I don’t have a lot to say about this story; its continent is self-evident. The publication date on the issue is November 1968, a fascinating fact to keep in mind as one reads the story and encounters the two major motifs of the Sixties Gone Bad– a bearded weirdo looking like Alan Moore reading from The Birth Caul and Evil Bikers denoted by their cross pattées– over a year before the Free Concert at Altamont and the Tate-LaBianca Murders. Furthermore, there’s an amazing cross-country motorcycle sequence that screams Easy Rider– once again, about a year early.

This story traces the general apprehension of America towards its children; that it is completely forgotten speaks to the unique positioning of Romance Comics within the cultural shifts & fluctuations of Vietnam/Psychedelic-era America, and that the books have become a tool, should anyone care to employ them, of genuine cultural history– it’s a narrative of the counterculture written by the losers, rather than the victors.

A note about the comic itself: you can get a sense of Charlton putting some weight behind this story, and perhaps the idea that Jonnie L♥ve might become a lucrative character by the fact that the creators– Joe Gill and Tony Williamson– are both credited on the splash page. This almost never, ever happened.

Compared with the feature story of Heart Throbs #92, “In Search of Love,” (which if you throw in an ellipses, sounds like an episode of the old Leonard Nimoy program) is instructive in both its differences and similarities. Post-Woodstock, post-Altamont, post-Summer of Love the scene is no longer merely backdrop, but an active and vital part of the narrative. The Wonder Mountain Rock Festival is a destination of both space and spirit, an actual desire of the story’s participants. Our heroine lies to her parents about attending! Just like in the go-go 90s, when I was 13 and lied about going to Lollapalooza!

Ultimately, genre convention consumes everything and our groovy chick meets a happening fella, who not only protects her from a proto-Hells Angel, but also questions her willingness to kiss him so soon and is hip to family. Through this morally upstanding gent, our protagonist finds herself back where she started– at her parents’ pad, but with a twist: she’s in love, a woman tamed. She’ll never run wild again! Can marriage be far?

Dig the crazy look in the eyes of the almost rapist. It gives a sense, forty years after the fact, of how far Altamont and Manson penetrated the national consciousness. The bad ugly of the hippie scene. Check it out:

I scanned two pages from FLO #61′s first story. It’s another example (though less dramatic) of the bleed. I love how the second page is a timeless laundry list of a young woman’s worries in the wilds of New York City. And check out that lingo, swingers!

These two pages of another story are just T&A. Look at how many men she’s taken to the drive-in! There’s a very strange undercurrent in this story.

And, finally, a Charlton house ad. Look at the lettering on each title’s logo. It’s like a hobo camped outside of Victor Moscoso’s studio and picked up tips peering through the window.

That reminds me– for those of you uninitiated in the history and lore of comic companies, Charlton was an ultra-low budget affair, so if you’re wondering why the art, printing, coloring and page orientation of FLO looks terrible compared to Heart Throbs #92, I’ll provide a help qualifying metric. Think of DC as a Rolls-Royce and Charlton as the Ford Escort.

What distinguished Charlton was their ownership of every stage in creation and distribution– originally a magazine publisher, they reportedly got into the comics game when it was discovered that turning off the press cost more than having it print continually. This fostered a spirit in which no one cared very much about what comics went out, so long as it made its money back. This benefited a handful of creators– most notably our own idee fixee Steve Ditko, who got to do pre-Mr. A Objectivist works, in particular the masterpieces Blue Beetle #5 and Mysterious Suspense #1. On the other, the interesting stuff coming out of Charlton represents about 0.05% of total output. The atmosphere mostly created horrible comics of dubious quality.

Charlton was where Romance died, and what a horrible death it was, with the very strange books of the late 1970s/early 1980s looking like ultra-cheap hippie comics of 1970-71 but without the cultural frame of reference. Ugly.

There’s a newish book on Romance Comics called Love on the Racks, authored by Michelle Nolan. We encountered Michelle at last year’s San Diego Comic Con, where I bought the book from her, and a nicer person you could not meet– the book is great, too, a thorough overview of a wildly ignored genre which will never, ever have a critical or popular revival. (Arguments about yaoi put to the side.) Worth the buy.

