November 15th, 2009 by Neal

Apparently, the site I associate edit was parodied/homaged on Smallville the night before last. That being the Blur Superman Homepage.

Neat!

June 22nd, 2009 by Neal

It’s rad to wake up to a kind review, and my thanks to Dan Ruble for nice words regarding my Hillary and Sarah comic.

There’s really no better feeling than when someone gets your work and enjoys what you were going for.

Now… BACK to said work! Just wanted to note the awesome and spread thanks.

May 18th, 2009 by Neal

I’ve decided to not speak to my thoughts about Star Trek at all, given that it’s controversial, given that it doesn’t really matter, and given that I’m much more obsessed with the nuance and minutae of another piece of material.

It’s a bad time to be talking about it right now, given that I’m fighting some fucking gnarly food poisoning, but because of it I can’t sleep, so why not?

In short, I’ve been a Green Day fan since they saved my fucking life. Sounds like a joke, sounds like a cliche, but I don’t give a solid shit. They did. Artists can do that, and some artists can do it in a heartbeat, and Green Day have always been that band for me. You can make your valid and sound arguments that they took money for their work (and there’s still something to be said for money not being a motivating factor, despite the aging rational punk inside of me sneering at Johnny Rotten’s butter commercial compared to Sid’s lonely grave). You can make the argument that if one goes from three minutes or less to mostly five (as 21st is) and forsake the grinding guitars in favor of piano ballads, you’re a differing genre and thusly contradictory in some fashion. I’ve heard all of the arguments.

I used to fight them when I was a kid, I mean, I really did. I used to stand by DIY and fucking punk vs. poseur and it was a hill I would have been proud to die on. I don’t know if it was my violent, irrational, visceral reaction to grunge, a bias I’ve since gotten over, or maybe it was because punk broke for the second time (third if you count the hardcore period) in the early nineties just as I was on the cusp of the apotheosis of my relative dysfunctions, but Green Day came at just the right time for me.

I wrote some of my first poems to Dookie. I used to walk streets in the early morning with nothing but a tape recorder with the volume turned low blaring Basket Case. It used to get me complaints from my customers, though I kept it quiet. A few understood.

I wanted to kill myself that year, which is something I don’t really admit to hardly anyone, because then I sound like a fucking emo kid, but it’s true. I tried once. Didn’t work out. I didn’t even get to the implement, and it’s not a good story for public consumption outside of, say, stuff I’ll write later.

David Byrne says: I’ll tell you later!

Dookie was the first tape I ever played so much that it skipped. People laugh when I tell them that. They don’t realize that if you play tapes enough, they will fucking skip.

At any rate, Welcome to Paradise, a song about wanting to leave home, She, a song about a woman who seeks to find fault in argument and sow chaos, Fuck Off and Die, a song about being sick of people, they all made sense at the time. I remember being 23, which is about how old the members of the band were when they wrote that album, and thinking, shit. Look where they were, and look where I am. I was ashamed and humbled. People look at Orson Welles and think that. I look at Green Day.

Insomniac comforted me in a very angry period. Nimrod brought me peace after a bad breakup, and helped me acknowledge that the rigid structured set of things I thought made a thing a thing (in this case, punk) could be annihilated and still survive if the spirit was strong. Warning helped me cope with another bad breakup (with the woman I’m still with today). And then, there was a long silence. Billie Joe got arrested for a DUI. I thought the old constant was something I’d have to reminisce on. I was dealing with Bush and the fucking war and all of the awful things that made me leave college a week before I would have graduated.

Then American Idiot.

To this day, it’s my dream project. I wrote a script based around it, a kind of new Tommy, and I would quite literally kill most any of you for the shot to have it made. It’s that close to my heart. I am a man with ten thousand songs in my damned music player, and a rack full of CDs fine and foul that would probably change your life. And if you don’t have a rack like that you could share with me as well, then shame on you. That’s the only place where I think it’s fair to keep music elite.

I considered it then, and I still consider it the finest piece of rock music pressed to plastic. And now vinyl, apparently. Fuckin’ kids.

So, 21st.

The new album hit me at a convergence of bankruptcy, artistic success, and most importantly, going from a neighbor who pounded the walls and made me turn off my bass, to my new house, where the rad lady next door characterized herself as “loud people.” So I upped the bass to human enjoyment levels, and the first full album I listened to in my new monitor womb was an album I waited five years for.

There is only one song on it that’s even remotely average, and of course, that’s the one they’re playing on the radio, just like they did with American Idiot.

