It’s been quite a ride so far these past couple of weeks, but it’s not over yet —
In Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #9 , the FDA makes its move against our increasingly-ostracized (partly by choice, partly due to circumstance) protagonist, who’s also getting noticeably more prickly in his dotage (not that he was ever exactly pleasant company), and as it happens it turns out that it was someone very close to him who ended up selling him out to the feds. These intrigues pass by unbeknownst to Willy, though, as he’s far too busy “discovering” the negative counterpart to Orgone, which he calls D.O.R., an acronym for Dark Orgone Energy. The cover for this issue is one of my favorites, the detail is just amazing and I love the lime green — a bold color choice that really draws in the eye. The interior art is solid as ever, and…
Several years ago, Minneapolis-based cartoonist David Tea worked at the comic shop nearest my home, where I am something of a “regular,” and to the best of my knowledge that was the only place that he sold his beyond-lo-fi comics, neatly stacked at the counter, each of them looking like they were run off a printer at Kinko’s, then cut and stapled by hand — which I’m fairly sure is exactly how they were made. Then, one day, he wasn’t working there anymore, and how one was supposed to obtain these utterly baffling little ‘zines became as mysterious a proposition as their contents, given that the only “distribution network” Tea seemed to employ was hustling them in person.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw that an apparently-randomly-selected work from Tea’s oeuvre, the 2005-produced Five Perennial Virtues #2, had been reprinted in the here and now of 2018, and…
Not as hard as the cartoonist who made them, of course — and Austin English busted his tail (and his hands, and probably even his brain) on his latest solo book, The Enemy From Within, published in late 2017 by Sonatina Comics. The sheer effort that went into the creation of the thematically-linked triptych of stories (the titular “The Enemy From Within, ” “Half-Hearted Slogan Dance,” and “Solo Dance #2”) is apparent on all 22 of these intricately-detailed, insanely imaginative pages. English uses every last millimeter of space available to him, his images densely packed from corner to corner, side to side, negative space a luxury he can seldom afford. He’s clearly got a lot to say — but what is it?
I’ll be honest — four times through this book, I’m still trying to figure that out. But I think that’s…
Underneath the sleek, art deco cover to Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #5, we find a story that’s actually pretty heavy on intrigue — both of the political and sexual variety. On the sexual front, our guy Wilhelm’s insatiable appetites are finally straining his largely-sham marriage to the breaking point, even as his philosophy of, for wont of a better term, scientific libertine-ism begins to bear fruit in terms of small-scale social changes in Germany. His “success” is not without its detractors, though, one of them being his then-beloved Communist party, who sever ties with him in the face of the right-wing repression sweeping the country. Which brings us, I suppose, to the political intrigue, as this installment sees both Hitler’s rise to power and, subsequently, the totalitarian measures enacted in the wake of the Reichstag fire, necessitate Reich’s flight from…
After finding myself considerably more than pleased with writer/director Scott Frank’s 2014 adaptation of modern noir master Lawrence Block’s gritty PI drama A Walk Among The Tombstones, I decided, in spite (or maybe because?) of its 0% Rotten Tomatoes score, to track down the only other cinematic take on Block’s work (and, more specifically, on his legendary protagonist, former-cop-turned-unlicensed-gumshoe Matt Scudder), 1986’s 8 Million Ways To Die. As things turned out, I had to go the Blu-ray route with this one since it’s not available for streaming anywhere so far as I can tell, but hey, things could have been worse — the Kino Lorber Blu (and,I presume, DVD, although I didn’t actually check to see if it’s available in that format) is actually a semi-recent release, dating back to October of 2017, and if I’d been determined to track this flick down before that, I may have…
There’s one in every school — the kid with the depraved imagination. The kid with no reservations about tapping into the deepest recesses of his or her id and displaying the contents for all to see. The kid who’s something more than just a garden-variety oddball. The kid who hears, at least once every day, “dude, you’re sick” — and, fortunately for us all, for whatever unfathomable cosmic reason, those kids can usually draw.
They may not be especially good at it, mind you, but it’s more about ideas than execution. It’s about using paper and pencil as their instruments for self-exorcism, as interpretive devices for channeling what’s within to the outside world. About cooking up the sickest, most extreme shit imaginable not just because they can, but because they must.
