Blue Lines Revisited

Nothing I write about ABBA this week will be as good as this.

oneweekoneband:

Thanks, Chelsea!

Next week, we’ll take on one of the best and biggest pop acts of all time—Swedish pop superstars ABBA, and for this I’m extremely delighted to be welcoming back Tom Ewing!

Tom has previously written for us on The KLF, is a contributor to Pitchfork and The Guardian, among…

Stockholm calling! This is what I’ll be up to next week, and thanks very much to Hendrik for letting me be greedy and have a second chomp at the OWOB apple.

It won’t be as considered or high-concept as the KLF one, it’s just 30 or so short pieces about ABBA songs.

If I know my online comics fans, I suspect Tim Marchman will come to wearily regret putting his Twitter name at the bottom of this bracing attack on modern “mainstream” (i.e. superhero) mags. It’s worth reading, though. The main fault with it is that it’s a mash-up of three different articles, viz:

- An article about how Marvel and DC Comics don’t sell as much now as they did 20 years ago even though superhero films are big.

- An article about how the people who create superhero properties for Marvel and DC have usually been shafted by them.

- An article about how Marvel and DC Comics aren’t very good at the moment.

I broadly agree with Marchman on all three - less so on the third, but only because the Big Two’s output is the same as it nearly always was: a mix of incompetence, competence and the occasional fantastic series. The balances shift, the yardstick of “competence” moves around (trippier stories one decade, screenwriter manuals on the shelf in another), but this was true in 1992 and 1986 and 1966, frankly.

The problem is that while it seems the joins between these ideas ought to be obvious, they’re not really. If you try and link the bubble-economy sales of comics in the 90s to their quality in the 00s, you’re arguing that the creators of today ought to be aspiring to the artistic heights of X-Force and Turok, Dinosaur Hunter. If you try and link creators’ rights to sales, you run quite quickly into the fact thatThe Walking Dead - a graphic novel sales phenomenon - is also a one-off sales phenomenon so far. Publishers Image, forged in the heat of the 90s sales boom, have always championed creators’ rights. Their comics now are - and I don’t think this is very controversial - staggeringly superior to their early 90s output. They also - Walking Dead aside - tend to sell around 1/100th as much. This being the Wall St Journal, maybe Marchman wants to apply entrepreneurial principles and vigorous free market logic to the fate of superhero comics, but whatever he’s doing the pieces won’t really fit.

His point that new readers might want a story with an actual beginning is solid - but Marvel and DC realised this back during the early 00s manga boom, tried publishing a bunch of titles (the Tsunami, Icon and DC Focus imprints, for instance) to capitalise on this and none of them sold terribly well. Vertigo, DC’s edgier, fairer sister imprint, produces new no-background-necessary non-superhero properties all the time and most of them tank. Manga is an interesting case, actually, in that during the early 00s it looked like publishers of Japanese imports had found a formula for reviving comics - pocket-size volumes, wide genres, serial but complete stories, bookstores, young audiences - but it’s stuttered like everything else. If there was an immense demand for comics simply being held back by the venal decadence of Marvel and DC, this was its moment. And it turns out there wasn’t really.

Marvel and DC comics are hopelessly snarled in continuity, for sure - the problem with Avengers V X-Men as new reader bait isn’t that you need to have read the Dark Phoenix Saga, but that it assumes you’re up on the more convoluted last few years/”seasons” of Marvel. But “snarled in continuity” as a diagnosis for them is much the same as “stuck with old business models” for the music industry: making it puts you on the side of the modern and innovative, so it legitimises your schadenfreude at how these exploitative companies are getting karmic payback. But as analysis it’s weak: it doesn’t really explain how Marvel or DC or EMI or Universal GET to this promised land given that every imaginable incremental step towards it fucks up their existing business. Create new characters? They’ve tried. Diversify into non superheroes? They’ve tried. Rip up continuity and start again? They’ve tried (DC has, several times). The strategy for years has been to manage decline, energise the base and keep Hollywood sweet, and that doesn’t look like changing.

parklakespeakers:

I tried to submit this post from the Guardian’s New Band of the Day column to gazingmales a while back but I guess it isn’t quite the right kind of gross to fit there, that quote up there aside. So I’ll just have to post myself about how much it pissed me off. Not least…