–

Yesterday, I checked my mail box, and, lo, discovered that my supplier/patron e.j. bought me a copy of a comic I’ve wanted for a goodly long while– Heart Throbs #92. The reason should be obvious, once you scope the glorious cover:

Published in ’64, this cover and its attendant story, anticipate the influx of youth counterculture into the genre– the closest thing would be a year later (#101), when very mop-toppy versions of the Beatles started appearing. The Mod, or the American conception thereof, being a guy who dressed like the Beatles, then became a semi-reoccurring figure in the genre. But The Mod, and the Beatles themselves, were in many ways tailor-made (pardon the pun) for the Romance Comic– they were wooden men in suits, and thus not far from the typical romantic lead. By 1969, youth culture had gone through such changes that the women in Romance Comics were decked out in post-Mary Quant fantasy clothing and the men, well, it depends on the comic in question, but there were plenty longhairs in fur vests waiting to steal a girl’s heart.

The cover story of Heart Throbs #92, “The Nights That Never Ended,” is a very typical tale of love gained, lost and regained that lightly uses an unnamed Greenwich Village as the backdrop for its denouement. Given the year of publication, 1964, I imagine this was an attempt to stay au courant with the interests of the target audience of young, middle class girls. HT #92 was published roughly at the height of the Folk Revival, that strangest of all pop music manifestations. For a brief moment, a band like Peter, Paul and Mary could top the American Charts. The story serves as a fine example of how little the genre changed with time– the inclusion of the Village is a meaningless nod to the assumed taste of audience. This reunion could take place anywhere in the world, even in outer space.

Romance Comics proved exceptional at adopting visual motifs and subsuming them to the core function of value reinforcement. This, by the way, is a microcosm of the fate of so-called underground art within capitalism– your aesthetic is sure to be co-opted, your meaning and intent are sure to be discarded. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t something worthwhile in the comics for what they were– after all, they produced this panel:

I love the formal device of this story– every panel of heightened emotion is a close-up with no background detail, just a solid block of red. It hits like the beat of a drum. Here’s the full thing:

I also scanned the splash pages of HT #92′s other two stories– unlike the cover story, I find both pages disturbing. Was lingerie what girls kept in their hope chests? I thought it was Tupperware!

Covers by Robert McGinnis, a man who dominated an entirely unique type of smut.

This year gave me hardcore deja-vu, but I was prepared by the previous engagement– I managed about twenty photographs and achieved the holy grail of commodity fetishism: the acquisition of a relatively unique object in unrepeatable circumstances. Along with my toilet photograph, this triumph indicates, I believe, that I had a good experience– two Unique Moments in what is, after all, an event dedicated to specific conformity of product.

It’s been many moons since I last read Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and my memory of it is terrible– but I believe that much of its central conceit revolves around the idea of the mass media providing a perverted mirror of actual human relations which then cheapens and destroys the human relations that it mirrors, thus making its own reflection increasingly perverted.

It’s hard to attend an event dedicated to the replacement of personalities with corporate products and not feel a little bit like a freaked-out Left Bank intellectual. The best way to think about the culture of comics fandom, or any fandom, really– and establishing a way of weeding out enemy from friend– is this: are people reacting to the product as a thing crafted and created by individuals and engaging with the communication implicit within that creation, or is the consumer’s interest in the surface aspects like “plot”, “characters” and “story”?

This is what makes the hoopla-hoo about the recent-released The Dark Knight completely repellent; Heath Ledger’s performance requires that the audience care (or pretend to care) about the Joker, a one-dimensional construct with no implicit or explicit meaning beyond its reflection of pulp tropes from the 1940s and an ability to sell related merchandise for the parent owner, Time Warner.

Ledger’s turn is an empty thing– imagine Popeye learning how to method act and channeling Marlon Brando from One-Eyed Jacks– but it could never be anything else. The Joker, in every incarnation, is what the lowest brow entertainment of its origin period had to tell us about criminality and madness: barely anything at all.

