Tag Archives: Comics and Music

A Theory of Why the Two Iron Men Became One

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I’m just going to say up front that I find Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” to be one of the creepiest songs in the history of the world. I knew I was going to have to listen to it to write this post and I picked the brightest part of the morning to do it in. And even then, I kept catching myself moving to stop the song, so I wouldn’t have to keep listening to it. I don’t think I’m alone. That song is just objectively, deliciously, scary.

It’s creepy from its opening moments, starting with just the thud of the bass pedal. Now, you can’t possibly know that there’s something just a little bit off about the timing of those thuds—since there’s no other accompaniment to compare it to—but even with nothing else going on in the song, those thuds don’t sound right. It’s hard to tell right at the beginning if Bill Ward is hitting each beat in a very slow four beat measure or hitting every other beat in a rather quick four beat measure (though later on, when you hear some actual quarter notes four in a row, I think it’s apparent that he’s doing the latter). But it leaves me feeling like the beats are somehow coming too fast and not fast enough.

Then comes the dissonant guitar riff, with the notes that refuse to differentiate themselves from one another, but just slide all over the place bearing bad news. And I don’t even have to tell you what comes next—that creepy voice, sounding like it’s rattling out of a metallic graveyard. It never fails to scare the shit out of me.

The lyrics themselves adhere to the first rule of good horror—don’t let your audience get a clear look at what’s going wrong. The longer the audience can’t tell what’s happening or why, the scarier the thing remains. Once there are clear answers, the scariest part is over.

There aren’t really clear answers in “Iron Man.” A man goes to the future to save mankind, though we don’t know from what. There’s some kind of accident and he’s turned to iron—somehow—in the magnetic field. And then he comes back to earth, gets propped up somewhere, and plots his revenge, though what he needs revenge for is also unclear. A third of the song is just unresolved questions about the iron man. And then there’s the killing.
I think this song is brilliant and I love it. But it is, to me, scary as hell.

Which is why I find it baffling that it’s kind of been adopted as the unofficial anthem of Iron Man, the superhero. “Iron Man” plays in the last Iron Man movie. Tony Stark wears a Black Sabbath t-shirt in The Avengers. When you look at lists of songs adapted from or influenced by comics, every single one of them both includes “Iron Man” and concedes that it doesn’t originally have anything to do with Iron Man.

They share a name, but that wouldn’t necessarily seem to lead so many people to connect the two, especially when they’re otherwise so diametrically opposed. But it’s that opposition that I wonder about. After all, if you think about it, “Iron Man” would make the perfect nemesis for Iron Man. “Iron Man” seems to have had some great scientific skill—since he travelled through time—which Stark could appreciate. But “Iron Man” is isolated from people where Tony Stark, though somewhat misanthropic, is in community. We know Iron Man by his intellect and quick wit. It’s not even clear that “Iron Man” thinks about much but revenge. And, of course, Stark is looking to save humanity while “Iron Man” is bent on destroying it.

I’m not a Jungian, but it seems like we’ve, weirdly, decided that Tony Stark needs a pseudo-Jungian shadow, a part of himself that he doesn’t acknowledge, but which we, as the audience, all know is there—and that shadow is “Iron Man.” It’s not him, it’s not even about him, but, in our minds, it can’t be separated from him. Now, the thing that makes this weird (and not Jungian) is that it is us, the audience, who has given Stark this alternate “Iron Man.” And yet, of course, if he’s going to have one, we have to give it to him. Who is there who can give a fictional character a shadow aspect if the artist creating him has not? It has to be the audience.

We have linked Iron Man so closely to “Iron Man” that it would, then, seem to be Tony Stark’s most secret identity—even though we’ve never seen it acknowledged in the Marvel Universe, we suspect he’s the lonely tin man slowly going crazy enough to destroy us all. He just doesn’t know it.

It’s kind of like fan fiction in which we’ve merged these two characters to see what would happen. But no stories have come out of this merger. Except that, clearly, the narrative of “Iron Man” itself is different, even though nothing changes, when it’s Stark who didn’t come back through the magnetic field the same guy he left Earth as.

Here’s what I wonder: Even now, is “Iron Man” so strange and terrifying that we link Iron Man and “Iron Man” not to improve Iron Man, but to give “Iron Man” some context, some way of being easily known and understood? Now, instead of asking, “What the hell happened? Who is this thing and why is it killing everyone?”, we get to pretend that it makes a certain kind of sense—“Oh, it’s Tony Stark! And he’s gone mad, finally.” If figuring out what’s happening makes a horror story less frightening and more manageable, I think the Iron Man/”Iron Man” merge is about making “Iron Man” less terrifying. It gives the song a context in which to understand it that the song itself refuses.

