Five For Friday 2010 Finale

It's that time of year where everyone starts making lists about what their favourite moments of 2010 were and what were there worst, personally I don't really believe in focusing on the worst moments so here is what I consider my top five of four different area's.

Top Five Movies
5. The Losers
4. Scott Pilgrim vs The World
3. Iron Man 2
2. Kick Ass
1. Inception

Top Five Comics/Graphic Novels
5. Invincible Volume 5 (Hardcover)
4. Blackest Night (Hardcover)
3. Batman and Robin: Batman Reborn (Hardcover)
2. Superman: Earth One (Hardcover)
1. Avengers The Children's Crusade (Mini Series)

Top Five Gigs
5. Sunset Drive at the Zanzibar Liverpool
4. Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly at the O2 Academy Liverpool
3. Lillies and Remains at Leaf Tea Cafe Liverpool
2. 'Weird Al' Yankovic at Manchester Academy
1. Gackt at The O2 Academy Islington

Top Five Songs
5. HIGH and MIGHTY COLOR: Re:Ache

4. MC Sniper- Hakuna Matata

3. Gackt- Ever

2. Kara- Lupin

1. Outsider ft LMNOP- Hero

The evolving tastes of Too Many Fandoms aka Blog 100

I've found that in the past year or so my tastes have changed, evolved however you want to call it. At one time I would horde comics and CD's in order to maintain and complete my collection but now I'm pickier, I've chosen necessity over obsessive compulsive buying.

Comics

With comics I have found that I am looking at titles with a more serious eye for the details I dropped Marvel's Avengers (which was one of my favourite team books) because I dislike the current writer's style of decompression where only a few pages of the story are relevant the rest is filled with clunky dialogue which just repeats itself and/or sounds completely out of character. This has made it rather difficult to enjoy other Marvel titles because other books were being influenced by the revelations that were being spun from the Avengers though not in a way that I would be completely lost (Wikipedia helps to fill the gaps).

There are some like Spider-Man which I've dropped because of editorial mandates which I didn't agree with (the of marriage between Peter and Mary Jane being wiped from everyone's mind including theirs) I felt that they could have done the more mature thing of having them divorce though it was argued that it ages the characters, even though they've aged pretty well over the last 48 years or so.

In fact my appreciation of Marvel Comics has wavered after their constant summer events crossover storylines which altered the status quo of the Marvel Universe for 12 months or so before the next event, during which time those titles affected by it would tell about three stories because nowadays comic stories are more often than not written for the trade paperback audience.

While my appreciation of Marvel Comics has wavered it has meant that my appreciation of DC has strengthened. At one time I wasn't too fussed on the two Trinity characters that weren't Batman but now I've come to like Superman and Wonder Woman because I can see them as really deep characters. Superman is more than just a survivor of Krypton who is practically invincible until faced with Kryptonite, he is an analogy of an immigrant who is paying back the society which took him in and accepted him by protecting it. Wonder Woman on the other hand is a character who is a walking contradiction as an ambassador of peace who will take up a sword to defend those who need protecting.

The stories in the DC Universe are all fairly self contained so you don't have to read JLA to understand what's happening in Batman or in The Flash, it's a story archetype that has worked for years and as the saying goes, 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'.

I've also started to read comics outside of the superhero genre, reading titles such as Fables, Joe The Barbarian and Y The Last Man to name but a few. It's a good change of pace to read comics where no one is running around in their underwear. It also makes me appreciate the superhero comics that I do read as well.

I admit that I am a trade waiter now because it’s easier to keep track of where the issues are in my collection though I have only recently begun cataloguing and properly storing the hundreds of comics I have amassed over the years. It's a great gauge as to whether I'm interested in a story or if I was just buying into the hype surrounding it at the time.

Music

My music collecting has changed a lot more than my comic collecting, for one thing I'm going to fewer gigs, having only been to five gigs this year where previous years I would have been to at least double that by now. I used to grab whatever E.P the support bands would be selling if I thought they were good but I found myself not even bothering to watch the support band at the last gig I went to (Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly) preferring instead to listen to the music on my MP3 player.

As I mentioned, I'm something of a hoarder, I tend to try and get a bands discography even though I may have only liked a few tracks from their previous album so with the aid of sites like Youtube I'm cutting the crap as it were and I'm not just buying on impulse only to regret it at a later date.

