FLINTRIDGE, CA – Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made a puzzling and grisly discovery today, when a video feed from the Cassini probe revealed a boy-shaped object drifing in the vicinity of Enceladus.
In the November 9, 1953 issue of LIFE Magazine, the popular periodical featured a short photo piece on the integration of Chicago’s Turnbull Park housing project and the typically American reception the current residents extended to the newcomers…
Gosh golly, I can sure see why the Fifties have been held up as an idyllic era by certain segments of polito-pundit class! Talk about your “Greatest Generations!”
While LIFE held a number of misguided (or simply dead stupid) editorial positions over the thirty-odd years of its run as America’s #1 periodical, it did tend to be on the right side of history where racial equality and civil rights were involved. The specifics may have been wrapped up in paternalist platitudes, gradualist timidity, and the white middle concerns about “angry Negro militants,” but the editor’s hearts were in the right place even if their heads were up their asses. (As illustrated by their partisan celebration of the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy,” which struck a blow at traditionally Democratic blocs while ensuring that the socially progressive right-centrism endorsed by LIFE would evaporate thanks to the GOP’s new dependence on batshit social conservatives and racist lunatics.)
Most of the readers’ responses (the ones LIFE chose to publish, at least) to the article expressed shock and dismay over the racist behavior of the rioters…if for no other reason than such behavior “gave the commies more propaganda material.” Still, there were some unreconstucted dumbasses willing to toss their vague semblance of wisdom into the ring. These included an Alabama state rep eager to gloat over Northerners’ hypocrisy and this poster child for poor reading comprehension…
Ah, yes. “I’m not a racist, but WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE PROPERTY VALUES?” It’s a reliable old chestnut capable of putting the fear of lost equity into even the staunchest of armchair liberals, except the properties in this case were units in a publicly owned housing project, you frigging moron.
As horrible and hateful as the “falling home values” fallacy was, at least it was rooted in empirically observable reality — a stupid self-fulfilling prophecy where racism and financial anxiety brings about waves of panic selling that depresses equity more than the rumored arrival of a hypothetical “Other.”
Today’s hate du jour doesn’t even bother justifying things with a direct economic angle — just some bowdlerized scripture or soft “statistics” or loaded phrases designed to trigger some primordial shithead reflex. “I’m not a homophobe, but WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE SANCTITY OF MY LOVELESS THIRD MARRIAGE?”
Some kids get into dinosaurs. Some get into Star Wars, horses, Hot Wheels cars or other momentary manifestations of the childsphere’s zeitgeist.
My childhood obsession was for all things aquatic. It makes sense in hindsight, given than this was an era when Jaws and Jacques Cousteau and Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle loomed large in the collective consciousness. Shipwrecks, sea monsters, sharks, whales, and warships — I was fascinated with them all, and spent those years sporting a sailor’s cap on my messy blond mop of hair and with a little stuffed seal as my constant companion.
My parents supported and encouraged my interest in maritime topics. Besides keeping my supplied with thematically appropriate playthings and games, they also provided a constant stream of books on the topic. Most of these were grown-up titles — massive coffee table tomes covering the fishes of the world or the evolution of warship design, as well as image-heavy (and thus “kid-accessible”) offerings from the National Geographic, American Heritage, or Time-Life libraries.
A favorite from that last publisher was a hardback volume titled either The Sea or The Fishes from the “World We Live In” series of pop reference books. It wasn’t until I started my intensive study of LIFE‘s original publication run that I realized that the book’s contents (and those of similar offerings) was essentially pulled from “special feature” issues that had run in various issues of the parent magazine. (It makes perfect sense, but six-year-old Andrew was slightly less savvy about the inner workings of publishing empires.)
It was one of those dumpster-diving expeditions that I uncovered something that nearly fried my brain with a nostalgia flashback of singular lucidity — a painted fold-out mural depicting cross-section of ocean life from surface to briny depths. It originally appeared in the November 30, 1953 issue and can be seen here, though the scanner fumbled the job by chopping the spread into to non-contiguous segments.