Linking “Iron Man” and Iron Man gives Tony Stark a much darker subtext, but it also gives “Iron Man” a less-frightening context. And more than a darker Stark, I think we crave a less-scary “Iron Man.”
 

Tales_of_Suspense_39

Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963): Iron Man debuts. Cover art by Jack Kirby and Don Heck.

 

Gil Kane, Memory Drawing, and Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait

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The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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There are two musics (at least so I have always thought): the music one listens to, the music one plays.
–Roland Barthes, “Musica Practica,” 1970

I just write ’em ’cause nobody says you can’t write ’em.
–Bob Dylan on his songwriting process, 1987

My dad is not convinced we saw Bob Dylan at Lake Compounce in Bristol, Connecticut on July 16, 1989. It was my first concert and it rained for most of the evening, from the start of Steve Earle’s loud, abrasive opening set to Dylan’s final encore of “All Along the Watchtower.” Earle was promoting his 1988 album Copperhead Road and Dylan was in the early stages of the Never Ending Tour, which continues this month as Dylan and his band visit the Northeast and the Midwest. On that rainy night in the summer of 1989, Bob Dylan, wearing a grey hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses, performed some of his most familiar songs: “Shelter from the Storm,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The audience cheered the first note of his harmonica solo on “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” But Dylan never spoke to the audience and he never took off the hood or the sunglasses. It could have been anybody up there.

So, almost twenty-five years later, my dad still wonders who we saw that night. Are we sure we saw Dylan? he’ll ask. He’s kidding, I think, and I guess the answer to that question depends on the Bob Dylan the two of us were looking to find.

I thought again about that July concert as I read Captain Marvel #20 (Marvel Comics, dated July 1970) to write this essay for the music and comics roundtable. “The Hunter and the Holocaust” opens with Captain Marvel’s alter ego Rick Jones performing for an ecstatic audience at a Greenwich Village folk club. The story, written by Roy Thomas with pencils by Gil Kane, inks by Dan Adkins, and letters by Artie Simek, spends most of its time exploring the relationship between Jones and the alien warrior Captain Mar-Vell, two heroes who, as we learn on the splash page, struggle with their dual identity: “What’s it like to be two different people??” asks Thomas in the first line of the issue.

In the next twenty pages, Rick Jones and his alien counterpart fight a pack of thieves, save a little girl from the wreckage caused by a tornado, confront a team of “hardened looters” called “The Rat Pack!” (see page 13) and, in the issue’s closing panels, finally come face to face with the Hulk. Only two pages of Captain Marvel #20, then, are about music, but I find myself thinking about Rick Jones’s folk song and what it might tell us about Gil Kane’s visual strategies and Roy Thomas’s nostalgia for early Dylan.

Thomas and Kane, I discovered, were also searching for Bob Dylan and, in the summer of 1970, they had plenty of company, as the singer had just released Self Portrait, a double album that shocked, disappointed, and divided his fans and his critics.
 

Fig. 1

Captain Marvel #20 (Marvel Comics, June 1970)

 
Rick Jones’s performance also challenged me: what do I hear when I read a comic book page? In the coffee house sequence that opens the issue, Thomas and Kane are inevitably working with memory. For Thomas, Rick Jones is the embodiment of the excitement of hearing Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde for the first time. For Kane, as we shall see, drawing a page about a musical performance is an exercise in technique: how does an artist design a page about music, either the act of playing or the enjoyment of listening? In order to hear the music of Kane’s Captain Marvel page, the reader must interpret the words and images just as a musician reads a score. The visual soundtrack of Captain Marvel #20, however, depends on the reader’s familiarity with Bob Dylan—or, more specifically, on the reader’s familiarity with the myth of Bob Dylan.

Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis and, later, Dylan’s biographer Robert Shelton all heard Self Portrait as Dylan’s rejection of his iconic status.
 

Fig. 2

Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait (1970)

 
An easy-listening Dylan record featuring songs written by Gordon Lightfoot, Paul Simon, and Rodgers and Hart? Greil Marcus’s review of Self Portrait begins with one of the most infamous lines in the history of rock criticism: “What is this shit?” (Marcus 7). Marcus heard the double album as Dylan’s willful retreat from the myth of being Bob Dylan and, therefore, as a kind of abdication. Early in his 1970 Rolling Stone review of the record, Marcus admits, “We are dealing with myth, after all, and the more Dylan stays away the greater the weight attached to anything he’s done” (Marcus 12).

Although no less puzzled by the record, Marcus’s friend and colleague Ellen Willis was more measured in her assessment. After she’d lived with the album for a few months, she wrote about it in the context of Dylan’s New Morning, the quick follow-up to Self Portrait released in the fall of 1970. Willis, whose essay on The Velvet Underground should be required reading for all young writers learning the craft of music criticism, argues that, despite its weaknesses, Self Portrait “proved that no matter what is put on a Dylan record—and ‘Blue Moon” is about as absurd as anything this side of a reading of the phone book—it ends up a self-portrait, because Dylan himself is so much more important than any record of his could ever be” (Willis 31-32). At the end of the review, after listening to Arlo Guthrie’s version of “Percy’s Song,” Willis longs for the “crude impact” of Dylan’s early work. Dylan’s new records are a reminder of the passage of time, of age and experience. By the summer of 1970, the days of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and The Times They Are a-Changin’ must have seemed very distant and strange.

Read in this historical context, “The Hunter and the Holocaust” might also be understood as belonging to the wave of “relevant” comics ushered in by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams with Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 (DC Comics, dated April 1970). This new wave of comics addressed a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. O’Neil and Adams even include their own Bob Dylan tribute in the form of a character named Johnny Walden in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #77 (also dated June 1970). According to one of the miners in the story, Walden is a young man who “taught hisself to play on the guitar” and “started singin’ songs ’bout us an’ our troubles,” songs that helped inspire “self-respect” and “a whole lotta discontent with the way we been treated…” (see O’Neil and Adams 38-39).

Critics associate the “relevance fad” in American superhero comics of the early 1970s most often with the socially and politically engaged work of writers such as Denny O’Neil and Steve Englehart. Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones describe relevance as a “passing trend” which “nevertheless helped expand the field of comics” by “loosening the outdated rules of the Comics Code Authority, broadening characterization, increasing the power of writers and artists, and drawing the aims of Marvel and DC closer together” (Jacobs and Jones 161). However, “relevance,” at least as defined by this issue of Captain Marvel, is also an acknowledgement of the fact that a comic book, like other cultural products, circulates in a much larger political and social context. The opening pages of this Captain Marvel story, then, are as much about a sense of loss as they are about music. The folk singing Rick Jones fills the empty space left behind by Bob Dylan after the release of Self Portrait.

On the second page of “The Hunter and the Holocaust,” in the magic world of a costumed superhero, Thomas and Kane set out to slow the passage of time which has eroded the promise of the 1960s. Rick Jones performs at a coffee house “where,” the text box that introduces page 2 tells us, “for a few, time is standing still…!” In the first panel, we see a sidewalk, a staircase, and a word balloon filled with lyrics and eighth notes: “One of these mornings / You may wake up dead…” The word balloon is colored blue and drifts like a cloud from the basement club:
 

Fig. 4

Panel 1 of Captain Marvel #20, page 2

We can read the words, but we cannot hear the music, nor can we read these musical notations. Rick Jones’s lyrics, Thomas explained in a recent email, were based in part on a poem by his friend Linda Rahm: “In my mind’s eyes I saw/heard them being sung in a rather Dylanesque manner.” Kane’s panel compositions and character designs assist us in imagining the melody, the chord structure, and—to borrow a term from Roland Barthes—the “grain” of the singer’s voice.

In order to hear the music, the reader must identify the cultural signifiers Thomas and Kane include in this opening panel. The reader is asked to remember the young Bob Dylan. “Coffee House” and “Greenwich Village, ” for example, are synonymous with the folk movement of the early 1960s. Standing with an acoustic guitar in a beam of orange light in the second panel of the page, Rick Jones resembles the Bob Dylan of D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back (1967).
 

Fig. 3

Panel 2 of Captain Marvel #20, page 2

 
Jones, however, was also, according to Thomas, “colored so that he reflected both Billy Batson—and James Dean in ‘Rebel without a Cause,’ except with a yellow shirt/t-shirt instead of a white one like Dean had…the yellow [was] the Billy Batson add-on.” Rick Jones, then, is a figure who embodies a nostalgia for these heroes from the past—the orphan whose magic word transformed him into the World’s Mightiest Mortal (and, as a result, into one of the most popular and lucrative comic book heroes of the 1940s and early 1950s); the iconic Hollywood rebel who, along with Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty, inspired the counter-culture of the 1960s; and the folk rock legend who, by the summer of 1970, and as a result of Self Portrait, had come to symbolize the lost promise of the 1960s.

