Here’s a “scoop”! Issue 5 has another huge artist! Just as we planned!

He didn’t say who though. I think that’s Bleeding Cool’s job. Leinil Yu, fresh from finishing his run with Mark Millar on Superior. Joe Maduiera will return for a later arc, just as Steve Wacker promised.

Not like I’m going to be able to claim full credit for that scoop or anything. CB Cebulski of Marvel announced it last week at the massive Brazilian comic convention FiQ, with MArvel attendance including Matt Fraction and Kelly Sue DeConnick

As well as telling people that The Defenders will see individual issues focus on individual characters, with issue 4 focusing on Doctor Strange, issue five on Namor, with art by Mitch Breitweiser and issue six on Iron Fist reuniting Matt Fraction with a past art collaborator.

Marvel seem to have had a good time at the show. Especially CB…

Watching the news footage and hearing the wildfire-spread of the riots beyond London had an apocalyptic vibe, oddly familiar from a lifetime of dystopian Science Fiction stories and movies. British TV drama has always been preoccupied with the possibility of social unrest and riots. Dystopian Science Fiction in Britain has dealt with it since the 1970s, all the way to 2000AD where Judge Dredd had riots to put down every few months. He still does. DREDD may be set in a future America, but the writers are British and they’ve always really been writing about Britain. Rioting and chaos dominated the final QUATERMASS miniseries in 1979. There’s of course V FOR VENDETTA. I doubt there’s a single British Science Fiction or comic book writer who doesn’t have visions of social unrest swimming in their heads at some time or other. The riots last week felt like all the dystopian social uprising stories happening at the same time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For me, there was a weird kind of serendipity in how I saw that uprising allegory RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES the night the riots broke out, and then I proceeded to meet the creators of the self-published graphic novel DARK AGE: DOMINION that same weekend. Entirely self-published and self-generated, DARK AGE is part of a proposed trilogy of graphic novels created by twin brothers Nick and Adam Hayes, Londoners who work in graphic design, photography and Fashion now based in New York. DARK AGE: DOMINION is set in a near future where fascist corporations have herded the outcasts and the underclass into gated crime and gang-ridden ghettos controlled with private military troops keeping them boxed in their hopeless ghetto. The plot of DOMINION takes place over the course of one night where a charismatic rebel plots to unite the warring gangs to rise up against the corporate rulers and declare independent rule with a new, more powerful drug they plan to sell to create an economy to support their new order. This revolution of course leads to a violent conflagration whose imagery is more than reminiscent of the riots that would continue to rage through London and the following Monday.

I was reading through DARK AGE on Monday even as I commiserated with the Hayes via email where we spent the day glued to the BBC newsfeeds and checked in with our friends and people in London to make sure they were all right. Even the Hayes noted that the images coming through the internet were eerily similar to panels in their comic. DARK AGE: DOMINION itself is quite impressive in its conviction. It’s one of those angry, ambitious political comics about discontent and insurrection even more hardcore than Brian Wood’s excellent DMZ, whose hero is a middle-class journalist who could use his social standing to keep an emotional and intellectual distance from the balkanized New York he chose to stay in so as to chronicle its stand against a corporate fascist regime. The main characters in DARK AGE: DOMINION were born, bred and trapped in their future ghetto, their only choices to use the violence and criminality they grew up in to their advantage. The art is along the lines of Bryan Talbot and Geoff Darrow and even though the setting is a kind of every city, the anger, attitude and patois read very much of London to me, including some fairly specific slang words. The Hayes are very much tapping into a tradition of angry, underground political agit-prop comics that were around in the Sixties all the way to the Eighties but seem to have fallen by the wayside until this book came along. It’s yet another type of comic that Marvel and DC probably wouldn’t publish and one that could only be independent, even self-published.

