sublime sublimation

We all desire, but civilization requires sacrifice. It controls our most brutal aggressive and sexual instincts. Sublime sublimation. . . . Ads do not interrupt as they fill in the blanks. They fill the emptiness of our souls. Fundamentally we are empty. Nature abhors a vacuum. Civilization satisfies desires by inflating them. It's a trade-off. Society credits you life and security in exchange for repression.

. . .

Suddenly evolution makes sense. Protoplasmic capitalism. Protein currency. Amino acid exchange rates. Molecular surplus. Carnivorous conflict. Reptilian exploitation. Cold-blooded shopping. Paleolithic corporations. Cro-magnon capital. Neanderthal profits. Virile enterpreneurs.

Tom Kaczynski, Beta Testing the Apocalypse

the greatest comics you should be reading, but aren't

We're currently undergoing a bit of a renaissance in self-published / avant garde comics. The combination of the internet and the ease of desktop publishing has allowed small scale innovation to flourish.

We're at the same time at a bit of an all time low in the "mainstream" (i.e. "big 2" direct market) comics. The flow of information the internet allows has made it easy for readers to compare notes on the abundantly clear way in which comic content is driven by editorial rather than aesthetic decisions. This is bizarre actually, because it's made big 2 comics more like Hollywood, in the sense that a) repetition (read: third-rate mimicking) of past success and b) corporate second-guessing of the tastes of a demographic they are manifestly not themselves a part of drive content. This is especially strange because in Hollywood, the motivation for this behavior is the enormous amount of money at risk. Unlike movies, however, comics take very little money and very few participants to produce. So a strategy motivated by the economic structure of one medium seems to have bled into another with a totally different economic structure.

So, mainstream fans, who love i) superheroes, ii) action, and iii) clever exploitation have been left out to dry by their long time suppliers—yet, despite the abundance of other sources for comics, it's hard to tell which might appeal to that mainstream desire for fun exploitation and which will turn out to be too avant garde / weird / inaccessible for the mainstream fan.

So, here's a first pass at a list of comics that might fly under the radar of a mainstream fan, but are worth checking out if they're dissatisfied with the big 2, but want some kind of comic experience to satisfy that itch.

Some criteria I've attempted to satisfy:

1. Series must be ongoing - there must be at least the possibility of new volumes / issues appearing in the relatively near future.

2. Subject matter must be fun exploitation, in the sense of involving action, adventure, superheroes, but not also graphic weird sex and/or violence in too much excess (where we're setting the bar for "too much" here only a little lower than DC seems to find acceptable these days, but still significantly lower than many of the old school "underground comix").

3. Weirdness / "artsiness" must be low enough that one doesn't have to be excited about "use of form" or some other deconstructionist analysis in order to enjoy the comic.

Follow links from the titles if you want to hunt any of these down.

Self-Published:

1. Copra (Michel Fiffe)

A superhero comic modeled after the old Suicide Squad (back when it was good), but filled with non-stop psychedelic invention. This comic does everything the big 2 should be doing but aren't—suck Michel Fiffe's big fat dick, DC and Marvel!

2. Decadence Comics (various)

A "comic collective" with a flagship anthology and a bunch of miniseries and short comic collections. The key here is primary participants Lando and Stathis Tsemberlidis, who share an aesthetic commitment to cool Moebius-inspired, politically interesting, but also fun and compelling sci fi. Island 3 or Olympic Games by Lando are great places to start. Stathis' stuff may be a little too psychedelic to satisfy criterion 3, but if you have a high tolerance for psychedelia, check out MOA-192B. Warning = a lot of it's silent, but the images are great.

Small Publisher:

1. Dungeon Quest (Joe Daly / Fantagraphics)

South African Joe Daly's D&D-tribute / stoner adventure is amazingly drawn and super fun to read. Some of the humor is certainly on the weird side (you can't be down on pot smoking, for example, or tiny men who are horny in a "natural" way?) but none of the violence or sexual(?) imagery is anything like as offensive and mean spirited as what goes on in DC these days. bottom line - fun. Supposedly the next volume may be the last, but given the rate at which the series has been progressing, I find that hard to believe.