Gil Kane’s compositional choices are essential in hearing Rick Jones’s “Dylanesque” music. As in most of Kane’s work, the placement and movement of figures in space creates meaning between and within panels. Kane was fascinated by figures in motion. Given his often blunt criticism of comic book narratives, why did Kane spend so much of his career drawing superheroes? In the 1969 Alter Ego interview, John Benson asks if Kane’s attraction to costumed heroes was a simple matter of proficiency: “I take it from your earlier comments that the main reason why you are illustrating super-heroes,” Benson comments, “is that you feel that this is the area in which you are most proficient. Is that correct?” (Benson 164-165). “Yes and no,” Kane explains. Drawing superheroes—idealized bodies in motion—allowed Kane the opportunity to invent and analyze forms:

It’s a comfortable area for me to operate in, since it depends to a great extent on action, and it also coincides with my interest at the moment, which is learning to design anatomical structure. I’m busy solving technical problems for myself, and sometimes it’s very convenient when the idiom that I am involved in happens to be sympathetic to the technical problems that I am solving. (Kane qtd. in Benson 165)

On page 2 of Captain Marvel #20, Kane sets out to solve a number of significant problems regarding music, words, and images.*
 

Fig. 5

Page 2 of Captain Marvel #20

 
Kane has designed a page that analyzes the relationship between the performer and his audience. After a close-up of Rick Jones in the page’s third panel, Kane devotes the fourth and final panel to the singer’s profile. Jones, his eyes closed, sings for us and for his coffee house audience. In the foreground of the image, Kane has superimposed a series of figures over Jones’s profile. As a result, we witness the performance and the response of the audience simultaneously, but not with a split-screen image as, for example, in Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock, which was also released in the spring of 1970. Rather, Kane employs a kind of montage in which the singer, the song, and the audience share a singular moment that, all too quickly, will recede into memory.

Rather than cutting from an image of Rick Jones to figures from the audience and back again, Kane offers readers a portrait of the social function of music—how it works as a means of collaboration and, in this example, as a form of ecstatic communion between the performer and the audience. The effectiveness of the panel, however, depends on the memory and imagination of the reader. The reader must recognize the allusions to Bob Dylan embedded in Thomas’s text in order for Kane’s images to resonate. In other words, Thomas and Kane are inviting the reader to remember the myth of Dylan and the utopianism he inspired.

In Section 4 of The Natural Way to Draw (1941), Kimon Nicolaïdes argues that all drawing is an act of memory. He also suggests various exercises in “memory drawing”:

With the exception of the contour study, there is no drawing that is not a memory drawing because, no matter how slight the interval is from the time you look at the model until you look at your drawing or painting, you are memorizing what you have just seen. Of course, in that kind of drawing in which the student looks back and forth from the model continuously, he is memorizing little bits at a time, hoping to be able, after he has assembled all the little bits, to put them together by some preconceived theory or plan or by some belated effort to see the model as a whole. (41)

Comics are ideal archives of memory and motion. Kane, always an innovator, circumvents the limits of the form by depicting music’s role in the building of a community. More specifically, he brings to life what has been lost, that yearning for a return to what Bob Dylan signified during the 1960s. The ecstasy of these figures in the final panel of page 2—the two women with their eyes closed, the hands raised in exultation—is the ecstasy of a lost moment, of a memory, or of a forgotten ideal.
 

Fig. 7

From “Memory Drawing and Other Quick Studies,” Section 4 of Kimon Nicolaïdes’ The Natural Way to Draw (1941)

 
Despite the ecstatic, communal celebration of Jones’s performance, there is also something terribly lonely about it. The figures, despite Kane’s best efforts, remain locked in time and motion. There is no substitute for the visceral power of music heard live and loud in a small room.

Words and pictures are at their best when memorializing what was or imagining what might come. Even music that evokes memories of the past remains powerfully and persuasively present. A melody or lyric might trigger images from the past, but we have no choice but to hear the music itself here in the present, note by note, moment by moment. The longing and loneliness I sometimes associate with words and pictures might explain why for so many years I saw music as an escape from the world of comics. As I once told one of my guitar students, music requires some sort of audience, or at the very least a collaboration between the performer and the listener (unless the performer and listener are one). A year after I saw Dylan for the first time, I got a guitar. Three years later, I joined a band.

