Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
Today I’ve updated the guide of Marvel’s marquee Olympian – The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Hercules!
Want to learn more about Marvel’s take on the Greek God, but don’t need a rundown of every issue in which he’s made an appearance? Keep reading for a summary of Hercules’ history, a review of what he’s been up to in 2017, and a tally of how many Hercules comics have been collected overall!
[Read more…] about Updated: The Definitive Guide to Marvel’s Hercules
I begin this episode reminiscing about the history of the Marvel Omnibus program, not realizing I would be pulling out one their earliest and most often-reprinted omnibuses – and one of my all-time favorites – Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 1. I get so distracted talking about it’s place in Marvel’s history (both of comics and omnibuses) that I almost forget to talk about its contents!
Want to start from the beginning of this series of episodes? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.
Episode 16 features Uncanny X-Men Omnibus, Vol. 1 (Amazon / eBay) as covered by my Guide to Claremont-era X-Men.
[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]This is where the choices are going to get really painful for me. I have a dozen favorite songs from 1993, at least.
Ace of Base’s “The Sign” and how it marked the end of my pop music fandom for the better part of a decade. Janet’s genre-bending “If” full of sex and squalling guitars. “River of Dreams” and the one time I could connect with my father over a piece of current music. Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club, a front to back listenable record that is so obviously the work of a collective of songwriters rather than a singular voice.
Juliana Hatfield, Liz Phair… I can keep going.
But, if we are going to talk about songs that really changed my whole damn life, we need to be talking about Polly Jean Harvey’s breakthrough album, Rid of Me.
All of it.
I didn’t come around to Harvey until a few years after Rid of Me, when I saw Tracy Bonham cover her “50ft Queenie.” Being a voracious consumer of female-vocal rock, it didn’t take much to convince me to head down to Borders to pick up the album that contained the original.
I was not prepared for what I heard. Rid of Me is a powerful and at-times terrifying album. This had all the rawness of Hole but the measured perfection of Tori Amos. It had guttural strength that stood up to anything on In Utero and spectral power that made it seem like a spiritual sister to Bjork’s Debut. While many fans and critics prefer her To Bring You My Love, the raw power of Steve Albini-produced Rid of Me remains her seminal work in this household.
I can’t pick just one song to highlight, so let’s just talk about half the record.
“Missed” never fails to stun me. It’s a lost track from Jesus Christ Superstar, Mary’s lament to a lost Jesus kept away in a tomb after Mary Magdelene insisting “Everything’s Alright.” It’s beautiful – takes my breath away on every play even after listening to it for 20 years.
The biblical theme continues on Bob Dylan’s famous “Highway ’61 Revisited,” the title track of his 1965 record.
Oh, God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
Who on their second album decides to take a mid-record break to cover Dylan’s strutting country-rock paean to the famous road as a squalling, foreboding rock song? The Dylan original and faithful covers sound trite next to this muscular, paranoid version. The surging power chords, the surprisingly nuanced drumming, the jangling single note riff.
I’ve always felt this ought to be the credits tune to an adaptation of The Stand, with its depiction of God sparing Abraham’s son at the start to a roving gambler trying to start the next world war just to see if god would stop him in the final stanza. [Read more…] about 35-for-35: 1993 – Rid of Me by PJ Harvey
[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug](Since Mondays were previously my #MusicMonday posting day, I’m giving you a double-dose of 35-for-35 to start the week and to fit all the songs into one month!)
Much of Paula Abdul’s debut Forever Your Girl is a cotton candy assemblage – whatever sugar they could spin around an inexperienced singer with an approximate relationship with singing in tune.
Don’t get me wrong – I love Forever Your Girl. I know every word on it. But, if you held it up to today it would be less Arianna Grande and more … I don’t know, who is a fake famous person who put out a record to maintain the illusion of their popularity? Julianne Hough? I’m not down with all the artists that kids like these days.
That’s besides the point. The point is that on this album filled with conventional spun sugar sounds (like title track “Forever Your Girl”) there are two singular, break-out moments that no one other than Paula Abdul managed to record.
One is the stark, funky “Straight Up.” The other is “Cold Hearted,” or as people more commonly know it, “Cold-Hearted Snake.”
Listen carefully to the sounds in the intro. It combines the same synth bass as “Straight Up,” the same 2s-and-4s snare hits, paired with with whining guitar bends not too different from the infamous wah on that song. What mades “Cold Hearted” stand out is the frantically sawing sampled string section that is subtly doubled by computerized blips.
When the intro chorus hits the song would be nearly identical to “Straight Up” if not for those strings, which stop their sawing to carry a counter-melody that makes Abdul’s clipped, staccato phrases form a single legato melody.
That’s it, really. Otherwise it’s just “Straight Up, Part 2: Faster and About Someone Else’s Lover.”
