The Major Fall, The Minor Lift: Music in 2011, Part 2

Video Games – Lana Del Rey: Apparently, the singer was not born Lana Del Rey and her fantastically alluring features are by cosmetic not genetic design. This bothers a lot of people for some reason but I can’t imagine why. All performers use a finely crafted artifice in their work and it’s a bit much to say that a prefabricated image is an unforgivable sin in and of itself. This is America. All of our best things are built on some kind of fiction. This song is about some of the better known and widely believed lies. That watching someone else play a video game isn’t arduous. That life in Hollywood is amazing and beautiful. That love is redemptive. Though I hate the way she pronounces ‘with’ Del Rey sings with enough authority and sadness for me to get a chill every time I hear it. She sings like someone you love lying to you about something important. What’s more authentically than that?

Bumper – Cults: Personally, infidelity can be devastating. In the abstract it can be thoroughly exhilarating. The forbidden temptation of fucking around is strong for even the most committed of couples but for two people who are on the fence but are you know, still totally in love with their significant others, it’s like licking German chocolate frosting. The brief taste sensation gives the prospect of devouring a whole goddamn cake a tidal pull. That overwhelming need for the rush of the new mixed with deep reservations gives “Bumper” its power.  Sonically, the song evokes a girl group classic, with its echo-y boom and syncopated drumming you’d almost mistake it for a particularly fuzzy Pipettes single, but the lyrics betray a frankness and sophistication about romantic entanglement that’s pure Cults. And the last verse, where the song goes full on Phil Spector and the regret piles up like a crash on 101? Perfect.

Immigrant Song – Karen O, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Finch: I used to/maybe still have somewhere a messenger bag with a Led Zeppelin album cover on it and while it was for many years my most prized possession and the fashion accessory that garnered me that highest number of compliments, I wasn’t crazy about the band. Don’t get me wrong, I loved a number of their songs but they were never my life. They had too many unsavory associations (School of Rock, Puffy, That ‘70s Show) to really connect in the way that they did for Cameron Crowe. This cover though, which is sung by O and chopped and screwed by Reznor and Finch hits just right. It’s longer than the original but feels faster. And louder. Not loud in the tacky granddad The Last Waltz-should-be-played-at-maximum-volume loud but actually loud. Like sacking a village loud. Beheading your enemies at dawn loud. Kick some teeth out loud. And it was introduced to the world with the best movie trailer of the year, which never hurts

Container Park – The Chemical Brothers: Hanna was a so-so action movie. At its best it was a Luc Besson fairy tale, and at worse it was an uneven music video compilation with a loose narrative through line. For every scene where Eric Bana wrecked twenty dudes in a subway, it had pointless travelogue scene with Olivia Williams. For every insane home invasion, it has Cate Blanchette’s Southern accent. But for all its shakiness, its action scene at its apex is flawless. After being hunted across the world by a Euro trash techno band who moonlit as mercenaries, adolescent super solider Hanna (Saosire Ronan) confronts her attackers in the urban sprawl of the title. The scene is far and away the best in the film, using a dizzying array of shipping containers as a kind of master class Parkor obstacle course that quickly turns into a killing ground. Its success is due in no small part to its careful syncing with “Container Park”, a hypnotic sonic odyssey that sound like three different dance tracks trying to kill each other. While fractured, the song is never messy, keeping precise time while madly genre skipping. Its crazy when a movie is completely outdone but its soundtrack like Hanna was but with music this good it’s hard to blame the film for failing to be transcendent.

All of This – The Naked and Famous: “Young Blood” was this group’s breakout but I’m kind of over MGMT so fuck that song. “All of This” isn’t a staggering work of originality but it has a much more idiomatic sound than the chameleonic “Blood”. It’s layered and fast in a way that would be near impossible to replicate live but it suggests enough energy to be transcendent in a covered in other people’s sweat kind of way. It has a beat that pounds like a drug addled pulse and lyrics that invoke of a brutal break up that happens at a really great party. This is pretty young white people in excelsis but not maliciously so. It’s not a crappy, bland CW show interval but rather a particularly vicious Degrassi episode. It’s a Degrassi where your favorite character gets gunned into paraplegia and her sex tape comes out the same week. This is Blair Waldorf music but it’s also Angela Chase music so you have to take the good with the bad.