2. Cursed Pirate Girl (Jeremy Bastian / Archaia)

Beautiful, elaborate art; a fun Alice in Wonderland (with pirates!) story; clever and complex humor. This is ongoing, just incredibly slow (the first half took years, we'll see how long the second half takes).

European, waiting for translation:

1. Dungeon (Trondheim and Sfar / NBM)

I don't know what it is about this series. It's magical in the best kind of way. Maybe Bone is the closest comparison coming out of the US? Anthropomorphic monsters in a sprawling, multi-generational fantasy universe—there's something disney and cute, something dark and Game of Thrones, and something that's just pure fun about it. Just like Bone, Dungeon shows that excitement can be all ages, that it doesn't need to be "dark", that it doesn't need to involve weird sex and trashy behavior.

2. "Cities of the Fantastic" (Schuiten and Peeters / NBM)

So, this one's a bit of a stretch in several ways. It's a little less exploitation and more arty (although there are consistent stories in each issue, they do focus heavily on architecture as a central plot point). Also, although it's technically ongoing in the sense that new issues may (will?) appear, the current English language ones are all out of print, and there's no definitive promise of future translations (though NBM would be a likely source if there were). But these are beautiful, and very compelling in a "HItchcock presents" meets Salvador Dali kinda way. If you see anything in this series for a reasonable price, by all means pick it up. (Oh yeah, and I put the title in quotes since the translation is terrible—future post on that at some point.)

Honorable mention:

Night Business (Ben Marra / self published)

This one's a little too violent / sexually explicit to satisfy 2. On the other hand, it's super fun. Picture the best of the trashy 80s—King of New York meets Taxi Driver by way of Beat It. Marra's at the forefront of the new exploitation movement in self-published comics and Night Business has been his most consistent and wide-ranging title so far . . .though there are some worries about how it will all pan out. Anyway, issues 1 and 2 are supposedly out of print, but Marra showed up with some at a convention recently, so it's unclear how serious to take that. He claimed he was going to finish the story as a graphic novel (?). Bottom line: if you see 'em, grab 'em.

huxley on debauchery

The real charm about debauchery . . . is its total pointlessness, futility, and above all its incredible tediousness. If it really were all roses and exhilaration, as these poor children seem to imagine, it would be no better than going to church or studying the higher mathematics. I should never touch a drop of wine or another harlot again. It would be against my principles.

[This little speech by Coleman is followed by the line "I told you it was an emetic" after a young man vomits after drinking whiskey (Coleman had early called gin an aphrodisiac, white wine a diuretic, and whiskey an emetic).]

~ Aldous Huxley in Antic Hay, 1923

huxley on irrelevance

[M]an's greatest strength lies in his capacity for irrelevance. In the midst of pestilences, wars and famines, he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think the irrelevant and unsuitable thoughts of a free man. The spirit is slave to fever and beating blood, at the mercy of an obscure and tyrannous misfortune. But irrelevantly, it elects to dance in triple measure—a mounting skip, a patter of descending feet.

~ Aldous Huxley in Antic Hay, 1923

orange zipper

orange zipper cocktail:

fill a tall chilled champagne glass half full with champagne, add a healthy couple of dashes of absinthe; fill almost to the top with orange juice and garnish with a small ice cube. serve.

spain, rip

Spain Rodriguez, 1983

on parallel fifths

One of the classic rules of counterpoint is the prohibition against parallel fifths, intervals of a fifth (a fortiori an octave) which occur consecutively, though changing in pitch. Although the prohibition has antecedents, its propagation was likely intensified when it was made the fundamental rule of counterpoint in the single most influential textbook of music theory, Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum (1725—the textbook used by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and many succeeding generations of musicians).

Here's a puzzle, though: parallel fifths became perhaps the dominant type of chord transition in the 80s and 90s with the rise of hard rock, punk, and grunge, all of which heavily featured the "power chord," i.e. fundamental, fifth, and octave. How can the popularity of the power chord be reconciled with the prohibition against parallel fifths?

The easy answer: parallel fifths have always appeared in low-brow, "popular" music, and they are just a sign of the general incompetence / lack of complexity of such music.

But this answer is not satisfying. If we reject the possibility of widespread poor taste / ignorance, then we should look for a more interesting answer, one which addresses the reasons for the prohibition against parallel fifths, and how or whether power chords violate these reasons.

The exact reason for the prohibition is unclear. Wikipedia gives several:

1. It interferes with the independence of voices in counterpoint.

2. It reduces the number of voices.

3. It throws the key into doubt.

None of these reasons seems especially deep, however: they depend either (1 and 2) on the assumption that one is concerned only with the integrity of one's counterpoint, or (3) ambiguity of key is undesirable. Both doubtful assumptions for harmonic music in general.

Going back to the most influential source, Fux's translator, Alfred Mann, draws our attention to a particularly important passage:

The purpose of harmony is to give pleasure. Pleasure is awakened by variety of sounds. This variety is the result of progression from one interval to another, and progression, finally, is achieved by motion.

"Direct motion" is that here called parallel, and it is in the following discussion of motion which Fux introduces the prohibition against parallel fifths or octaves. These are the perfect consonances. Direct motion between imperfect consonances, the third and sixth, is permitted. The remaining intervals (including the fourth!) are classified as dissonances.

Mann offers an enlightening gloss in a footnote to the quoted passage:

The statements, which introduce the following fundamental rules, may at the same time be considered an explanation of the principles of voice leading which they embody. The "variety of sound" is the basis from which all further rules are derived: first, the prohibition of parallel successions of perfect consonances, as depriving the voices of their independence. . .

Here, we see again the mention of independent voices, but now we are given a reason for the importance of that independence which transcends a mere commitment to x-voice harmony. Rather, we are given an explanation for the function of harmony (to give pleasure) and a theory about how it does this (through variety). Parallel fifths (perfect consonances) do not present enough variety to fully fulfill the function of harmony (while moving imperfect consonances do).

But this explanation sheds light on the popularity of power chords. The parallel power chord arose as a technique on the distorted electric guitar. Distortion adds new (potentially dissonant) overtones to a sound. This increase in overtones makes Fux's imperfect dissonances (e.g. the third, which usually complete a major chord) more dissonant than with a clean sound. This provides a negative explanation for why they are dropped in the power chord.

But Fux via Mann has now given us a positive explanation as well: parallel fifths are permitted as distorted power chords because the distortion adds the necessary degree of imperfection to the otherwise perfect consonance of the fifth / octave, thereby introducing enough variety to allow their successive appearance to give pleasure.

In fact, arguably, this deeper (psychological) analysis of Fux's principles mandates the switch to power chords in the context of distortion. If Fux classifies a clean fourth as a dissonance, he would certainly classify a distorted third as one! If we allow the analysis of intervals into dissonances and consonances to change with the overtones generated by the addition of distortion, then Fux may be interpreted as demanding the abolition of all but the octave and fifth in a distorted context.

[Further motivation for this interpretation can be found in the analysis of musical traditions which use instruments with very different overtone profiles than those encountered in classical Western music, e.g. Javanese Gamelan music.]

Of course, there is an unhappy consequence of this analysis. Music performed on distorted instruments is limited in its harmonic / counterpoint complexity. Of course de facto this is what we observe, but it is striking to discover that it might be a limitation on the cognitive effects of particular timbres, rather than merely a limit on the sophistication of popular musicians. In fact, on this interpretation, it is not a limitation on the side of the musicians (what they can conceive, etc.), but on the side of the listener (what they can hear as pleasurable) which motivates the use of powerchords rather than more complex counterpoint in the various flavors of "hard rock."