and the inventive “effects” that are very minimal furnishings, like the string of lightbulbs that Franz screws in to illuminate letters hung behind them, or the roll of iridescent fabric that Else unfurls to transmute into an ocean around her. Design could have overwhelmed drama, and character dynamic could have impoverished the seen environment, but instead it was like watching a kinetic painting (again from the script: “In this play, time is like layers of paint on a canvas: they blend into one another.”). Were you a graphic designer first, and this informed your writing, or have the two gifts always been simultaneous and thus naturally interplayed? XIA: I dabble in graphic design occasionally (or rather, I have specific tastes in graphics that represent my own work so I usually just end up designing my own posters) but it's not necessarily an initial career choice. My dad is a painter. Life didn't work out that way for him but he had initially wanted to go to art school and become a professional artist. He ended up becoming a scenic painter for films and working for decades in the film industry as an editor and writer. Now, ever since his retirement he's been creating new oil paintings in abundance. He's marvelous at using pigments to capture light. Growing up I never took serious lessons from him, and spent the entirety of my afterschool/weekend/summer vacations practicing the piano, so I suppose my first identification as an artist would be through music. Still, we've always been a museum/gallery family. I remember going to those touring Van Gogh, Dali exhibitions and my father and I would spend hours in those tastefully lit halls while my mom sat on a bench somewhere drinking tea (she now draws illustrations herself as well). In college I was a psychology major with a minor in fine art. I did my thesis on cognitive functioning processes in performance art and created illustrations in the style of stained-glass windows for theatre works I enjoyed during those years. One of my graduation projects was actually an art exhibition of my works. An ink on photo paper interpretation of Franz Marc's The Tower of Blue Horses was in the exhibition. I have never been interested in strict realism, as I always crave a bit of magic when it comes to storytelling. I'm glad you noticed the iridescent fabric and the letters lit by lightbulbs. Of course the use of simple sets and props is partially because of a modest budget, but I truly don't believe theatre should ever need to recreate anything elaborate. I like to put trust in the audience that they'll see, like I do, an entire ocean in a piece of fabric, and the hope Franz's letters represent for him during the war. The wire that connects the light bulbs also conveniently provides a path for him so that's an additional bonus. During rehearsal we also discussed how objects carry memories and letters don't need to be words. Marc was all about seeing what's possible, beyond visible, which is a very childlike view of the world. We needed so little to create entire worlds when we were kids, and I really love to embrace that when making theatre. HILOBROW: At times Else alternates between first-person and third-person pronouns in speaking of herself. This of course in part denotes the “character” she’s showing to the world (and reminds me of how Ringo Starr now always refers to the Beatles as “them” not “we”), but also makes a connection to me of a mindful dissociation I witnessed in my late wife when she was close to leaving this world, an alternation of vantage-point between body and spirit. Is Else trying to see herself and her misfortunes at a merciful distance? Was she memorializing herself before she was gone? XIA: I think you've accurately captured Else's point of view. I believe it's a coping mechanism when people use third person to refer to themselves or certain experiences they've endured. There's sort of an innate performative nature when Else does that. It's a lot easier to insert an objective filter when processing something traumatic. HILOBROW: Your Franz Marc very much felt to me like the troubled, yet gentle personality my mind assembled from his writings. This, as Else knows well and says often, can be as much a creation as any play or painting. Yet there was a stoic center to your conception (and Finn Kilgore’s portrayal) of him that rings true. (Just as there is a core sadness to your and Alyssa Simon’s Else that makes all her facades feel transparent and trustworthy.) You’ve said this is not a biography — did you feel there was a way, not to tell their whole life story yet in a profound sense, meet them? XIA: I met Franz early on (through his paintings) and Else halfway through creating this piece. Discovering her knocked the initial idea of this play out and is why this is now a two-hander. We talked a lot about unrequited love during rehearsals and whether or not we should interpret this relationship with elements of romance or not. I'd like to leave that up to each audience member. There is a core sadness to Else because I finished up this work during a time of upheaval in my life. The sense of not being able to experience security was what I felt during my 11 months of not being able to work, waiting for my O1 visa approval, and surviving on odd gigs, people's kindness (which can be embarrassing for someone with a lot of pride.) Franz was sort of Else's rock before WWI but she's not the easiest person to hang out around. I still don't know her very well after spending so much time conversing with her in my head, and I still don't know if I like her or not as a person. We discovered that she and I are both earth snakes in Chinese zodiacs. Perhaps that makes sense. She's also extremely hurt by constant loss. It's actually quite understandable how guarded she became, underneath that brandished facade. Franz was easy to identify with. I too was a quiet gentle kid with a storm cooking up inside. The rebellion we choose (Franz and myself, and I believe, you!) isn't lashing out as a teenager, but rather subtle. I first started working with Finn in 2017, on a different project, but around that time was when I picked this piece back up again. Perhaps I wouldn't have done this production so quickly had I not found the perfect Franz. HILOBROW: Related to that, the art of historical reclamation always involves a blend of incorporated quotes with words and actions the person “would have” said and did. You seem to have absorbed Lasker-Schuler’s poetic voice very pervasively — “You could hear the opera of light bouncing off pigments,” etc. — how do you yourself start “hearing” and recognizing what words and actions fit the people, and what interactions and incidents fill in parts of the picture that are lost to us? XIA: In middle school, our music teacher gave us a lesson on impressionism in music (Debussy, etc.). And our assignment was to pair up a painting and a piece of music and explain why. I don't remember which piece I chose but the assignment stayed with me. My piano teacher was also big on "seeing the music." She'd ask me to describe the events within a piece of a sonata. I think those things have always stayed with me. The direct quotes from Else and Franz in my script are within double quotation marks, and everything else is either rewritten, or speculative. [At a few points in the play] I did put Franz in deep space so we're departing a bit from historical reclamation and more of an expressionistic representation, to tell a story with a version of Franz and Else. I'm extremely dramaturgically oriented in the early process too. I believe I read a dozen or so books on them before hitting the page. HILOBROW: The past is not entirely static; it changes with what it means to us. In this play both Franz and Else are at many times reflecting on their lives from after it’s over. There are layers of understanding added by the years Else has to reflect on him, and the historical distance at which you reflect on both of them. This stems from each one’s life being a now finished story. Franz doesn’t live long enough to have the kind of regrets he expresses here; Else survives to mourn much more than anyone deserves to. How do you think different lifespans for either might have changed the story they left behind for you to interpret? XIA: They lived during a time when life wasn't documented as well as now. They didn't have texting. Or social media. Or easy access to photography. From what I've read I believe Franz Marc is inherently a kind person who does not have cruelty in his marrow, but he did also willingly join the army, through almost romanticism. If he had survived WWI, he might have been fundamentally changed, and abstract expressionism would've been quite different. There is no way for us to know. I try not to think about what could've been, but rather, with the knowledge of what has happened, how do we do better. In Blue continues its world premiere at The Tank in NYC, through Dec. 15, 2019. Images, top to bottom: photo by Asya Gorovits; The Tower of Blue Horses, 1913, Franz Marc; two more photos by Asya Gorovits; Yussuf, Prince Of Thebes, 1913, and Yussuf Models His Mother, 1920, each Else Lasker-Schüler; Deer in the Forest, 1914, Franz Marc *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE OFF-TOPIC (11) Published Date : November 16, 2019 Author : amcgovern Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This month, two recurring dreams of the industrial heartland converge, in remembrances of lives lived and left by native sons of the iron wilds, just towns and worlds apart… NOT PICTURED How do we do the things we do? We could have been anything…and when anything doesn’t happen, how do we go on, and how could we have done, said, acted the way we did? How could anything have been different? The Temptations’ refrain runs through much of Frank Santoro’s masterful graphic memoir Pittsburgh, sometimes with accompanying cartoon musical-note symbols, sometimes just as a stage-direction for what’s happening in the background — a chorus come loose from the drama it’s witnessing, seeping away into the horizon, in quiet contrast to those licensed standards that blare over period-piece movies to let you know you’re in the past. Santoro titles his reminiscence after his home town perhaps because he knows he will fade from the scene one day as well. Schooled in temporariness by divorced parents and a long family history of comings and goings (either off to war or not very far, between battling relatives’ different houses), Santoro’s stupendously assured style is made to seem sketchy, preliminary, transient. Often characters are taped into the scene, like paper dolls, rearrangement of possible realities, rough drafts of our own life stories; the figures themselves are just as often modeled with full flesh, but it’s the backdrops that will endure. This itself invokes a kind of movement; the positive propulsion of existing, whether or not you get out of your declining town (as many people in this book do, and even more dream). The streets and alleyways and factories and stores of Pittsburgh, and the wilderness still left beyond and around them, are what stay still, and Santoro’s pans around the industrial vistas and timeless rivers are majestic as well as melancholy. Yet in their stillness, filled with life, even when empty of people and neighborhood dogs — this is not the modern cliché of “setting as character,” but more like the Native American idea of the land being a kind of outer skin for those who exist on it; no matter how ephemeral Santoro’s marks are, the mark of his life and his community’s will remain upon this silent scene. The landscape is pictured at a distance that Santoro seems no longer to desire, and which in any case he can no longer count on; Pittsburgh is like a message-in-a-bottle rolled out on dry land, a time-capsule left aboveground for everyone to see while its sender and main recipients are all still in this world. At one point 6-year-old Frank comes upon his 28-year-old dad journaling in a yellow pad, and begs to read it. His dad has been writing down a nightmare from his time in Vietnam, and misgivings about his homelife that, to his son, might be even more disturbing. “Junior,” as he’s known by everyone, assents to his dad’s plea not to read it; forbidden knowledge in the eden of his youth. We can assume that the grown-up Santoro was shown every word, though there are some things in this book it’s surprising that he’d leave out in the open