Enthusiasm For Life Defeats Existential Fear

No, this isn't the sub-title for the Final Crisis hardcover (though it definitely could be), its a song performed last night at the Pitchfork Music Festival by those fabulous fearless freaks, the Flaming Lips.

Aside from being a comic book fan, I'm pretty well-versed in independent and alternative music, so I go to the Pitchfork Festival every year. For those who don't know, the Pitchfork Music Festival takes place in Union Park in Chicago, IL, and for my money, is a much more pleasant and entertaining (not to mention affordable) experience than the bloated Lollapalooza. The bands are a little farther off the mainstream than those appearing at Lollapalooza, though there is some cross-over -- I would say that the bands that usually headline Pitchfork would be a mid-day/early evening slot at Lolla. This means Pitchfork can also spotlight a lot of relatively unknown, up-and-coming bands that you might not have heard of before.

I always enjoy the festival, but this year was special, because this year the headliner was my favorite band in the universe, the Flaming Lips! The Lips have been around a long time, and had a lot of different incarnations over the years, so their songs feature run the gamut from heavily distorted guitar riffing to spaced out beats and synths. The common thread, though, is positive energy and songs that really bring out a sense of joy, wonder, and adventure. Their music acknowledges that life can be tough and horrible, but that it can also be amazing and joyous, and that the positive energy we can create may just be enough to counter-act all the negativity out there. I guess it sounds a little hokey written out like that, but when you see their show, it can be a truly transcendent experience.

I guess its also not surprising that the Lips resonate with me as a fan of mainstream comics. I mean, superhero books have been mining the same ideas, including the battle between good and evil, for decades. Upon reflection, and while basking in the glow from last night's show, I've come up with five reasons why comics fans should love the Flaming Lips:

1. Comics have no shortage of fun, anthropomorphic animals. Neither do the Flaming Lips live performances, with randomly picked crowd members being chosen by the Lips crew to don furry animal costumes and dance on stage while the band does their thing.

2. The Flaming Lips have a song in their catalogue called "Waiting for Superman". Its depressing and uplifting at the same time - who among us doesn't wish that Superman could swoop in and save us? But in the end, we know that there are some things in life that really are too heavy for Superman too lift, and that we have to hold on as best we can and do it ourselves.

3. They did a song cycle about a Japanese girl named Yoshimi who has to train hard to fight "evil-natured robots" who are "programmed to destroy us." But of course, one of the robots develops emotions and falls in love with Yoshimi. You can't tell me that wouldn't make an awesome comic.

4. Their music, and show, is truly cosmic in scope. From the heavy metaphysical themes I mentioned above, to more light songs like "Kim's Watermelon Gun" and "The Guy Who Got a Headache and Saved the World," they really are out there in a way most long-time comics readers can really relate to. Plus, they've been known to arrive at shows in a giant "spaceship" they constructed in their backyard - how cool is that?

5. They just rock.

One more comic-related thing to cap off my Lips post - if you've read Final Crisis, you know that Superman defeats Darkseid in the end with a song. That moment was my favorite of that entire book, and it really encapsulates the potential of what comics can be, and should be. Well, I think the song Superman sings should be whatever you personally want it to be - whatever music you think has the potential to break the Anti-Life Equation once and for all. For me, that song is "Do You Realize" by the Flaming Lips. If you don't check out any other song by them, check out that one - after all, it did save the Universe.

Reason # 1,573,921 That Comics Are Awesome

When you are having a really bad day, and that really bad day happens to be a Wednesday, you can always look forward to picking up a nice shiny pile of new comics later that afternoon!

Comics may not heal all wounds, but they do provide a nice band-aid that is fun to look at!

Comics Countdown . . . FOR JUSTICE!

I'm sorry, but I couldn't resist. I know its in the name of the book, and it is just part of the DC Superhero milieu, but having characters regularly just shout random stuff about JUSTICE cracks me up every time. At least Cry for Justice features three specific types of justice - Tiny Torture Justice, Insufferable Hal Jordan Justice, and Gorilla Justice!

After having mercilessly made fun of a book that I actually didn't hate - I didn't love it either, but I found it to be an average cape comic with a couple of questionable dialogue choices that it made it seem worse than it really was - I must now confess that I am terrible about doing these Comics Countdown posts. It was easy the first couple of weeks, because there were a ton of books I was buying that I was excited to write about, but lately I have had too little time to write and frankly not a lot to write about. I am still going to try to keep it going, but it may skip a week here and there depending on output, etc. So without further ado, here is a ten-item countdown of books spanning the past two week. Additionally, this week I am going to try to keep my thoughts on each issue to a single sentence, just to see if I can....

#10. Uncanny X-Men # 513: Matt Fraction's mutant riots sneak onto the list by virtue of a weak couple of weeks and very nice Dodson art.

#9. Irredeemable # 4: Waid's evil Superman analogue causes destruction (in a fun way), but the story better start moving a little faster, or this one is due to plummet.

#8. Invincible Iron Man # 15: An overlooked storyline in which Tony Stark loses his real superpower - his intellect - provides some surprisingly touching moments to make the list.

# 7. The Boys # 32: The "We Gotta Go Now" arc lagged, but the last couple of issues have put this book back on track as a monthly must-read.

# 6. Green Lantern # 43: I picked this up for the Mahnke art, but it was a really impressive story that has me anxious for Blackest Night, which I was previously on the fence about - kudos, Johns & Co.

# 5. Greek Street # 1: Not as strong a start as I had hoped, but I'll stick around for a few more issues as the potential is definitely there for something epic.

# 4. Wednesday Comics # 1: Its almost not fair for this to be part of the countdown, because it feels like a thing apart unto itself, but its a very exciting and entertaining project that I hope succeeds wildly.

# 3. Unwritten # 3: As much as I loved the previous issues, this one is where Carey and Gross really hit their stride - plus, I love me some Frankenstein.

# 2. Captain America: Reborn # 1: So it goes (if you don't get that reference, get thee to a library and pick up Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, which parts of this issue owe a LOT to).

# 1. Batman and Robin # 2: Morrison and Quitely - pretty damn near unbeatable.

How Did I Miss This?

Every once in a while, a comic comes along that it is perfectly suited to your tastes. It hits all the right buttons for you - the subject matter aligns with stuff you enjoy reading about; the tone and aesthetic of the book is one you enjoy immensely; the artist might as well have been sitting next to you asking, "Hey, buddy, what would you like to see me draw today?" And sometimes, when such a comic comes along, you completely miss out on it until years later, at which point you kick yourself for not reading it, living it, breathing it, and pushing it in the faces of anyone who will listen, all along.

Well, that happened to me recently, when I picked up some old issues of Darkhawk from a quarter bin..... No, seriously, it happened when I finally got around to reading the first (and as far as I know, only) trade of Casanova, by Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba'. I had read some of Fraction's Marvel work, and I had seen Ba's art on Umbrella Academy, but man, this book blew me away from the opening page.

The conceit is this: Casanova Quinn and his twin sister Zephyr Quinn are involved in all sorts of crazy, psychedelic, hedonistic spy intrigue involving travel between parallel timelines, work as double and triple agents, sex-toy robots, transcendental meditation, people getting murdered for not like the Beatles (a particularly satisfying scene for this fan of the Fab Four), pop-star assassins, and lots of other completely insane and unbelievably awesome stuff thrown in for good measure. Casanova is a double agent working for both his father, who is head of the world police agency E.M.P.I.R.E., and for W.A.S.T.E., which is E.M.P.I.R.E.'s evil foil.

The book is packed with action and ideas - most of the stories are only sixteen pages long, and more happens in each chapter than in six months of your average mainstream superhero book. Casanova owes a lot to both Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories and novels, and Steranko's Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (one of the characters working for E.M.P.I.R.E. basically is Dum Dum Dugan), but its still its own animal, and stands up well whether or not you're familiar with any of that material.

Fraction's Casanova changes his allegiances, and the status quo of the book, almost as often as most people change their underwear. You'll spend more time absorbing the goings-on on each page, usually in wide-eyed delight, than you might spend reading some full comics. Aside from the constant barrage of action, what comes through the most is that Fraction is having fun with this. There is a level of playfullness that is truly infectious - the knowing swipes at comics as a genre, pop music, and tropes of the spy genre and '60s psychedelia always fit snugly within the narrative and only enhance the story elements.

And the art - I enjoyed Ba' on Umbrella Academy, but I love his work on Casanova. Its stylish, sexy, fluid and distinctive without ever being confusing or stilted. It is in black and white, but the book also employs a green tone (and purple on a single page, to very interesting effect) in order to give the art even more depth and character. Casanova Volume 1 comes with my highest recommendation, whatever that's worth. I hope I never miss out on anything this good again.

The Pains of Having Painted Art

JLA: Cry for Justice # 1 has produced some of the most widely varying reactions I have seen in a long time. Some critics love it - witness CBR's Five-Star Review for the issue. Others find it so horribly bad as to be ripe for instant and unstinting mockery - Douglas Wolk's "Crying Congorilla", Digital Femme's "Superman Smackdown," and, best of all, Every Day Is Like Wednesday's "Misfits Remix". It seems that everyone thinks this is epically good or epically bad - with no in-between.

Without having even read the book (though I'll probably have to read it now, just to say how good/bad it really is), I had to wonder why this is the case. Why would this book be hailed as a conqueror or mocked mercilessly, with no one stating a case for mere mediocrity?

My theory is that its all about the art. Painted art, or even "painterly" styled art, simply cries out to be taken seriously. When the accompanying story is epic enough to justify these heavy, portentous images, the entire package can be elevated (a la Marvels, or Kingdom Come). When the story isn't very good, or even if the story is good but more limited in scope, this artistic style can collapse under its own weight. What might otherwise seem epic now seems pretentious. What might otherwise exude real gravitas now only signifies an inflated sense of importance just begging to be punctured by, say, a photoshopped version replacing actual dialogue with lyrics by Glenn Danzig.

It seems pretty likely to me that some of the people who read this book believe that the story justifies the epic treatment, and half the people don't. This is one instance where all press is good press for DC, because without these wildly divergent reactions, I would have been unlikely to buy this book. As it stands, I am curious enough now that I have to read the whole thing.

Oh Batman!

From The Daily Batman, here's irrefutable proof that Batman didn't like Robin "that" way: