I tried not to make a big stink about this movie coming out. I think I can afford myself some cheap entertainment.
The cover to the ‘Final Crisis’ trade
I really didn’t expect them to emphasize this, which I know is stupid of me, but now that they did, I really don’t mind it. It came and went fast enough. I like that they’re giving this art-house styled event a poster cover.
John Arcudi and Lee Bermejo’s SUPERMAN for WEDNESDAY COMICS.
Thank you, Kandid Kandor, for giving me a booster shot! Wednesday Comics is going to be a blessing!
“Dark X-Men: The Beginning” #1
I am so curious about this I might have to kidnap a Marvel intern and attempt some Khan-designed, White House approved interrogation techniques.
(via winnr)
It bothers me that I haven’t actually read God Loves, Man Kills yet. There, let’s see the censors make something out of that!
This makes me want to make a metal mix. Much later, but I was just thinking about it.
Luther as Hercules
-Hans Holbein (1523)
Okay, time to get the wheels grinding again. Desk has been cleaned, carpet has been vacuumed, windows have been opened and desk has been re-cluttered.
After spending my sleepless hours acting as a filter for all these far more clever people it’s embarrassing to try and talk about anything in a remotely critical fashion, but that’s not a problem, it just means for every paragraph you read I will spend fifteen minutes scrutinizing it or staring off.
When I was sophomore, coasting through a broadcast production degree, I took a film techniques class one summer where I was introduced to Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian English scholar whose work dug the avenues for future media study. It was far later when I peeled any real value away from his 1964 text, Understanding Media: The Connections of Man.
I recently gave a friend this book to read with the hope that he might act as a test audience and counter-point for me. He’s living out-of-town now so it took a few weeks but this past weekend we got back together to discuss the opening chapters. There’s a lot more to explore, but it brought my thinking full circle, so I’ll try to just make this an introduction to future discussion.
Understanding Media is infuriatingly brilliant.
It’s great because as a theory of sociological impact, it was literally decades ahead of its time. It reminds me of a field guide for the modern orientation: the first half sets up his philosophy, measuring a medium’s form and function through its wake running across cultures; the second, a holistic encyclopedia of man’s medium, their origins, dynamics and device.
It’s infuriating because McLuhan wasn’t actually that talented a writer, and his work is cumbersome, flawed and experimental, a catalog of high concept failures and successes. But the man knew what he was talking about and his sheer comprehension would give rise to rather prescient moments and ideas.
One of the tenets to McLuhan’s theory is that the delivery system for the media is actually the message that’s imparted. What’s specifically said, what’s specifically given is really just focus for the different orientations that media have. Radios, Bulletin Boards, Comics are all messages in and of themselves.
But McLuhan bore himself a victim to his own wisdom. For such powerful concepts, the burdensome text of Understanding Media is inaccessible and wrought with dead ends. It may be best to adopt McLuhan’s perspective without the attachment the specifics of his evidence.
Now, I think of this because my intention was to talk about comics’ operational definitions, comics in academia and historical precursors in form. The comics podcast, Funnybook Babylon, recently explored some of this in a great episode which I’ll probably now mangle.
One of the things that struck me was the debate over the basic unit of what make comics. While camps have yet to be firmly carved into the institutionalization and reception of comics study, discussion on the elements of comics is fairly robust.
To draw definitions, I still go by Will Eisner in that comics are “the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea.” It’s holistic, powerful and most importantly it’s not claustrophobic.
That malleability is important when the present discussions sometimes drift towards established dichotomies. The argument shouldn’t be whether or not comics are words and images or images in sequence; because comics are a very participatory medium where at the center is a language of reading images.
I wouldn’t hold credence to knowing comics origins, but I think some of the more interesting discussion is held centuries past Egyptian hieroglyphs, during the Protestant Reformation, as an illiterate Europe in the midst of one of history’s monumental culture war works through what would become the Westerner’s visual orientation.
There’s a definite resonance between the visual rhetoric of Renaissance period art and the comics storytelling form too. The thing that springs to mind is propaganda art during the Reformation, where visual images were used to present ideas to the masses. I think my favorite is either Christ jousting with the Satan, who has the Pope in his corner, or Luther as Hercules.
From both sides came illustrative posters, broadsides, covering churches and city squares, strung up with competing religious stories and social messages, wood carvings, elevating the myth of Martin Luther as saint, scholar, hero and doctor and campaigns of paintings that brings to mind Martin Luther and the Pope as analogues to other pop culture icons.
It certainly wasn’t the foundation of visual storytelling, but in consideration with McLuhan’s theories of societal influence, the form and function of individual mediums and the scales of participation within them, it’s something to chew on.
Hank Pym digs a hole for himself… surprise!
Jason Aaron gets Ghost Rider!
Nobody gets Ghost Rider.