for himself to read — at one point he tells us, “Even my closest friends know that I’m just a tourist passing through the little town that is our acquaintance” — though he may also be showing us (and himself) that there’s only one way to break the locks on the truth, even if getting ourselves set free is still a work in progress. Admissions like that perhaps redeem the unfilled space of what his dad would not show him. Still, collecting the facts is different than solving the mysteries; as he reads back through his life to make sense of the story, we see some of the unbreakable circles it moves in: Toward the front of the book, Frank’s voiceover remarks that his mom and dad only even speak to each other anymore at funerals, or, “maybe at my wedding, if that ever happens”; more than a hundred pages later, on a drive with his mom when he asks about her and dad speaking again “more than just to say hello at a funeral,” she answers, “Maybe at your wedding, if that ever happens” — and we see how much of our story is pre-written for us; the unknowing echoes of what our elders put in our mouths, and heads. In one remarkable scene, Frank is trying to process revelations from his dad (which cover much of the ground in that long-ago unshared diary entry about his domestic unhappiness); in Frank’s mind’s-eye we’re seeing a row of houses on fire (itself a reference to some disaster his mom mentions briefly but which, in this narrative, remains repressed). As he steadies himself with an internal monologue, we see the houses whole again, as flames rise from Frank’s figure; the fire contained, breathed back into himself, but neither extinguished nor warming. It gives nothing away to note the surrounding, unpopulated portraits of Pittsburgh that end the book; panoramas in a petroleum rainbow, a reverse arcadia to the Hudson River School’s ideals, but home. There are stories yet to end, and futures of uncertainty ahead. But art like Pittsburgh makes the world worth staying in, and the life it records is a book its author is doing his best to keep open. DISAPPEARING INK One artist whose journey into himself remained a solitary one was Steve Ditko, admired and enigmatic creator or co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Shade the Changing Man, Hawk & Dove and Squirrel Girl among many more. He closed the book behind him when he died at age 90 last year, but the quest to paint his portrait from memory has begun, with Lenny Schwartz’s play titled simply Ditko, which had a brief showcase a few days before the start of New York Comic Con 2019. The artist was famous for being elusive, a face not seen in photographs since the early 1960s and seen by most in-person through the sliver of his studio door in an office building near Times Square, where fans and younger fellow professionals would make pilgrimages to discuss the past and typically be turned away while Ditko got back to work. In the play, which is set in his mind but after his death, we enter at the point where the last page will be left blank; the stark white box in which his life replays, sometimes fully within the frame, so to speak, with straight reenactments of events, and sometimes with Ditko commenting from the borders, assessing the moments of his life. Those flash before us — there is a lot to cover in this brisk play — but Ditko himself is an island of calm, dedicated to his craft and stoic in his principles. A native of Johnstown, PA, the genesis of his ceaseless work ethic is clear and well-summarized in the play’s scenes of his modest upbringing (and it is one that viewers will recognize from his fellow rust-belt changeling, Andy Warhol). Disputes with perceived overseers like Stan Lee and dialogues with imagined idols like Ayn Rand define the course of his life as we see it here, and in the end the real Ditko, whoever he may be, disappears back to his drawing board. Derek Laurendeau is deeply moving in the title role, though like the disputed portrayal of Bela Lugosi by Martin Landau in Ed Wood, the feelings may be closer to the truth than to the facts. Those few people I know who knew Ditko paint quite a different picture than the masses had to fill in for themselves, but Laurendeau’s characterization, solitary while not superior, sad yet serene, is a study in decent individuality, whatever the limitations and loneliness, which seems to do an honest honor to the subject. Many think of Ditko as hard to get close to, but the playwright relied on surviving relatives of the artist, none more than his nephew Mark, who is said to have called the role as Schwartz has written it “close enough.” What most of us have to go on from Ditko’s own words are his intricate screeds on creative credit and social ethics. The play often has him embody and orate the positions he took, though Ditko’s colleague and former Marvel Editor in Chief Tom DeFalco, who was in the audience the same night as I, reported that Ditko did not talk the way he wrote: “I always found him very friendly, very open… Steve was a regular guy. I had a coffeepot in my office, and he’d come in, pour himself a cup of coffee, and we would talk about… anything. An article in the newspaper, that sort of thing. Nothing ever personal. I thought back on it, and the strange thing is, he’d come in and we’d talk for an hour or two and then he’d go back to work, and we never once discussed comics!” Though DeFalco’s not depicted in the play, he was the one who brought about the least disputed incident in it, when Ditko and Stan Lee reunited at the Marvel offices to discuss the project which became Lee’s Ravage 2099. Ditko passed, but DeFalco confirms that the spirited idea-session and affectionate reunion we see here was real. As Lee, Geoff White largely leans (quite amusingly) on the public, circus-barker Stan, but at moments like this last meeting (and earlier disputes, even though those may be happening just in Ditko’s head), White also nails the wistful, sentimental Stan behind the curtain, the man who could never understand the ill-will some of his most legendary partnerships ended in. The play doesn’t follow Ditko through much of the long years after, when he was a kind of Salinger-in-plain-sight, profusely turning out his strange, hieroglyphic-like philosophical indie comics; rumored to be living in his studio; reportedly getting generous royalty checks from the Spider-Man movies (which he deserved but denied); and being visited by a steady procession of (often rebuffed) acolytes, well-wishers and gawkers. Part of that story was picked up by another theatregoer the night I was there, comics writer-artist (and my eternal friend and occasional collaborator) Dean Haspiel. “I think…it was four or five times? I went [to see Ditko] not only as a fan, but also to show my work, to just get a review or a thought or something. And I had been working on Cuba: My Revolution at the time for Vertigo. I don’t remember what he said, but he was really intrigued with Castro, and Cuba. And I told him how it was my mom’s friend who had written this story, and he was really interested in that. So I was able to get to talk with him — in the front of his door. He had it cracked open, and he always looked a little disheveled, like he had just buttoned up his shirt, and maybe had one shoe on. The sense you would get was that he was always working, ’cuz that’s what he did. The last time I was near his studio, I elected to not go, because I felt like I would have bothered him at that point. I was just trying to say thank-you. Thank you for all the great work, and for influencing me in some way. And then just trying to talk to a person; get to know this person that famously no one really knows about. … And that’s his right. In a world where everyone is just exposing themselves, 24/7 — he didn’t need to do that.” Now that Ditko is himself a story, those who need to know him will travel back often, and without any more fear of him or his legacy being disturbed. Ditko is a welcome first trip. Images: Uncredited photo of the artist, circa 1959; self-portrait (detail) from Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 (1964); Ditko production photos by Duncan Pflaster *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE OFF-TOPIC (10) Published Date : October 18, 2019 Author : amcgovern Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This month, a reverie on reliquaries in progress and compartmentalized emotions left unlocked… SELF STORAGE The towers of the wealthy can never be too tall or too thin, but the territory of those closer to the ground is spreading ever wider. You see the ultra-slender high-rises climbing like upside-down icicles in the spaces left between the New York City skyline, but those are glass-flute fancies for a fortunate few; the real growth is along the elevated roadways running through the outer boroughs; massive concrete complexes for personal storage, built in fresh cement fortresses or housed in the vast factory buildings where we used to make stuff, given over to our principal post-industrial pastime of accumulating it. The ultra-thins, mostly sold to country-hopping oligarchs, are said to be unoccupied about 10 months out of every 12; the storage bays exceed this by never being inhabited at all. But that isn’t something the two have in common; the towers are trophies of affluence and vacant monuments to owners we’re meant to look up to in every way; the warehouses are filled with the personal effects of masses squeezed from their space and born to stay anonymous. More people than ever live nowhere; waves of displaced refugees are rising due to war, lawlessness and disappearing ecologies. The trail of discarded belongings, of lost belonging itself, marks their passage and leaves a hopeful route back to the past. Storage-blocks frame the dream of buried treasure, even as the map may change unrecognizably around us. Egyptian pharaohs were entombed with their belongings to equip them for the afterlife, but modern materialists like me with no confidence in heaven would be happy to simply be sealed up with our stuff; there is a strange, secret feeling to standing amidst a dark pen of private artifacts whenever I visit the repository where I believe things are kept safe, though in fact, as sea levels advance, my extra possessions are an omen of overflow. In the 1990s as the income gap widened and the walls moved in closer, some of America’s economic hopefuls first started setting up offices inside storage cubes; others were actually starting to live there. (An idea satirized in the final season of Maron, but all too based in fact.) A decade earlier we had feigned humorous horror at the capsule-hotels of our designated commercial nemesis, Japan; the idea of a chest of drawers for humans seemed like crass dystopia, but who wouldn’t want a morgue they can get up from in the morning, a tomb they can walk out of? In Beijing, where the countryside way of life shifts seismically into the metropolis, more than a million poor migrants, in cheap catacombs of old bomb-shelters and office-block basements, now live literally underground, just to complete the metaphor. Across the border of my home state, New Jersey, the ground rises up, in counterfeit mountains built with the tons of garbage we produce, on land leased from arcadian Pennsylvania and covered in soil and seeded grass. New York’s famed Fresh Kills landfill was commonly compared to the Great Pyramid, whose volume it surpassed by 25 times; artist Judith Brodsky satirically pictured a literal even-greater pyramid of garbage, but this vision would never really come true. We want our stuff closed in, not towering over us; in New Jersey’s own northern wastelands, the multicolored shipping containers of Port Newark sprawl, magical boxes of possibility, so profuse their prizes may never be found, but at least so labyrinthian their conjectured terrorist cargos can likely never be located. Right next to that, we wander happily through the mazes of a regional Ikea, where life is folded neatly and we don’t mind when or if we find our way back out. I used to fantasize about how long you could just move from one staged life to another in a store like that, lunching on the porch furniture, chilling in the living room set, sleeping in a different bed each night one step ahead of the security guards. Nomadic wandering without want is the perfect dream of a non-communitarian society; emptiness is our ideal. There is a romance to last-person-alive narratives, with cities-full of consumer goods and books or videos to binge forever; so many popular fantasies look into what our stuffed dolls do when we’re asleep, what the department-store mannequins get up to between closing time and morning. In the ’70s the great powers planned those bombs that would just emit radiation rather than explode, erasing the people but leaving the buildings and contents intact. Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” anticipated the smart home, still looping its intercom pleasantries, sounding wake-up alarms and reading its occupants’ favorite poems aloud after a nuclear war had vaporized them. Cartoonist Ben Katchor, poet of human transience, once said “I grew up in a city, so I saw this dead city of manmade things, and that was a great source of stories. It was a story in itself, just its existence.” The glass towers stand empty and still, the storage-bunkers orderly and undisturbed; the summits of our ambition and the chambers of our deferred joy already evacuated. We’re packed up and there’s a furnished heaven left behind. Before the buildings were even here, Fitzgerald wrote of a primal forest to carve possibility into, but of course it was never unpopulated, and so many of the marks made on it were just damage. Those still moving across the land can hope for a blank slate, and those still standing somewhere above them can dream of a clean one. Images (top to bottom): NYC 2022 (buildings now up or in-progress), by The Skyscraper Museum’s Jose Hernandez and Andrew Nelson; American storage corridor; refugees and migrants from Syria waiting in Greece at the Macedonian border, August 24, 2015 (Amnesty International); capsule hotel in Japan; Maron inside the box; building blocks of Port Newark, NJ *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE COVERED GROUND Published Date : October 1, 2019 Author : amcgovern COVERED GROUND The American dream lingers in sleepy towns, the mountain and backwoods Shangri-La's that outsiders idealize but which even the “left behind” can be dying to get out of. We all know what happened to the woman who tried to leave that fictional paradise — immediate removal from its protections, aging decades in a day — but this is women’s penalty for looking beyond their boundaries, as far back as Eve. It’s a myth we don’t have to believe, but rewriting your own future isn’t easy for anyone. In Annie Nocenti’s Ruby Falls (first issue out tomorrow from Dark Horse Comics/Berger Books), the dream has fallen short of the mountaintop, and blood runs downhill. The old shops are being hollowed out like the iron mines that used to sustain the town, and a restless young woman struggles to make missing pieces add up. Lana is trying to trace the fraying thread of her own family history, intrigued by a traumatic memory her intermittently demented grandma Clara reveals about a possible murder in the bar now run by Greta — Clara’s daughter and Lana’s mom — when Clara was a child and the bar was a speakeasy (the term has never been more ironic than for this tight-lipped family). Ties that unravel are everywhere around us — the silks that Lana’s girlfriend Blair hangs from at her nightjob in a “gentlemen’s” club; the clotheslines that span the alley between Lana’s divorced parents’ places of business (Greta’s saloon and father Blake’s butcher-shop) like sutures coming loose; the tightrope-walk of cats along the clotheslines, which cause personal artifacts to detach and drift to the ground like the autumn leaves that spiral in almost every panel. Lana is trying to excavate a memory, extract some truth, like the miners who once made lives there; however, we can’t tell what if anything Lana’s search can make whole. She races time backwards, delving into many sources that are dematerializing as she seeks — the print newspapers that local librarian Raymond digs out for her; her grandma’s fading and unreliable memory. Clara immerses herself in vintage crime fiction, so it’s hard to tell (and she shifts her claims) about what events come from her life story and which come from mystery plots. But she does lapse into calling her own granddaughter “Betty,” the name of the woman who was killed. Also rebellious and self-possessed like Lana in an era when that put women in even greater danger, this unknown phantom seems in some ways more like Lana’s forbear than either her mom or grandma. Like a seam of ore, a system of veins, the pattern Lana is navigating is right in front of her, and just as hidden. Red punctuates the landscape, from Lana’s hair to the rubies among gems Clara collects, to the blood on Blake’s apron and the red meat in a violent flashback scene, to the legendary red torrent of the iron-tinged waterfalls leading out from the former mountain mines. Literally fallen women, from Betty in the speakeasy to Lana on a safety-net when she tries out trapeze with Blair, are a recurring image in identical position; a chalk outline that any woman could be written into. Do such clues present an exit or just prove that all our story-points are already in place? Filing the blanks — in emotional spaces, in her elders’ memories or honesty — will be Lana’s purpose. The classic noir slat-pattern, from blinds, from high fences, paints many scenes in light and dark, lining through what can be seen and narrowing clarity like the sliding eyehole on an old speakeasy front door. The marquee of a closed movie house drops letters like an unsolvable puzzle, a ransom-note for some abandoned captive. Nocenti is at the summit of her powers, and artist Flavia Biondi lends a luminous, elegant eye and balletic storytelling instinct to this vibrant psychological ghost story. In one remarkable sequence, Clara’s memories gather like a stormfront before she realizes it herself, strewn dollars starting to flutter from her nursing-home ceiling like the leaves in other settings, a puddle of blood seeping toward her feet, until she has descended fully from an everyday conversation with Lana into the crime-scene her buried inner child keeps replaying; if we look closely we see that even the leaves of trees printed on her room’s wallpaper shrivel and drop as this memory gathers, snapping back to normalcy when she’s jolted back into the present — we saw it, but we have no more idea than she or Lana has of what was real. Colorist Lee Loughridge, always one of the best in the medium, has never been better. His pastel gels of amber and violet are veils of perception that can maybe tint our vision but not hide anything, and his palette of southwestern warmth and century-old shadows spills out to surround us; it’s sunset in America, but we live to see the tale. Richard Bruning’s book design is perfect, from the Route 66-roadstop logo to the pastoral endpapers, like a tourist guidebook to a place that can’t exist. Under the surface is a dangerous place for women in the world’s lore as well. Persephone was stolen from the sunlight because the subterranean god of buried bodies and precious gems put a claim on her; Eurydice was pulled back to the caverns of the dead for being looked at by the man she loved. Will Lana’s “descent” be a gift of her ancestors or a downward drop with no return? She has to know, so we will too. *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE OFF-TOPIC (9) Published Date : September 18, 2019 Author : amcgovern Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This time, four points on the map of creation — an audioplay troupe, a cartoonist, a poet, and a troubadour — holding matters (and energy) in their own hands to use modest means to justify new beginnings... OUR ROBOT OVERTIME Kafka thought he was a comedy writer, and sometimes we’re the best audience to our own miseries that we can hope for. We dream of mythic heroes whose story everyone has heard, but most of us, stuck outside it, will spend our day in tales we don’t even want to talk about. Galactic bureaucracy, not empire, is the less-told legend that Life With Althaar records. In the suitably rewired antique form of web radio, this sitcom saga of interspecies relations and deep-space backwaters is the newest frontier of populist experimental theatre troupe Gemini CollisionWorks. We’re in the long day after the future, on a derelict space station just past the dead end. “The Fairgrounds” was a kind of theme park to human achievement, back when that was something special; now it’s just a crumbling space-suburb, home to many lifeforms with nowhere else left to go and staffed by repurposed animatrons who retain their cliched personalities as Mother Jones or Kaiser Wilhelm while they’re checking your baggage or running endless union meetings. Earth loser John B winds up as a repairman on the station, finding himself at risk of futuristic health-and-safety violations on the job and the subject of a grand experiment at home, as the Iltorian Althaar, hailing from the nicest species in the galaxy but causing immediate panic and nausea to humans on sight, takes him in as a roommate and partner in forging a new cross-planetary understanding. Hilarity-if-it’s-not-you ensues, as John and Althaar navigate their differences and both they and everyone else negotiate the uneasy customs and purgatorial regulations of this gridlocked cosmic crossroads. John Amir draws an uncommonly distinctive everyman as John B; Alyssa Simon is vividly otherworldly as sentient cloud, extradimensional presence and resident disinterested deity Lt. Commander Frall; Zuri Washington is electric as contract-captured, way-too-good-for-this saloon singer Delilah “Dee” Mallory; and a demonically clever ensemble keeps the listener comfortably disoriented, especially Amanda La Pergola as proper gentlewoman and talking tree Mrs. Frondrinax; Derrick Peterson as tragic hipster, 28-limbed one-man band and peanut addict (you have to be there) Xtopps; and Ian W. Hill as an array of vaudevillian HistoriBots. Conceived by Hill and Berit Johnson, the workplace dystopia is palpably imagined, recognizably horrifying and vicariously hysterical. At times (as in the laborious second and third episodes) the digressive humor founders in exposition so lengthy it’s not digressing from anything, just suspending the narrative altogether, though even these eps have alleviating aural slapstick (like a harangue about banned peanut products by Hill’s WillhelmBot in ep 2 and the haute shtick and absurd earnestness of David Arthur Bachrach’s humanoid dog emissary in ep 3). But in brilliant episodes like the establishing abandon-hope opener (written by Hill & Johnson themselves); the fourth (written by Amir & Lex Friedman) about John B’s cursed citizenship/humanity status; and the fifth (the most recent one as of this writing, also by Hill & Johnson), a reflection on comfortingly manageable probability vs. satisfyingly self-determined chaos which is itself orchestrated with masterful symmetry and surprise, the series is a wise, deranged parable of the shock of the all-too-familiar and the contentments of the mutually unknown. Even the universe isn’t “universal,” but we’re literally all in it together. I sat down across the limitless void with Hill and Johnson’s digital simulations to codify the brainwaves behind their newest collaboration… HILOBROW: Writers can take intricate care in depicting the everyday world of a science-fictional setting, but almost never focus on the ordinary inhabitants of it. What were your influences and impulses in cultivating this rare genre of kitchen-sink cosmic? HILL: It all really started with Berit’s desire to do some kind of audio project between theatre pieces so we could keep both the company and our audience engaged — a desire I shared, but didn’t want to do until the right idea came along (and one that would only work in an audio format). And then one day… a riff started between us that kept going, and suddenly it was apparent that we were creating a sitcom. Both of us are life-long SF fans, and admirers of the classical sitcom form, so the combo came naturally to us, along with the general SF worldbuilding that we both revel in (as B is better at it, they wound up being the showrunner and final decision-maker on this project). I wound up at various points describing it to myself as a combo of Babylon 5 with Deadwood with NewsRadio with Community, especially as it became clear that while it is a sitcom, the overall structure (and length) wound up pulling more towards a classic hour-long SF series. I think B&I have also always had a fondness for focusing on the people