We live in the first society in which media narratives are an embedded industry: sheer statistics demand and enforce a hierarchy of consumption. Just as there will always be a certain number of cars sold each season, so too will there always be certain kinds of films achieving varying levels of success. Some will be blockbusters, some will be sleepers. Others will bomb.

The products themselves, being delivery mechanisms for the intake and release of capital, contain surface level narratives that are essentially meaningless and variations on tired themes: this is why the same people who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer are now watching Battlestar Galactica. The analogue with the auto industry again becomes useful: just as young people buy “edgy” cars and mature individuals buy “solid” cars, reasonably above-average nerds watch “smart” television, but avoid “dumb” shows like Enterprise. It’s an interface of marketing and demographics, and, in the case of Dark Knight, Time Warner’s exceptional good luck that its actor sacrificed himself upon Mammon’s Altar of High Marketing.

The lead-in for 2007′s installment– Transformers– was nostalgia for enormous fucking robots that turned into cars; this year it was the actor who went too far into the Darkness of the Joker and Never Came Back. But, really, let’s be honest: there’s about as much depth and darkness in the Joker as there is in the infinitely repeating cliche of the Hollywood OD. These same empty cultural tropes have been recycled forever; and if you don’t believe me, ask Lupe Velez.

The real purpose of Ledger’s performance appears to be a granting of permission for a certain kind of man to smear his face with makeup. You know these people: they had a real hey-hey-hey-day after 1994′s The Crow, another comics property with a lead actor bearing an oddly similar resemblance to Ledger in Dark Knight, who also died tragically before his film’s release. (Memo to Hollywood males: properly apply your eye and lip liners.)

These people, the cosplayers and the costumed, are the blank ciphers on which the spectacle is writ.

And that brings us right back to the San Diego Comic Con, 2008, ground zero of the masquerade, where the most common costume was the Joker. Cosplay and costuming are pretty abstractly interesting– if you think about them hard enough, you start wondering about the basic nature of free will. Each cosplayer makes a specific choice to dress up as a media property, but what if that’s an inversion of the actuality? What if the media property itself– the platonic form of the commodity– is making that choice on a spectral plane of existence? What if some people are genuinely so blank and empty that their souls and their bodies are nothing more than a canvas on which the idea of the Green Lantern is writing itself? And if that’s the case, then what, really, is the Green Lantern trying to tell those of us that see it?

The masquerade is like everything else at the Comic Con– a practical reassurance for all parties, those in costume and those not, that the Hobbies and Interests of the attendees are safe, unchallenging things. There’s a faux-surprise with each outrageous costume; can you believe that chick is half-naked? Can you believe that the fat dude is dressed as Kazaar? But these are rhetorical questions and the shock is faked, another false emotion amidst five days of lucre hiding behind camaraderie. The freak parade is a giant advertisement disguised as a hug.

The only reprieve from the sea of flesh was our attendance of a panel in celebration of Blake Bell’s recently released book on Steve Ditko. Around these quarters, Ditko is a long-term idee fixe– the only comic artist whose work I actively collect. I have my thoughts on the man, some of which are poorly expressed here.

I have a lot of trouble with panels– they conflict with my inability to sit still for more than thirty minutes and my complete unwillingness to shut up– but I always attend at least one of the more obscure. These sequestered, fluorescently lit cells are clusters of ultra-hardcore interests; the panelists and attendees are professionals and specialists in the totally arcane, and generally far removed from creeping product. Last year, I attended one on Disney strike-busting that bored my companion to tears; I was fascinated not only by the topic but by the audience. How was it possible to be in a room of thirty people who cared about attempts to unionize animators in the 1940s? But there it was.

Later, I discovered that the line-up of the Ditko panel as originally announced was Bell, the phenomenal Kim Deitch, Gary Groth, Jim Starlin, Carl Potts and Dean Mullaney. Mullaney– who had published Ditko under the Eclipse Comics banner– did not attend; his replacement was a younger woman Liana K., a Canadian who appears to be “known” for talking to a sock puppet and attending conventions half-naked, but, in the moment, we possessed zero knowledge of her background, nor of Mullaney’s absence, and assumed, in light of the seasoning of the other panelists, that she had been included as a misguided representation of the Female Perspective.

The panel had highlights. Bell projected a nice selection of Ditko art, and Kim Deitch discussed at some length the interest of his brother and collaborator Simon in Ditko; he also dissed on poor John Romita Sr. Sera sera, sez I. But, as all discussions of Ditko must do, the whole thing broke into contention around the topic of the Randian-influenced Objectivist comics, and in particular, Mr. A. (Viewers of the Jonathan Ross documentary might recall Mr. A as the point where Neil Gaiman, a man possessing no small experience with 20th Century American belief systems, started talking about “American barking madness.”)

It was Liana K. who brought the pain– discussing her discomfort with Mr. A and taking, I think, exception to the political didacticism in the work. These concerns fell into a well-honed tradition: most comics cognoscenti lean Left, and Leftism’s enduring problem is its condescension to those of opposing viewpoints. In short, while folks on the Right think that people on the Left are deranged, hell-bound sodomities, folks on the Left appear to believe that people on the Right are stupid.

It seems almost impossible to discuss Ditko’s Mr. A work without giving up a lament that the work “suffered” due to Ditko’s loading it with his politics. The person discussing the work will most often find these politics repellent and thus, indirectly, discuss Ditko as though he were stupid or somehow mistaken. (Not everyone, though: Jim Starlin was just fine.) But what this line of commentary really drives at is the same problem encountered in Ditko’s Hawk and Dove: the rigidity of the superhero genre as a storytelling device, and the limitations of a readership raised on genre expectations.

Ditko’s Mr. A stories only seem like “bad comics” if one expects genre exercises– if, however, one assumes that the works appear as their creator intended, they exist much more comfortably. They’re only “bad” if one’s definition of comics is limited to one genre & its one story, and if one assumes that there is only one potential audience being addressed.

Namely oneself.

(The strange thing about people constantly trying to wedge the Mr. A comics into the superhero genre is that both Dr. Strange and Spider-Man under Ditko were quite far from the genre; Peter Parker was the perpetually unfulfilled female lead of a Romance Comic, and Dr. Strange touristed through a successive series of monster/horror comics.)

Which is a long-winded way of suggesting that the worst possible place in the world to be raising the most obvious and hackneyed objections to Ditko’s Objectivist work has got to be a panel at the San Diego Comic Con. For the record, I also don’t recommend quoting scripture and verse to Christians.

It was not soon after Liana K. had called Mr. A something like “bad comics,” that a man in the audience called out with the most difficult possible question: “What would you have done differently?”

At the time, what stood out was the unfortunate undertone of (perhaps not so) latent sexism; who was this girl on a panel amongst industry veterans, and why was she prattling on about Ditko in such an ill-informed manner? Clearly, such assertions could not go unchallenged! About five to ten minutes of argument and floundering occurred– all of it painful and disagreeable to the eyewitness.

I was of two minds: I had a partial sympathy, knowing how incredibly awful it must be as a woman amongst nerds, but even without my later acquired knowledge, I couldn’t help wondering why anyone with such a surface level understanding of Ditko would sit on a panel of individuals that had published the man, or had hung out in his studio, or had edited him, or, you know, had written a book on the man’s life and art. We each have our interests, but interest alone does not make us an expert.

Coming home and discovering that the individual in question’s major credentials appear to be squeezing into a Batgirl costume and conversing with a sock puppet only made me wonder what in god’s name panel organizer Blake Bell was thinking; why would you ever invite this person? Isn’t it bad enough that the Comic Con is one enormous headsqueeze– must I witness parochial sexism against the ill-informed and often half-clothed?

With the distance of a few days, I have begun to see this moment as emblematic of the entire Comic Con; a collision between the cosplaying media personality, an almost living avatar of the convention’s current direction, and the ultra-nerd contingent, the kind of obsessive old school freak that was once its heart-and-soul.

Much as my basic sympathies fall with the latter camp, it’s also clear that these people are dinosaurs– the comics industry has become raw meat for the grinder of film & television, and there’s an awful day of reckoning not far from now, when the vast majority of youngish comic book fans have come up reading their funnybooks from right to left. Even the outcasts and the arty will be pushing books based on conventions and ideas that have no connection whatsoever– none at all– to that great mass of readers. And then, kids, it’s done.

There are two dominant cultural narratives of Danzig; the first is of the dumb rocker guy who sang “Mother,” a song that now resonates at sporting events coast-to-coast. The other, amongst those who care about such things, is that of the Punker Who Fell from Grace; the dude who wrote all of the Misfits’ music, invented at least two sub-genres and was the backbone of one of the most influential bands of the last 30 years (and now, given the prevalence of AFI and My Chemical Romance, might we not argue that Samhain has become as influential, if not more so, as the Misfits?) and then threw it all away to disappear in a haze of testosterone and strippers dressed like cats.

The curious thing is not the wrongness of these narratives. The curious thing is that they exist.

Pop quiz: name one American punk figure other than Henry Rollins who has immediate name recognition in the mass culture. A variation: name one post-1986 Metal Figure (and I do mean metal– no Axl, no Slash, no Marilyn) with an immediate brand recognition. Another pop quiz: when was the last time that you were able to leave the god damned house without seeing the Crimson Ghost on someone’s chest? Now, contrast and compare: how often do you see the Dead Kennedys logo, arguably the second most iconic image of American punk? Final question: how many people maintain a career in music for three years, let alone thirty?

These rhetorical questions hint at what has been a slowly dawning idea: that Danzig is best understood as a unique figure in American culture, with a remarkable persistence of musical prescence, and that, furthermore, his impact as a graphic designer and visual artist has been both considerable and virtually ignored. And it’s important, too, to realize that unlike Rollins (from the punk world) or even Ozzy (from the Grog Hall of Darkest Metal) Danzig’s recognition was achieved without ever transcending the various musical ghettos in which he dwells. There have been no spoken word tours and no shows on MTV or IFC.

The work itself (by which I mean: 85% of the Misfits catalog, Samhain and Danzig 1, 2, half of 3, 4p, Circle of Snakes and much of Lost Tracks) presents a surface level difficulty– the persistence of vision has revolved around a relatively simplistic musical approach (how many times can one man rewrite “Twist of Cain” and how many Misfits songs are reducible to Whoa-Oh-Whoah-Oh-Oh?) with an exceptionally thin lyrical palette. Put it this way: there are roughly 250 songs in total and 98% of them are about skulls, fire, demons, death and wicked, anthropomorphic she-beasts. Danzig’s easily dismissed personal appearance and choices only complicate matters. The dude who wrote “Attitude” was always going to be his own worst enemy, but something about the move to Los Angeles bloated his ego, and the New York/New Jersey visual edge of the Misfits/Samhain period became this:

In short: the man went Hollywood, and going Hollywood has always meant too much money.

The Misfits and Samhain were homegrown affairs, with Danzig designing the materials himself and never having the cash to afford a video, let alone one with a reasonably sized production budget. And thank God for that kindness, as we’ve seen exactly what we would have gotten: four dudes in black jeans invading Jumbo’s Clown Room and a red-headed ass show intercut with tight close-ups of Danzig’s own undulating face. (Note that he bears a odd resemblance to Paul Giamatti sporting the same haircut as one of my ex-girlfriends on her MySpace profile in 2006.)

By contrast, here are a few of the Misfits/Samhain fliers:

The last image– from the Die, Die, My Darling EP– is a less famous example of Danzig’s approach from the New York days, which revolved around a near-obsessive sampling of pulp media. The song is titled after the US release of a 1965 Hammer film; the band’s name comes from Monroe’s last film, and the EP features the best known Misfits logo– the letters of which were taken from Forest Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland. The central image of the cover was copied from Harvey Comics’ Chamber of Chills #19, which bears the not insignificant copy: “Here’s Looking at You Darling… On Our Happy Anniversary!”