Mario McKellop, 2012 

The Major Fall, The Minor Lift: Music in 2011, Part 1

Michael Jackson – Das Racist: There are thousands of songs made every year with the expressed intent of being fun. Shitty groups like LMFAO do their very best to craft aggressively artificial songs that’ll get aggressively thoughtless people to grind their misspent youths away. These songs are always terrible and wildly successful because as Will Farrell once never said, they are meaninglessly but provocative. They’re fun like your company’s office Christmas party is fun. Fun you have grit your teeth though. “Michael Jackson” was probably created under a similar fun is good idiom but’s actually fun. It’s clever and meaningless in the way that the best 21^st century pop music is. It’s full of standard issue rap braggadocio but it’s in service of a lot of refreshingly non-misogynistic catchy nonsense (I am sorry tired of listening to rap songs that objectify women, from an aesthetic standpoint if nothing else). While Das Racist has never quite been as simple as joke rap, their smart, self-aware lyrics have made them as much fun to smile as to bop your head to. And  it helps mainstream rap has gotten so simple over the last few years I can totally imagine Jay-Z screaming “I’m fucking great at rapping” on some awful Watch the Throne single. Silliness aside, the songs beat hits like a ground up ephedrine pill and Heems’ flow is so raw that once played it’ll automatically delete all the Drake songs from your iTunes. I don’t know what it says about the game that two Brooklyn vegans dropped a harder, better album than a Kanye/Hova collaboration but it feels like the right direction.

No Church in the Wild – Jay-Z & Kanye West featuring Frank Ocean: While Watch The Throne was maybe the most disappointing album of the decade it did have its bright spots. “Wild” was far in the way its best song even though the animal noises almost ruin it. Whereas the rest of the album speaks to how awesome it is to be 38, black and obscenely wealthy this one is something different. There’s an ominous darkness here that feels heavier than an Armand de Brignac hang over. The beat sounds like something of a Silent Hill club mix and Jay and Kanye’s lyrics suggest an orgy that is closer to Kubrickian than Little X, full of paranoia, violence and a maddening lack of satisfaction. You don’t want to go to the party this song is the anthem for. You wouldn’t survive the night. If the whole album (or any of the other tracks) were this focused, it would’ve have been one the best records of the year. As it stands, its blood stained Justin Timberlake singing directly to camera. Also: of course rich people don’t believe in god, once you become a multimillionaire in America there’s no higher power to answer to.

Will Do – TV on the Radio: On the subject of albums with only one good song, Nine Types of Light was also a heartbreaker. The low tempo, introspective side of TVOTR that was featured heavily on Dear Science and responsible for tracks like the immortal “Ambulance”, I found Light to be subdued to the point somnambulism. I like the feel of the album in a long car ride sense but overall it just didn’t connect. Except for “Will Do.” “Will Do” isn’t wildly different from the rest of the album but it hits harder and digs deeper than any other track. There’s a battered optimism to the song that grew on me as its count climbed into triple digits. The beat, which is TV at four in the morning hypnotic, is as good as anything the bands ever done. Desperately trying to connect with another human being has never been this sexy.

Call Your Girlfriend – Robyn: This song was the kind of thing I was looking for from Born This Way; a deeply synthetic soundscape with enough genuine sentiment to make your jaw clench involuntarily. “The Edge of Glory” has some of that but you have to wipe off a lot of Aqua Net to get to it. “Call Your Girlfriend” is maybe the best breakup song ever best it’s so sincere. Sincere in how much Robyn cares about the emotional state of someone she has no reason to want to protect but does anyway. Sincere in her conviction; these are the word you need to say and this is how she’ll fall apart and here’s what you’ll need to say after. Sincere in her confidence that she is by far a better girlfriend. Maybe one Gaga will get off the coke and bad art school impulses and create something worthwhile again but as long as Robyn’s around, who needs her?

Strawberry Swing – Frank Ocean: Like most right thinking people I don’t really fuck with Coldplay. Their songs aren’t bad exactly but there are overwrought in such a way that you’d be publicly shunned by your peer group for singing along with one of their songs whereas you’d get a lot of appreciative nods if you did the same with a Journey song. Maybe it’s that they’re such a dazzlingly humorless band or that their lead singer is married to Gwyneth Paltrow but expressing a fondness for Coldplay is tantamount to admitting that you sometimes wake and call your parents when you have a bad dream. Its inexplicable this cover of one of the band’s deeper cuts can be played anywhere freely. Partly because it’s a semi obscure Coldplay song sung by black man so no one’s going to place its origin on first listen. Secondly, Ocean’s plaintive warble makes that metaphor about a heroic exodus from a dying planet sound far less goofy than it should. And the end bit, where all the romantic yearning is burned away by the beep of an alarm clock? Perfect.