The fantasy of Social Unrest Fiction tends to be much more orderly than reality, of course. Most of the stories, as in RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, V FOR VENDETTA and DARK AGE: DOMINION, involve characters or groups that manage to organise into a politicised group with an active agenda while the rioters in Britain last week were only out to loot and destroy things in a chaotic and unarticulated expression of their anger and hopelessness, a rare chance to give the finger to the police and, they think, the rich, even though nothing they destroyed belonged to the rich or oligarch class that has taken up residence in 21st Century London. When I heard about the kid who looted a laptop computer from a Dixon’s and then wandered around looking for someone to buy it off him for twenty quid, I thought that was the tragically perfect example of how clueless and uneducated these kids were – he could have kept the laptop, taken it home and learned how to use it. He might have become a successful computer person or criminal hacker, but he didn’t even have that kind of savvy. He lacked the education. Instead, he’s probably just headed for jail and drugs.

I’m probably being pessimistic, but I don’t expect the politicians to have the right idea or the right answers, let alone the right social policies to counteract the simmering anger and hopelessness that sparked off the riots, and images of riots, looting and burning buildings will continue to swim in the zeitgeist for the foreseeable future, always a few steps away from bursting again into reality like a magical summoning.

You can find DARK AGE: DOMINION from its homepage.

Dodging fictional Molotovs at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture,
stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

IGN has been handed the full details of the Batman relaunch by DC Comics.

Bleeding Cool has already shown you the covers to Batman #1 and Detective Comics #1, but IGN also has covers for Batman And Robin #1 and Batman: The Dark Knight #1

Batman #1 is written by current Detective Comics scribe Scott Snyder and, as we reported, Greg Capullo.

Detective Comics #1 is written and drawn by Batman writer/artist Tony Daniel.

Both books will star Bruce Wayne in the lead, and will be the only Batman going,

Batman And Robin #1 is written by Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason, with Damian as Robin.

And Batman: The Dark Knight #1 will be by David Finch, making it the second number one in three issues.

IGN report an announcement on the future of Batman Inc to come. There’s no news on Nightwing #1, seen on Bleeding Cool earlier today.

But what IGN also show, mistakenly it seems, as thumbnails attached to the story, is the Catwoman #1 and Batwoman #1 covers we showed earlier today… and the cover of what appears to be another Bleeding Cool reveal, Batgirl #1.

Here it is all big…

This year, the official competition at Cannes will see its first 3D entry, Takashi Miike’s Harikiri. That’s just one of the many surprises in what looks like a very exciting line up of films.

Presiding over the selection juries this year will be Robert De Niro (feature films), Michel Gondry (shorts), Emir Kusturica (Un Certain Regard) and Bon Joon Ho (Camera D’or). That’s a uniquely brilliant assembly, and I’m glad they’ve been delivered such a strong program to deliberate over.

In the competition picks alone there’s the shock of a 3D film; the surprise of Julia Leigh’s debut Sleeping Beauty; the long awaited return of Ratcatcher‘s Lynne Ramsay; a sci-fi picture from Von Trier; a horror movie from Almodovar; a papal black comedy from Nanni Moretti; what looks to be Terrence Malick’s most experimental film to date; the dependably solid Dardenne Brothers; a film starring, written and directed by Maiwenn, “the blue Alien singer from The Fifth Element“; and the most interesting looking Woody Allen for a few years now, at least judging by the trailer.

IN COMPETITION

Once Upon A Time in Anatolia, Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen

Polisse, Maïwenn Le Besco

No Tsuki Hanezu, Naomi Kawase

L’Apollonide, Bertrand Bonello

Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn

Footnote, Joseph Cedar

Harakiri, Takashi Miike

Le Havre, Aki Kaurismäki

We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay

The Kid With The Bike, Dardenne Brothers

Melancholia, Lars Von Trier

La Source des Femmes, Radu Mihaileanu

Parterre, Alain Cavalier

The Skin That I Inhabit, Pedro Almodovar

We Have a Pope, Nanni Moretti

Sleeping Beauty, Julia Leigh

The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick

Have I told you how much I want to see The Beaver? A lot, that’s how much. I’m glad to see it show up. I probably couldn’t say no to a bit of Kung Fu Panda 2, either.