I’ve neglected to mention that Dylan himself is a visual artist. The cover of Self Portrait features one of his paintings, and over the years he’s written songs from the perspective of painters and other artists. Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind ends with “Highlands,” a slow, deadpan narrative of over 16 minutes (you can listen to a somewhat shorter but inspired live version from 1999 here). In the middle of the song, after several stanzas in which he drifts between the “rat race” of his life and his dreams of the Scottish highlands, the singer finds himself in a Boston restaurant where he orders a plate of hard-boiled eggs. The waitress makes an unexpected request:

Then she says, “I know you’re an artist, draw a picture of me!”

I say, “I would if I could, but

I don’t do sketches from memory”

But, as Gil Kane has shown us, the singer has no choice. Every sketch is a sketch from memory, and each line and gesture offers another shot at recollection.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure how to answer my dad when he asks if we saw Bob Dylan that summer and, really, it doesn’t matter. We stood there together, and that memory is more important to me than the music itself. Besides, Dylan and his band played most of our favorites, except for “Boots of Spanish Leather.” I can’t imagine a place I would rather have been on the rainy evening of July 16, 1989, a date that, without my dad and without Dylan, would have been an otherwise meaningless set of coordinates in time and space.
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*Of course, one simple solution to this dilemma—how to create a page a reader can hear—is to include the melody of the lyrics in some form of musical notation. A reader familiar with notation, itself a series of symbols invented to record and document sounds, would then be able to read the score and hear Rick Jones’s song. Or, why not include a soundtrack with the comic itself? This, of course, is a viable option today in the age of web comics, and even by the early 1980s some writers and artists began exploring forms of multimedia. Issue #3 of Mike Baron and Steve Rude’s Nexus (Capital Comics, 1981), for example, included a flexi disc. “Comics in Stereo!” declares the black and white magazine’s colorful cover. Tim Truman also included a flexi disc in issue #19 of Scout (Eclipse Comics, May 1987) with songs recorded by his band The Dixie Pistols. Eclipse then released a full-length album by The Dixie Pistols in 1987. The record included a Scout minicomic.
 

Fig. 8

An image of the flexi disc included with Tim Truman’s Scout No. 19 (Eclipse Comics, May 1987)

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References

 

Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

 

Benson, John. “A/E Interview: Gil Kane” in Roy Thomas and Bill Schelly (Eds), Alter Ego: The Best of the Legendary Comics Fanzine. Raleigh: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2008. 156-168.

 

Marcus, Greil. “Self Portrait No. 25” in Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010. 7-27.

 

Jacobs, Will and Gerard Jones. The Comic Book Heroes from the Silver Age to the Present. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. 1985.

 

Nicolaïdes, Kimon. The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art Study. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941.

 

O’Neil, Dennis and Neal Adams. The Green Lantern/Green Arrow Collection. New York: DC Comics, 2004.

 

Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2010. (e-version)

 

Thomas, Roy. E-mail to author. April 7, 2013. 8:15 pm.

 

Thomas, Roy (w), Gil Kane, (p), Dan Adkins (i), Artie Simek (l). “The Hunter and the Holocaust” in Captain Marvel No. 20 (Marvel Comics, June 1970).

 

Truman, Tim. “Houserockers” in Scout No. 19 (Eclipse Comics, May 1987).

 

Willis, Ellen. “New Morning: Dylan Revisited” in Nona Willis Aronowitz (Ed.), Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2011. 30-33.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poster Boy

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Do D.I.Y. posters—the Xeroxed or silkscreened posters you find on lampposts and kiosks in big cities, advertising bands and events—constitute a form of comics? The question is at least arguable. In 1975, theorist Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle posited that a comics page (and the double-spread that occurs after the turn of a page) is understood by readers in both linear and tabular ways. The panels on a page are read one at a time, in order, as the reader follows the linear progress of a narrative, but the page can also be read as a table or a map, as a single image subdivided and organized to impart information. (There’s a tradition of artists, beginning perhaps with Frank King and including Jim Steranko, Neal Adams and J.H. Williams III, who emphasize the overall tabular design of their pages much more than typical cartoonists do.) Both comics pages and D.I.Y. posters, then, function as single-illustration “tables” according to Fresnault-Deruelle’s definition—they have that tabular dimension in common.

