I am quite glad Pete never got round to doing his “Why Englebert is a good idea” piece for Freaky Trigger.
Anyway, entering a pop record which sounds like the pop records people in Europe are actually buying (i.e. “Starships” in this case) turns out to be a good idea - astonishing, I know.
Big swing back to Western Europe and “pop credibility” since the juries came back in, too. Good for Sweden, I guess: it was alright, better than the last few winners if memory serves.
It has been a woeful Eurovision, except for Ukraine’s song which was BANGING.
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.
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The defensive need to prove that what was edgy when we were 20 is still edgy now.
“The good news: Twitter lets you block a person’s retweets while still following their original tweets. When you’re looking at someone’s Twitter page, click the gray menu-box in the upper-right corner with the silhouette icon, and select “Turn off Retweets”.” —
http://www.splatf.com/2012/05/retweeting/
This is the most useful thing I have learned all day.
“More than 115 racist incidents were recorded in Britain’s schools every day between 2007 and 2011, with four in five teachers saying they had seen pupils being abused. Data from 90 local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales shows there were almost 88,000 cases of racist bullying, which can include name calling and physical abuse. Charities and teaching unions fear the figure is just ‘the tip of the iceberg’, but a body campaigning for better standards in schools believes the number may have been ‘inflated’ because teachers felt pressured into reporting incidents which were merely playground banter.” — “Better standards” = “more racism” apparently. Article
katherine st asaph: "They're all just voices on legs" -
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…
“Personally, the mainstream pop culture of the seventies never seemed entirely comprehensible until I started thinking of it as something like a bubble economy, full of irrational exuberance and an earnest, often-naïve sense that some grand new door had been opened. A bubble, specifically, in terms of people’s belief in a self (not just a set of socially dictated roles and responsibilities, but a malleable, improvable self, one you could purchase books about), and in terms of sensuality and sophistication (a decade of luxurious hair, and the mass-marketing of the waterbed, and glitter and silk and sun-dappled fields of wheat, and sighing, sensualist hit songs like ‘Lovin’ You’), and boy, oh boy, oh boy, in terms of sex.” —
Nitsuh Abebe, amidst his Donna Summer/Robin Gibb obituary. (via marathonpacks)
One of Dominic Sandbrook’s ideas which I do think is quite good is about how a lot of the stuff that we popularly associate with the 60s - particularly the sexual revolution - actually had its mainstream impact in the 70s. And like everything which started out underground and went mainstream, a lot of people decided it was suddenly extremely naff.
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