There’s one song that’s only above average, and that’s Christian’s Inferno. But it grows on my every time I hear it, because it’s an important part of the narrative.

The narrative in this album is much, much thinner and vague than American Idiot. But that’s fine, because though it’s billed as a rock opera, the album is really just more of an album with interconnected thematics. There are characters, but it’s not like American Idiot, where there was a clear beginning, middle, end, and connecting tissue that my mind was able to instantly string into a beautiful story.

Instead, it’s a mallet that hits you in the head repeatedly with blue collar working class post-modern apathy, angst, and hope, often all in the same song. And usually the way Jesus intended it, with three chords and a fucking chorus that the most lowly working class man or woman could hit.

See, I don’t truck with the idea that Beethoven is the highest art. I can understand the beauty of the music, and I love it myself, but I like bringing it down and keeping it high. Meaning, I think Issa and Basho had a point when they point out the most zen fucking thing on Earth is farting and cleaning outhouses, and a poet’s job is to make that thankless task beautiful and have a point.

Green Day swings it.

I don’t know where it stands in terms of American Idiot, but I know it’s easily number 2 all-time right now. It may become number one as the broader points come to root in my subconscious and I can see the work of the lyrics more instead of getting caught in the music.

Most albums have good music and shitty lyrics at least half the time. Really, most all artists suffer from that. I can’t think of many examples. Usually, one outweighs the other enough to be forgiven, though. My absolute faves rock both, because unlike most, I pay damned close attention to the lyrics with the ear of a guy who’s written a fuckton of poetry.

Good at both, generally, almost always: Rancid, Green Day, Bad Religion, Roger Clyne, Regina Spektor

There are many other bands I listen to, but the above have a fucking ear for the verse.

I think, if American Idiot is my favorite album, I would have to say that 21st has the best lyrics I’ve ever read on an album. Top to bottom. Much thought, time, revision, and care went into it, beyond Know Your Enemy. That track relies more on the creativity with transposing matching verses, which works to a degree, but it’s about average.

Some of the lyrics flat out make you cry if you listen through with an honest heart, the first time. At very least, if you’re not a pussy like me, you’ll get gooseflesh.

I honestly expected to be disappointed, because there’s sure as shit no way to find the concordance of the last album in my life again.

I do, however, have a mischievous little narrative flow in my head for this one. As I listen, I’ll see what develops. If the title track isn’t a cynical Shakespeare style muse about to introduce a tragic drama, I don’t know what is.

My inkling is that it’s a story of the father becoming the son. It’s about the class of ‘13, but it starts out telling how a guy was born into Nixon and moves into the story of a couple of kids born into Bush.

But either way, if you can listen to Before the Lobotomy without busting up a little inside, I pity your cemented heart. Go here and read along.

I have broader commentary and longer thoughts, but my stomach is no longer upset, and I’m either preaching to the converted or being considered an aping sellout, so meh. Point being, if there’s a lesson I can pass along from these thoughts, it’s to fuck what you heard, it’s to not give a shit about what the fuck internet message boards say. Give this one a shot, you won’t regret it.

May 11th, 2009 by Neal

I’ve been asked in letters and by folks what I thought of the new Star Trek movie, but I’m too busy working to put my thoughts on paper right now. This is why:

But beyond that, I’ll probably put down words later. In brief? It can’t really be said in brief. Basically, there were many, many things that annoyed and perplexed me, and a few things I liked. So far the bad outweighs the good by about 2/1 My inclination is to enjoy new takes and new examinations. James Bond is a prime example. But Casino Royale worked because it was a practical new imagining. It still felt like a Bond movie. The new Star Trek movie is like the Casino Royale reboot, but in a bad way. Take cerebral, diplomatic wargames based around an ensemble cast, and turn it into an action flick with character work for two characters (some of which works, some of which is garbage), and you have Star Trek.

I have yet, two days later, to feel like I’ve seen a Star Trek film. I feel like I watched a summer movie, and an action movie, and an action movie with cool moving parts and a few moments of character, but it felt more like watching Transformers or Terminator than watching Nemesis or First Contact.

Nemesis is where I hoped the new movie would be, a movie where you can go, “Ah, flaws here, here, and here that suck, but a Trek film, for sure. Maybe they’ll get it as good as First Contact next time.”

And, as was pointed out to me, the movie blows so fast that you might miss little subtleties. But then, isn’t impression nine tenths of the law?