Were the strings alone enough to turn this into the massively memorable hit it became? Probably not. I tend to think it had a little something to do with the video – released almost a year after the LP originally dropped.
I was eight years old when that video hit. I wasn’t the kind of little boy who thought girls were gross – I was deeply in love with a girl in my class. I always wasn’t the kind of boy with prurient interest in scantily clad women – maybe because I was being raised by a cadre of women myself.
So please understand when I tell you that, even as an eight-year-old, I knew this video was heart-poundingly sexy.
Honestly, I think it kind of defined sexy for me. The moment that sticks in my mind is from the four-minute-mark, the image of the throbbing mass of limbs expanding and contracting around Abdul.
(Also, it was directed by David Fincher, who would go on to direct the video for “Vogue,” and later the films Se7en, The Game, Panic Room, Benjamin Button, and so on.)
Between the special alchemy of the song and the sexed up video, “Cold Hearted” was a memorable track that dominated my eight-year-old life. It seems like it’s slightly faded in the eyes of pop culture in favor of “Straight Up” and the whimsical “Opposites Attract,” but it remains among my favorite Paula Abdul songs.
[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]The first time I encountered a wordless picture book for children was Journey at my mother’s house nearly a year ago. Long before we had ventured to the library she was already cycling through books for EV every time she visited.
I gave it a cursory page through and didn’t quite get it. EV didn’t seem to love it, either. I took away that EV wasn’t excited about wordless picture books.
Over the summer, E bought EV a wordless book called Pool. I was skeptical of it at first, recalling EV’s disinterest in Journey. Then, I watched something magic begin to happen. E kept making up the story of Pool, and EV began to interact with the story. Sometimes she interjected to add something from a prior telling, others she inserted her own details.
I took a turn reading it to her, and I noticed different facets of it than E, so my telling was a shade different. If I asked nicely enough and didn’t make a big deal about it, EV would even “read” Pool to me.
Pool was one of our most-read books during the summer. When E was listing off books from her want-list for our request list for the library and mentioned Journey, my ears pricked up.
I wondered – how would EV like the book now that she was older and more engaged in the shared creation of a story? Would Journey include both enough narrative and enough ambiguity to make for as interesting a read as Pool?
What a difference a few months made!
CK Says: 
– Try them!
Gender Diversity: Female protagonist; most other characters are male, although background characters are sometimes agender.
Ethnic Diversity: None, unfortunately
Challenging Language: None!
Themes to Discuss: imagination, fantasy, canals, cooperation
Reading Time: Depends on the reader! Between 4-15 minutes each, for us.
The Journey Trilogy by Aaron Becker is a beautiful, brilliant, fantastical trio of wordless adventure books by with a capable little girl hero, each with plenty of room for interpretation and expansion in the retelling. Becker proves himself an ingenious storyteller with an eye for detail and a knack for tantalizing ambiguity.
Journey is the story of a young girl who uses a piece of red chalk to travel to a fantastic world by drawing a door on her bedroom walk. In that world, she learns that the chalk can draw anything out of thin air.
After sailing through a town built on a series of canals, she encounters a group of soldiers flying in zeppelins are trying to catch a vivid purple bird. The girl tries to save the bird, but she’s captured herself, and the two work together so she can get free. The bird leads her to a door just like her own, except it’s the same color as the bird! On the other side, she is back in the real world down the street from her house, where she meets a boy with purple chalk.
I could add so many more details to that plot summary, but none of them are verifiably true and that’s the best part of Journey. The story told by the series of gorgeous illustrations is never proscriptive, but it includes many hints to act as hooks for your imagination. The colorful chalk creations pop off the watercolor backgrounds.
The easiest example is the red chalk itself. The girl finds it on the floor of her room. Is it the first time she has encountered it? The natural urge is to say yes, as that fits with how stories like this one are usually told. However, she already owns a matching red scooter and red ball which she has been carrying around the house with her. Is it a coincidence that red is her favorite color, or had she created with the chalk before?
These points of interpretation abound in Journey, and they’re part of what makes it so fun in the retelling. Does the girl mean to steer her little red boat to the top of the highest canal? Is it she or the the bird who engineers the magic carpet that will fit through the bars of her cage? Where do she and the boy find the body of a bike that they draw wheels for at the end of the book?
That’s what makes Journey perfect for a small reader who can interact with you while you read. The details that EV noticed and questions she asked shaped out version of the story. Sometimes it’s a very plain, descriptive version that simply explains the action on each page. Others it unfurls in the telling like a florid fairy tale, full of little asides and descriptions of the girl’s inner monologue.
Journey would already be a surefire recommendation if it stood alone, but Aaron Becker extended the story into two additional books – Quest and Return – that are somehow even more captivating than Journey itself! [Read more…] about Children’s Book Review: The Journey Trilogy by Aaron Becker