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The Year of Ted White

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august1980p96

August 1980 – Page 96 Chain Mail

If you ever get the opportunity to look at a copy of the August 1980 issue of Heavy Metal, flip to the letters column on page 96. On the bottom left corner of the page, you will find a letter that I feel perfectly captures the mood of the average Heavy Metal reader during that year. It reads as follows:

Dear Ted,

The day is fast approaching when “reading Heavy Metal stoned is like being stoned… almost” (as one reader put it) is no longer true. Who can get into reading book reviews, movie reviews, and other such stuff when one is stoned? You sit there and stare at a paragraph for ten minutes before you realize you’re not even reading it, much less absorbing the content. I’d much rather sit staring at full-page artwork for ten minutes and really get into that.

I especially miss Druillet’s very worthwhile contributions[1]. So fire up another bowl and get HM back up to the top – where it once was.

T.H.C.

Decatur, Ind.

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August 1980 – Page 53 Salammbo by Druillet

If online message boards, forums and/or Usenet had been widely available in the late 70s, the one(s) dedicated to discussing the content of Heavy Metal magazine would have exploded in controversy in 1980. This is obvious from the content of the letter columns during this year. The usual approach was to print a page of positive responses with an equal number of negative responses, followed up in later months by reactions to the responses. The printed responses were obviously just a drop in the mail bucket – I can only imagine what would have happened if it had played out in real time.

So what happened in 1980 to cause so much wailing and gnashing of teeth? Short answer: they got a new editor. Not quite two years after the inception of the magazine, the first editorial team of Sean Kelly and Valerie Marchant was replaced by Ted White, who had spent ten years editing Amazing Stories and Fantastic. At the time, it was felt that his success on those publications made him a good choice to take Heavy Metal in a new direction. It’s also interesting to note that the entirety of his comics-related work to that point was a Captain America novel he wrote in 1968.
 

The biggest (and most controversial) change that White brought to the pages of Heavy Metal were four columnists, each writing about a different topic – Lou Stathis, Jay Kinney, Bhob Stewart and Steve Brown. Original fiction pieces were dropped entirely and the volume of art pages was reduced to make room for column inches. To the editorial staff’s credit, they did play with the layout considerably, often presenting pages that were half text and half comic. Regardless, the huge blocks of text were easy to skip over and doubled the amount of time it took to read each issue.
 

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May 1980 – Page 57 Gallery Section: New Books

 
Of the regular columnists, the most controversial was Lou Stathis (who was an editor at Vertigo later in life). He insisted on referring to rok musick, an affectation that looks amusing now, but was probably seen as very progressive at the time. In his first column (January 1980), he starts by claiming that the only two acts that were any good during the 70s were the Sex Pistols and Roxy Music. This probably came as somewhat of a shock to the readers of Heavy Metal, who were mostly in the Led Zeppelin camp (a band that Stathis doesn’t even deign to mention in that first column)[2].

Stathis presented interviews of bands he enjoyed and did a review of a whole slew of debut singles at one point – up-and-comers like The Cure, X, and Gang of Four. Later columns included an homage to Brian Eno and a long examination of Ultravox, which ran next to Ted White’s review of an Ultravox performance written under the pen name of Dr. Progresso – a name that White still uses for his prog rock radio show. White wrote additional articles on occasion and the contrast in approaches is very striking. Stathis wrote from the hip, in his best Lester Bangs sneer while White’s articles were about sharing the love of an artform that he deeply respected.

In hindsight, it’s easy to make the case that Stathis’s attitude and contempt for what he considered to be the mainstream of music had the potential to severely alienate a portion of the existing Heavy Metal readership. Unfortunately, audiences tend to take criticism (real or implied) of the bands they like as criticism of themselves. After all, if you tell me that the music I listen to sucks, aren’t you also insulting my taste in music? As jazzed as he was about The Residents, Stathis was just as scornful of “the tuna fish that you get on your radio” and he constantly read like he was trying to pick a fight.

