 :: Sunday, November 30, 2003 :: Na, nana Na Okay, I’m no longer putting a date on the interview that is still in the middle of being transcribed, it’s just taking much longer to transcribe than originally planned. Although it’s still having a major influence as I think through its themes, one of the major pieces discussed is music. I like thinking about music I like writing to music and I like playing music, and that got me thinking about how music, and the music industry relate to comics and the comics industry. SUPER SINGLES! Okay this is a little of a retread of something often harped upon in other areas, but it does well as an opener. I’m about to launch into a massive devils advocate mode today, full with Armani suit, horns, pitchfork, and a stylish brief case holding the devils legal files. Alright, here’s a nice little term that applies to both comics and music, “singles”. I believe it was Warren Ellis who coined the term in relation to comics, a single issue of a series to help sell the entirety of the graphic novel (oddly enough the term graphic album has fallen by the way side) to come. Singles in the music industry are what are openly thrown out to the consumer public, they are what music videos are made from, they are the selling point for an album, they are the teaser for the whole. Even books have a similar nature as every now and then you can find a chapter or two as part of the fiction section in a magazine, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicles first chapter even appears in his short story collection The Elephant Vanishes as a short story on it’s own. Single issues of comics are ideally supposed to function the same way, often it can get forgotten since the stories can go on for so long and the artists involved get so involved in the minute forget that outsiders won’t understand what is going on. The single issue comic should simply be viewed as an advertisement for the larger work, and occasionally that larger work is part of something even bigger. There are a lot of people who think that the single issue comic should be done away with, unfortunately they have yet to devise or find adequate replacements. There are options like getting sections of soon to be completes graphic novels put into high profile magazines. Theoretically the internet can function the same way but people don’t necessarily want to go to see something, they’re too lazy, they want it to come to them. If they read a 10-15 page comic in a magazine and then see that stories continuation in a book store they are likely to pick it up if they enjoyed the 10-15 pages. The problem is that 10-15 pages is a lot of magazine to fill with funny book, especially some of the places where there are more popular things to cover. So the single issue is here to stay, but, it will be the Graphic Novel that will ultimately remain. SUPER COVERS I’m not talking about what you judge a book by here (at least not yet). I’m talking about cover songs. There’s a certain mindset that says that the original artists version is the definitive version of a song, but I can’t really hold to that. For me Stevie Ray Vaughn recorded the best version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” and Vaughn’s version left out the lyrics, I actually even rate Sting’s version slightly higher than Hendrix’s own interpretation of his own song. I find Axel Rose’s serpentine voice more evocative and gripping than Mick Jagger’s for “Sympathy For The Devil”. A Leonard Cohen song is almost always better when done by someone else. Now this isn’t meant to take away from the original artists, their versions do hold a certain passion for their own work that can come across, but sometimes another artist can simply add a flourish to a piece, a strength, their own experience that can make the song even more powerful. A good example is Johnny Cash’s version of Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt”. There is something that comes across with Johnny Cash singing that song that reminds you of everything that he has gone through in his life, the extent of the understanding he has of his own pain comes across so powerfully that makes Trent Reznor seem slightly like a whiny little Goth boy whose mommy didn’t love him enough. So what does this have to do with comics? Well I hope it’s actually bloody obvious to you at this point. Almost every superhero on the comic stands actually. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and The X-Men are all comics version of a cover song. The difference between the comics industry and the music industry is that anyone one can become a superstar doing brooding covers of ‘80’s tunes (see Marilyn Manson), but these days you have to be a superstar in the comics world to get to do a “cover” of one of the icons of the industry. It’s actually an interesting method, the idea that you have to prove yourself to be an original, talented and reliable artist who can deliver before you are allowed to play with someone else’s concept. Now all that isn’t to meant to take away in the least from the people who spend their time working solely on their own original works in the medium, and it can be viewed as the difference between the composer/musician who writes and performs his own work, or the musician who only performs the work of others, because you can’t deny the fact that Yo-Yo Ma is an amazing cellist who deserves a great deal of respect as an artist. SUPER COVERS (I thought we covered this) Like my first topic this has been covered before. (Sick of reading the word cover? Cover, cover, cover, cover, cover, cover, cover. Pttts!) I believe it was Antony Johnson over at Ninthart.com who made some comments about rethinking the traditional face of comics, and actually thinking about bringing some “grown-up” design elements to comic book covers. This idea really hit home for me this week when I picked up Neal Shaffer’s Last Exit Before Toll. The cover of this book looks more like that of a novel than a comic, so much so that I actually can leave it sitting out and catch it out of the corner of my eye and momentarily think “hey, what’s that book sitting there?” Brian Wood designs beautiful covers for his books, but they still have the comic book flavor to them, most comics do having drawings of the characters on the front facing the world. Occasionally this can be viewed as a cheap marketing ploy to get the book in people’s hands, because as often as we are told not to, we often will choose an untried author by the covers of his books. When I bought my first copy of Brian Michael Bendis’ Jinx it was the version that has a bunch of little boxes of different colors all over it, it was an ugly cover. I had been hearing about what a fantastic book it was, but I couldn’t actually bring myself to pick it up for the longest time because the cover was such a turn off to me. Once I finally did buy the book I read it twice in one day. So yes, having art that isn’t by the interior artist can be a cheap marketing ploy to get the book into people’s hands, but in the end isn’t that where you want the books anyway? *** Okay, that’s it for now. The next Supersized should be soon. Perhaps I’ll finally finish that damn interview, or it could be a whole other interview, I don’t know. Until then… take care -Jay 11:40 PM + Jay D'Ici + permalink |