Archives for November 2016

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – The Kindred #1-4

November 10, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Today we’re tackling the first WildStorm book to deliberately connect their various franchises – The Kindred mini-series.

We’ve seen many hints dropped throughout WildStorm’s books about International Operations and Team 7. It’s obvious that it has some resemblance to the retconned Weapon X program, which turned out many more characters than just Wolverine.

The Kindred capitalizes on these dropped hints to tell a new story that isn’t just expositional history, but that ties several pieces of information together along the way.

The book is more memorable for those revelations than for its plot. For a title starring the electric Grifter, the badass Backlash, and the mysterious Lynch, it seems like it could have escalated to a considerably higher-intensity.

Maybe the simmering intensity level is a good thing – it corrects the pacing issues that hurt the opening arcs of both WildCATs and Deathblow, presenting easy-to-follow rising action with a definitive end-point.

There’s no single credit for scripting on this book. At points it shows in the torrent of gently conflicting information. Also, while Grifter and Backlash bumping heads ought to be a teeth-gritting delight, somehow their combined prickliness slightly waters them both down.

Backlash is a character whose coolness isn’t fully justified by what we’ve seen from him so far on the page. He’s lithe, gray-haired, wields a whip, wears a slick black suit, and can dematerialize into fog. It’s all dangerous, but altogether it doesn’t suggest a terrifyingly deadly character we ought to be scared of. He definitely qualifies as “the most arrogant man alive” for all his bragging and complaining, but not the deadliest. Kindred doesn’t really do him any favors – he gets beat up more often than not, here, and he’s a lot of bark with relatively little bite.

(Grifter, on the other hand, just keeps getting cooler now that we know he went AWOL from Team 7 thanks to his unrequited love, is hated equally by Backlash and Lynch, and was the softy who tried to save his teammates who got left behind. Also? Still no hint of his powers.)

The villainous elements of the mini-series are needlessly complex. The Kindred’s leader Bloodmoon isn’t even a Kindred and the result of a totally separate Team 7 caper, which leaves a lot of questions and ultimately makes The Kindred sort of window dressing in their own story. It also leaves a lot of open questions about Bloodmoon that a little dose of simplicity could have solved better than more explanations.

Art from Brett Booth is solid and enjoyable. All of the characters are recognizable and Booth draws clear action that’s easy to track. His characters can have a slight Spider-Man rubbery-ness to them that calls back to earlier Eric Larsen or even Todd McFarlane. That this would become somewhat of a trademark of Backlash rather than a more muscular stance is definitely down to Booth’s early influence on the character.

The biggest reason to include this in your WildStorm read? Context, glorious context. We finally understand Director Lynch’s place in the WildStorm Universe, and how Team 7 and IO are linked with the history of Stormwatch.

Want the full details? Read on to learn more about the connective tissue of the WildStorm Universe. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read. Tomorrow we head back to WildCATs to see Jim Lee reunited with his X-Men co-conspirator Chris Claremont on WildCATs #10-13!

Need the issues? This is a rare early WildStorm title with a TPB collection! Look for it on Amazon and eBay. Also, the single issues to this series tend to be pretty cheap – try eBay (#1-4) or Amazon (#1, 2, 3, 4). Since a second Kindred mini-series hit these same issue numbers, be sure to match your purchase to the cover images in this post. [Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – The Kindred #1-4

Live @ Rehearsal Video Concert – November 8th, 2016

November 10, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Good news and bad news about this week’s Live @ Rehearsal broadcast from my Facebook page.

Good news: I figured out how to do it with soundboard quality audio and, most importantly when it comes to my personal dynamic range, compression.

Bad news: I chose Tuesday night to stream, and the election internet traffic (combined with some router issues) slowed the broadcast to a crawl at points. So, this isn’t too fun to watch, but it’s a solid listen!

Setlist: Dirigible, My Heart (written by long-time blog buddy Jett Superior), Are You, End With Me, Curves Sketched In Letters, Regenerate, Ruiner, Message

Performance Notes:

Just a few this week, since I’m already focused on improving the audio and video quality for next time.

This is one of my first live runs through “Dirigible,” a deeply weird song that is what happens when I try to write like Gina does for Arcati Crisis. It’s about hot-air ballooning over a world covered in water, maybe figuratively or maybe literally. It’s still a little shaky, but I’m getting close to it being able to hold its own.

It’s also maybe my first internet play-through of “Message,” a song that I love and that we briefly worked up for the band. It’s actually maybe written by Madonna, but in a dream, so you can’t possibly serve me with a DMCA notice about it. I’ll write a better story about it when I have a better video of it, but you can hear it all in the recording. I have some timing issues playing it here without the band, but I think the vocal is pretty strong.