Jay Kinney’s running history of underground comix was nowhere near as controversial as Lou Stathis, but some readers still managed to find time to complain about it. Kinney started with one of the main influences of Crumb and company – EC – and sketched biographies and bibliographies for most of the big names in subsequent months.  He only managed to get as far as 1971 with his history before his column was cancelled along with the rest of them in December 1980. Along the way, he provided a fairly good blow-by-blow account of the various underground cartoonists migrating around the country, looking for more reasonable markets (San Francisco and New York were favorite destinations). It’s a collection of columns that would form the good backbone of a definitive history of the period – as a companion to Dez Skinn’s book, maybe.
 

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May 1980 – Pages 84&85 First Love by Bissette and Perry/Comix by Jay Kinney

 

Bhob Stewart’s Flix column was dedicated to film. His first three columns featured an extended interview with Stephen King, whose novel The Shining was being made by Stanley Kubrick at the time. Later columns focused on animation festivals, weird films that would now be put into the “psychotronic” bucket and a story about the time he met a background artist from Fantasia. He also did a long write-up of the upcoming Heavy Metal film, which was deep into production at the time.

Steve Brown’s SF column aimed at bringing news of contemporary science fiction and fantasy books to the readers of Heavy Metal. He reviewed David Brin, Samuel Delaney, Ursula K. Le Guin and a slew of other authors. Despite the occasional bully pulpit rant about how the science fiction genre deserved better, it was easily the least controversial of the columns because it was ostensibly aimed at a demographic that liked science fiction. Unfortunately, it was lumped in with the rest of the columns as a waste of space because those column inches could have been used for more art.

There were guest columns as well. Maurice Horn provided a quarterly international comics column. The April issue featured a write-up of Guido Crepax’s Valentina (Crepax’s thank you letter was published in July, alongside photos of a van that was painted with the Heavy Metal logo), August was dedicated to Herge’s Tintin and Tezuka was in November. April saw a hysterically ironic Sidebar column from Norman Spinrad that panned both the first Star Trek motion picture and Disney’s The Black Hole as being more about the special effects than the story – a criticism that has been leveled at Heavy Metal on more than one occasion.

During this period, Heavy Metal also ran interviews with certain key creators – Jeronaton, Enki Bilal, Moebius, Philippe Druillet and Guido Crepax. In most cases, these were the first English-language interviews with these creators and exposed the readers of Heavy Metal to more than just their art. Jeronaton was all over the place, but the Druillet and Bilal interviews are excellent insights into the artistic and creative influences that shaped them and their productions.

Scattered among the columns were some top-notch comics work. Berni Wrightson, Spain Rodriguez, Joost Swarte, Guido Crepax, Howard Cruse and Matt Howarth showed up in Heavy Metal for the first time during this period and a lot more of Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette’s work was also evident. Several of Caza’s pieces from Pilote appeared, as did a lot of older Moebius material – including a great strip from when he was going by Gir. Ted White even did a few strips with Ernie Colon. Chaykin didn’t show up, but early Corben did – from the period before he discovered the airbrush.
 

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May 1980 – Page 24 House Ad

 
Despite the fact that he oversaw one of the best issues of Heavy Metal ever produced – the Rock Issue, October 1980 – Ted White did not make it to the end of the year. The last issue he edited was November 1980, but the columns made their last appearance in the December issue, which makes me think that his departure was fairly abrupt. Controversy may be good for raising awareness of a publication, but when the self-identified long-term readers[3] start complaining about the format of a magazine that they have grown to love, it’s time to make hard decisions.

After acknowledging that “[s]ome of the ideas worked, others didn’t,” the editorial in the December 1980 issue laid out the new status quo and claimed that White “is now relinquishing his duties as editor to devote his time to two novels and his new record company.” He was scheduled to do a tribute to Will Eisner in an upcoming issue and wrote a few follow-up comics, so the split wasn’t entirely acrimonious.