I've also gotten out of the habit of listening to mainstream western music because of my Asian Tour show, having become immersed in that side of music, though there are a few bands whom I'll still listen to on occasion. I think he main reason I chose to immerse myself into Japanese and Korean music in particular has been the fact that I like the mystery of not knowing what a song is about and coming up with my own interpretations that turn out to be completely opposite to what the artist or group intended.

However I feel that the western music industry has become too reliant on these 'design your own pop star' shows like X Factor or American Idol and while its good that the public get to choose the 'next big thing' it's kind of a cheat on those artists and bands who struggle to get a record deal when its handed out so readily if your prepared to subject yourself to the ritual humiliation of being on the TV for a few months before you debut with the finished product.

Now I realise that what I've written sounds like I have turned my back on the struggling artists who rely on people to buy their E.P's at venues where they are supporting a headline act and yes it's true, but I feel that in order for music to not start sounding stale I need to distance myself from it until such a time when my music taste changes again.

I know that the factor that changed my taste in music has been working at a radio station where you're constantly exposed to the top 40 and other tracks on a daily basis. I've experimented with so many different types of shows from rock shows to new music shows to chart shows to the drive time, lunch time and even breakfast slots and doing that variety of shows has expanded my musical pallet, it's certainly made me more appreciative of different tastes and I think it's made me a slightly more informed person

I think it's impossible for a person's taste in whatever they love to remain a constant, and with multimedia offering so much choice now it has become easier to experiment with new things.

Discovering Invincible

Every time I get money from the holiday season I like to experiment with a comic series I've been interested in checking out but not particularly brave enough to invest in it, this year I was looking for something that wasn't Marvel or DC, I needed a little break from them. So I went to one of the comic shops to find something new, I came across the first Invincible hardcover from Image Comics unwrapped, a rarity for hardcover graphic novels. I've seen the trades displayed on the shelves in the past but I've never really felt like grabbing them from the shelf like I did with the hardcover, and soon found myself flipping through the book half reading it but mostly looking at the pictures and from what I saw it was something that could provide that break from Marvel and DC I desperately needed.

Long story short, I was back less than a week later getting the other three hardcovers.


Debuting in 2003 by writer Robert Kirkman and artist Cory Walker (and later Ryan Ottley) Invincible is about Mark Grayson, a teenager who has inherited his father's alien powers which include flight, super strength, super speed and invulnerability (hence his name) the book shows him developing his powers and encountering other teen heroes (such as Atom Eve, Rex Splode and Dupli-Kate) and even teaming up with his father (Omni-Man) as well as discovering some home truths about the alien race (Viltrumite) he gets his powers from.

Unlike Marvel, DC and the vast majority of Image Comics offerings, Invincible is fairly light hearted, not to say it doesn't have its dark and gory moments, it's funny without being too goofy while at times it can be fairly serious. At times Invincible reads like a homage to the Silver Age of comics i.e. the stories are fairly self contained, done in one but at the same time is part of whatever the ongoing story arc is, which in an age where comics are often written for trade is a bit of fresh air infact you could just read the first 13 issues and get a fairly complete story.


What I liked about Invincible is the fact that it's a teen hero book that sounds like the hero is a teen both in his civilian life and when he's Invincible, the dialogue reads as something very natural and doesn't get too overbearing like Ultimate Spider-Man does at times and unlike Ultimate Spider-Man which has a tendency to overload the reader with too much of the civilian identity plots and subplots, Invincible balances the civilian stuff with the superhero action, there is more action than 'talking heads' which is what I want from a superhero book. Invincible's support cast is nicely featured without becoming too overbearing some of whom have their own sub plots which don't detract from the main plot in the story.

Each issue is well paced and there is never a sense that the story has been decompressed or that it features filler subplots thrown in to make up the page count (Kirkman even performs a bit of a fourth wall moment by illustrating how modern writers and artists reuse the same panels to pad out a page when Mark meets one of his favourite comic book writers)and because Invincible is so well paced I found myself being completely engrossed in it and reading the four hardcovers in less than two weeks compared to most trades or hardcovers where I'll only read an issue a day.. There's also a quick turn around for subplots becoming major plot points and being resolved all of which feels natural.

The great thing about Invincible creation wise is that he's 7 years old so there isn't the issue of being tied down to say 70 years of back story like you are with Superman or almost 50 years like Spider-Man making it completely new reader accessible. While it is an Image Comic character, Invincible is still Robert Kirkman's to 'play with' which means unlike a character from the two big companies, Kirkman has more freedom to alter his characters since he is the creator while other writers on mainstream titles are merely caretakers. This makes Invincible a bit of an unpredictable title, anything can happen to the characters and despite his name, Invincible has already been bashed about quite a bit. Invincible is like other Image titles as it is fairly self-contained in it's own little universe so there isn't a need to know what's happening in other Image titles such as Spawn, Savage Dragon or Youngblood. I'm excited to find out what happens next and judging from the last two images I've posted on this blog it looks like Invincible is in for a costume change, other than that, well I'm just going to have to keep reading.

Image Comics have the first issue online as well, if your interested in seeing what the hell I'm talking about.

Paul Du Noyer and Comics

For those of you who are unaware as to who Paul Du Noyer is, he is an author and a journalist and has been an editor for magazines such as NME and Q and has helped launch magazines such as MOJO, Heat and The Word. He has written books such as We All Shine On, Liverpool: Wondrous Place and his latest book In The City: A Celebration of London Music. He was at the Cornerstone Festival at Liverpool Hope University as part of Food For Thought and was in conversation with Gobshite Miscellany's Paddy Hoey last week commenting on the difference between the Liverpool and London music scene specifically how London's music scene was geared more towards a narrative while Liverpool's music scene went in the opposite direction being more surreal.

During the course of the hours conversation Paul offered ideas and theories about how the music from the cities had evolved from the positions the two cities had been in, such as the newstellers in ye olde London telling the public what was happening in the capital and how modern artists continued that trend by informing people about modern London life while Liverpool's past was linked to immigration and how they weren't able to move on and so music became the only means of escapism.

Now I know what you're thinking; "How does a conversation about the difference in two cities music scenes relate to comics?" The answer is it doesn't however after listening to the conversation last week I began thinking about other examples of two parallel scenarios and that's when I came up with the comics analogy.

Right now I would compare the two major comic book companies Marvel and DC in this scenario Marvel is like London in its storytelling, it goes from one story to the next with little or no break in between and likes to ground itself in realism while DC is like Liverpool it has a tendency to delve into the surreal and provides an escapism from reality.

Marvel has become an expanding media empire intent on making money from digital comics, motion comics and its own films. Du Noyer said that the musicians moved to London primarily to reinvent themselves and to make money from that reinvention and Marvel has set about doing that, at the beginning of this century Marvel were practically bankrupt but by launching the Ultimate comics range they retold their popular characters origins to a new audience which sparked a reintrest in the core Marvel titles and their flagship title is now New Avengers, because it features Marvel's most popular characters Spider-Man and Wolverine. Marvel also likes to constantly reinvent its status quo's giving its universe a more unified front from the registration act that came from Civil War to the mistrust in Secret Invasion and now it is a place where the Green Goblin is in charge.

While DC is notorious for its constant reinvention with it's Crisis's resetting certain status quo's, it is akin to Liverpool's music scene as it isn't widely recognised or played up, much like Liverpool's reluctance to play up the popularity of The Beatles. DC has had sleeper hits with The Sinestro Corps Wars which ran in the Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps books in 2007. DC's storytelling is less decompressed than Marvel's allowing for stories to be told in an finite number of issues such as Batman and Robin's three issue story arcs. It has also led to surreal narratives such as Grant Morrison's use of channel-zapping which he explained as:

"With Final Crisis and especially with issue 7, I’ve been working towards this storytelling technique I’m calling channel-zapping comics. Why spend a page on a scene when you can press all the same buttons with a single loaded panel? Why waste readers’ time on every mind-numbing detail of story when you can blitz them with the good bits and move onto the next thing?"
Grant Morrison- talking to comic foundry http://comicfoundry.com/?p=1693

While there is no right or wrong way about writing music or creating comics, everyone has their own preferences, I admit to enjoying the sounds of Liverpool's music as the lyrics don't necessarily have to mean one thing, but I also enjoy the progressive story London musicians tell with their lyrics and music. However the same can't be said for comics, right now I find the escapist vibe DC has in it's stories much more appealing than Marvel's constant reinvention mainly because Marvel spends less time examining its status quo before moving on to it's next one, mainly because of the decompressed stories it's writers tell. But that's something for another blog.