“My Heart” and “Are You” are both returned from many years on ice, although I play the former a lot just because it’s fun to sing. “End With Me” and “Curves Sketched In Letters” are, of course, my twin songs from Eric Smith’s Textual Healing, which have become setlist staples. There’s another song from those writing sessions I’ve never played before – perhaps it will make an appearance soon!

Also? I don’t ever want to play “Regenerate” without compression again. What a difference it makes on a song like that that goes from my lower chest range up to a belt at the top of my mixed voice.

35-for-35: 1991 – “Vibeology” by Paula Abdul

November 10, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Oh, yes, we are going there. I have another Paula Adbul song on this list of all-time favorites from the same year Nirvana released Nevermind. Come ahead and fight me.

Spellbound is a much stronger LP than Forever Your Girl. It signaled this clearly on each of its first two singles – “Rush, Rush,” a ballad with Abdul’s finest recorded performance (crazy, since it’s reportedly an early scratch vocal) and the unpolished and new age-y “Promise of a New Day.” The third single was the marginal ballad “Blowing Kisses In the Wind.”

That meant that the core of this album had yet to be heard by the general listening public. It included a sexy, sultry, witty set of songs that paired well with Prince’s 1991 effort Diamonds and Pearls. Songs like “Spellbound” or “U” would have made terrific singles that could compete on the radio. (“U” was even written by Prince! How do you pass that up as a single?!)

So, of course, the fourth single was “Vibeology.”

This song… I really have no words. I love it so much. How can I possibly express my feelings to you other than through dance?

“Vibeology” sort of takes the position of, “What if Paula’s duet with MC Skat Kat was the best thing on that first record?” And, well, “Cold Hearted” aside … maybe it was? While Spellbound was pretty evenly split between ballads and more sultry numbers, paula-abdul-1991-spellbound-album-cover “Vibeology” alone stood in the center as the one batshit crazy dance-capade full of horns and also Paula Abdul screaming “horny horns!” to introduce said horns.

If you listen to it next to the Prince-penned “U” it seems to be imitating the New Jack Swing sound with dancehall flourishes. It’s just so damn manic it’s hard to take it as anything other than a novelty song. I mean, all the different voices, the lack of a discernible verse, the croaked slam poetry section, the “Go Paula!” chants, the horny horns.

Yet, there is something I unabashedly love about this song. It’s basically built from the same pieces as “Vogue” – check out the bounding low bassline and the clanging piano chords. If you stripped away some of the silliness here and moved the “you got the vibeology” rap further into the song, it would actually feel a lot like “Vogue.”

Only, you know, with horny horns.

Honestly, I think this song single-handedly killed Paula Abdul’s career – maybe specifically her low-rent “Express Yourself” video, sexy frumpy circus-with-feathers aesthetic, and subsequent pitchy MTV Music Video Awards performance. When she came back with an even sultrier follow-up in Head Over Heels it seemed like a desperate grab for attention in a post-pop, rock-oriented world – but, that’s only because it was never set up with the right singles from Spellbound.

Here’s that so bad it’s bad MTV VMA performance: [Read more…] about 35-for-35: 1991 – “Vibeology” by Paula Abdul

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Union #1-4 & 0

November 9, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug] In June of 1993, a fourth title joined WildStorm’s fold, and it was the first whose heroes seemingly didn’t have an explicit connection to the shared backstory of Kherubim, Daemonites, IO, and Stormwatch.

union_v1_001 That hero was Union, co-created by Jim Lee and Mike Heisler – a longtime letterer and only occasional writer. (He’d later write a long run of the Gen13 spin-off DV8).

Union has a rich origin that nods to Superman’s, though his Krypton is not an exploding planet but a sister reality to our own that is in a constant state of civil war. When Ohmen, a warrior Relayer of the Protectorate, is shunted through an explosion of energy from his world to ours he crash lands on the Maine coastline.

Union’s mini-series is a pair of parenthesis, two stories opened in the first two issues without the full information we need as readers to understand them, and then two issues that resolve their mysteries in reverse order.

That makes for what is undoubtably the best first issue yet from WildStorm, and even the exposition-heavy final issues is a thrill since they answer so many questions. Union #0 provides a thick spreading of glorious connection-making context to fill in Union’s past and tie him to more closely to another Wildstorm title. It’s a bit leaden told all in one shot, but it makes re-reading the series even more fun.

The real draw here wasn’t the mysterious superhero from another dimension, but the artwork. Mark Texeira was mostly known as a Marvel utility player who launched Ghost Rider and drew Punisher and Sabretooth. His wild, untamed pencil-work and inky blacks were nothing like the high-gloss figure-work of the other Image founders and their proteges, but a near neighbor to Sam Keith and Jae Lee.

Maybe that’s why it seems like the early digital colors are fighting against Texeira’s linework in the first two issues of Union. While some of the gradients help enhance the inherent dimensionality of his characters, too often the colors are garish or overwhelm his rough lines. Despite the struggle, Texiera delivers wild, beautiful work – especially in the domestic scenes that could easily be just talking heads. The colors settle down by #3, and by the end of #4 it’s the best Texiera’s work had looked to date.

Despite the unevenness of the pace and the colors, Union feels like a title that’s truly grounded in a universe that’s already-formed. It’s filled with references to Supreme, Youngblood, and Cyberforce, and it opens by featuring Stormwatch so prominently that the first issue could have easily been Stormwatch #5.5.

That’s a tribute to Mike Heisler, who bucks the WildStorm trend of super-cool action to unfurl an exceedingly human mystery of how much we can trust Union as a reliable narrator. We see him deliberately withhold things from us and from his human companion Jill, and that makes it hard to completely trust him as our protagonist even when he professes to be doing good.

Jill is the most well-rounded character we’ve had yet in a WildStorm book. She’s an actual human being who loves art and sometimes does stupid things in the name of romance. She makes gallows-humor jokes to herself and absent-mindedly explaining why she switched to painting abstracts when she was in a world of beautiful landscapes. Even if her budding romance with Union is rushed, this book is grounded in human emotion more than any of the other Wildstorm material to date. Together, she and Union give off major Lois & Clark vibes from the classic Reeves Superman films.

If Union had pushed forward from this mini-series to continue the story with Heisler and Texiera still at the helm it would have catapulted into must-read territory for me along with Stormwatch! Instead, it was the first WildStorm book to take a brief hiatus and return as an ongoing series (a pattern Gen13 would follow). However, Heisler does stick around for every issue of Union ever published, so maybe I’m in for a treat when I get back to the title’s ongoing relaunch later this month.

Want the full details? Read on to unravel the mystery that begins in Union #1. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read. Tomorrow we find out what Backlash and Grifter have been up to in Kindred #1-4.

Need the issues? These issues have never before been collected! For single issues – try eBay (#0-4) or Amazon (#0, 1, 2, 3, 4). Since the ongoing Union series hit these same issue numbers, be sure to match your purchase to the cover images in this post.

on action

November 9, 2016 by krisis

I want to talk to you for a moment about the difference between support and action.

It has both nothing and everything to do with politics, but it’s not political.

Two years ago I lost a friend and one of the people I loved most on this planet, Dante Bucci. It was a crushing loss and still is. I can’t even type his name without crying, so I am crying right now as I write this.

dante-hands-photo-pic-5 I saw so many friends who I hadn’t seen in a long time at the events held to remember Dante’s life. I gave all of those friends massive hugs, because that’s what Dante did every time he saw me. I spoke to them. We shared stories with one another.

One conversation, in particular, sticks out. It was with a brilliant musician and a phenomenally kind human being. As we talked, I excitedly rattled of all of the aspects of her life I was proud and excited to be supporting. Her shows, her new songs, her tours. She looked genuinely shocked.

“Wow, Peter,” she said with a huge smile, “I had no idea you cared so much!”

“Well, I LIKE all of your posts and I listen to your songs!” I replied. We kept talking and we’ve kept on talking since then, but I haven’t liked any more of her posts.

I haven’t liked, or hearted, or little round angry-faced a single message on Facebook since that day.

I think of all the times I silently supported Dante instead of telling him I loved him, that he was brilliant, and that he made me want to be a better musician. I think of that musician friend and how she had no idea how much I cared about her success.

Now, every time I am tempted to add my silent support to something I instead say those words of support. When I love one of my friends’ songs I tell them about it in the most effusive language I can summon.

Like buttons, smiley faces, emojis, and animated GIFs are fun because pictures can be worth a 1,000 words. They are a wonderful shorthand for support, agreement, and affection. People treat them as digital currency.

Don’t let having them at your disposal cause you to lose sight of the power of words – not just words spoken to those you care about, but even to strangers who have said or done something you value.

There are people today across America who are expressing very personal feelings – fears and aspirations – and you are going to be tempted to use your hands to click a button to express your support for them. Please don’t. Please use your voice to say something instead. I promise you, it’s going to matter so much to them.

Furthermore, don’t let your ability to comment in support from the comfort of your home and your own bubble of safety cause you to lose sight of the power of action. Going to dinner with a friend is action. Going to a show is an action. Hugging someone you love is an action. Intervening if you see someone else being harassed or bullied is an action.

So is voting.

Please take action when you can, my readers, when you feel able and safe to do so When you can’t please make your voice heard.

Please be safe and well. And, if you ever need to talk, I’m only a tweet or an email away.