Even in its butchered state, there was no mistaking this intimately familiar vector for childhood nightmares…
…upon which hours upon hours of my childhood were spent in rapt contemplation and semi-successful efforts to copy freehand onto manila drawing paper.
This particular detail…
…occupied a significant space of my childhood’s imaginative landscape. The crazy and terrifying morphology of deep sea fishes dug its hooks deep into my developing brain and engendered all sorts of bizarre kid-sociations. Even today, I can’t look at these denizens of the depths without thinking that Jimi Hendrix music follows in their briny wake and that their fanged maws would speak with the menacing growl of the teen burnouts who used to hang out on the corner by the lead burning plant.
The above will be discussed in more detail in my forthcoming oceanology monograph, Viperfish: Conversion Van-Loving Stoners of the Abyss.
Recommended listening: This one goes out to all my hatchetfish homies!
When my senior year of high school rolled around and it became time to choose colleges to apply to, my first choice was the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin. I can’t remember what my reasons were for choosing the school, apart from the “great adventure” giddiness that was sweeping my circle of peers.
“Get out of Woburn and see the world,” was the fashionable mantra for the artsy-fartsy set I hung around with (yet quietly disliked), though most would end-up crashing and burning by the end of their first semesters, forcing a retreat back to the safety of the City of Roses.
My dad thought going to Wisconsin was a stupid idea. He didn’t actively lobby against it or try to dissuade me from applying, but I think he knew, better than I did, how tightly my sense of self was rooted in this sullen patch of real estate known as eastern Massachusetts.
“We’re creatures of the coast, Andy” he told me while we were sitting on a bench at Long Wharf. “You’ll miss the ocean, trust me.”
Then the financial aid package which would have made UW-Madison possible fell through and rendered such speculations moot. I threw together a last-minute (as in “two weeks after I graduated”) application for UMass Boston, was accepted on the spot by an admissions officer who saw my transcripts and thought I was spoofing her, and went from getting away from the Atlantic Ocean to spending a large share of my life within spitting distance of her churning gray waters.
While my guidance counselor was appalled by my decision to forgo an education at a nationally reknowed institution in favor of a locally mocked “safety school” (which was and is an utter bullshit rep), I have no regrets about the road not taken. Every good thing that has come my way since 1990 has tied back to my years at Umass Boston — with a certain big-eyed, dark-haired, punky and no-nonsense classmate-turned-soulmate being the grandest prize of the lot.
I don’t need adventures, and some of my worst moments have made when I strayed from that realization. I want to be content, to be centered and to accept my limitations.
It hasn’t been completely smooth sailing, but I think I’ve achieved such a state.
Recommended listening: Preach on, my classic rock brothers.
Sometime in the spring of 1991, I signed on as player in a Dungeons & Dragons game run by one of the college Sci-Fi Club’s mildly high poobahs. Even though I’d all but given up D&D (and role playing games in general) by that stage of my developmental evolution, it seemed like a nice way to waste a Friday afternoon and get to know some club members I knew of but rarely socialized with.
The run was a fiasco from the beginning, as the DM was an anal-retentive fellow who felt obligated to micromanage every aspect of game in accordance with whatever “advice for gamemasters” column ran in Dragon Magazine that month. From his insistence on inspecting everyone’s sets of dice before each play session to his demand that he personally select the miniatures we used to plot out complex combats, the kid reveled in the pettiest of petty tyrannies.
When he wasn’t enforcing his narrow yet arbitrary sense of authority around, he treated the player to a continuous stream of in-jokes and obscure references from his hometown campaign that were utterly opaque to a bunch of outsiders. “Realism” dictated that players had to deduce creature names themselves based on the halting, nasally descriptions provided by the DM, thus leading to a memorable series of battles against “hunched humanoid sorta thingees with glowing eyes and axes and stuff.”
And then there was the time when he based an entire adventure around that irritating staple of irritating geeks otherwise known by Dr. Demento fans as “The Existential Blues.”