at the fringes of things that actually get things done. JOHNSON: I think the main reason for the “ordinariness” of the inhabitants is the setting of the Fairgrounds — you just don’t end up stuck there if you’re any kind of Big Shot. (Or if you are a Big Shot but don’t want to be, it’s a pretty good place to disappear.) And that’s mainly for comedy reasons — failure is just funnier than success. So, given that, the problems our characters are dealing with kind of have to be more everyday ones — failing to stop an alien genocide or rampaging swarm of murder-bots is hard to make funny. I’d add to the list of reference points both Hitchhiker’s Guide and Red Dwarf, not just because they’re both SF comedies, but because they also take place in a universe where Murphy’s Law trumps the laws of physics, and the characters reel from one disaster for which they’re utterly unprepared to another. HILOBROW: The devised-news narrative format has been with us at least since the Mercury Theatre’s War of the Worlds, but, traveling in the opposite direction out into space, Life With Althaar is the one that really feels like a documentary. Like we’re hearing a raw FaceTime feed that John B left running. Did reality-media make a mark on this method of delirium-verité, or is it just the fruits of some lifetime immersion in speculative and experimental fiction? HILL: I have no interest in “reality-media” as such in any way — it just seemed important to really conjure up the feeling of the locale and the world in a way that, if not really “realistic,” was a solid landscape in which the characters and jokes would best sit. In technical terms, because of the limited budget and equipment we had, I chose to record the dialogue in a somewhat “documentary” way so that it wouldn’t sound as studio-bound as some audio productions. At all times, I imagined myself as present in the actual 3-D space it took place in, and moving through it like a microphone coming in and around the characters and location sounds. This makes for some rough edges in the recording compared to your average audio drama, but I like the energy it brings to the performances and overall feel. JOHNSON: I’m not a reality-TV watcher either, but I think there is a sort of “fish out of water” sub-genre that John’s life might fit into. I could see a 26th century producer in some alternate timeline making John an offer before he took off from Earth, so he’d have a camera drone following him around while he tries to deal with his new life. They’d have to black out the screen whenever Althaar was around, of course. HILOBROW: Being most known for theatre and then embracing audio might seem like a deeper immersion in language exclusively, yet the sound design of this show gives me a richer sense of place than some of your stage productions. Was it important to “compensate,” or more a matter of new spaces (or senses) to conquer, so to speak? HILL: I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with language in theatre — I love writing dialogue, and love good dialogue, but feel there is too much importance placed on spoken words in an art form that is first and foremost about actual bodies moving around in space, before voice even comes into it. In fact, on my last few original plays, I completely staged and blocked the whole thing before writing one word of dialogue! Knowing what people were going to be doing meant they only had to be saying what was absolutely necessary. The physical space of the theater, and the bodies within it, is at the core of all my work in that form. As I have to create that kind of space entirely myself in the audio form, it means creating an entirely new sonic “theatre space” for every location the show takes place in (the other upcoming GCW audio series, The Chickie West Enigmas, on the other hand, takes place in something more like the audio equivalent of a theatrical “void”). In building the sound of the show, I first have to have an idea of where it all takes place before I can put the voices in it effectively. It’s not so much about compensating, as connecting with the same basic creative philosophy in ways that are unique to each medium. JOHNSON: My focus is more on the language side of Althaar, but I absolutely wanted to make sure we defined the setting as clearly as we could with the sound design — any time you’re working on a piece set outside the real world, you have to make sure the audience has enough information to understand what they need to of how your world works. And sometimes “enough” information is a few words, or a quick bleep, or a particular type of background hiss. And then sometimes it’s half a page of exposition, or a few recording hours’ worth of background voices and seventeen layers of background noise. It’s similar to when I’ve built props for SF stage pieces — the best part of it is also the worst, which is that there’s no real-world version of what you’re building. You get to decide what it looks like, but you also have to decide what it looks like, and make sure the audience can pick up on what it is without having seen it before. And, because it doesn’t already exist, you pretty much always have to build it from scratch, rather than being able to pick it up at the 99¢ store (although sometimes you can cobble it together with few things from the 99¢ store and a liberal application of silver spray paint). HILOBROW: Conceptualizing other worlds and far futures is impressive enough, but many writers seem too far removed from the ways people outside their circle live to conceive of them even in the present. Althaar, though, rings true as the work of people who have had to set foot in offices and shop-floors and outside of the shining city (I especially empathized with the indifference of the Recreation Director-bot’s droning voice, the compulsory corporate cheer of the welcome videos, and the bland deadliness of the uninvited luck-consultants). Do you have a hope and interest in making “red” and “blue” America collide? HILL: Hmmmn. Well… honestly, B&I could certainly be seen (and I see myself, certainly) as very privileged, ivory-tower artists with a very fortunate life and lifestyle. That said, both of us come from families that worked, who may have moved from the factory and shop floors to the office towers, but it was within our lifetimes, and when B&I have worked on jobs other than our own art, it was always as “the person with the tools who fixes things.” I’m not sure we see this as a “red” and “blue” or “white-collar” and “blue-collar” thing as much as “the people who get things done” and “the management that really doesn’t know how things work but knows how to ‘advance.’” B&I have great admiration for craft and professionals, and high contempt for empty, useless corporate blather and sloganizing, so as Althaar is filled with regular characters who are good at getting things done, they will often be going up against forces that are simply bureaucratic and empty (and indeed, sometimes even casually murderous in that emptiness). JOHNSON: I’m usually “the person with the tools who shows up to fix things” in my art as well! I’d add that some of the day job experiences of our writers and other company members have already made their way into Althaar, and I’m sure they’ll keep doing so. ([Space-barkeep] Chip’s rant at the security goons at the end of Ep 1 is only about half scripted, and the other half was ad-libbed by [his actor] real-life bar owner/manager Chris Lee, for example.) But yes, we are both very much on the side of “the people who actually make things that need making,” with the understanding that art is one of those things. Images (top to bottom): Althaar logo by Dean Haspiel; rough Fairgrounds schematics by Berit Johnson; Althaar’s control panel; the writers’ and /or actors’ room, partial cast (clockwise from bottom-left, Amanda La Pergola, Berit Johnson, Lex Friedman, Ivanna Cullinan, John Amir, Chris Lee, and Philip Cruise); a salient Althaar script fragment; Zuri Washington in the holodeck nightclub as Johnson appreciates. SACRED SCROLLING We try to climb the sky, but it falls past us faster. It’s as if the friezes and tapestries of ancient epic have been turned on their side, the vertical roll of the electronic screen pouring living memory and human effort to the bottom. The stories in our hands progress as our fingers climb down them; to go forward we must dive deeper. Dean Haspiel’s online comic STARCROSS plummets Icarus-like from the firmament for its morality and meaning to rise to Earth. The third series in Haspiel’s The Red Hook cycle (itself one branch of the “New Brooklyn” stories which also include Vito Delsante & Ricardo Venancio’s The Purple Heart also on Webtoons and, full disclosure, my own Aquaria with Paolo Leandri and Dom Regan in print at Image), STARCROSS crowns the narrative from a teetering beanstalk. It began with the titular hero, a palooka turned costumed burglar, hewing close to the cracking pavement of his native Brooklyn — at least until the anomaly of the borough’s tectonic “secession” from its adjacent New York landscape unleashes celestial forces that push him into a life of good deed-ing. The Red Hook wrestles with his base (and humble) instincts of self-interest and a higher calling bequeathed by a cosmic hero who happens to die in his path and affect a kind of angelic possession. Long story, but the tension between Red Hook’s street scale and the grandeur of his mission has always been a tug of war between the mortal and divine, the pedestrian and quantum. In his first series the ground held him (and his lover and crime-partner The Possum ended up under it); in the second War Cry, the sky collapsed on them both as she was resurrected in the form of a planetary protector by secret doomsday-failsafe protocols (longer story); in STARCROSS the horizon and the material world reunite after an ordeal that takes our heroes to heaven and back. Common causes are the staples that bind Haspiel’s universe, and those who go it alone stay that way and end up nowhere. Epic pairs are the nucleus of his work, from the sex god and goddess Billy Dogma and Jane Legit to The Red Hook (Sam) and War Cry (Ava) here; the more circles of humanity that radiate out from these unions, the more gets done. When Jane and Billy’s balance is stormy, the world shakes and whole communities take to the streets and take matters (or each other) into their own hands to restore harmony; in STARCROSS the sun is going out from human coldness and Sam & Ava must figuratively and literally reignite it. Along the way they must cross dimensions, argue with uncaring gods, and share profound sacrifices; Haspiel understands that the most superlative stakes are those that affect each person, and the scale of his monumental menace is measured by the intimacy of his focus. STARCROSS is an epic for a post-solitary century; the kind of quest defined not by what prize you bring back, but by what precious values you leave the world. FLESHWORDS Distances are just intervals, viewed from a distance, and at each distance we’ve closed the last one; opening unfolds us at a different point each time, moving away from the dividing line that holds our past crossed paths in place. The split cell creates equal opposites, the irrefutable 1 the seam in the infinite zero, crack in the egg, possibilities shedding in particle shells at each step we take, pages falling apart but bound, pressed leaves dropping out in random destiny, no straight line between them but the slash, leaning in and swinging back, the rorschach origami collapse and burst of the breathing universe. Wendy Chin-Tanner’s fractal, tidal phrasings set associations alongside and interchanging with each other as on a celestial scale. The mirror tells you what you haven’t seen, not what you already know, and the void these poems look into is the expanse inside herself and the universe arrayed beyond. The transmutation of starfish to baby’s hands, of fallen birds to flailing fins, crescent moons and scythes and the sweep of clockworks carving days and years, is a prima materia of perception whose seeing can shape any idea; the vibration between terms alphabetically and homophonically adjacent and conceptually combustible in connection (“woe woven/we are rain/wet wool weight/and weft we/wait for no/one waiting”) converts language to a geometric, runelike frame around a pane of pure understanding. The natural world as seen and sought by the city child Chin-Tanner was, made tiny in its