Come on down to the Mothership

The Atlantic discovers Black musicians can be geeky too:

But what such cutesy nicknames obscure is that R&B music—and black American culture more widely—has embraced fantasy, sci-fi, or other “nerdy” subcultural tropes more often than many people realize. From the space-travel fantasias of Sun Ra and George Clinton in the ’70s to the Wu-Tang Clan’s Shaolin kung-fu obsession in the ’90s to the present day—when 2012’s most widely acclaimed album, R&B singer Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, includes a nine-minute odyssey imagining the ancient Egyptian empire reincarnated on the Las Vegas Strip— black musicians have drawn from the same wellsprings of imagination and popular culture as everyone else.

Well, yeah. Moreover, Black musicians have not just drawn on those wellsprings, they’ve replenished them as well. People like George Clinton or Sun Ra were not just influenced by fantasy or science fiction, they also composed their own epics. Clinton especially with his parliamentfunkadelicgroovethang was just as creative in developing their own cosmology as Jack Kirby was in developing his Fourth World. It’s just that these contributions often go unrecognised. Black geekdom, Black interest in science fiction and fantasy is still strange, still dangerous.



Cat Claw

Cat Claw

So this might sound familiar. A meek, shy student is bitten by an escaped lab animal and is given strange powers as a result; radiation is involved. Once these strange new powers have revealed themselves to her, she decides to become a superhero. Wait, “she“? Yes, because this is Bane Kerac’s Cat Claw, not Lee/Ditko’s Spider-Man. Not that the similarities in their origins are coincidence; Kerac was inspired by Spider-Man when he created Cat Claw for a Yugoslavian comics zine in the mid-eighties. Where they differ is that Carol Connor was much more likely than Peter Parker to lose her already skimpy costume.

Popular enough in her home country to get a television special dedicated to her and her creator in 1991, Cat Claw was also exported to various other European countries including Holland, as well as reprinted in a nine issue series by Aircel/Malibu comics in the US. To be honest, her adventures, or at least the ones I’ve read, are all pulpy nonsense, but Kerac has a sense of humour and that makes up for a lot. The mini movie from that tv special, excerpted below, meanwhile is very eighties, but does get across the spirit of the comics well.



Pouring a pint in a quart pot

only part of the thirtysomething boxes of books and comics

So in between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, my dad hired a man with a van and schlepped twentyfive years or so of comics and books from the parental home to Amsterdam. Above is only a small part of the thirtysomething boxes: sixteen long boxes of comics, a couple of short magazine size boxes and a lot of banana boxes from the local supermarket. Luckily I had a lot of book shelve space left, not to mention the build-in wardrobe — the clothes can all be scrunged up, can’t they?

There’s a lot of crap in these boxes of course. I started collecting comics properly in about 1987 so was there just in time for the speculation driven Image years; I still have Youngblood #1 fer chrissakes. Most of these aren’t worth anything anymore, so I can’t really sell them, don’t want to keep them, but also don’t want to dump as wastepaper. So who could I do a pleasure with them?

Saga — Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

So a couple of months ago I talked about Prophet and how much it seemed influenced by European comics. Well, Saga is another Image series that could’ve just as well been published in Metal Hurlant or A Suivre. It’s written by Brian K. Vaughan, known to me from Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina, but whom I haven’t yet read anything from and drawn by Fiona Staples, who I know nothing about but who is seriously good here. Especially her facial expressions:

Saga - cutting the umbilical cord

Saga is the story of Alana, the woman on the left and Marko, the horned dude, starcrossed lovers in a galaxy at war. Alana is from Landfall while Marko is from Wreath, its moon and these two have been at war for seemingly forever, having outsourced it to the rest of the galaxy. Alana and Marko met on Cleave, the latest planet to become a battlefield when he was a POW and she his guard, fell in love and deserted. Now they have to get off planet while taking care of their newborn baby. Hijinks ensue.

Saga - The Will and the Lying Cat

Both sides meanwhile want them dead. From Planetfall Prince Robot IV is sent to Cleave to hunt them down, while Marko’s people have hired freelancers to do the same. That’s one of them above, The Will, with his partner Lying Cat, who can tell if you’re lying to her. The other freelancer is The Stalk, below, whom The Will has history with.

Saga - The Stalk

The story moves slowly over the course of the six issues represented in the first trade paperback, with Marko and Alana trying to get to the Rocketship Woods on the other side of Cleave, while The Will, The Stalk and Prince Robot IV all attempt to catch up to them, one way or another.

Saga - Prince Robot IV

What makes Saga more than just a pretty sci-fi adventure is the simple fact that none of the main characters are true villains or heroes. Alana and Marko just want to live in peace with their daughter, to be left alone, while Prince Robot IV just want to get things over with so he can go home to his pregnant wife. Even the two freelancers are anything but Boba Fett like bounty hunters, with The Will frex having confliced feelings about his former partner, The Stalk.

Saga - The Will and the Stalk

But what really makes the series is the artwork; as said Staples is seriously good at facial expressions, slightly exaggerated at key moments, but also has a good eye for character design and layout in general. In general, like Prophet, this is a series that actually makes me enthusiastic about American comics again, something that shows there are still pleasant surprises to be had.

To be Grant Morrison when you could’ve been Alan Moore

A couple of weeks ago Pádraig Ó Méalóid looked at the strange relationship Grant Morrison has with Alan Moore. It turns out Morrison was Not Amused and keen to let people know this. So The Beat gave him the space to fisk the article. It’s all a bit needy, spending that much time and space refuting allegations made decades ago in different contexts. You get the feeling he’s too defensive and honestly, mocking it is the only right response.

However, since his extending whinge got on my tits, I thought I’d take umbrage at one part of argument, this:

I’d already submitted art and story samples several times to both DC and Marvel, along with a pitch for a crossover entitled “Second Coming” to DC’s New Talent Programme in 1982. I was on the files and I didn’t stop angling for work. DC would have found all of us, with or without Alan Moore, who seems curiously unable or unwilling to acknowledge that he was part of a spontaneous movement not its driving force or sole font of creativity.

Which is somewhat contradicted a few paragraphs later:

To get work with Marvel UK and “2000AD” I suppressed my esoteric and surrealist tendencies and tried to imitate popular styles – in order to secure paying jobs in the comics mainstream. There is a reason those pieces were written in a vaguely Alan Moore-ish style and it’s because I was trying to sell to companies who thought Moore was the sine qua non of the bees knees and those stories were my take on what I figured they were looking for.

If Morrison would’ve made it without Moore’s pionering work, if Moore’s influence on the development of the “British Invasion”, comicd edition wasn’t that great, why was it important to imitate him?

Because of course without Moore’s Swamp Thing, without Watchmen, without the commercial and critical success he brought to DC, at a time when unlike now it was actively courting an adult audience, trying to establish itself as the thinking person’s mainstream comics publisher, there wouldn’t have been a Hellblazer or Sandman or Animal Man. Without Moore to blaze the trail, to teach DC to handle writers not desparate to write Superman, not beholden to corporate superheroes, would Morrison have had the freedom he had to revamp Doom Patrol?

Of course not.

Yes, there was a larger talent pool in the UK in the early to mid eighties, thanks to 2000AD and the surge in punk inspired, d.i.y. alternative comix, but there was no guarantee that these writers would’ve crossed the ocean without an Alan Moore to do it first. His influence really cannot be overestimated: Marvelman, V for Vendetta, Halo Jones, Watchmen: any writer would give their left arm for just one of them. Through him, DC learned how profitable it could be to have such an independent, literary writer on board; through him, it also learned how easy it was to lose such a writer, through scamming him out of his rights or mucking about with his scripts, something that all the writers who would go on to form Vertigo would profit from.

Both DC and Morrison have forgotten those lessons, both profit from this, but both are the lesser for it.