As discontent spread in the ranks, each of the players began to rebel in their own way. I opted for sociopathic griefing, where my chosen-for-me chaotic good fighter began feasting on his kills and festooning his armor with their severed heads. Those actions — along with my new battle cry, “BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD” — were references to Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, which had replaced D&D as my RPG of choice during my sophomore year of high school.
The grubbiness of the Warhammer mythos (as depicted in the various magazine ads for the oversized and ludicrously spiky lines of Citadel miniatures) dovetailed nicely into my transition into the thrash metal and hardcore punk scenes. The system’s extensive and opened roster of player careers and extreme lethality contasted sharply with the syncretically baroque yet fairly limited mechanics that characterized AD&D (first going into second edition) at the time. While I’d never managed to get a substantial run going with my local circle of gaming pals, the system dug its hooks into the part of my adolescent male psyche that celebrated violence, futility, and the importance of skulls as fashion accessories.
My passive-hyperaggressive goofing caught the attention of the other players. This led to a DM-excluded discussion where I was pressured into taking control of the group and starting a WFRP campaign, which I quickly cobbled together after an uncomfortable and false round of “no hard feelings” with the deposed DM. (I suspect he went home that night and wept into his collection of threadbare Rush concert shirts.)
I didn’t run my campaign along the system’s suggested lines of interaction and intrigue, or in accordance with the traditional rules of good gamesmastering, period. I held to the higher principle of “as long as the players are having a good time” and it served me well through eight months of old school dungeon crawls and shameless loot grinding. The game’s notorious lethality and accent on gory death were typically limited to the party’s adversaries or hidebound traditionalists who harshed the buzz.
“Oh, an ambush at a roadside tavern is hopelessly trite? Well, lookie there, it seems the mutant criticaled a crossbow bolt through your Adam’s apple. Don’t worry about your corpse, Southie Dave’s thief is already looting it for valuables.”
By the time the run concluded, the players could (and would) recite the nastiest results from the critical hit tables — which for the most part ended with “a shower of hot blood covers you and your opponent. Death is instantaneous” — alongside me.
It was great fun predicated on anticipating the expectations of the players, and that’s how these things ought to be. There were some folks who groused at the cliquish nature of the group. That characterization may have been true to an extend, but it was never an elitist affair. Anyone (apart from a few guys I really loathed) could participate as long as they were willing to accept the fast-and-loose spirit of things. I think half the active membership of the club (plus my little brother and a friend from high school) cycled through the campaign at some point or another…which was how I ended up getting elected as club president.
There’ve been times in the past two decades where I’ve thought about putting together another Warhammer RPG campaign, acutely so after the 2nd edition ruleset fixed and fleshed out many of the original deficiencies. My efforts never made it past the daydream stage, however. The lack of free time and a handy central meeting place have complicated things past the point of feasibility, but the biggest hurdle is the knowledge that I’ll never find a group of core players capable of matching the old Sci-Fi Club gang.
The children of Fox News —
– what beautiful policy statements they make!
(With thanks to Pal CJ)
Should you need a reminder about how far comics studies have come and how much further they still need to go, check out the Wikipedia entry on “graphic novels.” While some of that muddled mess can be chalked up to the site’s semi-discriminate, crowdsourced approach to scholarship, it also illustrates how fundamental funnybook terms and concepts still retain a degree of amorphous ambiguity.
The situation will change as time passes and the “wild frontier” aspects of the field mellow into a more structured and methodical discipline (and there are plenty of wise souls working toward that goal at this very moment), but things remain in a state of transitional flux where a happy medium between unexamined fandom and repurposed critical theories tends to be an elusive proposition.
In the case of “graphic novels,” it doesn’t help that the term originated as a marketing-friendly euphemism. Just as boy-targeted dolls were rebranded as “action figures,” the graphic novel tag was generated to differentiate a class of works with superficial structual similarities from the percieved peurility of the “BIFF BANG POW” stuff enjoyed by the kiddie crowd.
