Library Day w/Connecticut Native

Spending the afternoon redesigning the website for college friend / talented artist Kate Ten Eyck - so this particular blog entry is doing double duty as a Rambler update and as a way to show her how Blogger works.  Carry on. 

"Discs" - © Kate Ten Eyck, 2012

Speaking of Kate, I'm also showing her how to upload pictures and attach links.

See?  It's all so fucking easy.

D.

1/26/12

Amazing how far we are into the future.  2001 still seems like a year out of an unreachable, science-fiction datebook, and now it's eleven years past that.  Which I guess makes this the post-future.  No wonder we're building the Clock of the Long Now out in the middle of nowhere - once every single day of the present is actually the future, the entire concept of time becomes antiquated.

D.

Canadian Spandex

A Comic Appreciated
Alpha Flight
Marvel Comics, 1983-1985





It occurred to me that it was time to start a new recurring feature here at the Rambler; enthusing about comics I have enjoyed.  I'm going to keep it flexible - an appreciation can be anything from a single issue to an entire series, and anything in between.


This inaugural A.C.A. is about Alpha Flight, specifically issues 1-28.  Alpha Flight was a group of Canadian superhero characters that first appeared in a 1980 issue of X-Men - specifically designed by creator John Byrne - himself Canadian - merely as a team that could 'survive a fight with the X-Men.'  The back story is that Alpha Flight is a branch of the military, and Wolverine was originally part of the team who went awol to join the X-Men.  The Canadian government, having poured untold resources into his creation, sends Alpha Flight to reclaim him.


Wolverine doesn't return with them, and by the time Alpha Flight's own comic premiered, the government funding had been cut off and the team was officially disbanded.


What followed was one of the oddest superhero comics of the 1980s, a decade where superhero deconstruction was the norm.  Alpha Flight preceded Watchmen (by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons) and The Dark Knight Returns (by Frank Miller) by a few years, but was also part of the era's thematic shift away from the 'what' of superheroes to the 'why' of them.  The difference between Alpha Flight and the other two books (beyond their being substantially more famous to the general public) is that, while Moore and Miller on some fundamental level thought superheroes were silly, John Byrne unabashedly loved them.  But he also spent a lot of time thinking about the 'why,' and that's the fundamental core of this book about a 'team' that rarely met or acted together. 


My reasons for loving Alpha were that it was very different from anything else on the stands. Quieter, more introspective.  Most of the action took place in the middle of nowhere, making the stakes to bystanders minimal, but the stakes for the heroes much higher.  

It also looked different, with open space and forests - as close to a classic western as any superhero comic has ever come.  It was more serialized internally, less tied in to Marvel continuity, and there was real character growth and change.  White, anglo-saxon and even heterosexual men were in the minority on the team, and the views into other cultures and traditions were treated realistically and matter-of-fact, rather than some kind of curiosity.

Money problems were real, and the solutions were never perfect, permanent or effective.  Interpersonal conflict was an organic outgrowth of the characters, not tacked on to add flavor.

Tonally, with the longer character arcs and naturalistic dialogue, it shares a lot with the alternative comics of the early 80's, and served as a bridge to those titles for me.  In many ways, it's the book that changed me from an young adolescent reader of superhero comics to a fan of the form of comics, and the idea of comics as something that could be enjoy in much subtler and more 'adult' ways - and it did so without the gratuitous violence and sexual boundary pushing of Watchmen and Dark Knight.  In a lot of ways, the violence in Alpha Flight has much more consequence than in those books, and certainly more consequence than in any other contemporary title I can think of.

On top of that, it was a book with an almost zen stillness in places, which ran not only counter to the rest of the mainstream titles at that time, but seemingly the rest of American popular culture.

And it hasn't dated as a read!  If ever there were a self-contained title/run that can be re-experienced in comics, it's that.  It's like the Chronicles of Narnia of superhero comics, minus the Christian allegory (at least not one that I got).

I just realized that I wrote all that without once saying anything about the art, which is a testament to just how good the writing is. Obviously, the art was - to my twelve-year-old eyes - fucking awesome, and it's still stellar.

D.

Friday Night is Nacho Night

Apparently, Yesenia an I have both decided to live like bachelors together.  After getting home and telling  me she wasn't hungry - meaning that I stopped making plans for preparing dinner and went on to doing laundry - she asked me to make nachos.  Which I did, although one of my more soupy and ever-so-slightly disappointing plates of nachos.  

Since we were fresh out of jalapeños, I opened a can of Hormel's Vegetarian Chili and dropped about 3/4 of it on half a bag of chips, along with some decent salsa and a few handfuls of shredded Italian cheese mix.  Microwave on high for three minutes, and tell me that isn't the most bacheloriffic meal you can imagine?  I even left the chili can out with the spoon in it, contents dripping down the outside of the can to stain the counter.

My only concern is that I also had my dad's very bean-centric vegetable stew for lunch, so I feel I'm cruising towards a night of gas leaks that will have energy companies abandoning sites along the Marcellus Shale and coming instead to frack my ass.

D.

Sailing the Tappan Sea

I have declared 2012 the year of the completed artistic project.  I am, of course, thoroughly willing to write paragraph upon paragraph of whiny self-flagelation about stagnant artistry, but what good would that do?  More to the point, how readable would it be?  Not very, I suspect.

And readability in this blog is the goal.  Just as listenability will be in the forthcoming round of recordings from the basement studio.  And curse of the internet gods be damned (can you really damn a curse?), I'm going to discuss these projects in grimy detail as they rumble along.

Thus far, we've gotten our drum sound down.  Well, isn't that what I said last week?  Last week was almost there.  This week is there.  The drums do take their time.  Next week, we'll no doubt get our 'tambourine sound'.  It should sound like the jubilant bells in the distant belfry of a countryside Tuscany church.

D.

Think It Through

There's much to celebrate in the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., but the thing that I realize I've most come to appreciate in his legacy is the thing that seems to most often be overlooked - the best way to tackle a problem is to approach it with cool intellect, not heated emotion.

After all, emotion fades, but the logic and truth of social justice remains.

D.

Bright Spark

Just caught the SNL with Daniel Radcliffe as host, and I have to say that I am officially completely blown away by how good he is.  Near flawless American accents - not just one, but a variety in different characters.  If he doesn't somehow have a long and acclaimed career ahead of him, there's something very wrong with either movies or audiences.

D.