Mario McKellop, 2011

The Major Fall, The Minor Lift: Music In 2010, Part 2

Giving Up the Gun – Vampire Weekend: I once had mixed feelings about Vampire Weekend. All that privileged whiteness and unabashed Paul Simon referencing made me uneasy. I took an immediate dislike to the band because people and publications that I dislike were so enamored with the band. This was incredible stupid. Liking or disliking anything should be determined solely by the enjoyment you derive from it. All other considerations are strictly High School. Vampire Weekend is great. They’re funny and mean and slight enough to be good driving music but substantive enough to spark, long satisfying conversations. “Gun” is obviously meant to be a super accessible first single, but it’s also the group’s best song. It’s tighter and more confident than anything on their debut and more anthemic than all the other songs on Contra. Its syncopated beat is hypnotic enough to get you to bob your head and its breakdowns are good slick to dance to. And it has the best backing vocal of any song this year. Slip into a cardigan and stay awhile.

Extended Play: Let’s Get Out of Here – Les Savy Fav: No explicit links to VW (they’re both from New York?) but this year my list didn’t have much straight ahead rock so pairing the two felt necessary. I like this song for the same reason I like “Wet Hair” so much. It expresses a very simple emotion – NEED – effectively and with a lot of incredibly pleasing fuzz. Feedback and foot stomping 4ever.

Black Sheep – Metric: The best song off of the best soundtrack of the year. The redubbing of this song in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is one of only two major missteps in Edgar Wright’s giant leap forward (the other is Michael Cera). In the alternate universe where Pilgrim actually made money, this song was the breakthrough that Metric needed to (rightfully) become the biggest band in the world. You know that those 50,000 word Rock magazine interviews would be more interesting if they were about Emily Haines instead of Bono or whatever. Haines is great because she can write songs that are inscrutable and direct at the same time. Metric songs are great because they match Haines’ obliqueness with power chords and drums fills strong enough to get a stadium swaying. “Black Sheep” is great because its sounds like a disco group that keeps getting drowned out by a power pop band and because it has three climaxes before it actually ends. “I hate my ex” never sounded so good.

Extended Play: Summertime – Sex Bob-Omb: The best thing to come out of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that it was that its soundtrack was the project that finally revitalized Beck after whatever it was that happened with the Flaming Lips that so devastated his coolness. “Summertime” is kind of a failure within the context for which it was created. In the Pilgrim comics, Sex Bob-omb is a half hearted effort by seemingly talentless kids that goes nowhere. In the movie, they’re so good they actually get signed to a label. I don’t know if this change was made as a concession to Hollywood narrative structure (what protagonist band ever actually sounds bad?) or because Beck is so good he’s incapable of turning in truly awful pop music but either way, it’s a distractingly good song. And Brian LeBarton needs to put out an album, ASAP

Past My Shades – B.o.B. featuring Lupe Fiasco: B.o.B. didn’t might’ve dropped my favorite rap album of the year. I’ve listened to singles from The Adventures of Bobby Ray more than any other album this year. I liked “Airplanes” right up until it became ubiquitous (though it’s still the best pop/rap crossover in years). “The Kids” has what is probably the most subversive sample of the year even it doesn’t invert the meaning of the track it samples. “Airplanes pt.2” has a better Eminem verse than anything on Relapse. “Magic” a bass line so good it almost stops you from laughing at the joke that Rivers Cuomo has become. Almost. “Nothing on You” is teenage poetry-overly sincere but B.o.B’s is sadness is genuine enough to keep things grounded. “Ghost in the Machine” is Scarface-level depressing but kind of reassuring. The rest of the album is sort of forgettable other than “Shades.” The opening thirty-three seconds of the song are near perfect. Lupe Fiasco sings about the pain of not being understood only to have his sorrowful crooning cut off by Bobby Ray’s defiant affirmation; all you need to know aout me is that you’ll never get me. Fiasco spells it when he drops in the X-Men metaphor; I’m an outsider and I always will be but there is a power to being unknowable and a strength that only comes from relying only on yourself.

Extended Play: 6 Foot 7 – Lil Wayne: Real G’s move in silence like lasagna.

General Patton – Big Boi: Yes, yes the rhymes on “Shutterbug” are tighter than ones on this song but holy shit, that beat. The triumph march Aida crashing against a baseline strong enough to knock over skyscrapers. “Patton” sounds like Tony Scott movies look. It’s like aural equivalent to that panel from We3 where a hails of bullets rips that one guy apart. I get the same adrenaline rush from this song that I get from listening to Feed the Animals; The thrill of listening to two disparate but equally wonderfully elements combing to form something new and transcendent. It’s a goddamn travesty that The Blueprint 3 sold nearly 2 million records while this only moved 175,000 units.

Extended Play: Get It Get It – Girl Talk: All Day, while great, just wasn’t the atom bomb of creativity everybody wanted it to be. Personally, I think it’s because the songs were all a minute or so too long. The longer extracts made for a deep listen but the added length made all the tracks imperceptibly less fun. “Get It” isn’t that danceable (its way to tonally inconsistent) but it does have some of the smartest recontextualizations on the album. Lady Gaga sounds ominous when mixed with Apex Twin. Pitbull sounds like a club kid when rapping over “Just Can’t Get Enough”. Missy Elliot runs riot over Daft Punk. And I actually enjoyed part of a Soulja Boy song. Gregg Gillis is a magician.

Monster – Kanye West featuring Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Bon Iver, and Jay-Z: I might be alone in not loving My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy but I just don’t. There are a lot of hot songs on it but you know, Kanye’s a terrible rapper. His cadences are really slow and while some his rhymes are excellent (“Head of the class and now she want a swallowship”), they’re usually sloppy and self aggrandizing to the point of being off putting. His beats are so good that his songs are disappointing because they so clearly need a better lyricist. ‘Monster” would have been good but not great with Bon Iver (surprisingly black sounding), Rick Ross (aw big guy, you’re not a no good blood sucker), Jay-Z (his verse actually brings the song down a few pegs. I know they’re tight and all but Kanye needs to give Hova the “better to leave the party before it ends” speech about his rapping career before some rival rapper releases a diss track made up entirely of his guest appearances from the last few years) but the Nicki Minaj bit elevates it to best song of the year material. You can tell he extended the song because he knew her verses were something special. And it was. For that minute and a half cameo, she was the best rapper in the game. Her terrible debut album proved that while she has undeniable talent, she wasn’t a strong enough presence to outshine the MOR instincts of record label executives. Still, for a brief moment Kanye fucking West was completely dumbfounded by the power of one woman’s magnificent flow and that’s one hell of a promise for the future.

Extended Play: Power – Kanye West. “No one man should have all this power” was the instant recognition phase for all American men between ages 20 – 35 this year for a reason.

The Major Fall, The Minor Lift: Music In 2010, Part 1

Infinity Guitars – Sleigh Bells: Listening to Sleigh Bells cost me three sets of earbuds this year. Skullcandy nor Auvio make buds strong enough to withstand the power of the band. I didn’t mind though because nothing I listened to rocked me harder. This is teeth rattling music through and through. Derek E. Miller’s guitar bombardment makes my eyes roll back. Listening to Alexis Krauss’s non-sense rhymes is like hearing Asami Yamazaki’s internal monologue. This song is like listening into an alternate universe where Ronnie Spector discovered thrash and ran with it instead collaborating with Eddie Money. It’s playing in the most intense football game ever. This song you play to hide the sound of a beating. It’s all violent emotion with no let up. This is straight riot music and you don’t feel the need to slam dance at 1:55 in, you’re not exactly dead but you sure as hell aren’t alive.

Extended Play: Forever vs. Infinity Guitars – VBWM.  Since “Guitars” is only 2:35 and the mashup is 3:27, the beat does get stretched out a bit too long, but it’s worth it to hear the LeBron James theme song come off this hard. VBWM wisely left Kanye West’s lazy playground-taunt verse out of the remix and sharpens Drake’s flow into something a grown man wouldn’t be embarrassed by and makes Eminem sound less like a cheerleader and more like man who owned in his prime Jay-Z on his own song.  Lil Wayne still sounds like he uses the cut up method for his writing but by making the beat harder he doesn’t feel out of place anymore.

Bottled in Cork – Ted Leo + Pharmacists: Earlier this year, I called this my favorite song. “Bottled in Cork” is a great song, full of punk energy and older dude resignation, it is the 2010 track. Leo really cracked the how to do a political song in the Obama era. Make it personal. Show the weight of repeated tragedy but start with a core of optimism. Guitar solos are essential. And call and response is mandatory. I only discovered Ted and company this year and I’m filled with regret that I didn’t know about them earlier. This is the kind of music that all teenagers should hear so that they’ll know that growing up isn’t the end of anything expect ignorance.

Extended Play: “Bottled in Cork” Music Video. The video is an extremely low budget goof on how silly the American Idiot musical is. Paul F. Tompkins wears a tuxedo and a delightful mustache and talks the band into making a “half-assed musical that cheapens what you do and embarrasses all evolved.” It shows how inane it is to buy into the ethos of any band with a corporate sponsorship and how middle-aged relaxed the band is.

Dance Yrself Clean – LCD Soundsystem: Our generations Talking Heads; super cool art kids who manage to devastate with unexpected profundity and earned sentiment. Nine minute songs about losing yourself to rhythmic oblivion don’t need lyrics this good. “Drunk Girls” was the most fun single of the year but even it had some melancholy around the edges. “Dance” is a full on no escape from the sadness song and it’s still more fun than the entirety of Recovery. That’s because James Murphy is smart enough to know that depression can be exhilarating if you get the beat right and talking about your specific problems for ninety minutes is really off putting. The best thing about LCD songs is how surprising the arrangements are.”Dance” plays it cool and detached (like “Losing My Edge”) for the first three minutes and then goes all blood on the dance floor midway through and then it collapses about 30 seconds from the end. The bit where the instrumentation slowly breaks apart and it’s just synthesizer vamps and Murphy warbling -  it’s as close to perfect as music got this year.

Extended Play: New York, I Love But You’re Bringing Me Down – LCD Soundsystem. I heard this song for the first time this year even though it’s off of Sound of Silver. I’m a singles guy so I’ve only ever heard tracks for it before and I listened to the whole album this year after hearing this amazing live version. I like this one more because it’s sadder and slower and how Murphy sings the opening from “Empire State of Mind”. He adds so much bitterness and anger to it that it ends up sounding like the tail end of a bad relationship.

XXXO – M.I.A: /\/\/\Y/\was a pretty mixed bag. This, “Meds and Fed”, “Internet Connection” and “Born Free” are all hot fire but everything else is thoroughly unlistenable. I suspect this was on purpose after M.I.A. gained a big frat boy following after “Paper Planes” blew up. “XXXO” is the best cut on the album both musically – that beat is undeniable – and lyrically. “You want me be somebody who I really not” is half the story of M.I.A.’s career but The Interview pointed out, “I’m not who I say I am” the other half. I don’t think the second matters that much. Yes, the whole ‘well funded revolutionary’ thing was a put on. How is that different that anybody else in rap music? You really think Jay-Z ever remembers what the streets were really like now that he’s getting interviewed by Charlie Rose? Or that 50 Cent feels bad about pushing Ja Rule out the game by calling him an actor when he grew up wanting to be one? “Hood” has been a persona since NWA and anybody who thinks otherwise isn’t paying attention. M.I.A. matters because she’s the best female rapper since Missy and she put out the most forward thinking hip hop album and mix tape of the year. All the truffle fries in the world won’t make this song less addictive and her directing the tackiest music video ever doesn’t diminish the power of the song the way “Alejandro” did. The female version of a hustle as a hustler.

Extended Play: I almost said the “XXXO” remix but damn is that Jay-Z verse weak. Check out Vicki Leeks. 35 minutes of goofy as hell mixed with real talk political and personal mission statements. As a unit, it’s her strongest work.

Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) The Arcade Fire: Arcade Fire songs that don’t feature Win Butler singing might end up being my favorites. Grant Morrison is my favorite comic book writer and Paul Thomas Anderson made my favorite movie so I’m a staunch pretentious is a good thing kind of guy but Butler has a tendency to come off as a bit too Art School for me. You know he’s the kind of guy who secretly wants to be Bono when he grows up. The Régine Chassagne cuts have always had a profundity that the group’s other songs have lacked. “My family tree’s losing all its leaves” from “In The Backseat” is maybe the most personally effecting lyric I’ve ever heard. “Sprawl” is great because it grounds the whole oppressive suburbs concept in a way that none of the other songs on the album do. Chassagne sounds like she’s gone though something more rigorous than being told you can’t have the car on Friday. It’s a bright and uplifting song that hides a lot of pain underneath all the disco vamping. It’s the a song about fighting the conformity of the housing developments and strip malls with the power of young love and about how that love doesn’t make all of life’s insecurities vanish. If Arcade Fire ever decides to grow up, this is what all their songs will sound like.

Extended Play: We Used To Wait – Arcade Fire: The second best track on The Suburbs. Regret for how things used to be from a guy who just turned 30. I don’t miss the agonizing wait between sending and receiving letters even though I realize The Internet has slowly eroded my capacity for delayed satisfaction. I disagree with the sentiment of “Wait”, its beauty is undeniable. It builds and falls ever sixty seconds like a crashing tide and the last minute –all shouts and an abrupt end- is terrifying warning bell. What we gain might outweigh what lose but if what we lost is essential to the human condition where does that leave us?

Comic Bookery: Night Of Simplicity

Thor #617
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Pascal Ferry,
Matt Hollingsworth, and
John Workman

If Lichtenstein were alive, this is kind of comic he’d steal from. Ferry continues to do some of the best art of the year. At least half the credit has to go to Hollingsworth for giving his art a lushness that makes most everything else on the shelf look like worse than it already does. Check out this panel.

This isn’t a panel that’s designed to thrizzle. It’s there to let the audience know that the setting has changed from Paris to New York. It even has one of those stupid location tabs that lets you know its NY even though there’s only three or four places on Earth that look like that and later on the page the guy in the cab whines about how irritating tourists are. Even though it’s a throwaway establishing shot panel, it’s still better than ever other panel from every comic released this week. The Fourth World collapsing thing splash from Return of Bruce Wayne had a more interesting layout and that sheepish smile that Alan Davis gave Thor was funny as hell but neither popped the way this page like this did. Check those awesome John Woo doves and those faceless, nearly amorphous crowds. Without that awesome pastel color wash, the panel would look unfinished. With it, it looks like a shot from a Lance Acord movie. This comic is all motion and sublime, electric beauty which makes the ho hum writing all the more disappointing.

This has been three issues of “unstoppable evil is coming, the Asgardians are sad, and that nerdy scientist has a bunch of wacky nonsense happen to him.” All of this is prologue and none of it feels consequential. Thor resurrects Loki for no reason other than the author’s interest in familial conflicts. Balder finally acknowledges that death is coming to for Asguard and he doesn’t care. How am I supposed to care what happens to these people when they don’t care themselves? Why does anyone think an exploration of godly ennui is appealing?  And the villains of the piece should be in range of Thor’s hammer sometime next year. All this unearned pathos and portentous storytelling is just a drag. Its small stakes conflicts plays out across a needlessly expansive tableau. I can’t tell you how thankful I was for that exciting yet pointless Parkour race though Paris. Otherwise this comic would have a been indistinguishable from one of those maddening Thor issues where Olivier Copiel was reaching for Kirby grandeur and JMS would prove how good a writer Stan Lee was by cramming all the pages with interpretable blocks of text that read like a half assed fusion of RPG and political blog.

I couldn’t find any of the guys made Casanova in this comic. There’s no humor or anger or lust in this. It’s the lumpy cement between ugly red bricks. Even worse, this mediocrity is repetitive. This molasses slow build up is identical to the Avengers/X-Men crossover. Cyclops and Osborne fought each other across the chessboard of life and came to a thrilling stalemate. That arc at least had a hint of effort in it whereas this just feels like R&D for a Thor cartoon series. Even though I disagree with the whole how-dare-he-criticize-his-critics Fraction backlash, (why is a surprise that an artist finds that the most hostile and pettiest criticism imaginable lacking?) I can say definitively the man’s output have never been worse. Iron Man has become a San Francisco based soap opera with a cast full of mannequins. Uncanny X-Men is less accessible and less interesting than X-Men Forever, which was is the diametric opposed to the book’s initial mission statement. Hopefully when Casanova finally comes back it sparks some kind of quality resurgence because Fraction is edging ever closer to Jeph Loeb territory and that’s a regrettable spark to see extinguished.

Comic Bookery: Way Down In The Hole

Batman & Robin #16
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Cameron Stewart,
Chirs Burnham, Frazier Irving,
and Alex Sinclair

I don’t love Batman and Robin because it tries to incorporate the entirety of Batman’s history into a logical chronology. I love it because the dialog is crafted with a precision that makes everybody else in the game look lumbering and sloppy. I love it because of Cameron Stewart’s perfectly choreographed sixteen panels to a page fight scenes. I love it because of Frazier Irving’s insane vertical splash pages. There’s a reason these comics get puzzled over and annotated and discussed in reverent tones and everything else gets a gentle pat on the back for not being actively terribly. There’s ambition in his comics that extend beyond “fill a plot hole” or “get a movie option”.

B&R 16 is the end of Morrison’s long running Black Glove master plot. Dr. Hurt, a malicious pilgrim who was granted eternal life by the god of evil, has spent the last five years slowly trying to destroy Batman in every way possible. He failed. This outcome was never really in doubt given that this is a superhero comic. That particular song is only entertaining when the singer’s on point and here that was the case. The villain failed not because he was equal to his adversary, he wasn’t even equal to his foe’s nemesis. Batman didn’t defeat Hurt did. By making him slip on a banana peel and then burying him alive. He was outclassed from the word go and the price of hubris is death. Fuck heroism, evil has standards too. I tdon’t know if this is the last we’ll ever see of Hurt. Morrison villains by nature of the freakishness and complicated origins tend not to be the utilized by the rank and file but if this is it, all the better. Total destruction and irrelevance are much more statisfying than diminished returns.

One of my favorite things about B&R is how its structured. Back in the so-so Batman days, Morrison was all over the map. Story arc’s didn’t really flow into each other very well and there was the whole Ras al Ghul resurrection interruption that sapped the run of lot of its energy. B&R has had one clearly defined, cinematic through line. Every three issue arc raised the stakes and amplified the central conflict of the series – are Dick and Damian the real deal or just another set of pretenders? The series, even with its flying Batmobiles and mutant gangs has felt grounded in a way that it hadn’t before. Damian isn’t Robin because he wants to fight crime or because he wants to become part of some grand superhero legacy, he’s dresses in a garish costume and hits mentally damaged people in the face because that’s the only way he has to connect to his dead father. Dick didn’t recruit Damian because he suffered a familial trauma, it’s because he’s a child soldier who desperately needs some human kindness before he turns into a remorseless killer. Throughout the series there’s been a very real sense that the partnership would work out and Dick would end up back on the J.V. team and Damian would have been damned to a life of empty inescapable violence. In this issue, we are finally given closure. The original gives unconditional approval to his successors.

At the end of the issue, Wayne has reveals that he’s supported Batman’s operations over the years and now plans to expand the brand. Better living through Batman. This isn’t a new idea. Morrison had aspects of this going as far back as the second volume of The Invisibles when poor little rich boy Mason Lang funded King Mob’s militant group as a way to to free the world from the tyrannical oppression of the Outer Church. In New X-Men, he had Professor X reveal that he was a mutant to the world and subsequently turn the X-Men in the X-Corporation, an international rescue organization that had boarder ambitions than defusing Magneto’s latest plan for world domination. And in his aborted WildC.A.T.’ run, Morrison had Hadrian mass produce himself as a disposable superhero. Batman Inc feels like that next level of this idea, allowing a mainstream corporate icon like Batman to become self aware and to use that awareness as a tool to battle evil. He’s moving Batman beyond caped crusader and into the realm of more amorphous concepts like the Phantom or Grendel. This is one of Morrison’s pet themes; the democratization of the superhero.

As electrifying as the mad ideas are, its the art that’s drove this series to new heights. Multi-year Batman stories aren’t new. Peter Milligan had the idea of using a long form story to slowly tear down Batman and the idea later grew into Knightfall which started a cycle of incredibly long, incredibly tedious story arcs in the associated Bat books. There was no point to these zero sum crossovers other than progressively making Batman a less and less likable character who eventually grew to resemble the hardcore, uncompromising Frank Miller version of the character but without a sense of humor, which is an easy way to summarize 90′s superhero comics. These stories had little in common save Chuck Dixon and hundreds of pages of deeply unremarkable artwork. B&R has had Frank Quitely, Cameron Stewart, Andy Clarke, Frazier Irving, Jonathan Glapion, Scott Hanna, Dustin Nguyen, Alex Sinclair, Tony Avina, Peter Pantazis, and yes, Philip Tan. These artists gave us a string ray Batmobile shooting cartoon smoke at 30′s gangster pastiches, a zombie Batman reliving a nightmare version of the last thirty year of Batman, Damian Wayne silently coming to terms with being disowned, Dr. Hurt pouring champagne on the back of a sex slave, and Jason Todd doing is best Walter Kovacs impression. Outside of Mazzucchelli and Miller, Batman comics have never looked better.

The series is going to continue with the not-at-all-bad Paul Cornell and Scott McDaniel doing a fill in arc to be followed by Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason but as far as I’m concerned this series is over. It’s that Talking Heads album without Bryne or Twin Peaks after Lynch left. These were a lot of fun and I don’t want to hang around for the retcons and the needless follow ups on minor plot details. I don’t to read anybody’s weak imitation of Morrison’s poetic velocity and there’s no one working in North American comics that touch Irving’s psychedelic 3D spatial distortions. The series wasn’t always perfect – Philip Tan – but issue for issue you could put this up against anything else published by the Big Two and not find it wanting.

Comic Bookery: With The Fear In Your Heart

Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #15
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Sara Pichelli and
Justine Ponsor

Couldn’t get through it. Maybe I’ll try again later but I doubt it. It’s one of those issues where Bendis really leaned into the stereotype and just wrote an entire issue of people talking to one another and nothing else. It’s an issue dedicated to fallout of the Chameleon taking over Peter’s life and destroying his reputation and personal relationships storyline so it’s just like that one arc in Amazing from a few months ago expect it didn’t go as far as suggested rape or implying that a more aggressive Parker would actually improve his friends lives so it ends up being a replay of the Venom arc and Carnage arc and the one where Ms. Marvel kills the Green Goblin for being an irredeemable monster instead of hoping that a 500th trip to jail will turn him around. Everybody hugs and nobody learns anything. I miss the youth and humor this series used to have and I kind wish Marvel would just turn the series over to David Lapham  because then at least one character would act in way that at least resembled the way a real teenager acts. Like say, totally self interested or cruel just because that’s an easy way to get what you want out of people. All these kids with wildly different backgrounds that all have exactly the same morality and speech patterns and disturbing lack of sex drives… No matter how funny or clever, nobody can stay interesting for long if they don’tchange up their tone of voice.

Ultimate Mystery #4
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art Rafa Sandoval, Roger Bonet
and Matthew Wilson

What fuck was this? An audition for a writing position on TV show? Nothing in the main plot moved forward and it’s really tough to care about Spider-Man’s girl clone unless she’s doing things with Johnny Storm that make Peter Parker question his sexuality. Last issue Reed Richard’s was revealed to be the bad guy behind this month’s world shaking attack on the infer-structure of the United States and there’s no explanation of his reasoning here, just a bunch of unconnected flashbacks to moments in his life that were copied from early issues of Ultimate Fantastic Four, LOST-style. I guess we’re supposed to gather that a lifetime of being a passive nerd and high profile failure turned Mr. Fantastic into the kind of guy who hits his ex so hard she might lose an eye? What’s the point of that? And how is this rewind the clock storytelling stalling tactic crap remotely appropriate for an ending to a four issue series? That’s the kind bullshit we-have-more-episodes-than-we-have-story filler that made Battlestar Galactica and all of Joss Whedon’s TV series mixed bags instead legitimately great. But the real question here is why this half an idea was stretched from a passable six issue mini into twelve part embarrassment. It’s not like the Ultimate line is this hot shit imprint where even the outtakes can be published to chart topping sales. The line’s besting selling series is regularly outsold by Kick-Ass and that mind numbing Defenders book Ed Brubaker writes. Surely explaining the cosmic cube to Joe Johnston pays better than trying to tell a story no one will want to read with 11 of 22 pages with material you’ve written years. You’d probably get to play with shield and everything.