You’ve heard the line, delivered with oblivious sincerity or snide mockery: “I don’t read comic books. I read graphic novels.” That jargonesque genesis — adopted far and wide due to the lack of a better catch-all term — still lingers in the definition’s DNA, now encompasses any printed work of comics which sports a non-floppy, ready-for-the-bookshelf trade dress.
For comics fans of my g-g-g-eneration — the kids who came of age just as the direct market and early 1980s indie booms hit their stride — the term “graphic novel” evokes a very specific format. Pioneered by small-press publishers and adopted by the Big Two, these works were slightly oversized, softcover prestige marques containing done-in-one tales and sporting a premium price tag (four to seven bucks when a single floppy issue ran from sixty to seventy-five cents).
Marvel took the lead in popularizing and propagating the format to starry eyed kids who’d never cracked open an issue of The Comics Journal. Starting with Jim Starlin’s Death of Captain Marvel (back when super-mortality still had some vestige of gravitas), the House of Ideas cranked out a regular series of glossy, softbound one-shots which alternated between superhero stuff, reprints and trial balloons of Epic imprint material, and the occasional “serious” work.
Even today, decades after format fell out of favor and was phased out, I still reflexively prefix “Marvel” whenever I read or hear “graphic novel.”
DC also tentatively tried its hand at the graphic novel game, though with considerably less enthusiasm and success in comparison to Marvel’s efforts. The company’s relatively modest efforts did produce handful of quality works — the editorially bollixed release of Jack Kirby’s Hunger Dogs, an adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s Demon with a Glass Hand illustrated by Marshall Rogers, and the videogame-inspired Star Raiders (where some sweet García-López art offset a space opera snoozer of a story).
Where Marvel was able to strike a workable balance in terms of content for its graphic novel line, DC hewed toward licensed and original sci-fi material more in line with Byron Preiss’s pioneering work with the format during the 1970s. Though the approach may have been aimed at a higher literary plane than the one occupied by the New Mutants’ intro tale or a painted Dr. Strange epic, the results ultimately fell into one of two equally problematic categories.
On one hand, you had adaptations of popular prose sci-fi tales which were forced to compete with the individual readers’ imaginative preconceptions of the visual trappings. On the other, you had substandard genrewank that was forced to rely on the novelty of the medium…
…such as 1985′s Me and Joe Priest.
The conflation of a predominant genre (namely “superheroes”) with the medium of comics as a whole has had a number of unfortunate effects over the years. One of the most unfortunate of these has been the tendency to overpraise pedestrian material simply because it thought outside of the capes-and-spandex box. You can see this confusion between lateral movement and a legit step forward in the debates surrounding Shia LeBeouf’s “artcomix,” where “they’re not worse than many other critical darlings” wasn’t a defense as much as a sad reflection of the current state of diminished expectations.
The superhero genre doesn’t preclude decent storytelling any more than a non-superhero focus guarantees it. Crap is crap, no matter which hat it chooses to wear. In the case of Me and Joe Priest, the chapeau in question was “apocalyptic sci-fi.” Here’s the back cover blurb:
It’s a trifle cliched, but still fertile (HAH!) with narrative potential along the lines of such acclaimed works as Children of Men or Y: The Last Man and a nice hook where religious celibacy is pitted against the survival of the species. There’s a lot to work with there, which explains why the creative team decided to opt for a farm league rehash of Road Warrior tropes illustrated by the world’s least convincing Tim Truman imitator.
Joe Priest was a priest named Joe who wanders the wastelands with his burly biker acolyte on a holy mission to sex up the ladies of a sterile future earth.
Joe’s missionary (position) work was opposed by the evil Pope Juggalo XIII (not his real name, but it should have been) and his Dark Carnival of Vaticaninjaz.
During a climactic battle where an army of bikers storms the Hole See, Joe slays the Juggaleminence in hand-to-hand combat and reveals that the fallen holy man was actually….wait for it…JOE’S REAL FATHER.
Or maybe his dad was a space alien who also happened to be the Judeo-Christian concept of God. The story is a bit vague on that front.