profusion; the seeds of thought which grow a reality in the abyss’ black starless soil; the tiny lives she imbues in her children, who will outgrow her and leave her unbreakably rooted in the bloodline of family and culture; the myriad minutes of an intimate history that she sorts to make meaning of, like the collected scraps of that rampant, magnanimous natural world — the mark we make is a pebble thrown upon the frozen pond of existence; the cracked pattern that creates can be mistake or miracle, and Wendy Chin-Tanner’s leap is true. THE SOUL OF GEEK-FOLK Just because apocalypse becomes real doesn’t guarantee it will be exciting. We’re in a fight for our survival right now, but decency rather than perfection, integrity rather than “power,” is the best weapon we have (even if it weren’t also the only one in this real world). Performing as Kirby Krackle, singer-songwriter Kyle Stevens and a rotating cohort have been touring comic shops and conventions for ten years (as well as scoring cartoons and opening for Weird Al Yankovic), standing out not so much for setting comics, games and genre fiction/TV to music as for speaking to the hearts of the misfits (and then mainstream) who relate to these fantasies. A similar human scale is set in Stevens’ latest (and first truly solo) album, Suburban Hearts/Vigilante Hymns, which temporarily throws down the gear of Kirby Krackle’s usual full rock ensemble and sound-effects for a solitary-guitar, acoustic anthem model. I’m sure Stevens felt the time was right to reinvent social-comment folk for an era of paring down paraphernalia and traveling lean as our way of life tries to kill us and we talk back to the leaders who don’t see that’s a bad idea. The title song starts out strong in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent; Stevens is a nerdcore Michael Franti where compelling sincerity and sharing sentiments hidden in your heart is concerned. In “Broken Compass,” Stevens’ voice on each verse comes in before the last one has faded out, as if the urgency of the moment compounds the persistence needed, and even alone he must model a communal effort while not literally getting ahead of himself. The chain of family from home to human race is tended to in manifestos of love to his wife like “You & I” and to their daughter in “Happy & Free.” The latter rates with David Bowie’s “Kooks” as a wise, whimsical legacy from one kid to another, though the former gets too attached to its refrain and would linger perfectly in my mind without the extra two minutes it lingers on record. “Not My Fault,” addressed elliptically to an abuse survivor, no doubt means a great deal to the singer, but reliance on well-known recovery mottos and escalating his emoting to an almost seemingly exhibitionist level gets in the way of its personal connection. But everything builds to one of his masterworks, “Lay It on the Line,” whose tossing-seas rhythm and deep-carved chords ground vows of staying yourself and never forgetting others; “Oh, This Year” closes the cycle with a warm, wondrous sunset-cowboy song of bedrock ethics which reminds us that calm can come from resolution, not just resignation. The sound of one person, his voice and hands, Suburban Hearts/Vigilante Hymns is a living record of how much we can do with how little they can’t take away. *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (8) Published Date : August 8, 2019 Author : amcgovern One of 25 installments in a series of enthusiastic posts analyzing and celebrating some of our favorite action movies from the Seventies (1974–1983). * QUINTET | d. ROBERT ALTMAN | 1979 The 1970s saw a lot of action on the drive-in and grindhouse screen, but back home and on the street the decade mostly felt like entropy. The bleak decay of cold war and world recession triggered reflexes of drugged numbness in everyday life and cathartic bloodshed at the movies. Robert Altman saw through to the persistent sense of menace, and wound the pace all the way down, in his 1979 anti-actioner Quintet. It’s slow-motion chase, funereal casino, glamour-free survival struggle; all the attributes of midcentury adventure fantasy are here, but seem suspended in ice. Figuratively — a refracted haze frames the screen from start to finish — and literally, as the film takes place during a future ice age, picturing the remnants of humanity temporarily hanging on. Filmed entirely on location during winter in the exposed ruins of Montreal’s utopian “Expo 67” site, the harshness of the scenario radiates to the viewer; a fire of sympathetic suffering to place us in the middle of the drama more deeply than many a spectatorial military or martial-arts thriller would. This movie is made not to adrenalize but mesmerize. We follow protagonist Paul Newman’s every move as he trudges around the skeletal complex that seems made entirely of steel stairs and mirrored windows, following the mysterious man who has just murdered his family, until a third man equally inexplicably slits the first one’s throat. We shift in the uncomfortable inevitability as other characters (all marked as each other’s prey in a real-stakes role-playing game that these last humans use to pass the end-times) meet with crude, intentionally conspicuous mutilations or impalements, or as another background extra is found eaten by dogs or dead of frostbite. Foreboding keeps us frozen to the screen. Quintet was widely seen as one of Altman’s worst follies, but its stoic tone, stilted speech, stark aesthetic and somnambulant pace create one of the most cohesive works of art and convincing other worlds in this entire era of moviemaking. And one of the least obvious allegories of the desolate, deceptively festive times in which it was made. A “golden age” of film was waning, authorities were never to be respected again, and Quintet closed up the decade with a hero’s journey to nowhere. *** CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION | Madeline Ashby on BLADE RUNNER | Erik Davis on BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA | Mimi Lipson on CONVOY | Luc Sante on BLACK SUNDAY | Josh Glenn on THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR | Lisa Jane Persky on SORCERER | Devin McKinney on THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE | Adam McGovern on QUINTET | Mandy Keifetz on DEATH RACE 2000 | Peter Doyle on SOUTHERN COMFORT | Jonathan Lethem on STRAIGHT TIME | Heather Kapplow on THE KILLER ELITE | Tom Nealon on EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE | Mark Kingwell on THE EIGER SANCTION | Sherri Wasserman on ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK | Gordon Dahlquist on MARATHON MAN | David Levine on PARALLAX VIEW | Matthew Sharpe on ROLLERBALL | Ramona Lyons on ALIEN | Dan Piepenbring on WHITE LINE FEVER | Marc Weidenbaum on THIEF | Carolyn Kellogg on MAD MAX | Carlo Rotella on KUNG FU | Peggy Nelson on SMOKEY & THE BANDIT | Brian Berger on FRIDAY FOSTER. MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW KLAATU YOU (2020 weekly): ZARDOZ | METROPOLIS | DARK STAR | SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS | SOLARIS | & dozens of other pre-STAR WARS sci-fi movies. CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2019): THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE | ROLLERBALL | BLACK SUNDAY | SORCERER | STRAIGHT TIME | & 20 other Seventies (1974–1983) action movies. SERIOCOMIC (2019 weekly): LITTLE LULU | VIZ | MARSUPILAMI | ERNIE POOK'S COMEEK | HELLBOY | & dozens of other comics. TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2018): LOONEY TUNES | THREE STOOGES | THE AVENGERS | ROCKY & BULLWINKLE | THE TWILIGHT ZONE | & 20 other Fifties (1954–1963) TV shows. WOWEE ZOWEE (2018 weekly): UNISEX | UNDER THE PINK | DUMMY | AMOR PROHIBIDO | HIPS AND MAKERS | & dozens of other Nineties (1994–2003) albums. KLUTE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2017): THE KILLERS | BANDE À PART (BAND OF OUTSIDERS) | ALPHAVILLE | HARPER | BLOW-UP | & 20 other Sixties (1964–1973) neo-noir movies. #SQUADGOALS (2017 weekly): THE WILD BUNCH | BOWIE'S BAND | THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP | THE HONG KONG CAVALIERS | VI ÄR BÄST! & dozens of other squads. GROK MY ENTHUSIASM (2016 weekly): THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LUNCH | WEEKEND | MILLION YEAR PICNIC | LA BARONNE EMILE D'ERLANGER | THE SURVIVAL SAMPLER | & dozens more one-off enthusiasms. QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2016): "Tainted Love" | "Metal" | "Frankie Teardrop" | "Savoir Faire" | "Broken English" | & 20 other Seventies (1974–1983) new wave singles. CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2015): DARKER THAN YOU THINK | THE SWORD IN THE STONE | OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET | THIEVES' HOUSE | QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST | & 20 other Thirties (1934–1943) fantasy novels. KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2014): ALDINE ITALIC | DATA 70 | TORONTO SUBWAY | JOHNSTON'S "HAMLET" | TODD KLONE | & 20 other typefaces. HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2013): "Spoonin' Rap" | "Rapper's Delight" | "Rappin' Blow" | "The Incredible Fulk" | "The Adventures of Super Rhyme" | & 20 other Seventies (1974–1983) hip-hop songs. KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2012): Justice or vengeance? | Kirk teaches his drill thrall to kiss | "KHAAAAAN!" | "No kill I" | Kirk browbeats NOMAD | & 20 other Captain Kirk scenes. KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2011): THE ETERNALS | BLACK MAGIC | DEMON | OMAC | CAPTAIN AMERICA | & 20 other Jack Kirby panels. OFF-TOPIC (8) Published Date : August 6, 2019 Author : amcgovern Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This time, a brief spell in possibility with two of the local architects of existence… HELL IS EACH OTHER We may all be headed for a cosmic drain, but it’s the circling that matters. With the Dirt [contained] Theatre Company’s Crushing Baby Animals, I feel I may have seen my first true gesamtkunstwerk — and nobody even sneezed. Only the performers were hurt during the making of this production, and that was years ago anyway. Staged in the semi-labyrinth of Long Island City Artists’ Plaxall Gallery, we follow like a group tour of the abyss as “Tana” and “Maria” (played by the play’s creators, Tana Sirois and Maria Swisher) struggle to conceive a career-defining Dante’s Inferno but end up spiraling down the rabbit-holes of their own psyches. Actually it’s a high hell; the close creative partners come to realize they’ve each had the identical recurring dream since childhood, in which they are straining to save a multitude of innocent creatures from a tornado but only end up dropping and crushing them. It’s a nightmare we’re only surprised more people don’t have in the era of climate anxiety and kids in cages, but in the world of the performance, this crossing of threads in the collective unconscious causes a wormhole to open which sends Tana and Maria on a quantum quest through possible universes and their own unreliable pasts. Many worlds and pearls of wisdom build around the grain of sand that was their original intention, as Dante, Beatrice and Virgil disappear deeper into the shadows and the crumpled drafts of Tana and Maria’s careers and personal history collage into a masterwork. As the cosmic pond-rings expand, the two encounter mirror versions when they orbit nearby, including “The Whitecoats,” higher-dimensional spectators who simultaneously cheer on and heckle the mortal Tana and Maria, like affectionate but arbitrary Greek deities (or the inspiring yet uncaring universe we write a plot for by imagining such beings). Traumatic memories recur like musical motifs; Tana and Maria go up to the precipice and dance at the apocalypse; multiple personae and mobile settings make all the stage a world; and a supercollision of film, lightshow, philosophy-dumps, animal balloons and a surrounding thematic art exhibit splatter the atmosphere with an action-painting of the id. “We’ve got to go there,” the characters tell themselves in reference to hell or the horizon of experience or the plateaus of creative risk or the unreachable, inescapable past; and yeah, they just went there. I spoke with their offstage incarnations about still more of what they brought back. HILOBROW: You two do some of the most linguistic dancing I’ve ever seen — it doesn’t feel like a break in the story but like bridges