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From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – WildStorm Rising

November 30, 2016 by krisis

It’s the grand finale of my daily read of the first three years of WildStorm Comics – WildStorm Rising!

WildStorm Rising is the first direct crossover between any WildStorm books. Just like here at CK the WildStorm crew doesn’t do anything halfway – their first crossover hits every one of their eight ongoing titles, adding a prologue and a pair of bookends for 11 total issues:

Team 7: Operation Hell #1
WildStorm Rising #1
WildC.A.T.s #20
Union (1995) #4
Gen 13 (1995) #2
Grifter #1
Deathblow #16
Wetworks #8
Backlash #8
StormWatch #22
WildStorm Rising #2

The crossover is really only meaningful to a trio of them – dual flagships WildCATS and Stormwatch, and the debut of Grifter. Everyone else is merely a bystander in the culmination of a year-long plot launched in Stormwatch to alter the struggling status quo in WildCATs.

There are pros and cons to any linewide crossover, and WildStorm Rising is no exception.

On the pro side, the event manages to accomplish something that few Marvel crossovers could manage back in the 90s (and still can’t today): Each chapter worked well as an issue of its own book advancing some of its own themes. That’s true despite the fact that many books weren’t written by their typical authors and many of them continued directly to the next title in the crossover sequence.

Plus, we really do get a new status quo for several books, none more so than WildCATs!

On the con side, WildStorm Rising squanders Defile’s long-running infiltration of Stormwatch in favor of him chasing a McGuffin of power discovered in Team 7: Objective Hell. Many of the pillars of plot that support this crossover were built from Defiles machinations, so it feels like a massive cheat to see his master plot lose steam just as WildCATs and Stormwatch come to blows. He almost literally says, “Screw my plans that have been built up in Stormwatch since issue #6, now I’m going to focus on this other thing.”

Even worse, in a hairpin final turn of plot it turns out the McGuffin has no real meaning. It was merely a red herring to bring back a fan favorite character squandered too early in the life of the line!

What is this amazing McGuffin? It’s both a key and a symbol. It’s about the balance of power in the ruling class of Daemonites. When they arrived on Earth in a space ship chasing the Kherubim, there was a natural division of power between politics, military, and (sort of) transportation. A representative of each held a key to the ship that also signified their unquestionable ruling power. All three would need to align their keys to activate interstellar navigation technology so none could shift the balance of power too far towards government, military might, or (one would imagine) commerce and colonization.

The transportation key was lost in the ship’s crash, which left the political and military arms of the Daemonites stuck in a two-party struggle for planetary power for 2,000 years with no means to escape. Now, the two pieces of the lost key have showed up in possession of a rogue Daemonite and a member of Team 7. Both sides of the Daemonites are racing to collect the pieces while the assembled might of our heroes try to defend them (while resolving their inter-squad squabbles).

Is WildStorm Rising worth a read? As a self-contained event it’s nothing special. However, if you plan to read any other WildStorm books from 1995-1997 – like Grifter’s solo series or Alan Moore’s WildCats – it’s a good primer. (It’s far back enough from Ellis’s takeover on Stormwatch to be irrelevant there.)

The rest of this post is split into two sections. The first reviews each issue of the crossover (w/links to purchase) with relatively few comments on plot. The second second offers a plot recap of each issue so you can fill in the gaps of your read if you don’t own every issue.

Want to read the entire thing in one go? All of the material aside from the prologue is collected in a single TPB (Amazon / eBay).

From The Beginning: Dr. Seuss – McElligot’s Pool (Book #5)

November 30, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Today is the fifth installment of my “From The Beginning” read of Dr. Seuss’s entire bibliography. Last week I reviewed the slightly odd, lesser-known Horton book Horton Hatches the Egg.

Dr. Seuss followed Horton with another silly rhyming tale, recycling Marco the protagonist of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and his wild imagination. However, this time around Marco didn’t seem to capture my toddler’s imagination.

McElligot’s Pool (1947) – Dr. Seuss

CK Says: – Consider it

Reading Time: 5-8 minutes

Gender Diversity: Marco and the farmer are male; some fisher are gendered as male. The one named women is out hanging her clothes (as most of Seuss’s early women are)

Ethnic Diversity: None

Challenging Language: pasture, croquet, connecting, whoofing, friskers, kangaroo, gristle, acrobat, thrashing

Themes to Discuss: imagination, littering, evolution

McElligot’s Pool reunites us with Marco, the imaginative star of Seuss’s debut And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. On this occasion he’s not walking down a busy city street, but sitting at a fishing hole out in the country. His vivid imagination is not only intact, but it has grown.

That means the same is true for Marco’s author, Dr. Seuss. His fifth book is the first to dive deeply into his fanciful world of ridiculous made up animals – here represented in meter by all the unusual fish that Marco can possibly dream up.

mcelligots-pool-dr-seuss-rooster-fish McElligot’s Pool is a really just an overgrown puddle, a hole-in-the-ground filled with water and people’s junk. A local farmer says Marco couldn’t possible catch a fish there even if he fished for fifty years! Even without the junk, I’m not sure that any fish would want to live there.

Marco is undeterred, imagining the pool as an underground river that runs out under his little town to the sea beyond. And, while there might not be any interesting fish in McElligot’s Pool, the sea is full of them! He starts out picturing real (or, at least, realistic) fish he might catch, but escalates quickly to picturing rooster fish, cow fish, downhill skiing fish and people fish. (It’s pretty gruesome to imagine catching some of them with a hook!)

All of those fish are the reason Marco keeps fishing, even if they might not really exist to be caught.

Seuss feints in the direction of an environmentalist tale with the initial focus on all the junk littering the pool, but the theme doesn’t linger after its initial mention. Once the underground river flows out to the sea, the story is like an underwater adaptation of Mulberry Street fueled by extra imagination.

mcelligots-pool-dr-seuss-pg-32 I found the book full of silly fish to be charming, but from the first read the toddler had found it to be boring. I wasn’t sure why at first. It has colorful illustrations and zippy, easy-to-read language. After negotiating with her to read it a few more times, I think her disinterest is the result of McElligot’s Pool lacking the progression of Mulberry Street. Though the fish do get slightly bigger and more unusual as the story continues, there isn’t a clear “this replaces that” theme nor a sense of reaching a destination. It’s just a list of silly fish.

What interested toddler does have in the book are certainly the illustrations. This book features a fuller range of colors than the last few – delicate watercolors rather than the bold color fills of Mullberry or the flash of red in 500 Hats and King’s Stilts. The fish themselves are quite delightful. Seuss pushes each of Marco’s fanciful concepts as far as possible. Some of them definitely elicit a chuckle from me on re-read, especially the saw fish who can’t get around on his own because he’s poorly balanced and the skiing fish because why would a fish need to ski underwater?!

McElligot’s Pool is a silly book to borrow from a library to spur your child’s imagination, or perhaps a fun read to get them excited about a visit the aquarium, but it’s not a Seuss classic you must own.

35-for-35: 2015 – “I Need Never Get Old” by Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats

November 30, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]”Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

I love that quote, often attributed to Elvis Costello but actually the words of actor Martin Mull. He was simply paraphrasing sentiments like this one, from The New Republic in 1918:

Strictly considered, writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics. All the other arts can be talked about in the terms of ordinary life and experience.

I like Mull’s quote better. I don’t think writing about music is illogical, but I do think it is like using art to describe other art. There is an art to finding an adjective to describe a song, a riff, or a voice – waves of sound that speak their own descriptions. I wouldn’t have endeavored to write about music for 30 days straight this month if I didn’t feel that way.

What I do think can be illogical is the taxonomy of music. Litanies of labels and galaxies of genres. They’re used to so careful contain the sound of an artist, but what happens when they write a song that doesn’t fit into the container. When a punk band unplugs, are they immediately folk-punk? When Lady Gaga sings with a Southern accent, is she country?

I sometimes wonder if artists reflect on this stuff as they read what’s written about their work. I probably would. One artist I’ve been wondering about in specific is Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats. They were one of the “Country” artists I was introduced to in the series of song summits a year ago that lead to Smash Fantastic playing tunes like their “S.O.B.” and Eric Church’s “Springsteen.”

I understood why Country fans would listen to “S.O.B.” There’s no doubt that it has a raw, throw-back country vibe with its handclaps and walking bass line. That’s not what I heard. Country isn’t one of my major influences and when I heard the song, I immediately thought, “That sounds like Motown.”

I initially wrote it off, thinking perhaps there was just something about the combination of the bassline and the horns that evoked a certain Motown hit for me. Then I heard the entire Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats LP.

It’s not Country. It’s Motown and Stax Records. It’s The Isley Brothers. It’s Otis Redding. It’s Sam Cooke.

Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats is one of those “every song is amazing” albums that I cherish and listen to on repeat forever. The first tune – “I Need Never Get Old” – might be the best indication of that, but I could have picked any song on the album.

It’s not just that it sounds a lot like The Isley Brothers. It sounds like some specific Isley Brothers song that you’re sure you’ve heard before and loved. It’s aural déjà vu, a sound that can create the memory of having heard it before.

I always try to take note of these songs when I first hear them. It’s like writing down your dreams as soon as you wake up when the details are still vivid. Over time and repeated listens you will subconsciously normalize this special act of déjà vu as just sounding like itself. Sometimes I find little lists of song names scribbled on a piece of paper, my solitaire version of musical $64,000 Pyramid where I try to define a song by all of the little references I hear inside of it.

The entirety of Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats produces that feeling for me.

That makes me wonder: how did Rateliff get filed with Country? The record was released by Stax Records and it absolutely has a classic Stax sound, which was the sound of 60s R&B and Soul.

The truth is that in our illogical modern taxonomy of music, there is no poplar modern analog to those genres. If you write an amazing, earth-shaking album of classic Stax-style tunes in 2015 you’ve got two choices: have close to nobody hear it, or promote it to Country radio because all those real instruments you’re playing will be appreciated there and rack up over 30 million YouTube views in your first year-and-a-half as a big label band.

You should probably choose the latter, because any words that are used to describe your music are just a dance about architecture – one imperfect undefinable art describing another.

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Team 7: Objective: Hell (1995) #1-3

November 29, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]This month of reading WildStorm from the beginning has frequently defied my expectations, with my enjoyment of the contents nearly reversed from what I expected.

team-7-v2-03-pinup Team 7: Objective hell tops that list of unexpected outcomes. It’s a riveting, gorgeous, well-written book that merges military themes with superhero powers. There are a few tiny nods to the future of these characters, particularly for Slayton/Backlash, but otherwise this series hardly acknowledges the wider WildStorm Universe and the future it holds in store.

Chuck Dixon shines here even more than on the original limited series. Past needing to introduce his massive cast and take them through multiple missions, this series has both more action and better character moments. No one gets the sort of monologue or grandstanding they did in the first series. It’s all tiny beats that tell us more about the team – particularly Slayton’s temper and the babyfaced Cash’s rise to leadership before an eventual fall from their graces.

Every page of this book looks damned great. The covers truly don’t do justice to the interior pages.

Chris Warner spares no detail in illustrating the jungle environs of Nicaragua and Cambodia. A gang of multiple inkers introduce some variation but fill every page with plenty of contrast for colorist Monica Bennett to make pop with rich greens, golden flesh tones, and Team 7’s red war paint.

The long-haired, well-muscled men of Team 7 have a certain mercurial hint of motion that’s reminiscent of issue #1’s cover artist, the legendary Barry Windsor Smith. The members who we don’t know in the present day stand out the most, with Caitlin Fairchild’s father clearly modeled on Iggy Pop and Grunge’s father Chang drawn more distinctly as an Asian than on the prior outing.

The inspiration for this story seems near to that of The Divine, an OGN I reviewed last year. The difference is that while The Divine was about child soldiers in an eternal war, Objective Hell is about a small bubble of peace that Team 7 is forced to disrupt for the greater good.

Was a greater good achieved? There’s no question that removing low-yield nukes from the grasping Khmer Rouge is a positive, but the open psychic warfare between US and Russian forces signaled a new front of the Cold War that Team 7 found themselves alone to defend. While they escape with only one serious casualty this time, it helps to frame their later choice to splinter and become mercenaries. As long as the specter of their reassembling as a team exists in the world, the US Government will find some threat that demands their intervention … but does their existence also escalate the seriousness of the threats?

Team 7: Objective Hell doesn’t hold those answers or very many keys to the big questions we’ve been asking about Backlash, Grifter, Dane, Lynch, and Cray, but it is a superior WildStorm offering that makes me wish we had an ongoing comic to add more past missions to Team 7’s published history.

Want a recap? Keep reading for a summary of how these soldiers became super. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read. Tomorrow is the main event! WildStorm Rising! Let’s get ready to cross over, baby!

Need the issues? This series has not been collected, so you’ll need to grab the singles – try eBay or Amazon. Since further 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 – Team 7: Objective: Hell (1995) #1-3

35-for-35: 2014 – “Unconditional Love” by Against Me!

November 29, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]I’m not sure that I’m capable of unconditional love, because I don’t believe it really exists.

How can you even define what it means to love someone or something “no matter what?” The variable of “what” in that statement only includes the changes you can conceive of in the present day. It’s a statement that you could love something’s status quo forever, and maybe also anything within a few degrees of difference.

I know this is a silly measuring stick but I always try to define this sort of unwavering commitment via musical fandom. Sixteen years ago this week I lamented that Ani DiFranco websites were shutting down left and right, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would quit her. I was in my sixth year of listening to her, but some of those fans were in their twelfth. At the time, I said:

I don’t expect her to reproduce the same album over and over, and i don’t expect her to stay the same. The people shutting down their website’s now might not have expected her to do either of those things, but i suppose on some level they were hoping she would.

Now I’m in my twentieth year, and Ani’s new albums barely register with me and I no longer see her shows. She’s not too different and I’m not too different, but the two of us have each changed by enough degrees that love has turned into like. I Now I’m just loving the old her, and that’s not love. It’s nostaglia. The new her can’t change that, and I still have affection for her, but it’s not the same love I had before.

I think the same holds true for anything you love – not just always-changing things like musicians or family members, but static things like a song, a board game, or a statue. That’s because one side of that loving equation can change: you. So, even if you love something unconditionally now, you can’t predict all the future conditions.

That’s how Against Me!’s beautiful, rambling, three-chord “Unconditional Love” resonates with me. It’s off of Transgender Dysphoria Blues, the band’s first release since lead singer Laura Jane Grace came out as a transgender woman. That’s a pretty big change in conditions – one that most people don’t account for when they express their unconditional love. It’s a change that finds a lot of people reaching out for the unconditional love they were promised and finding a void in its place.

Laura knows that. She understands the fundamental lie of love. Unconditional love isn’t really about the future, it’s about the present.