A related point: many comics artists have made posters, and vice versa. One excellent book on posters is the RISD Museum/Gingko Press exhibit catalog Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present (2006), edited by Judith Tannenbaum and Maya Allison (with design by Helene Silverman and Dan Nadel). Wunderground assembles posters from the Fort Thunder renaissance of Providence’s underground, by such key Paper Rodeo/Kramers Ergot/Monster cartoonists as Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Jim Drain and Leif Goldberg. One of the first selections in Wunderground is Brinkman’s Eagle Square (2000), (Update: Eagle Square is actually by Brian Chippendale) an image designed to mobilize opposition to the construction of a new strip mall:
 

image1

 
This poster has much in common with Brinkman comics like Teratoid Heights (2003) and Multiforce (2005), including the impossibly dense delineation of a surreal, maze-like environment and the focus on a single character navigating said environment (I imagine the cowboy on the left side of the poster following the path into the labyrinth). While I’m not sure how Eagle Square represents the cause—does the multi-colored tower represent the “historic mill complex,” the prospective strip mall, or neither?—the poster is an eye-catching companion to Brinkman’s sequential art. Robert Crumb’s album covers and comics reflect his love of “old-timey” music; Evan Dorkin channels his obsession with Ska music into his images for the American Skathic series of CDs and the milieu of his Hectic Planet series; and Mat Brinkman simultaneously makes comics, posters, and tapes of homgrown electronic music, ignoring distinctions between different media. Culture is culture.

I’m not writing this essay, however, to theorize the nature(s) of culture(s), even if such sweeping theories were possible. Instead, I want to tell a personal story about how comics enter into dialogue with music and with single-image posters. Teaching is part of the story too, since it happened during my “day job” teaching English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

In spring 2002 I taught my first class on comics and graphic novels, but it was a creative writing class, and I was charged with teaching the students the basics of visual storytelling. Which, frankly, was ridiculous: I can’t draw, I’m a mediocre fiction writer, and at that time the only comics theory and history I’d read was McCloud’s Understanding Comics. (No Feiffer, Kunzle, Witek: I hadn’t even seen Steranko’s History of Comics.) Still, I dove into the class because I was into comic books—especially, blindly, nostalgically, the 1960s Marvel comics of my childhood—and I got lucky: the students in that class were a ferociously sharp bunch, challenging me with controversial ideas (“Prince Valiant looks like book illustration to me, not comics!”) and generating better work than I expected.

One of the best students in that class was a junior named Chris Williams. Chris had been an Art major, but transferred to English when it became clear that his interest in cartooning (particularly Mike Allred’s American version of la ligne claire) didn’t jibe with the Art department’s emphasis on conceptual and abstract work. Some of my class assignments focused exclusively on writing—students were expected to write both a full-script comic and a Marvel-style plot—and Chris was very good at these. He truly excelled, though, when I asked the students to draw images to go along with their words. He put more background detail into his pictures than anyone else in the class, and his figure drawing, clearly inspired by Allred, was rubbery, expressive, and compulsively readable. My major critique of Chris’ art was that his images read too much like outlines, like ethereal diagrams of spaces and people, and I asked him to use cross-hatching and spot blacks to bring solidity to his pictures. Chris cheerfully ignored this suggestion, and even made a joke about my nagging; for one assignment, he turned in a splash page featuring a rocket blasting through outer space, but refused to paint the universe in shades of inky darkness. Chris’ astronauts flew instead through a field of white paper punctuated by lines indicating the bright areas of his fictional stars.
 
I did have an influence on Chris in one way, though: I loaned him all of my Love and Rockets collections (13 of the fifteen that collected the entire run of the original L & R magazine), and they blew his mind. He loved how Jaime Hernandez out-Allreded Allred, how Jaime stripped his drawings down until every line carried expressive meaning. (He also noticed that Jaime was a wiz at laying down big slabs of ink.) He fell for the stories too. Chris played guitar in a loud slow-core band called Maple Stave, and he connected with Los Bros’ love of rock and roll, and their attempts to import the speed and recklessness of the music (such as the out-of-control, almost abstract orgy in Gilbert’s “Bullnecks and Bracelets”) into verbal-visual terms. During this period, Chris drew and xeroxed a zine that combined an irreverent approach to the superhero genre, tonally very similar to “Mechanics,” with a stone-cold swipe of Jaime’s line-up cover to Love and Rockets #1 (which is itself—as revealed in The Art of Jaime Hernandez book [2010]—a riff on a Raymond Pettibon illustration on the back of a Black Flag 45). At the end of our class, Chris returned my L & R books, along with two surprises: he gave me the two volumes that I didn’t own (House of Raging Women and Hernandez Satyricon), and he drew me an original comic strip about what he’d learned (or tried to learn) from the art of Los Bros.
 

image2

 
After Chris graduated from college, he went home to Raleigh and took a bookstore job. He also saw lots of bands in various Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill venues—Local 506, Nightlight, the legendary Cat’s Cradle—and Maple Stave occasionally opened for headliners like Port Huron Statement and Section Eight at these venues. Most importantly, he kept at his art, experimenting with screen printing and crafting images with splattery, phantasmagoric colors. Many of Chris’ interests collided in 2004 when bars and galleries started hiring him to screen-print gig posters, and he’s crafted over two hundred since, most of which can be seen at his Storenvy site here. I’m proud of the work he’s done, I delude myself that I had a little influence over his creative direction, and I’m impressed by anybody who can make art pay.

Chris has come back to ASU for visits (once to attend an opening reception for an exhibit of his work at the campus art gallery) and during these visits we’ll sometimes get together for a lunch that typically ends with Chris giving me copies of his newest posters. I like them all, but I have a favorite, an image of a soldier dressed in olive-green fatigues sitting in a field of red plants. The soldier is an immediately legible cartoon abstraction conventionally situated in the center of the composition, while the plants are a network of indistinct, slashing brush lines that represent energy as effectively and abstractly as Kirby Krackle: the result creates vibrant friction between two different modes of comic-book expressionism.

I’ve framed and hung this image on the wall of my living room, next to original art by Ben Towle and Richard Thompson, so I can’t scan it. My version of Chris’ image has no text on it, but he recycled the picture (and, presumably, the screen) for a 2008 gig poster, and it’s the following, without blue lettering, that greets guests as they walk into our parlor:
 

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After decades of over-indulgent comic book reading, my default mode is to narrativize every image I see, wrap them in stories that tame their visual extravagance. Initially, the story I ascribed to Chris’ soldier-in-a-field was tragic: he’s manning a military radio, waiting for a message that’ll reassign him to the Front or bring him bad news about the point platoon. (Note the worn anxiety on his face.) Yet now I wonder if this original tale was too pessimistic. Maybe the soldier has exiled himself to the blood-red field, to tune a civilian radio and listen to stations and music banned in the barracks. Maybe his life was saved by rock and roll. Maybe a network of beats and notes link Jerusalem Crickets and Maple Stave, comics and posters, teacher and student, me and you.

Re(Dis)membering Pushead, The Cheerful Blasphemer

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The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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The album cover for Funeral Mist’s 2009 album Maranatha featured a dark chiaroscuro drawing of a cherub blowing his trumpet in the ear of a naked old woman, her eyes rolling back on her head as she masturbates for the apparent titillation of the viewer. Among the images within the liner is a very young girl, rendered in a similar style, holding a small, smooth stone delicately engraved with the word “Whore.” Really, no matter what you make of the message, it certainly qualifies as an attempt at humor, rendered with attention to traditional Western visual aesthetics.
 

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This cover was created by Funeral Mist’s only remaining original member, Mortuus, (nee Arioch), not by Brian Schroeder, a.k.a. Pushead, known best for his ‘80s and ‘90s illustration work for Thrasher magazine, Zorlac skateboards, Metallica and the Misfits. But the Maranatha art represents a revival of a Pushead-like appreciation of handicraft and fun that has been absent from Juxtapoz-style graphics for far too long. Despite his narrow range of subject matter (bones, skulls, bits of cloth or meat), Pushead’s work resonates with allegorical death tableaux from the northern European Renaissance, “ukiyo-e” Japan, revolutionary Mexico, and modern Symbolism, Expressionism, and Art Nouveau, realized in monochromatic tattoo-ready vignettes of sublime line and texture variation. Adorned with scarves, bandages, hair, wires, etc., Pushead’s skulls wink, leer, and grimace, eye sockets full of sparkly miasma and undead mirth.
 

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I don’t know if there was any conscious influence, but when I first saw the work of German printmaker Horst Janssen, shortly after his death in 1996, I could not help but be overwhelmed by the formal similarities. Thorny tangles emerging from shadowy recesses, suffused in a particulate cloud of decay, to resolve into a mass that may have once been alive, always rendered with a delicate sense of slightly sadistic absurdity.
 

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The other artist that Janssen, and perhaps by extension Pushead, recalled, was that other grotesque light of my teenage rendering pantheon, comics illustrator Bill Sienkiewicz. Which helps to make the point that this artwork is, at least at this point in history, “low” art. Not because it is in any way ignorant, but simply because it values craft over concept and fantasy over empiricism.
 

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At least that’s what “low” art should value, according to me. The fact that so many design-based artists since the millenium want to cash in on their lack of craft or taste by painting a skateboard deck and hanging it in a gallery, and that the kind of trained, elegant modeling Pushead epitomized has been turned into pointless jungles of calligraphy screenprinted on to wraparound T-shirts at Kohl’s, is neither a judgment on “high” or “low,” fine art or illustration, but their troubled relationship. It’s a two-way sellout, much like the deliquescence of Metallica, post-Cliff-Burton, into therapy-empowered stadium-ready flight-simulator music, and the simultaneous aspirational decline of underground comics into faux-cinematic narratives of tortured magical-realist sincerity. The race for seriousness has done a lot of harm.

For years the door to my room sported a Thrasher page featuring Pushead’s Zorlac logo, a one-eyed pirate’s skull in which not only two locked cutlasses are embedded, but also a Christian cross formed by two bandage-bedecked bones.
 

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It was (and is) a provocatively ridiculous image, but was never an issue for my churchgoing mother. This was years before black metal band members had to cut their bodies and smear themselves with entrails onstage in order to achieve cred– although Gwar had been using roughly similar tactics, equal parts Gallagher and G.G. Allin, for quite some time. This was when Slayer sang songs gleefully extolling murder and hellfire, but was fronted by a faithful Catholic, and Deicide was soon to take off, untroubled by its majority Christian lineup. Anti-racist skinheads were beating up Nazis, but thy weren’t jumping random people coming out of a bar. It was a less extreme time for extreme culture posturing.

This may have been partially because the censorious culture warriors were far more militant in the ‘80s. You could get in real trouble just for drawing a comic called “Boiled Angel.” Insofar as the retreat of assholes like Jerry Falwell, Tipper Gore, Jesse Helms, and Ed Meese means, say, more freedom for gay teenagers to come out and not kill themselves, we are in a far better place. But, in a way, Pushead had a kinship with the politically and viscerally confrontational artwork of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, when a sense of humor and detachment did not reduce the ferocity of a statement, but saved it from the pious, solipsistic irrelevance that has dogged visual culture since shortly after that time.
 

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“Family Romance” by Charles Ray from the 1993 Whitney Biennieal

 
Looking at Pushead again makes me think that it may be time to safety-pin a bloody banner to our genitalia and get back out in the street. I find hope in the fact that Mortuus from Funeral Mist, despite his grand statements about devil worship, obsessively quotes the Bible in his lyrics, thereby emphasizing in-between space over mere fidelity. Sometimes a stance is just an attitude, which may be far better than an ideology.
 

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Comics and Music Roundtable — Index

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We’re going to be running a roundtable on comics and music over the next couple of weeks. This will serve as an index of posts in chronological order.
 

Bert Stabler, “Re(Dis)Membering Pushead, The Cheerful Blasphemer”

Craig Fischer, “Poster Boy”

Brian Cremins, “Gil Kane, Memory Drawing, and Bob Dylan’s Self-Portrait”

Betsy Phillips, “A Theory of Why the Two Iron Men Became One”

Qiana Whitted, “Sound and Silence in the Jim Crow South”

Noah Berlatsky, “The Unheard Peanuts”

Kailyn Kent, “Phantom Music”

Marc Sobel, “A Review of Reinhard Kleist’s Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness

Michael Arthur, “Non-Canonical”

Ng Suat Tong, “Opera As Drama As Comics”

Chris Gavaler, “Top 5 Superman Songs of All Time”

Noah Berlatsky, “Klingklang Drawing”

Ng Suat Tong, “The Freewheelin’ Daredevil”

Subdee, “Phonogram 2: The Breakfast Club”

Russ Maheras, “Gene Simmons and Kiss: Channeling One’s Inner Superhero”

Noah Berlatsky,, “Presence”

Domingos Isabelinho, “Pamplemoussi by Geneviève Castrée”

Sean Michael Robinson, “Music or Comics, or Making a Joyful Noise”
 

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