OUT OF COMPETITION

The Artist, by Michel Hazanavicius

The Beaver, Jodie Foster

La Conquête, by Xavier Durringer

Kung Fu Panda 2, Jennifer Yuh

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Rob Marshall

Note: there’s no mention of Panda on the official press release, but I’m bowing to peer pressure and keeping it in for now. The world is reporting that it’s included, so…

I’ll give you the Un Certain Regard films too, but for all of the details on way-way-off-piste screenings, check that press release.

UN CERTAIN REGARD

Restless, Gus Van Sant

Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin

The Hunter, Bazur Bakuradze

Halt auf freier Strecke, Andreas Dresen

Skoonheid, Oliver Hermanus

Hors Satan, Bruno Dumont

Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro, Robert Guédiguian

The Days He Arrives, Hong Sang-Soo

Bonsai, Christian Jimenez

Loverboy, Cătălin Mitulescu

Tatsumi, Erik Khoo

En maintenant, on va ou?, Nadine Labaki

Ariang, Kim Ki Duk

Toomelah, Ivan Sen

Yellow Sea, Na Hong-Jin

Miss Bala, Gerardo Naranjo

L’exercice de l’Etat, Pierre Schoeller

Travailler Fatigue, Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra

Oslo, August 31st, Joachim Trier

And there it is. Some of these films will make few ripples on Bleeding Cool in future, while others will make waves. Just don’t make too many assumptions, yet, about which is which.

Bad news:

Really bad news:

Godzilla pix:

As the entire Northeastern sector of Japan faces a nuclear meltdown that could render the whole region uninhabitable, tens of thousands of displaced people are still in need of food, water and shelter and a death-toll that’s probably in five figures, dangerous levels of radiation found in food supplies and tap water all the way south to Tokyo, I couldn’t help thinking of this as the latest chapter in the story of Japan’s messy relationship with nuclear power, and wondered how this was going to be processed in Japanese pop culture.

All the hopes, dreams, fears and anxieties of a culture tend to get expressed in its popular fiction, and the Japanese more than any other creators has a direct line to their subconscious.  Pop is the Aboriginal Dreamtime of developed countries.  It’s how we know what their main preoccupations are.  Japan was, after all, the first country to ever get nuked – twice — back in World War II, and Japanese manga and anime have borne the scars of the nuclear nightmare ever since their inception after WWII.  Godzilla, or Gojira (his original name) was a metaphor for the devastation the atom bomb and the war brought.  A couple of decades later, the first nuclear power plants, designed by Western companies, were built in Japan and SF pop culture began to reflect a more benign relationship with atomic power – Godzilla became friendlier and the good guy in his movies by the 1970s, Mothra was portrayed as a guardian, and even Astro Boy, whose Japanese name is Tetsuwan Atom, is powered by a small nuclear reactor in his chest.

And yet for every good guy who was a metaphor for the benign side of nuclear power, there were nearly as many representations of the bad side, which revealed a deep ambivalence that never went away. There was BAREFOOT GEN (HADASHI NO GEN), Keiji Nakazawa’s autobiographical manga about the Hiroshima bomb’s impact and lasting legacy on him and his family.  The movie THE MAN WHO STOLE THE SUN (Taiyō o Nusunda Otoko) is considered a minor classic, touching on post-Sixties discontent and terrorism where a disgruntled chemist builds his own atom bomb to terrorise the government with his whimsical demands like demanding baseball games being shown without commercials or lifting the ban on the Rolling Stones so they can perform in Japan, all the while unaware that he’s dying from radiation poisoning before the cops might even catch up with him.  There’s no way to keep track of how many manga and anime series use the atom bomb as a backdrop or motivation to their stories, with radiation causing mutations to create either monsters or superpowered heroes.  In many ways, Otomo’s AKIRA, both the manga and anime are the pinnacle of nuclear metaphor science fiction, though it certainly wasn’t the last to do so.  Japanese pop fiction has continually flirted with the apocalypse, and I’ve often suspected this was because they got nuked in 1945, and that sense of Armageddon just lurking round the corner has never truly gone away from their psyche, and Fukushima seems to prove it once again.