through it. Dramas of avoidance and reconciliation, struggle and resolution, are moved forward just in the body language. I’ve heard it said dance was probably the first artform, and it’s easy to imagine that gesture preceded speech. Is the line between our bodies and minds, our movements and thoughts an illusory one? SWISHER: Part of what we are exploring in Crushing Baby Animals is that the lines between everything are illusory. Whether that’s the line between you and your surroundings, your thoughts and the collective unconscious, the past and the present. As humans we divvy things up into categories that are sometimes helpful but are always contextual. And yes, one of the most pervasive of these is the idea that our minds are us, piloting around our bodies like a small alien operating a big machine. It seems like there are ways of knowing that are hard to access from the thinking brain, and ways that the thinking brain can tie itself up in knots without access to a more embodied perspective. Movement is a powerful tool to understand our existence. Which is one reason we don’t like the audience to sit and consume the entire show from their seats. The play is a journey that moves the body through space and through ideas woven together. HILOBROW: That might relate to perceived breaches between decision and action. Theoretical physicists will tell us that “the universe has already decided” everything we’re going to do, that we’re playing out a script along the only timeline we can exist in. Does this matter, if the tapestry is too immense to make out, and gives us room to follow as many of our own unique threads through it as we ever could in a lifetime? SIROIS: “Following the unique threads,” as you put it, seems to be a very important part of the conscious human experience. (In fact, “making the ‘right’ choice” is a huge theme in our play.) Even after Tana and Maria have made it to point B, and seem to have a better understanding of their place in the universe, they still experience attachment to concepts and to their individual identities. It’s very hard not to! Tana and Maria do eventually experience the euphoria and joy in giving yourself over to life — to fully investing, experiencing, and yes, feeling; while also developing an ability to step back from it all and by holding on (loosely) to this idea that perhaps our choices don’t hold quite as much weight as we thought. We call it play. HILOBROW: Free will, the ability to affect the course of our existences, relates to a preoccupation with underlying mechanisms, sometimes at the expense of appreciating the beauty of complete systems. The characters in Crushing Baby Animals share this obsession, getting in the way of the writing of their own story. But as their creators you seem to have figured out how to be enacting and observing, creating and critiquing at the same time. Might you have any tips for the rest of us? :-) SWISHER: Tips? Haha. As Tana and Maria’s Doppelgangers point out, “Only a really fucked-up individual would create a play with the goal of teaching themselves and the audience how to live an enlightened life in less than two hours.” Which I suppose is our way of saying, these things are all worth thinking about, but also feeling and moving through physically, without too much attachment. It’s important to take time to be more aware, more compassionate, more connected to our place in what you call the beauty of complete systems. It’s what astronaut Edgar Mitchell described when returning from his trip to the moon as a sense of “the ecstasy of unity.” Tana and Maria go through a process, beginning by feeling trapped in their traumas, the things that have happened to them and the place they are, overwhelmed negatively by their place in a huge universe. Then they have an unexplained dream that makes them wonder if there is more going on that what appears on the surface, metaphorically, meeting their Whitecoat selves. Through this process of trying to figure out who and what is really in control they allow themselves to oscillate back and forth between realizing the power of their own beings, and realizing that ultimately they are but twigs on the mighty steam of some larger giant beautiful but ultimately deterministic universe. Maybe all they can change is their attitude towards that, not letting the knowledge “make them flabby” … as a mysterious hamster in the show later points out. After one performance of CBA we spoke to a young man who said he wasn’t sure if he got it. So we asked him to tell us what he took from the show: “So Tana and Maria want to make a play, but it’s really hard. Then they meet the Whitecoats, who are versions of them, but ones that don’t care about the little stuff so much. And we all have Whitecoats. Is that right?” I think that kid hit the nail on the head. We can afford to allow ourselves the experience of being humans, in the thick of the battle with feelings and emotions, and pains and sufferings, and also be able to have versions of ourselves that can step outside and see a larger picture. Both of these ways of knowing are crucial. HILOBROW: The elusiveness of objectivity is felt especially intensely in the scenes about “Tana” and “Maria”’s conflicts of aesthetics and personality. The fights feel so immediate and impassioned, though they must be meticulously composed — and reconstructed from moments in our lives that are among the least thought-out, and thus must be the hardest to analyze afterward. How do you access such intense emotional recall while keeping removed from it? SIROIS: Well, it’s no secret that the “real world Tana and Maria” scenes are built from our own experience as artists making work together. I would say, anything “meticulous” that happens in the scenes, is a result of us as individual actors making sure we know exactly what we want, and how we feel about anything that might come up in the improvisation so we can respond with as much truth as possible. The argument scenes are actually the scenes that change the most from each performance to the next, because although they are “structured” improv, we try to let the scenes drive themselves, taking us through different versions of conflict each night. These conflict scenes aim to explore what it’s like to simultaneously feel the need to protect ourselves, ask for what we want, and ultimately experience connectivity in each other. HILOBROW: Certain wishes and ambitions must remain eternally unreachable or else it’s not an Inferno — the way that the grand statement the characters want to make stays just out of their grasp is a clever cosmic joke about the existential mourning of their literary model. And yet Crushing Baby Animals is “about” so much more than just its circular self — childhood personal trauma, adult civic helplessness, recurrent self-doubts, contemplation overload. Is the secret to be still, at the center, and truly see the truths swirling around us, rather than fixating on “getting somewhere”? SIROIS: Getting somewhere can definitely be a trap, but staying still at the center of it all doesn’t sound like a very rich life experience, either. I think it’s about finding a balance. The journey to “get somewhere” can be great fun and result in beautiful growth, but if we cling to our ideal outcome and deliberate over our choices too much, we miss the joy and calm in embracing our lack of control. I mean, I think we should definitely vote. And recycle. And absolutely allow ourselves to care deeply about the things we care deeply about. But yes, there is a power in learning to be still, at the center of it all when that is what you need. SWISHER: Knowing that we are “waterfalls and not rocks” as the Whitecoats point out, means acknowledging process as part of existence, that I am not now what I was one minute ago. Letting go of expectation, and living in a sort of beautiful discomfort and danger that allows for newness and transformation, whether that is through stillness or suffering or chaos. There is space for all of that, and a need for Inferno to come to moments of Paradiso. “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” — T.S. Eliot HILOBROW: Circus and spectacle seem to be built-in human needs, from tribal ritual to traveling pantomime to The Avengers. And you stir in much of it: silent-movie slapstick, Marx Brothers-ist mad scholarship, corporate team-building, sci-fi farce, downhome singalong, Broadway kitsch, and obligatory 1960s-movie acid-trip scenes. Are these and other elements things you feel are just fun to include because of their incongruousness, or things you feel are equally legitimate and worth incorporating? SWISHER: A lot of what we do with our work and have pushed to the brink with Crushing Baby Animals is the stylistic disintegrity. It’s along the lines of what Augusto Boal talks about in his work with political theatre for the masses, as well as what Peter Brook is talking about in The Empty Space when he refers to “Holy Theatre.” It’s also, by the way, what Mary Poppins talks about when she says “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Genre shifting is super Boalian, and something we’ve been attracted to for a long time. It’s an attempt to meet people where they are, to be utterly specific in the way we address audiences, using their languages. It is the feeling of recognizing something very familiar, something pop-culture, or that allows us to twist it very slightly, and reintroduce for critical distance. CBA is fast, it uses montage, it is a collage of incongruous elements, and it attempts to touch people on a primal, visceral, emotional level, without getting stuck in that area too long. It’s also a show created for audiences experiencing the world digitally, in redigested chunks. This is a way of not only exploring the everythingness of a multiverse lorded over by two Joker-like characters, but a way of allowing us to dis-integrate, to break things down, to push them to their limit and then, just when the audience nears fatigue, to look at them from an opposite angle. Giving ourselves the freedom to ask, “what is the best language to discuss what we want to discuss,” regardless of whether we break rules, ultimately leads to a very Circus-like feel. It is thought out with a lot of specificity, given a container, so to speak, and then allowed to be as dirty as possible. That’s the idea anyway. HILOBROW: Did you at any point write dialogue or storylines for each other’s character? SIROIS: We definitely wrote dialogue for each other (specifically some of the more direct descriptions of each other’s pasts… there is a type of truth achieved when writing about someone else that’s difficult to find when you’re writing about yourself). Honestly, I think we wrote the majority of the show without a huge thought as to which character was saying which line. It’s not uncommon for us to trade lines in the performance depending on which one of us feels compelled to jump in. It’s challenging to even remember whose line is whose, sometimes! I always like when that happens though (even if it throws a bit of momentary panic into the scene for us as actors), because it shows that although Tana and Maria (or Whitecoat Tana and Whitecoat Maria) often seem to be in perpetual conflict, they are also so often on the same page, wanting the same thing. (Crushing Baby Animals next collapses into a black box at Greenwich Village’s pioneering IRT Theatre, August 6-9, 2019; keys to the universe here) Photos (top to bottom) by George McClintock (1, 2, 6) and William Hopkins (3, 4, 5, 7); poster image by Katelyn Kopenhaver (photos) and Marco Baratto (design) *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE OFF-TOPIC (7) Published Date : July 20, 2019 Author : amcgovern Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This month, some revelations from a behind-the-scenes wizard of sound on what the record doesn’t show. INTO THE ARENA [caption id="attachment_127567" align="alignnone" width="550"] Influences and powder burns worn on the sleeve…(covers to Issues #1 and 2 of Gunning for Hits) [/caption] You’re not Martin Mills, and neither is he. An American Sociopath at home in the 1980s music business and hiding a previous career as an unspecified assassin, Mills makes millions by spotting the rarest talent and richest target audiences while moving unnoticed in the Dayglo Decade’s garish habitat, one of many creating obscene wealth undercover in the golden age of surface. He’s nothing like his kindly twin Jeff