Talking Comics 2

The great thing about being a comic book fan now is the fact that lots of comics are availably ten, twenty even seventy years after it first saw print thanks to trade paperback collections. There was a time when you’d have to scour long boxes to find the comic you wanted or that comic run that was from time gone by, ok not everything is collected, and there aren’t enough trees in the world for that task. But some of the important stuff from the past has been collected and most comic book companies will now reprint current runs after a few months (well DC is a bit fussy when it comes to that) in some instances having everything in one collected kinda works out cheaper than buying it in a single format and like I mentioned you can get stuff from years ago without going through musky old comics to find what you want, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyway there is a point to this, I’ve been getting more and more trade paperbacks (mostly old runs or completed runs that I didn’t start at the time for whatever reason) and I wanna write a quick thing about them.

Batman: Child of Dreams- it’s basically Batman as a manga, it’s very intriguing Kia Asamiya (who has worked on Martian Successor Nadesico as well as Uncanny X-Men) crafts a very basic Batman tale bringing a Japanese reporter over to Gotham to cover Batman while some of Batman’s best villains are acting strange. The story is basically about fandom and how it can lead to obsession. It’s a shame that the book has been flipped from the traditional Japanese manga style to the western way of reading a comic.

Batman Knightfall Part One: Broken Bat and Part Two: Who Rules The Night- during the 90’s DC replaced many of its core characters with newer characters Batman was no exception, but it’s the way they did it in part one of Knightfall which is fantastic, over the course of the book Batman is fighting one villain after another while new villain Bane watches and waits for the moment when physically and emotionally drained he delivers a crushing blow. Part two deals with the new and more violent Batman taking to the streets in an effort to make sure no one knows that the real Batman is now wheelchair bound both of these books just add excitement to the last chapter when the payoff is really worth it.

Captain Britain and MI13 Secret Invasion- A tie in to the latest Marvel event which is dull boring and has been done to death. This tie in is ten times more fun, interesting, exciting, brilliant and shocking than the event it tied itself into. Paul Cornell (writer of Father’s Day on Doctor Who) crafts a story of alien invasion while simultaneously instilling British pride and patriotism, making this an untypical superhero book. Plus John Lennon’s in it, ok he’s an alien who was originally supposed to replace the real Lennon but decided not to.

Green Lantern: In Brightest Day: The current writer of Green Lantern (Geoff Johns) picks some of his favourite tales from Green Lantern’s past, many of the stories focus on the Silver Age Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) but also looks at tales from the other earthbound Green Lanterns and some of the known alien Lanterns, most of the stories show the mythology of the characters some are just interesting tales, it’s a good read for someone who is interested in checking out Green Lantern.

Heroes: volume 2: every week NBC publishes a webcomic to accompany the TV series about 8 pages long, sometimes reading comics online is very easy because the formats designed that way but some don’t which is why I wait until these comics are collected. Some of the comics featured in this volume are good because they add to the story however some of them don’t and they can just feel out of place and there is one comic that is the end of a multi part story which doesn’t really make any sense.

Watchmen: Ok I haven’t only just read this I read it months ago but because the film is out I decided to reread it and I enjoyed it alot better the second time round and I think it’s because I knew what to expect from the narrative and the story within the story. I'll do a more indepth look at this book very soon

Wisdom- The Rudiments of Wisdom: Written by Paul Cornell this is a mature look at the British mutant known as Pete Wisdom, from shagging fairies (the Tinkerbelle kind) to getting abit frisky with a fellow agent while on a stakeout mission, the six issues in the mini feel pretty stand alone as well as feeding into a larger narrative but its affective, and the supporting cast help to make the stories enjoyable, from a geriatric version of Captain America to a Goth fairy. Still it’s the shape shifter John the Skrull who comes out with some cracking lines, such as referring to Liverpool on a Friday night as a collective unconscious which just made me laugh.

Y The Last Man- Deluxe Edition: Collecting the first 10 issues of this book with such an amazing concept; Imagine there was only one man left after every man and animal with a Y chromosome died along with every sperm cell leaving one man (and his male monkey Ampersand) and an entire planet of women. What I like about this is that you don’t know why all but one man died or why this one guy survived. The thing that also makes it interesting is that most of the women are quite content with a maleless world going back to Amazonian ways (i.e. removing their left breast) at the end of this book there is an interesting cliff-hanger which has got me intrigued to read on. This is probably one of the most interesting comics I’ve read and there are no superheroes involved.