The earthquake and meltdown at Fukushima looks like a checklist of all the elements you’re going to find in a Japanese science fiction story: a devastating quake that has killed thousands, a nuclear meltdown that’s threatening to irradiate the entire Northeastern part of the country, heroic and doomed nuclear plant workers desperately working to cool the reactors to prevent catastrophe, food and water becoming dangerously radioactive, government and nuclear power officials downplaying and outright lying to the public about how dangerous the situation really is, with the CEOs of TEPCO increasingly proven as craven, greedy liars after the revelation that they always knew the plants would not be able to withstand a major quake and not doing anything to reinforce them, fears of cancer or mutations in babies and future generations.  Japanese genre fiction, especially in manga and anime, has always been full of callous and venal corporate bigwigs who value profit over the lives of workers or ordinary people.  Everything that’s happening has happened in some novel, manga or anime in the last 20 years.  It’s as if the storytellers had their fingers on the pulse all this time.  Everyone has just crossed their fingers hoping the worst would not happen, but now their luck has run out.

The Japanese are essentially humanist in their outlook and this is often seen in their stories.  They have to carry on, it’s not like they have a choice there.  What I’m curious about is what kind of stories are they going to tell from this point on. The video game series DISASTER REPORT has just had its latest sequel cancelled in the wake of the current crisis since that game would not be considered escapism anymore.  I’m not saying ALL Japanese pop fiction deals with the nuclear issue, but let’s face it, a fair chunk of their genre fiction is inevitably going to continue to do so.  I wonder what the lost generation, the young Japanese who grew up in the economic crash and don’t feel anything is stable, is going to react to the current situation.  I wonder if the shut-ins, the hikkomori, will have their agoraphobia reinforced or if this might kick-start them into some kind of new activity.  Comforting escapist pop culture will be needed more than ever.  I wonder if manga and anime creators will be inspired to create more new dynamic stories or if they’ll become more insular and retreat further into the moe girl fetish.  I suspect the basic tenet of Science Fiction won’t change: series like ALIVE: THE FINAL EVOLUTION, NEON GENESIS EVANGELION, games like GOD EATER, PARASITE EVE and so on may not be about the nuclear holocaust directly, but the apocalypses they depict have always been allusions to nuclear destruction, and they are always about surviving and transcending it create a new world.  That is the inherent optimism and hope of Science Fiction.

I just wonder what’s next.

It’s still not too late to donate to the Red Cross, who can get essential supplies to Japan:

You can also text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10.

I also suggest donations to the Search Dog Foundation, who are being used to rescue earthquake survivors still being dug out:

Dreaming of monsters at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK!  IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture,

stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

This Friday evening, a screening of the film at London’s Curzon Soho will be followed by a Q&A with writer-director Gareth Edwards. He’s been going round and round and round doing lots of publicity for the film but he was still fresh when I heard him speaking recently, and both the film and the way it came into being are both rather interesting and have the potential to inspire some great questions and answers.

It’s the 6.15 screening. Book ahead.

Meanwhile, Foursquare users can get discounted tickets to the film at certain screenings at certain cinemas. Here’s the full explanation of how it works from the press release:

On the 3rd December (release day) from 6pm, fans who are eagerly awaiting the release of Monsters are encouraged to gather in 5 Vue Entertainment cinemas and 5 Cineworld venues around the UK. Using the Foursquare application on their smart phones, fans will need to unlock the coveted Swarm Badge, which can only be unlocked when 50+ Foursquare users check in to a venue simultaneously.