Rougvie, indie record-exec and natural storyteller, who has a genie’s-bottle-full of industry legends he’s sealed Martin safely into, starting with the runaway-success debut comic, Gunning for Hits (from Image). Entertainment and criminality have been in a duet for as far back as either goes, and GfH is like Rougvie’s doppelganger diary of a crass and cutthroat culture in contrast to the career of inspiration and integrity he’s actually had… though truth and fiction have been dancing around each other and making beautiful music for millennia too. The series’ first arc (premiering in collected form at San Diego Comic Con around the time you read this) holds a funhouse filter to Rougvie’s real-life years as a new hire handed the repackaging of David Bowie’s catalog (and rehabilitation of his career) at the Ryko label as the ’90s loomed; in GfH the prematurely grizzled Mills tries to resuscitate his hero “Brian Slade” while cultivating the next craze and fighting off his own extinction in the corporate ecology. (Slade is of course yet another layer of tear-away personality, sharing a name but traveling a separate timeline from the Bowie-analog in Velvet Goldmine .) Cartoonist Moritat expresses the absurdities and intensities of this lost, recent world with a multi-octave visual voice, and Rougvie’s own ear is unerring for natural speech, period detail, psychological truth and wild wit, all plotted as tensely as the best of crime-lit and wound tightly as the sharpest clockwork farce. Rougvie and I got together to talk optional identities, revisionist reality and inescapable pasts. [caption id="attachment_127568" align="alignnone" width="550"] Art references so-called life (from Gunning for Hits #1, art by Moritat)[/caption] HILOBROW: One of the main things that fascinated me about your comic is how it seemed to follow the roads-not-taken, albeit through times that we definitely recognize and remember. The Brian Slade character, for one thing, is almost this shadow biography of all the worst rumors and negative impressions that people had of Bowie. Did you make that decision to kind of tell the story of all the people that you and your associates were not? ROUGVIE: Bowie got to [a] point in the ’80s where he could’ve said, “Y’know, who cares? I’m selling millions of records and getting huge advances from EMI. I’ll just keep making these,” what he called his “Phil Collins records” [laughter]. And instead he put together Tin Machine, which was a great way to challenge himself artistically, but got him dropped from the label, and put him in a very difficult position for five or six years. I started working with him [in] 1989, right before the Tin Machine record came out. As a small company, we had invested a ton of money in his back catalog. We never had any doubt he’d regain his stature, so to speak, and his back catalog would continue to be popular. But there was a brief minute where it did cross my mind, what if he kept making records that didn’t connect and ended up playing state fairs in 1999? You never know. Luckily for us he made all the right choices. So the idea [for GfH] was, what if he hadn’t been such a genuine artist, but somebody who didn’t have [as much] integrity or drive? [caption id="attachment_127569" align="alignnone" width="550"] The real Bowie was even on the bleeding edge of satirizing Bowie (from the Jazzin’ for Blue Jean video, 1984; to Jonathan Rhys Myers, Velvet Goldmine, 1998) [/caption] HILOBROW: You’re probably too modest to answer, but how much of a role did the Sound + Vision project have in restoring his confidence? ROUGVIE: It forced him to reassess his back catalog, and helped him appreciate how great those records were and where they were going to fit into his overall legacy. Also the pretense of the Sound + Vision tour was that he was no longer going to play any of his best-known songs live, ever again. When you’re letting go of almost all your hits, you’ve forced yourself into a corner and the only option is to fight your way out. The reception to the Sound + Vision campaign helped reestablish him as an artist at the right time in the minds of a lot of the public, and it introduced him to new generations, but the challenges he gave himself subsequently really made the difference in his career going forward. HILOBROW: I guess Sound + Vision was the ground-zero of a pattern where, whenever he had something new out, there would be a retrospective project too, for the rest of his career. ROUGVIE: As he got older, he was thinking a lot about his mortality, what his legacy was going to be and how to frame it. You look at a lot of rockstars’ careers, and the legacy is not well-curated; his is very well-curated. It helps that there are all these different Bowies that are entry points for people. That’s the ultimate genius of the whole thing. That’s one of the reasons why I like the idea of using the Brian Slade character; I think now that Bowie’s gone, he would like us to create more Bowies. [caption id="attachment_127570" align="alignnone" width="550"] Looking over reality’s shoulder (from Gunning for Hits #4, art by Moritat) [/caption] HILOBROW: In many ways, Martin Mills seems to be playing more of a role than any of Slade’s passing personas. Could anyone pass themself off as someone they’re not (or I guess, an extra person that they are) quite that way in the era of omnipresent self-surveilling social media? Is he an artifact of a time when that kind of secrecy was possible? Or is he just one of the many heirs of Bowie-esque self-invention? ROUGVIE: It’s a bit of both. Martin’s figuratively living off the grid, but in this fairly glamorous world. He’s partly doing that himself, but there’s some outside assistance we haven’t met yet that keeps him from having to deal with the remnants of his past. On the other hand, when I wrote this, I was thinking about how Bowie just blended into New York, even into this century when there were cameras everywhere. I love that about New York; people really don’t care. And Martin is not a person who’s ever sought celebrity… later on in the series, there is a point where he becomes very well-known, and it’s a problem for him and other people [laughter]. But unless you’re on the cover of a magazine, or movies or TV — or even if you are — most of the time nobody cares… I breezed past Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris from Coldplay just walking in Union Square and nobody was bothering them, they were just out eating ice cream. HILOBROW: It’s like one big stage set. ROUGVIE: The New York thing is, “we’re all in it together” — you treat people the way you want to be treated or it goes sideways fast in New York. [caption id="attachment_127572" align="alignnone" width="550"] Music Monopoly, as narrated by Martin Mills (from Gunning for Hits #1, art by Moritat) [/caption] HILOBROW: [Laughs] Speaking of Martin’s story, I’m curious about his “journal entries” on Twitter (@MartinMillsHits); do you excerpt them from lengthier texts you have, or are you just composing the narrative from these fragments as you go along? ROUGVIE: I’d had this story in mind for a long time, and the Martin character came along later. When I sat down to write this arc, I ended up writing his whole life story. It’s not as fleshed out as [the comic], but I know what happens and when. HILOBROW: You’ve said that one of your own roads-not-taken (’til now) was making comics; did an interest in visual narrative connect your love of comics with love of an artist like Bowie who was so much about the visual? ROUGVIE: Yeah, very much. When I first started getting into music as a teenager, if you saw the cover of Destroyer and were reading comics, you just bought that record. My feeling is, of course, you can make great music in jeans and a leather jacket. Music doesn’t require you to be very image-conscious; Tom Petty’s a perfect example of that. By the same token, if you’re going out on stage and giving people a show, do something big, if you can, or have ideas that are more than that. It is “show business” after all, and that visual stuff does really put it over for me. KISS records are not particularly masterful, but there’s just something great about the big dumb spectacle of it all that, to me, sells the whole package. And if Gene Simmons would stop doing interviews I probably would still be a huge KISS fan! [laughter] But I do think that that’s part of it, and — unless you go too far, I don’t think anybody’s ever been ruined by refining their visual image. I would much rather go to a Janelle Monáe show than, I dunno, see Miscellaneous Guy-With-Beard. [caption id="attachment_127574" align="alignnone" width="550"] Plastic soul: The demon-possessed “Derek Crowley” vs. KISS (from KISS: Blood and Stardust #3 and 5, words by Bryan Edward Hill, art by Rodney Buchemi; Dynamite Entertainment) [/caption] HILOBROW: I loved what you wrote in the regular comic’s backmatter about how you said to Moritat, “It’s set in the ’80s but it shouldn’t all look like a Nagle drawing.” Comics that are true to their period are rare, but GfH does feel that way, without being just, like, a fossil of big hair and shoulderpads set in amber. I know it started brewing in your mind at the end of the ’80s, and you’ve been kind of adding to the past as you developed the story. What are your thoughts on keeping it believable to its period, yet feeling as immediate as it does? ROUGVIE: I think if the story works, the period you choose to put it in can either enhance or detract. If you look at the Gunning for Hits logo, it’s based on the Compact Disc logo. And that’s important, because during the CD era, the business was really changing. The label guys who were real maverick lunatics that started labels and either got lucky or were good at picking artists were imperiled. These people wouldn’t sink loads and loads of money into records, but they would keep an artist’s career going. Nearly all those guys get bumped out during the ’80s, because the big corporations are realizing, hey, they own all these recordings, and people will buy them again on CD, so we, the big corporations, are going to come in and buy up all these labels, because it’s boom time. That’s a bad turning point in the history of the music business; and New York is also undergoing this crazy gentrification, where the artists are getting forced out of Soho. That world that spawned punk and downtown artists is changing forever. In a broad sense, one of the things, amongst many, that Gunning for Hits is about, is the balance of art and commerce, and how does that work. The ’80s were a time when that balance was really under fire. So I’m using the series to explore that, but I definitely didn’t want to dress it up in all of the clichés of the ’80s. [caption id="attachment_127575" align="alignnone" width="550"] A web of many layers (from Gunning for Hits #3, art by Moritat) [/caption] HILOBROW: Talking about the crossroads of art and commerce in the ’80s is interesting, since one thing that struck me about some of the dates for entries in Martin’s journal on Twitter is that he somehow survived longer than the record industry as we knew it. ROUGVIE: He did, even if a handful of people would argue the music business is thriving, although I disagree. I haven’t decided when I’m going to jump around time-wise; the next storyline does take place right after this one. But there are things to tell about Martin’s past that we’ll need to get to before we can get up to the present… and I think I’ve said this before, but he’s dead now; in 2019 he’s dead. So there’s a definite end. And there’s a specific incident where he’s finally had enough with the music business, and that is one of the best story ideas I’ve ever had, if I do say so myself. I’d guess I have about a hundred Martin Mills stories. I printed out calendars for every year that has significant events in his life, and annotated the dates where things happen. So I’ve got about 15 binders full of calendars with Martin’s story in them. HILOBROW: Binders full of Martin, I can’t wait to see everything that’s in the vault! [caption id="attachment_127577" align="alignnone" width="550"] A different set of books, or, The Return of Martin Someone [/caption] *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE OFF-TOPIC (6) Published Date : June 17, 2019 Author : amcgovern Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This month, a contemplation of collapsed fourth walls and what we’ll do to keep a roof suspended