I sound negative, and that’s not what I want to come across as. But there are just a few things that make Star Trek Star Trek I felt were fundamentally missing in favor of things designed to (and that point of fact did) please most people.

I’ll go into more depth later.

But one thing I’ll say up front, putting a fucking Nokia ad product placement in the goddamned movie alone was almost enough to make me turn against Abrams. But there were a few good things. More on that later. Back to work.

May 11th, 2009 by Neal

HEED!

I am in LA, and will be so for another day, but I still have the internets, and thereby I got my google alerts, which revealed to me an AWESOME review by Steve Saunders at the WIRED blog.

Yeah! Wired!

R. A. D.

At any rate, he’s very, very kind, you should get over there and check it out!

May 7th, 2009 by Neal

I’m a little late to the party on this one, though I was there for the beginning of it. I just forgot I’d be on a plane and everything, so I hadn’t had a chance to post this yet.

My friends Eric Trautmann and Brandon Jerwa introduced me to Wide Awake in its initial stages, and since then I’ve eagerly awaited the culmination and where the comic would go. The concept (which I won’t spoil for you, you have to read the story) is an awesome one, and Amanda is a character I already want to knuckle into and visit with weekly.

I thought it’d be a regular comic book series, but Eric and Brandon are actually going in a novel direction, a direction that I want to experiment in myself, so I’m watching (and hoping) their project goes really, really well. I’m one of those guys that can read something on the internet or on the computer and enjoy it, as well as buy a regular copy, and I do believe it’s where we’re headed, kicking or screaming or not.

To that end, Wide Awake, their concept, is being developed as a weekly project, starting up soon, whereby you get six pages of story a week for free, and then, in a year, if you dig the story, they go from there, evolve it, transmute it, use a little alchemy and find a happy medium. It just sounds like an awesome concept, and if you can bookmark a webcomic every day (as I know most of you do), imagine a free comic every week. Warren Ellis succeeded in his attempt, and it’s my hope that Eric and Brandon will surpass his ingenuity and bring the world to its damned knees, becuase this is the kind of serialized storytelling I miss. I mean, just crack open the paper and read Garfield to see how low the weekly awesome has fallen.

We need more weekly awesome, and I think it’s here. Newsarama agrees.

But don’t take my word for it, just read it and see.

Get a cool wallpaper, here diminished by my smallor-izing and stealing of it, at the website:

And if you can’t do any of that, then please, any time you see someone misspell the name Trautmann or Jerwa, stab them in the face. That’s completely ancillary, of course. I just see they do the same thing with Eric’s name in print as they do with mine.

I am not Niel Baily. Nor is Eric a Trout-Man, from what I can ascertain. At least… I hope?

But even if he does have gills I am unaware of, these boys can write, so hit it up!

April 1st, 2009 by Neal

Steve and I came up with a few great April Fool’s bits for this year. The trap was sprung, and quite well, I thought. You should check them out.

Particularly the “Obama in New Krypton” and “Men of Steel” ones.

I can’t stop saying to myself, “Well, the world needs more bastards!” And I particularly pride myself on being able to channel a fake Didio quote so well that folks initially bought it in the comments despite utter absurdity.

March 25th, 2009 by Neal

Valerie D’Orazio has been an important influence to me in the last few years. I bring this up because today, she’s indicated in her blog that she’s going to step away from Occasional Superheroine after a fashion, and channel the energy elsewhere. There are a few quotes that particularly moved me, given that I’m going through a similar crisis of conscience:

Quote one:

…she said what I had already figured out myself. That the blog was so tied into this strong, adversarial, tumultuous energy that even if I wrote about harmless topics, it would still attract some people who wanted more anger, more tumult. So I could write about daisies and there would be some brilliant individual who would react angrily with: “Daisies?! What do you have against petunias?!” And so on and so on. Because they’re addicted to the drama. I get it.

I get told every once in a while by well-meaning people that this sort of tumult and schadenfreude is just the warp and weft of the Internet community, and not a big deal at all. Within that point of view, I often feel as if I’m the one singled out as doing the worst behavior of all — being real and saying how I actually feel at any one given time. I’m told not to act like a martyr, and then instead to just sit and not say anything. Which is sort of like…being a martyr. I guess it’s better to be a quiet pious-eyed martyr, of the old Christian variety, than an annoying loud-mouthed spouter of opinions. That’s what I got from those conversations.