Unlocking the Swarm Badge will unleash a discount to see the film that very evening at Vue Cinemas (7pm) and Cineworld (TBC) in the following participating venues: Vue Birmingham City Star, Vue Bristol Cribs, Vue Cheshire Oaks, Vue Leeds Light, Vue Westfield, Cineworld Birmingham Broad St, Cineworld Cardiff, Cineworld Edinburgh, Cineworld Greenwich (O2) and Cineworld Sheffield.

The official Foursquare page and Facebook account for this promotion have more details.

And this is all without even making a case for supporting a smaller film from a talented filmmaker. I would love to see this film succeed.

The announcement is expected to be made at 12:30 ET/ 9.30 PT – in less than an hour’s time.

I understand a New York office will remain, and will likely house  editorial for Vertigo – a brand that believes it needs to stay in and around the publishing capital of the USA. But editorial for the DC Universe, as well as the rest of the company, will make the move to it’s corporate masters Warners on the West Coast. Many will travel. A number won’t. Expect to see some very familiar names leave the company – will they include Richard Bruning? Bob Wayne? Mike Carlin? We find out later today.

This is the move that Paul Levitz always resisted. And despite assurances from DC that they were considering all possibilities, having Diane Nelson, Jim Lee and Geoff Johns as natural West Coasters – with Dan DiDio spending more and more time over there – others thought it was just a matter of time.

Less than an hour to go folks. Unless, of course, it is all bunkum… or if they’re all on Mark Millar time.

UPDATE:

Best of luck to anyone reading this who’s on staff at DC Comics, today- Warren Ellis

all the best to everyone at DC today – Jock

Let’s talk about thriller comics.

Thriller comics tend to run counter to juvenile vibe of superhero comics, since the thriller genre tends to carry a more, I don’t know, “respectable” or “adult” vibe compared to stories about men in long underwear beating each other up. But then the idea of the non-superpowered costumed vigilante was an offshoot of traditional two-fisted crime stories, since the idea of a two-fisted or gun-wielding hero who solves crimes and saves people was a fundamental mainstay of the crime and thriller genre to start with.

Thriller comics are in the minority in the US, despite prose thrillers taking up a big portion of the book market. Steven Grant pointed out in his column Permanent Damage that this is probably because the mainstream American comics market is superhero-driven, and the superhero genre already assimilates the crime and thriller genres into itself much of the time. Batman and Daredevil are prime examples of this.

Thriller comics, on the other hand, are huge in Europe and Japan, and each region has different aesthetic approaches: most European comics tend to be more austere and almost detached in their approach to storytelling, preferring an almost staid matter-of-factness in getting the story across, whereas in Japan, manga tends to use the cinematic tricks of editing and composition to create a more expressionistic and visceral reading experience – they want you to get inside the characters’ skins and minds. And in Japan, there are thriller manga for different markets, from the teenage-oriented BLOODY MONDAY, about brainy teens fighting a criminal conspiracy, to the different adult, male-oriented series like JIRAISHIN, which is aimed at older teens and 20somethings with a darker, more punk view of the world, to the various comfort food-style police series, to the endless htiman series GOLGO 13, which is aimed at men in their 30s and 40s who are reasonably educated and keep up with international news. There are romantic comedy thrillers like Tsukasa Hojo’s CITY HUNTER and its sequel ANGEL HEART that’s popular with both 20something men and women, jumping between slapstick comedy, pathos and romance with ease. (and Hojo deserves a column all to himself if I ever get around to it…). The most popular thriller manga of recent times has been DEATH NOTE, which was really a procedural cat-and-mouse chase between criminal and the cops with a supernatural element added to it.

And then there’s UNTIL DEATH DO US PART.

This manga series is my latest comics obsession because it’s a strange example of how when there’s nothing original left in stories, savvy and talented creators can throw a whole load of familiar ideas and characters together in a blender and end up with something so archetypal as to be the ultimate thriller manga.

The story goes like this: Haruka, a young girl with the ability to see the future, goes on the run from a corrupt corporation that wants to control her and chooses a blind swordsman vigilante named Hijikita Mamoru to protect her, making him promise to stick with her “until death do us part”. In doing so, they find support from The Element Network, the secret organization founded by victims of crime and terrorism to support vigilante teams for protecting the innocent, and The Wall, an international covert ops network. The corporation that wants Huruka is part-funded by international terrorist Edge Turus for his own ends, and he uses his ties to the Yakuza in Tokyo to hunt her and Hijikita down, underestimating them and their allies all the way.

Tell me if that summary doesn’t sound absolutely hoary. By rights, this comic should be utterly ridiculous and bloody awful – the title itself is too long and layered with strange ironies and abstract pretensions the way prose thriller titles often do — but it’s quite the opposite. It’s possibly the best serialized thriller series I’ve read in years. Writer Hiroshi Takashige (about whom little seems to be known other than his previous series SPRIGGAN) and artist DOUBLE-S seem intent on creating the ultimate thriller comic, and what fascinates me is how they manage to keep the plot strands and cliffhangers going consistently since 2005. This is the kind of compulsive serilaised thriller we all want to read in our Marvel and DC comics, and here we have manga schooling everyone again. What’s especially interesting to me is how it feels like a compendium of superhero tropes found in Marvel and DC comics filtered through a Japanese lens. The characters in the series are pretty much superheroes and villains without the naff costumes. Hijikita is an amalgam of Batman (he has a tech specialist backing up his special blade and experimental glasses), Daredevil (he uses his senses and athleticism to fight bad guys) and Zatoichi (the quintessential blind swordsman of popular culture). His pairing with Haruka recalls the father-child warrior partnership of LONE WOLF AND CUB. The Wall, with its specialized operatives and grizzled leader Alpha, are reminiscent of SHIELD and Nick Fury – in fact, some scanlators think his real name name is a Japanese take on “Jack Kirby”. Turus and his network of gangsters, criminals, hitman and mercenaries, is the kind of vast criminal conspiracy you find in Marvel and DC. There’s an interesting feel of both American and Japanese comics being combined in UNTIL DEATH DO US PART. Takashige appears to have done a huge amount of research not just in comics and the thriller genre, but in politics and urban warfare as well to lend the pulp some weight. History, current affairs and science books are big sellers in Japan and manga writers frequently read nonfiction to fuel their plots.

It’s all crazed adventure bollocks, but it’s fun and addictive crazed adventure bollocks. The tone of the series is kept at PG-13 so there’s no nudity or porn. The heroes are stoical and complex and the bad guys are gleefully black-hearted. All the characters are clearly defined, down to the supporting characters. Everyone has enough dimensions as to be unpredictable. There’s Sierra, the Wall’s gunsmith and markswoman who wants to adopt Haruka to ease the pain of her own daughter’s death. There’s Juliet, the Wall’s top undercover op and femme fatale, who enjoys manipulating both men and women to discover their weaknesses. There’s Tatsumi Dalba, the sofrware billionaire who founded and runs the Element network, who was orphaned at a young age and vowed to find a way to protect innocents (another Bruce Wayne Manqué). There’s Teppei Genda, the hotshot cop on Hiikita’s trail, waiting for him to commit a crime, to kill a perp, so he can bust him, and who slowly finds the big picture unfolding before his eyes. There’s Aegis, a former bomb disposal expert and fighter who’s now a bodyguard and agent of the Element network. There’s Turus, whose sadism is ignited by his obsessive hatred of Hijikita for foiling his plans and maiming him as punishment. There’s Fang, the assassin who delights in finding a worthy adversary in Hijikita and wants to discover his weakness. There’s Wiseman, an American academic and criminologist whose true calling is to be a freelance master strategist for criminals, a 21st Century Napoleon of Crime.

This is just a small list of the characters in the series, and with all these high-concept characters, the creators still manage to convey the sense that Hijikita is still the scariest and most unpredictable bad-ass of the lot. And they also show that none of comes easily to him. He’s blind, after all, and has to judge every move, every decision he makes since one slip would be his last. Takeshige and DOUBLE-S have spent five years upping the stakes in his fights, coming up with scenarios you never thought you wanted to see in a blind swordman series – will Hijikita triump against a building full of yakuza all armed with pistols and and machine guns? What about when he’s facing off against prototype military drones that are invisible to radar, including his own? How does her fare against a speeding, radio-controlled car with an injured hostage tied to the front, preventing him from slicing up the engine block up to stop it? Or when he takes it upon himself to fight every mercenary that wants the $10 million bounty on his head in a single night in a park in central Tokyo? Have you ever wanted to see a blind swordsman take on a tank – and his blade is broken so he only has a reach of barely a few feet? And he always wins, the same way Batman always wins. And Haruka isn’t a submissive little girl but a proactive heroine on her own – the whole series is kicked off by her running up to Hijikita, a complete stranger, for help in the opening pages because she literally foresaw her future with him in that one instant when she decided to run from her captors. In one episode, she even saves a mafia princess classmate from gunmen by using her precognitive sight and the evasion skills Hijikita taught her to out-think them.

UNTIL DEATH DO US PART is like a masterclass in adventure serial plotting. The creators have a grasp of story, theme, plot-twists, escalating peril and complications with an ineffable sense of cool in a way Hollywood and American comics have become tired and lazy in. And in an age when everyone is looking for that hot new thing, trying to pitch what they hope is the next big franchise, we have this series quietly being published in Japan for five years now, in monthly chapters of over 20 pages each the same way US superhero comics are serialized, albeit in an thick anthology with other series. Its 11 volumes (and still going) are collected and published by Square Enix, the company that owns and produces the FINAL FANTASY game franchise. Too bad it doesn’t look like anyone is going to translate it properly for publication in English.

Collecting for Superheroes Without Spandex at lookitmoves@gmail.com

© Adisakdi Tantimedh

The covers and artwork from Until Death Do Us Part are copyright Square Enix.

026

“Heroes” is playing through my desktop speakers. And stops. Moves on to “Clay Bodies” by Zola Jesus. The robot head of Jack Kirby, set next to the speakers on my desk, has stopped talking. The web of connections that gauzed the room have faded. The lights in its eyes have gone dead. I take the cigar from its jaws, feeling suddenly like the people at Marvel who recovered and framed Jack Kirby’s last cigar (butt) at the office. Except that this was my bloody cigar and the thing just bitched at me until I donated it. Bastard didn’t even have lungs. Just a stolen and repurposed robot head full of words and pictures, running off electricity. A thing full of connections.

And connections, of course, are all you’ve found here.

If I were a responsible author, I’d provide you a list of sources here. But, to be honest, a lot of the material here was gathered using the machine of connections, the internet. If there’s a statement you want sourced, stuff it into Google. You’ll find a lot of the interview-based material that way. I half-remembered things that Jack Kirby and others had said, and chased them down across the howling wastes of the web. The things you don’t find… you’ll discover they’re mostly the anecdotes of a writer who’s been involved with the medium for twenty years or more. Me. These things just accrete in your head, when you’ve been studying the medium and its history (and meeting and talking to people) for that long. And, before you know it — or, at the very least, when you’re forty and you sit down to start trying to write a comics column with a new angle to it — you, too, are a thing full of connections. You can see how everything ties to everything else, that nothing happens in a vacuum, and that all culture is a web of connections.

This wasn’t a complete view of comics, nor was it a detailed one. It was a ride across one part of the landscape, nothing more.

This short book was inspired by the cultural writing of Umberto Eco, and by Paul Morley’s WORDS AND MUSIC, and by the work of Simon Reynolds, Lester Bangs, Chris Roberts and all the other people who made me realise that writing about music is music. And that, maybe, writing about comics could be music too.

ANYTHING

I’ll be back in a few weeks with the start of another 26 instalments of something. Happy new year.

COLOPHON

I can be sent things via Avatar Press at Avatar Press, 515 N. Century Blvd., Rantoul, IL 61866, USA, but I cannot promise a response or a review. You can email me at warrenellis@gmail.com, but I warn you, it’s a dump address, not my regular email address, so it can take me a few days to check it.

025

Engineer Tony Visconti has set up three microphones in front of David Bowie, with volume-triggered gates on them. It was a huge room in Berlin, previously used to record symphonies during World War 2.

(Private Jack Kirby: “I was handed a chocolate bar and an M-1 rifle and told to go kill Hitler.”)

One mic was in front of Bowie, one was fifteen feet away, and one was fifty feet away. Bowie begins singing softly. And yet the world is getting faster. Punk is in full run now, its “do anything” ethos (fake at the root, true in the world) infecting everything. Fashion is coming back to life. Comics are leaking into other media at an increased rate.

Bowie raises the volume of his voice, as he goes into the third verse, and the second microphone switches on. He is louder, closer, and yet further away, all at the same time. At the same time, Joost Swarte is defining the Clear Line and Atom Style: back in time, right here and pointing to the future, all at once.

The unearthly feedback howl of Fripp-through-Eno is racing through everything. It should have been (and yet is not unlike) the sound of the “time-tunnel”/”howlaround” effect from the classic DOCTOR WHO opening: which is, itself, visual feedback, birthed from making two TV cameras point into each other. (The first episode of DOCTOR WHO is entitled “An Unearthly Child.”) At this moment, Philip K Dick’s book A SCANNER DARKLY is being published. He is also, at this moment in which David Bowie raises his voice, giving a speech in Metz, France (a town twinned with Kansas City, Missouri, where Matt Fraction was living when he began writing X-MEN) entitled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others,” in which he says:

“I submit to you that… the creation or selection of such so-called ‘alternate presents,’ is continually taking place. The very fact that we can conceptually deal with this notion — that is, entertain it as an idea — is a first step in discerning such processes themselves.”

This is how it sounds:

The third microphone kicks in. David Bowie’s voice is filling the room, in all places at once, an audio superposition. Stray waveforms are passing through the windows from which Bowie watched illicit lovers kiss by the wall and wrote them into the song, crossing the four hundred miles from Berlin to Paris and embedding themselves in the matter of the stage he stands on as he talks about the nature of eternity itself. The reverberations are felt in Paris, where Jean-Pierre Dionnet is grinning and publishing METAL HURLANT, and Francois Roche is on the street outside, seventeen years old and thinking that he’d like to design buildings for a living and that this one in front of him is pretty nice but would be much more interesting as a vast rotting concrete stomach filled with robot antibodies, and Grant Morrison’s sitting outside the coffee shop down the road, a year older than Roche and a year away from getting published for the first time, head full of Jack Kirby comics, and Skylab swoops overhead, its Raymond Loewy-designed interior empty and abandoned but by God they did it, and David Bowie is singing, at the top of his lungs, “we can be Heroes.”

Which only means, quite simply, that we can do anything.

ANYTHING

026 will be the afterword to this short serialised book. After which I shall take a short break to commence DO ANYTHING 2. The collected version, entitled DO ANYTHING: Jack Kirby Ripped My Flesh will be available in spring 2010.

COLOPHON

I can be sent things via Avatar Press at Avatar Press, 515 N. Century Blvd., Rantoul, IL 61866, USA, but I cannot promise a response or a review. You can email me at warrenellis@gmail.com, but I warn you, it’s a dump address, not my regular email address, so it can take me a few days to check it.