Some of the changes that came out of 1980 were subtle– the overt drug references didn’t go away, but the rolling paper ads were replaced by ads for stereo equipment and science fiction book clubs. Guest editorials and commentary continued in later issues, as did interviews. White introduced a portfolio section, which showed off samples of art books by Syd Mead and HR Giger. This was later resurrected as a general presentation feature called Dossier that ran for years.
 

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July 1980 – Page 22 Romance by Caza

 
If you were to cleave the history of Heavy Metal into distinct periods, the Year of Ted White makes a neat dividing line between the fast and loose production values of the early years and the more professional publication that was eventually given to Julie Simmons-Lynch. It’s a shame that it was only a year, though.

 


[1] Druillet had an excellent piece published in the same issue.

[2] A letter in the May letter column starts by asking the rhetorical question “What is the most useless person in the world?” and answering it with “A rock critic” then goes on to argue that New Wave music is terrible by citing the complete lack of talent exhibited by Devo, Elvis Costello and the Talking Heads.

[3] Of a magazine that’s just over three years old

Grappling With Genre

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One of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors is The Player of Games by Iain M Banks. It is a Culture book, the vast anarcho-communist utopian space opera setting that Banks has designed from the ground up to be both self-consciously rational and pure wish-fulfillment for those of us who like their escapism with a hefty dollop of moral superiority. The Culture has no money and is made up of an aggregate of alien races and artificial intelligences, include self-aware spaceships with jokey names.
 

 
The Player of Games is about a man whose job is to play games (I told you the Culture was a utopia), who is recruited by the Culture’s dirty tricks espionage group Special Circumstances to help them engage with something they’ve never run into before: an empire that is built around a very large, very complex game. The victor of a population-wide tournament becomes the new emperor.
 

 
I do not mention this book to praise it, but rather to use it as an example as I discuss the complexity of the abstract concept that we call genre. If genre was a coworker, he’d be that guy at the end of the hall that is absolutely essential to ongoing operations but is also annoyingly pedantic about minor, almost trivial items.

Genre is used in a variety of different ways: as a marketing tool, as a critical tool, as a tool for readers to identify what they want to read next and as a stick that some people use to beat up on other people for their reading tastes. Genre also provides a veritable catalog of generic elements that creators can use when constructing their works.

The Player of Games is a science fiction novel. (If you want to get pedantic and insist that SF stands for speculative fiction, it fits under that rubric as well.) There are genre elements galore: spaceships, aliens, worldbuilding – the author even admits that he stole the primary setting for the first half of the novel from Larry Niven’s Ringworld. On paper, this has all the trappings of a generic novel; after all, the more genre elements that a work contains, the more generic a work becomes.
 

 
And if you were marketing The Player of Games, the smart money would be to lean very heavily on the “spaceships and aliens” angle. It’s a book that rewards an educated and opinionated reader, though, so perhaps the marketing could even be tweaked by indicating that it contains “spaceships and aliens, but smarter.” This reveals one of the main weaknessness of the genre concept – it reduces complexity to its lowest common denominator in an effort to attract as many readers as possible. In theory, every iterative step away from the core generic descriptors risks the alienation of readers who are only (dis)interested in the generic elements.

As a consumer, I rely very heavily on genre to help me make intelligent choices. For example: I do not enjoy the adrenal rush that comes from people jumping out from behind things, which happens to be a core element of the horror genre. As a result, I tend to steer away from the horror genre as a general rule, which has probably resulted in me missing out on work that is probably pretty good, despite the inclusion of jumpy-outy bits. And yes, there are plenty of other, non-horror movies that contain jumpy-outy bits – is Alien a horror film or a science fiction film? Why can’t it be both? Oh yeah, because marketing demands that it be given a straightforward handle that can be given to potential consumers.

I also happen to enjoy spaceships and aliens and I recognize that there is a vast gulf of difference between The Player of Games and Star Wars, despite the fact that both can technically be shelved under that particular heading. Because my tastes are broad, a listing of genre elements offers a good starting point. But when tastes are prescriptive (as in my blanket disregard of the horror genre, above), there is a very good chance that marketing by genre is not actually helping bring in customers.

Genre can also be challenging in a critical context. When I read a review that includes some variation of “this novel transcends genre conventions” I immediately read that as “the novel contains generic elements but doesn’t use them generically.” For example: The Player of Games contains spaceships, but those spaceships are self-aware and have names like GCU Of Course I Still Love You, Superlifter Kiss My Ass, GSV Unfortunate Conflict of Evidence and so forth. This is an obvious stab at the inherent conceit in most space operas that ships must have big, imperious names.

Banks also points out [1] that having names that are self-consciously jovial tends to disarm potential opponents because they are less likely to take the ships seriously. The worldbuilding that comes from such a simple inversion of the genre convention really adds to the glamor constructed by the novel, but it may or may not be what the standard genre fan was looking for when he picked up a book about spaceships (and aliens). But it is absolutely the kind of thing that a critic would hold aloft when praising a book for moving past the generic elements that it’s built on.

On the flip side, some critics are known for using genre as a kind of yardstick – separating genres into categories, most often of the “good vs bad” variety. Just as there are any number of essays written by any number of good critics imploring readers to look beyond genre conventions and try something new, there are any number of critics who look down their nose at genres they consider to be somehow less important. This critical shaming doesn’t just stop with critics, though. Margaret Atwood is well known for claiming that she doesn’t write science fiction, even though she clearly does.

Some people revel in this, repurposing labels for their own use: Nobrow and Lowbrow are the two most obvious examples. But for most, genre is a ghetto – a well-populated ghetto, to be sure, but still a ghetto. Part of that has to do with the mainstream culture’s attitude towards genre works and part of that has to do with the consumers of the genre, which is another topic entirely.

Banks, on the other hand, doesn’t shirk from claiming that he writes science fiction. In fact, it’s very obvious that he enjoys spaceships and aliens and is quite happy to continue to be paid to write them, thank you very much. And I’m happy to enjoy what he does with them because the results are interesting and original and not at all what is expected.
 

 
Unfortunately, most authors do not have the sheer creative energy that Banks brings to the table. Most use generic elements as a sort of construction set, building weird stories that tend to violate the “could this story be told in an ordinary setting?” rule as a matter of course. And that’s one of those places that genre falls down, in my opinion. Someone writes a good story that introduces a nifty concept and someone else comes along and uses that same concept without doing anything original or interesting with it. The result comes across as, well, generic.

I fully expect an entire cottage industry of Harry Potter and Scott Pilgrim clones to come along in the next generation of creators, the same way that the mid-70s were dominated by Tolkien clones and Black Sabbath knock-offs. In this way, successful creators could be said to become a genre unto themselves, regardless of what parent genre they were marketed under[2].

Given my druthers, I’d prefer that we did away with genre altogether. It’s a useful tool, to be sure, but it’s also a tool that is leaned on far too much, far too often. Unfortunately, it’s not a very versatile tool and, when all you have is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail. I get that without genre, all of the books would just be in one big section marked “fiction” and that some kind of sorting mechanism is necessary to find what you really want to read (or really don’t want to read, as the case may be).

However, genre doesn’t really do a good job when it is applied to marketing. By virtue of how the two are used in conjunction, the most generic books tend to float to the top. The truly interesting books take a little time to find their niche and fall out of the marketing by genre idea because they don’t exactly fit into the standard genre boxes. Ironically, looking for exceptions to the rules of genre tends to lead to exceptional works.

In the end, genre is a tricky thing that works perfectly at separating works by element, except when it doesn’t. The Player of Games is a great example of this. It contains spaceships and aliens but is in no way the poster child for either generic element and searching for it under those terms would be a fool’s errand. Critics might look down upon it because it is absolutely science fiction (and happy to be so) and they would prove themselves foolish if they did because it is the kind of book that critics hold up to indicate that science fiction and literature are not mutually exclusive. Which is as it should be.

 


[1] A Few Notes on the Culture by Iain M Banks.

[2] See also: Stephen King