Max Clotfelter was one such kid, and in his 2016 self-published mini, The Warlok Story…
For today’s music video of the day, we break down the video that the New Musical Express named as being the 16th worst video of all time. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to get … Numb!
0:06 — Drip drip drip. Someone’s in for an unpleasant shock when they get the water bill.
0:30 — Numb is one of the few U2 songs to feature lead vocals from The Edge. The Edge’s real name is David Howell Evans.
0:35 — That’s U2’s bassist, Adam Clayton, blowing smoke in the Edge’s face. Clayton is the only member of U2 not to sing on this track but he still plays an important role in the video, as we’ll soon see.
0:50 — Who doesn’t love a good massage?
1:00 — The Edge is learning that singing lead has its advantages.
1:17 — “You’re not Bono!”
1:23 — Holding the rope in the background is, once again, Adam Clayton.
1:45 — As Clayton ties up The Edge, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. makes an appearance. It was actually Mullen’s idea to start the band that would eventually become U2.
1:53 — However, Mullen has obviously been overshadowed by Bono.
2:11 — Oh no, they killed the Edge!
2:13 — Hello?
2:15 — Is anyone there?
2:20 — With the Edge apparently dead, now seems like a good time to tell you that Numb was the first single released off of U2’s 1993 album Zooropa, which many consider to be the moment that U2 went from being an energetic group of rockers to the most pretentious band on the planet. Numb, like the rest of the album, is about sensory overload.
2:23 — Numb was originally recorded for Achtung Baby and was called Down All The Days. No one in the band liked the song but they still reworked it for Zooropa.
2:27 — Edge, can you hear me?
2:33 — Larry Mullen, Jr. is the new Edge.
2:41 — Adam considers tying Larry up but realizes that he wasted all of his rope on The Edge.
3:00 — The Edge lives!
3:18 — But with those feet in his face, The Edge might wish that he was dead.
3:36 — The Edge catches the bouquet.
3:51 — That is Morleigh Steinberg dancing in front of the Edge. Nine years after the release of this video, the Edge and Steinberg got married.
4:12 — Just the fact that the fans are using cameras instead of phones proves this video was made in the early 90s.
4:17 — “Excuse me, Mr. Edge, but we have a wedding party coming in so if you and your friends could please vacate the room…”
4:25 — The Edge ain’t going nowhere.
Numb was originally release as a video single, so if you wanted to listen to it outside of Zoorupa, you had to buy it on VHS. Also included on the tape was a video for Love is Blindness.
Every comics fan has “holes” in his or her reading history — books that you know you should have read, books that everyone goes on and on about but that you, for whatever reason(s), simply haven’t gotten around to yet. This past week, I finally got around to addressing one of those.
Seriously, though, who are we kidding? For a guy with both feet in the comics scene and at least one foot (does that give me three?) in the world of parapolitics/parascience/”conspiracy culture,” the fact that I hadn’t read Elijah Brubaker’s celebrated Reich, a 12-part chronicle of the life, times, tribulations, and travails of (in?)famous psychoanalyst/inventor/philosopher/shit-disturber Wilhelm Reich is more than a “hole,” its a yawning chasm, and frankly pretty well inexcusable, yet my excuses were plentiful : my LCS didn’t stock it while it was running (for nearly a decade at that, from 2007-2014), its publisher, Sparkplug…
Sometimes. you’re just in the mood for a private eye flick — am I right?
I know that I certainly was the other night and so, after a bit of browsing, I decided to scratch the particular celluloid itch I was feeling by streaming writer-director Scott Frank’s 2014 cinematic adaptation of legendary hard-boiled crime fiction author Lawrence Block’s popular novel A Walk Among The Tombstones via our local cable service (it’s also available on Blu-ray and DVD should you choose to go that route), and whaddya know? What I found underneath the typically slick, borderline-“artsy” modern direction and cinematography, and decidedly lurid subject matter, was actually an old-school PI drama, anchored by some very strong performances, that would more than likely make the likes of Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and even Humphrey Bogart proud.
That means it comes with one fairly big downside, though — for all attempted twists and…
Through the Shattered Lens