Quote 2:

I do think there will be an end-point to this blog very soon, and I will carry the conversation onto another blog under my name. I will certainly talk about comics, pop-culture, my life, etc, but it will be done from a new forum. A lot of the passion I put in my posts…maybe it’s time to put them in my comic book writing. I need to do this. I’m not the same person I was when I started this blog. I’m not better or worse, I’m just different. My goals are different. My perception is different.

I sympathize with Val, because her audience is much larger than mine (I presume, or at very least, as I’ve witnessed, more vocally rude) and her site deals with a more controversial source material.

I also am going through some of the same things, albeit in diminished fashion, she is. On a smaller scale, I mean. And it’s hard for me. For eight years, I’ve written for the Superman Homepage and had my every word analyzed and spit back at me, most of the time by good people, but some of the time by the mealy fools that teem and fester like a bloated carcass across the internet (including, sadly, a few creators). People will log on anonymously and send me awful, unjustified streams of hate mail. Threaten my family. Threaten me. Some people will write with good intentions and engage me in a dialogue, and that dialogue will take a turn for the worse. Some people get angry when I can’t respond to them immediately. Others become the best friends I’ve ever had that I’ve ever met. It’s a complex bag.

I used to give creators crap for not wanting to dive in and interact. My logic was that the idiots can be ignored. My ignorance was that sometimes you can’t tell the ignorance from the kindness, and the trolls know that, and will capitalize on that just as much as they’ll take advantage of a sensitive, kind person.

I’ve not always agreed with Val on everything. But see, I’m one of those individuals that, when I disagree or agree, can say, “Well, that’s her opinion.” Below that class in my regard is the person that will then debate that person if their opinion is different politely, and below that is the person who insists you change to their viewpoint and threatens you if you do not change it. I would say 99 percent of the people are the people who are like, “Well, that’s her opinion.” or who close the browser if they’re mad. Unfortunately, they (the kind) are also dead silent on the constant for that very reason. They keep their shit to themselves. Which is, as I age, what I become more inclined to do (He wrote on the internet, chortling).

I wrote Val, however, so I’m a hypocrite, but it was to encourage her to ignore the bastards, and as a point of sympathy for what she’s going through. I see a lot of people hesitate to write courageous things for fear of the response. I don’t want to be a part of that. I want to be courageous. Like I would have, she responded to me in kind, taking time out of her day, being courteous. Those interactions (when I’m the one responding) are ones I value and want to encourage. But they’re vastly outnumbered by the shitstorm of assholes with personal agendas or failings. For every one kind letter (which I hope I could have been for Val at a hard time), there’s people who will not let it go and have your email and hate you.

Brian K. Vaughan left the internets, semi-famously. That’s probably a wise decision. I’m not that brave. I know that I have my corner on the Superman Homepage, and that I love this site, and that there are a few places that really enhance my life and never bring me grief. But I tire of message boards. I tire of vitriol. It’s not that most of the time it’s not something I can do, it’s that in the long run, folks wait until your grandmother dies, and then they pounce. They fucking do. And it ruins your shit for a week. What could have been an important, good week.

It’s time, as a damned good friend related to me, that I could be spending doing any number of awesome things. It’s time, as Val points out in her article, that I could be spending working on my comics. Or banging my gal. Or eating a hoagie. Or reading a book. Or running. Or anything, anything, anything in the known universe and including Hugh Jackman OTHER than justifying myself to people who I have already justified myself to with my goddamned work. Or not. But explaining the work has never changed anything in that regard to anyone.

To that end, and as a gesture of solidarity for the trouble Val has gone through, and others I know have gone through on a regular basis, I’m gonna stop hitting message and comment boards at the Superman Homepage, where I was formerly a rather large mod presence. Over the last year I’ve gone to the steps of deleting any letters that come my way that are cruel or rude. Now I’m going further, and will not respond to every letter I get that’s kind, only the ones that truly intrigue me, because I too often fall into the trap of, “Oh! He’s asking questions, he must be curious and have good intentions, so I must respond to them.” And then it’s not.

Too often, it’s, “Cool reviews! I was wondering what you think about Watchmen!” (or insert X topic of the day here)  And, to be cordial, I reply, “It is a movie on film.” (IE, the most banal, noncommital thing ever) To which they reply, “I disagree with you there, I think, I think, I think.” And I’m thinking, “I don’t even know this guy, and he’s debating me.” It seems like a kind letter or gesture, but it’s actually sucking away time I could be working. This is probably fifty percent of my correspondence on boards. The other forty is people who debate why I write what I write, and the other ten are the constant stream of good damned people who just want to say thanks. And I love them. But they’re fighting to get the loaf of bread with midgets that have long fucking knives. And anyway, they can still email.

And it pervades your consciousness and fucks up things. You second guess yourself. I was with FRIENDS today, honest-to-god friends, not internet people, and I was afraid to say to them, “Yeah, I liked the new Indiana Jones” because whenever I say that online, I get the shit ripped out of me. So I downed it a little, then brought up the thing I liked about it or wanted to talk about, and it made me look and feel like an ass. Turns out, I was among friends, I didn’t have to be ashamed to be myself, but the internet and my interactions with it over the years pushed me to second-guess myself (and overanalyze, like I am here), which I find it doing more and more often lately. When I say, “I really dig Stephen King.” I feel I have to caveat it instead of it just being a fact of opinion for me, because when I mention it in articles I get nasty letters. Or when I say, “I really fucking hated George Bush.” I am presumed to have to explain why to other people, despite the fact that I know why I have come to these things in my own mind, and feel justified in doing so.

So I’m gonna lay off that bullshit.

What irks me is that the intellectual in me says, “Yeah, but that’s what the fucks in the political spectrum do. They square themselves off against any alternative thought and don’t respond to critics, and they thereby suck.” And that’s generally true. It’s generally true about comic book writers, too, in my experience, who think that their shit doesn’t stink. They don’t listen to valid criticisms, don’t vette their own work with themselves or others they are creating with, and resultantly, you get shit like Final Crisis, which blew ass because it was the Grant show with no thought to telling a story people would dig. IN MY FUCKING OPINION, he felt he had to caveat like an ass.

But that (intellectual walling off) doesn’t happen because they don’t listen to the media or the internet or naysayers. That happens because they don’t put proper effort or time or thought into the craft of a thing. I can anticipate, being a wise man, any criticism of my beliefs and works, and thereby decide to include or not include elements based on that. I can be my own fucking critic, and accept where I fail, without the help of a fat man in a Star Sapphire shirt. Failures in work occur from this lack of consideration of the work on the part of the artist, as I know from viewing the people I see as role models who put in the fucking work. They care for their craft. They work into it. The failures just coast and whip shit out. I’ve known them and seen that as well.

George Bush was a smart enough man to know, had he actually looked at all sides of things before acting, that the Iraq War would fail. I know this because I knew this as a lay asshole with no military experience. I didn’t need to write him a letter to convey that to him, and my letter wouldn’t have changed anything. He consciously ignored common sense to justify the actions he wanted to take, and thereby failed. There were a million things he could have done better, but as I realize (and the reason I quit CTF is), a thousand internet trolls debating over the angels on the head of a pin never solved a goddamned thing, and as much as I could intellectually debate our former president, if he stepped down from his ivory tower and went toe to toe with me and I empirically whipped his ass where he’d done wrong, he’s still be the same person he ever was, and it would not profit him intellectually to listen to me, because he’s a fucking moron. People who are not fucking morons can self-regulate, and so I must.

It seems simple, and self-evident, but I need to cram that into my fucking cranium by taking a step back and using the internet as a consumer instead of a provider, and leave my providing for the texts I craft, generally, or in fashions that I can control and do not bring me stress. Not the letters or the response.

No more letter columns for the Smallville review. No more responding to petulant requests and demands. No more comment boards unless the purpose and intent is plain.

A good example of how it fucks up your life is the way I’m considering ending this piece. My mind is saying, “God damn, man. They’ll come at you from the angle, “Oh, you wrote a shitload of reviews, and now you’re saying you can’t take criticism.”

But I’ve written a hundred times about how there’s a difference between someone putting a work into the public and asking it to be reviewed after you pay for it, and me giving an article up freely to people who don’t pay for it as a piece of analysis and having people attack the analysis simply because they disagree with matters of opinion. The person who can’t see or comprehend that shade? There’s no helping them. There’s no reward in making that assertion for them. And the person who CAN see it doesn’t need my words to tell them that, so there’s no profit in it. None. None. None.

I don’t need it, I don’t want it, and I’m done with it.

Thereby you will see “Caveat Emptor” on the top of this page in the title bar, forever more. And if you cannot comprehend it, then go fuck the fuck off. I will, in turn, give you what you pay for. A good piece of writing, and little more. That’s my duty as an artist.

And Val… don’t let the bastards get you down. I hope she’s off working on Cloak and Dagger, and they’re still masturbating to furry porn wondering why she didn’t reply to their complaints.