In any case, Joe jetted off into outer space, leaving his legion of offspring to rebuild the future of the human race.
A future dedicated to the notion of half-siblings fucking each other.
Besides the extreme grottiness of a half-assed concept executed with little regard for obvious implications, Me and Joe Priest also raised a number of other questions. Why did DC think a fetid pile of nonsense scraped together from stale “new wave” sci-fi tropes justified the graphic novel treatment? Did anyone involved really think someone would be willing to drop six bucks on this drek? And how does a story explicitly about sex and religion manage to say utterly nothing of substance about either subject?
There are those who claim that effort alone should be enough to justify praise. Those folks need to spend a rainy afternoon in the company of Me and Joe Priest, a copy of which occupies a place of dishonor on the silverfish-infested bookself of Nobody’s Favorites.
I don’t care much for the song or the band, but there’s something magical about metal concept videos from the 1980s. They so perfectly channel the fantasy lives of that class of middle school males who’ve spent long afternoons contemplating the builds of their next Gamma World character as their parents hector them over why the lawn hasn’t been mowed yet.
I won’t be seeing The Avengers this weekend.
Not because I hate fun. Not because of the creators’ rights issue. Not because I already promised the wife I’d clean the front room.
I won’t be seeing The Avengers because I don’t see the logic behind spending fifteen bucks and three hours on an experience I can already extrapolate from the previous struts of the franchise’s tentpole. Oh, sure, my hypothetical version may have some of the banal one-liners mixed up or assume the giant explodo-thingee at the climax will make a “CRASHABOOM” sound instead of “SMASHAKRAKOWIEE” effect, but I’m pretty confident that the actual beats will closely match the imagined ones.
Here’s where everyone laughs at some “witty” bit of trash talk. Here’s where some CGI monstrosity barrels down the Uncanny Valley. And here’s where everyone fidgets through the end credits for the pseudo-surprise commercial for the inevitable sequel.
For the most part, I’ve enjoyed the feeder films leading up to the big event. I’m not immune to the charms of big dumb spectacles, especially where they intersect longstanding points of interest. Yet it was pretty clear by the time Captain America rolled around that the process of content generation had settled into a predictable and profitable formula. That plug ‘n’ play aspect is ideal from a production standpoint; a reliable recipie for success is the Holy Grail of studio execs — especially when dealing on the blockbuster level of budgetary scales. From my perspective as an end-user, however, the sense of diminishing returns has set in with a vengeance.
Chalk it up to having a PSYOPS vet for a father or just a general sense of surliness, but there are few things I despise more than being blatantly pandered to by some agency or form of entertainment. It’s greasy and gross and presumes familarity that it hasn’t earned or been granted.
“We know you’ll lllluuurrrrrrrve it! It has that thing that you have fond memories of in it!” Fuck that noise. I don’t drop trousers for every Slick Willie who promises to massage my nostalgia or fandom cortexes. In fact, I resent the assumption that I could be so easily bought — or, in the case of the contemporary model of fandom, induced to buy.
That may reek of cynicism, but so does a big-budget cinematic juggernaut ruthlessly tailored to maximize licensed revenue streams for a massive entertainment conglomerate. That doesn’t preclude an entertaining experience, but it does color my impression of it.
Whether it excites you or not isn’t my call. I don’t really give a shit either way. Conversely, my lack of enthusiasm shouldn’t be interpreted as litmus test for my geek credentials. If someone told me going in that loving stupid shit would eventually require playing an unpaid cheerleader for media combines, I’d have found another hobby.
I’m a dedicated functionalist where my entertainment is concerned. If it moves me, it moves me. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Sources only matter when they intersect non-negotiable matters of ethics. While there are some serious ethical issues surrounding The Avengers, the real dealbreaker was that it just doesn’t interest me.
(Panels taken from Avengers #252, an issue which presents the platonic ideal of what the franchise means to me. If Disney gets around to making a film which reflects that, I’d be more than willing to reconsider my stance.)
Recommended listening: The notes may change but the song remains the same.