above us… USE YOUR ILLUSION It only takes one to have a dialogue — especially the conflicts within our own heads. Open by Crystal Skillman is a conversation with silence; a confessional from a solitary speaker, Kristen, to the empty foreground where her lover Jenny, close to death after a random homophobic attack, is disappearing before Kristen’s eyes, too. Before that happens, Kristen is in a desperate moment of magical doing, putting on a metaphorical act to conjure Jenny into the present. I’ve been a witness to this play since the start of its life, some six years ago before I lost my own wife; a particular soliloquy from it (in which Kristen imaginarily “levitates” with Jenny, high enough for them to look down and see their lives together play out into old age) was one of my shields against a sense of finality. And in fact, this play has been born in several forms. In the versions I saw before, the audience is in Jenny’s place; Kristen is addressing a crowd of one, and we are being told by her who we are even as we are learning more about Kristen than she may ever have offered before. The very fact that Jenny may or may not be hearing it perhaps has something to do with how honest Kristen is being. In the new production, we are removed still farther from Jenny, back to our place as an audience, and one Kristen explicitly identifies as being all in her mind, imagined spectators to help spur her attempt to bring Jenny to life, too. Many real people rise from the text as we hear the voices of the parents that nurtured or stunted both Kristen and Jenny, share visions of when the lovers met and how they grew closer and stayed distant, unlock the secrets of Jenny’s fearlessness and self-acceptance and Kristen’s hesitancies and regrets; cumulatively, the feat of Kristen facing what got her to the current moment, and how she can go on. As “The Magician” (Kristen), Megan Hill gives the most phenomenal performance I will see this year. The burden is all on her, and she moves through the play conveying its weight but seemingly flying from point to point. The palette of emotions that plays across her face and the kinetic vocabulary with which she both evokes each scenario’s motions and channels sheer abstract psychological exertion shows us an expression that starts in the soul and extends to the body’s limits. She is on her own on a bare set, but tricks of selective light and well-aimed shadow throw ghost performers onto the walls and create magic murals that emerge and vanish. Hill’s skillful, restrained miming, Sound Designer Emma Wilk’s judicious effects, and Lighting & Scenic Designer Sarah Johnston’s atmospheric color sense and compositional invention have me remembering settings and locations that I know weren’t there. It is in some ways Skillman’s most sensorily rich production (though her scripts can conjure worlds for me from even simpler means), and Director Jessi D. Hill modulates the play’s emotional current with a remarkably disciplined intensity. In the written text, Skillman situates the play in time by merely saying, “While the Magician slips into stories, she operates from the urgency of the now.” In the second weekend of Pride Month, on the morning of the Tonys and minutes after one of the show’s first performances, she and I sat down to discuss what we know now. HILOBROW: When I saw the earlier versions of the play it was just Kristen and Jenny (from our point of view). What was your thinking behind going from this solitude to incorporating the audience? SKILLMAN: I wanted to embrace the fact that Kristen is imagining a theatre. I also think that for the audience to be invested, they have to think that they need to believe. I’m really mindful of, what do audiences go out into the world with, and how can this play wake up with you the next morning. Maybe it’s immediate, maybe it’s just that you cry at the end of it and then you’re in a new place. Maybe it makes you more aware of what’s happening around you and makes you stand up for someone you didn’t stand up for before because you were intimidated. Any of those things. And I have seen people [at the play] say, “Wow, that was something,” or, “This reminded me of so-and-so” — I’m seeing people talk about their own lives after the play, and I think that is always the goal that a writer is looking for. We’re not so interested in when we hear them say, “That was cool, now when do we get to Sardi’s” [laughter]. I think because people are put in such a state, they’re examining themselves, and examining the world. In terms of the imagined audience as a concept, I think I’ve always been obsessed with it in my artistic life — from art-school days, since I was 19, since I saw Fellini. Because Fellini’s films are so much about who’s watching them, and also the characters are other people in their lives. Specifically 8 ½ has an incredible moment when anyone who’s been in any of his memories, they dance together and it is like a pageantry, and it is this beautiful, there’s a band and it’s just an incredible moment. And I think that’s why I like magic, I like circuses, because there’s something that says, “Hey, we’re in this together.” HILOBROW: There can be a tenuous equilibrium between what’s material and what’s abstract in a play like this… SKILLMAN: I kept hearing, in earlier versions of the show, “But it’s a magic show, and we wanna have fun,” and I was like, “Ughhh, okay” [laughs], “so what is it about this form that I’m not doing so well” — at first I took that to mean, maybe we do see the magic… but it would appear over time; maybe halfway through the play that would happen. So I did a version and was sitting at the screen thinking… "this is dumb” [laughter] — if you want to know if what you’re writing is dumb, listen to the stage directions and they’ll tell you! I had this confirmed because my friend Scott Hitchcock who’s a magician in Vegas, he consulted on the play. He read the draft — and I was just starting this version, just to see — and he said he cried when he read it, and then he goes, “And let me tell you, I don’t ever want to see the magic.” And I thought, “If even a magician tells you he doesn’t want to see the magic, you listen to the magician.” So then the question became how. And we had a lot of talk about more bells and whistles, and a lot more big-budget, but y’know, between Jessi, myself and Megan’s work on all sorts of shows, if you can’t figure out how it works downtown, if you can’t figure how it can work with a dime, there’s just something that doesn’t work about it. It’s resting on other stuff, and there’s gonna be other stuff on top of it. Jessica Dickey wrote a one-person play called The Amish Project in which she broke down the shootings that had happened at that school [a massacre in Nickel Mines, PA in 2006]. What she did that I really latched onto in her work was…the power of the present, and using the power of the present in a one-person play. And I thought, that’s so exciting because that one person can change that present just by saying a line, and we don’t necessarily need to see a projection or an image or have another person come onstage, it can be all there in the story. HILOBROW: Where in your own life, or what touches you, does this play come from? SKILLMAN: There’s a line in the play, “Reality and I don’t quite get along,” and that is a lot of me. When the Magician first happened, I started writing and the Magician just started talking, and I didn’t know it was Kristen, I didn’t know about the story, and then she just started telling the story. It’s very rare that I’ve actually channeled something like that, and it just stared to build itself, and I just felt like I knew them and I just felt very… like it was something that was [really] happening. I’d already written a bit of this, but then I completely understood how to approach it after the election. Because in my neighborhood of Brooklyn, in 24 hours my gay neighbors had been threatened, I was accosted as a woman; I’d never seen a flip like that. It was insane; swastikas appeared within 72 hours. In four days’ time someone got punched in a restaurant, a man punched a woman, for talking against Trump. We were living next to people, and with people, who… we had no idea there was such rage. The things that they weren’t saying. That’s the message of this play in one way: how do you be fearless? How do you still be you and not have fear. How do you be kind and still protect yourself. I know that people are drawn to me because I’m open, there’s something they’re not used to. A lot of people are like, “Oh, are you enjoying your time as a tourist here in New York?” [laughs] But I have my armor on when I walk too. A great actor who I love to work with, he’s African American and we were talking, and I was talking about how I found the city to be somewhat magical, and he said, “Yeah, I don’t know if we’re walking in the same city.” Every street is different for every single person at every moment. HILOBROW: I was struck by the recurrence of the phrase “my city” — at first reflecting Kristen’s ideal view and then her admonition about the brutal things that can happen there. SKILLMAN: I do have pride in my city, but we don’t take care of each other all of the time, we do have a lot of issues, and then violence erupts. Now more than ever, this is an island that should be coming together. I like playing with repetition and how it grows, and how that does unexpected things. And… I’m a little obsessed with finding success and failure; a lot of [my recent plays] are about just, really having overly ambitious ideas, thoughts, concepts that are not totally sound or realistic [laughs], and somehow trying to win by using imagination, by storytelling, by communication. Death is something beyond you, and yet, we want to wrestle that angel. HILOBROW: Bending reality with perception. I cling to the idea of consciousness as a quantum field — even though I’ve had friends poke holes in that — and thus reality being manipulable, or at least influenceable, by what we can imagine. SKILLMAN: It is about perception, it is about how… it’s simplistic to say is the glass half-empty or half-full, but there’s something that keeps you going. There’s something about going through it. You’ve got to move… it’s not so much live through it, you’ve got to move through a moment — and sometimes the moment’s quite long, or years — but you’ve just got to keep moving through it because there are some things that happen in ways… things are changing around you that you have no idea about and there’s lots of positive momentum that we don’t see and feel. For all we talk about how something bad is happening here and something bad is happening there, likewise something good is happening here and something good is happening over there that we can’t even see, and those things are having effects. And I guess that’s where the ultimate [narrative] conflicts of fights, and trying to right the scales of justice come from; it’s not a perfect world. HILOBROW: And it’s uneven — as per William Gibson, “the future is already here, but it’s not evenly distributed.” And it’s interesting that you should say “scales of justice,” because I’ve come to very much think of history as a tipping balance, not as a line that you can make advances or retreats along. Our worst and best selves and outcomes are always side-by-side, and it’s a matter of what course you plot through that. This means the evils of existence will always be with us, but it’s never game-over either. SKILLMAN: We can put out our energy for the Rebel Alliance — we’ve got 20 of them, so… [laughter]. I do believe that everyone in your life has been there for a reason, and I think the love you’ve experienced is there for a reason, I think it changes the world, and I think that energy is still with us. And I think there’s a lot in this play too about letting go but realizing that you haven’t lost. You’ve gained. Open’s current run continues at The Tank in NYC through June 22, 2019 All photos by Maria Baranova *** MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2020 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern's and Paolo Leandri's comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: C.L. Moore's JIREL OF JOIRY stories | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: "Freedom" | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti's comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam's posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE