Comics212.net

Just want to give a quick shout-out to two excellent indy comics projects that got announced this weekend at NYCC, which may or may not get drowned out in the cacophony of announcements and discussions.

First up, Brian Wood rejoins with Kristian Donaldson (the team previously paired on Supermarket from IDW and DMZ from Vertigo) for THE MASSIVE, a new ongoing series from Dark Horse debuting in June. As the graphic says there’ll be a 3-part prequel running in Dark Horse Presents magazine starting in January. The news has been somewhat overshadowed by the announcement that Wood will be re-teaming with another frequent collaborator, Becky Cloonan, on a new Conan series all for DH. I’m all for that too, Becky told me a little about their plans for the character and they sound… Metal.

Next, it’s FATALE, the new collaboration between Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Criminal, Incognito), coming from Image Comics. CBR has an interview and 4-page preview of the work here, and I really think the mix of the teams’ noir stylings with near-Lovecraftian levels of horror has the potential to hit with contemporary comics audiences. Despite my best efforts the duo’s Incognito was always an easier sell than Criminal–I think the sorts of comics audiences likely to pick up monthly comics these days want a supernatural ‘hook’, and this is poised to deliver. The first issue of Fatale, currently scheduled to run at least 12 issues, will drop in January.

Speaking as someone who enjoyed the previous collaborations of both of these creative teams, and is always happy to see new monthly comic books on the stands? This was a great day for comics announcements.

EDIT: Whoops! Guess I shoulda kept reading my email. Look what was buried in there:

Here is the complete press release; there is almost no information in it other than “3 issues” and “2012”. But If I don’t post that here I will get a dozen people asking for more info.

GEOF DARROW’S SHAOLIN COWBOY RETURNS IN AN ALL-NEW THREE ISSUE SERIES FROM DARK HORSE!

NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 14– Five years after it’s initial run ended, Geof Darrow’s (Hard Boiled, Big Guy and Rusty) returns in 2012!
Originally published by Burlyman Entertainment, Shaolin Cowboy is a loaf of wry in a wonder bread world, a nicotine patch in a ten pack-a-day universe. He wonders as he wanders through a world where yesterday, today and tomorrow exist in a collage of carnage of his own making!

“Geof Darrow’s relationship with Dark Horse goes back to the early days of the company. I can’t tell you how excited I am to again be publishing his amazing work” said Dark Horse president, Mike Richardson. “Geof’s art literally stopped me in my tracks when I first met him more than two decades ago and his work is every bit as stunning today. Geof has influenced a generation of artists and I am proud and excited to have him back partnered with Dark Horse.”

Shaolin Cowboy returns with all-new stories in 2012!

That is very good news indeed! It’s a great book, and one that’s been absent for far too long. Hopefully an announcement of a collection of the first series will follow soon.

– Chris

Dear Ontario,

Today is voting day all across the Province, where we decide who will govern us for the next 4 years, give-or-take.

Now, I know it’s not an easy choice this year, what with the incumbent administration having allowed the horror of the G20 on their watch… The tax thing doesn’t bother me as much because the previous administration spent us into a horrorshow of a deficit, all through tax cuts for big business, and what were they gonna do? At least they were reasonably upfront about it.

I generally like the NDP, although I am not terribly inspired by them this election. Their politics–socially, economically–are generally the closest to my own, inasmuch as that matters to you reading. They are probably who I am going to vote for in my riding, which I believe is a reasonably close race between them and the Liberals.

(I don’t care for the Green platform.)

Which brings us to the Conservatives. If there was any chance that the conservatives might take my riding, and the next closest candidate was a Liberal one, you can be sure that my vote would go to that Liberal because Tim Hudak is, by his own account, a terrible human being. He has run an anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-intelligence campaign. He and those running under the banner of the Conservatives have campaigned on fear and outright lies (there will be no tax cuts, there will be no increase in services), and this is for me a rare case of not just disagreeing with someone’s politics, but actively hating the man himself for what he’s trying to do to the political discourse in Ontario. I mean, he called actual Canadian citizens “foreign workers” because of where they used to live. Look it up.

What I’m saying is, please go out and vote against the Conservatives this election. I don’t care who you vote for, but if there’s a chance that you can reduce the hold of an American-style conservative politician over the voting public of Ontario, then please, do it. For yourselves and for the rest of us that are trying to have a civilization over here while the Conservatives do their best to tear it down.

Sincerely,

– Christopher Butcher

I had music growing up. I say that because, particularly in geek circles, it’s not always assumed that people had music as children. My first boyfriend only owned one CD, and it was the Star Wars symphonic soundtrack, and he didn’t really listen to popular music. Or classical music. He didn’t really ‘listen’ to music, it just happened to be something that was on. That still strikes me as odd to this day, that you can literally, culturally, be immersed in music and have it have no affect on you. It don’t stick. He was a lovely guy though and I liked him a great deal and did my best to try and develop his interest.

I liked to dance as a kid too. Weddings were my favourite, because everyone was dancing and you didn’t have to be self-conscious about the fact that you liked to dance quite a bit more than the other boys.

My parents liked music a lot, my mom’s tastes sort of calcifying around the time of late 80s radio pop, my dad’s much earlier in the late 60s and early 70s–classics but not so far ‘out there’ as Led Zeppelin or anything. Anything earlier than that and it was their parents’ music, anything later and it was ‘crap’. So the soundtrack of my youth was a steady stream of pop music from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Middleschool introduced me to a slightly wider variety of mainstream popular music, as pop R&B and Rap artists of the day–Milli Vanilli, NKOTB, Boys II Men, Whitney, Mariah, Paula, Salt n Peppa, and many more were added to my musical lexicon. And that’s where I discovered R.E.M.

Pop hits like Radio Song (featuring KRS-One, of course), Losing My Religion, and Shiny Happy People were mega-successes, and while I had remembered hearing Stand on the radio, it was that triumverate of songs that caused me to remember who was singing them. It’s kind of funny, I still enjoy those songs a lot, but my favourites from Out Of Time are still Country Feedback and Half A World Away, probably my first exposure to southern gothic anything. They still resonate today.

And then when I was 15, about a month after starting grade 10, they released Automatic For The People. Someone lent me a tape of it, and I listened to it incessantly for months. The first single, Drive, had done my head in. When you’ve just broken up with someone, every song on the radio sounds like a sad love song. When you’re an alienated 15 year old, every song on R.E.M’s Automatic For The People sounds like it is about you and about your life and they are performing the songs directly in your head. I spent about 3 solid months being powerfully depressed about my life and about the world with “MAYBE YOU’RE CRAZY IN THE HEAD” echoing around thanks to Michael Stipe. Drive, and then Try Not To Breathe… how’s that for a one-two-punch to start off an album? For a depressed 15 year old? To this day, Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight still seems sad to me, sandwiched as it is between those two songs and Everybody Hurts.

Everybody Hurts. Fuck. After just months and shitty months, that song on the tv, on the radio, on my cassette player, hearing it constantly from all sides. It was catharsis, a good cry. I still didn’t really snap out of my misery until almost a year later (came out, got some gay friends outside of school), but it was a start. I made a wonderful friend named Isaac during the time, who liked R.E.M. a great deal more than I did, and shared their back-catalogue with me. Green, Out of Time, Document, and the Eponymous singles collection. Their easily-available back catalogue, I guess I should qualify that. Actually I remember Isaac loving Pretty Persuasion and a few other songs, South Central Rain, from their I.R.S. years, but I really don’t remember listening to those songs with him. Probably my fault that they didn’t stick. But Eponymous, that stuck. It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) was my favourite song for almost 10 years, after that. It’s still up there. I still know all the words. That collection of their early years was the then-perfect survey that I needed.

I was a total convert by the time Monster rolled around. My friend Franz lent me Life’s Rich Pagent, Fables of The Reconstruction, Reckoning, and Murmur. I’m still not entirely sure I’ve owned Chronic town. I was pretty well-versed in their catalogue by that point, and I welcomed Monster with open arms. Their fans… did not. I didn’t really understand at the time, I didn’t realize how anyone who liked Drive couldn’t ‘get’ Let Me In, or the clear musical transition from Everybody Hurts to Strange Currencies. And What’s The Frequency Kenneth and Star 69 just kicked ass. But the instumentation had shifted to crunchy rock-guitars that put off their earliest fans, their sexiness and specifically their queerness put off the radio-fans. They still toured to sell-out stadiums, but the show didn’t end until the encore where the hits came out to play.

I finally saw them in concert, on the tour for Monster, by the way. I was 17. It was exactly what I’d hoped for.

And then came the album they recorded on tour for Monster, and it was called New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and if people didn’t like Monster, man did they not like New Adventures in Hi-Fi. It was dark, dark dark dark. The first single, E-Bow the Letter, was the most southern-gothic thing they’d ever done, they brought Patti Smith to wail over top of it. That’s sort of the opposite of radio-friendly. Bittersweet Me had some of the old R.E.M. flavour to it, and it’s a great song, but the video aggressively confused members of my family, with its homaging to obscure italian cinema. It was a bit like a Francesca Fiore/Bruno Puntz Jones thing, but with models. Electrolite would’ve been a touching love song for the radio, if anyone knew Michael Stipe was singing about exactly. I bought the album on release day, and I listened to it over and over again, and I really did like it… But for an arena-rock album it was pretty fucking complicated. Best listened to lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

Then Bill Berry left the group, and ‘everyone’ agreed that the band should break up, and they didn’t, and their next album had a drum machine on it and that was pretty much the end of R.E.M. in the public eye. In private though, I loved Up. Just, just loved it. It represented a departure and an evolution, dovetailed nicely with my broadening musical tastes (dance, electronica, and an unhealthy fascination with the lost Beach Boys album SMILE thanks to Matt Fraction). It was a good run for them, and I was secretly quite pleased that I was a fan of one of the biggest bands in the world, but seemingly no one else I knew was. It was all the benefits of both populism AND being avant-garde and cliquey, with none of the work!

I tortured my roomates with Daysleeper. Tortured them.

Sure R.E.M managed to stay relevant and in the headlines. Mike and Peter were on tons of side-projects and events. Michael produced films and music, guest appeared on stuff. Velvet Goldmine was Stipe and friends. And then the Andy Kaufman bio came out and R.E.M. was all over that, with Imitation of Life from Reveal prompting the radio-fans to give them one more go. But Reveal revealed the band wasn’t the same as Green or Out of Time or Automatic for the People, and nor should they be… that was more than 10 years earlier. Summer Turns to High, I’ll Take The Rain, All The Way to Reno? Still make my list.

Then Around The Sun. Then Accelerate. Then a Live Album, finally, after years and years of high-quality bootlegs. And then today, they broke up.

Honestly I’m still processing it… that’s what this is. R.E.M. was not my first music, but it was probably the first music that well-and-truly spoke to me. They’ve been a constant in my life since I really started paying attention to music, and they’ve been recording almost as long as I’ve been alive. They formed when I was 3. I’m sad that there aren’t more R.E.M. albums coming. I’m happy that they made so many and gave me such good music. I’m frustrated at myself that I didn’t respond as intensely to their last few releases, I kind of feel like this is my fault somehow? I’m glad I can turn on my computer and all of their music is there. I’m going to miss them.

I didn’t come to R.E.M. early, and I didn’t recognize them right away, but they have been profoundly important to me for longer than they haven’t. Thanks to Michael, Mike, Peter, and Bill for everything.

– Chris