Many will disagree, but I find no enormous disparity between the sound of the Misfits period and the early Danzig albums; there’s a certain amount of growth and slowing down, and The Voice becomes hugely apparent, but lyrically and musically the sound is not particularly changed. (Samhain is often considered the bridge between the two, but the issue of where Samhain ended and Danzig began is a non-starter. The final Samhain lineup was identical to the lineup of the first five Danzig releases. Different names, same band.)

I would argue that the perceived change had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with visual aesthetics; here are the original covers of the first four Danzig releases:

Let’s linger over the self-titled first release. Here’s the original gatefold LP all opened up:

Okay, so: this is a great piece of design, and it demonstrates just how completely bizarre Danzig was; 1988 may be known for many things, but two-tone minimalist cover art is not amongst them. This is, sadly, one of the last gasps of Danzig’s New York design sense; immediately after we move into (more!) weird close-ups and when your record label is giving you enough money to license the artwork of H.R. Giger for your third album, you know it’s gone to shit and then you’re getting Simon Bisley to draw big evil demons and there’s no point of return. (Except there was, sort of: Danzig 4p, the fifth release, had artwork designed by Danzig. It’s great but afterwards everything immediately goes to shit and never comes back.)

The lettering for the Danzig logo on this cover comes from another pulp source– the film poster for The Giant Gila Monster– and the Skull, also used for Samhain, and which seems so prototypically metal, was stolen from the most ridiculous source of all Danzig’s sampling: Michael Golden’s cover to an obscure Marvel comic called Crystar.

It’s the same damn thing. Musically, visually; it’s all the same until money corrupts the enterprise and gives the dude too many cameras and lick-whipping strippers. (The two most recent Danzig offerings– Circle of Snakes and Lost Tracks– were self-released. Both, musically anyway, are vastly superior to the previous 10 years of crap. It’s all come full circle.)

The “Evil Elvis” moniker becomes an enormously useful metric. While I’m in no way arguing that Danzig’s cultural position is any way commensurate with that of Presley in terms of influence or importance, it bears remembering that Presley was a major artist and musical force whose late career choices effectively destroyed his achievements.

Some of the best Presley songs were recorded in the early-to-mid 70s period, but they remain hard to hear. The visuals of the period– the sequins and the jumpsuits and the fat– are overpowering. By the end of the 70s, Elvis’s aesthetic choices had done enough damage that Greil Marcus had to write Mystery Train to remind people of the revolutionary music from the 50s and 60s.

Presley was and continues to be discussed like an idiot, as if the multi-decade career was a mistake into which a country bumpkin had wandered; replace Memphis with Lodi, New Jersey and you’ll see the same kind of dismissal of Danzig. But if the 20th Century taught us anything, it’s this: anyone can get a record deal, but the only people who survived were the ones that knew what they wanted and understood what they were doing.

“Trade follows the fad. On the one hand stand the hippies, suppliers of psychedelic art, tribal crafts, drug religions, acid rock, love-ins, be-ins, underground newspapers and flowers. On the other hand stand the voracious teenyboppers, curious college kids, swinging singles, gimmicky housewives, and panicky over-30s, who fear that Life may be passing them by. The hippies are supplying something, the straight world is demanding something, and in the middle–guessing–stand a few fearless entrepreneurs. Some of these are Flower Children, some are businessmen, some are greedy, some are idealistic…”

And though Serios has been semi-convincingly debunked, I recommend the book– it’s reasonably well written, and it reeks of the subjectivity that paranormal investigation engenders, an in the moment loss of perspective which leads to dodgy but compelling narratives. It contains an enormous number of reproductions of Serios’s Thoughtographs. Whatever their value as psychic manifestations, they often are visually stunning. This is a Serios image of the Denver Hilton (he had been trying to produce the Chicago Hilton):

When I was traversing the archives, I discovered a letter that I had written to Serios in May of 2006. I had read this article by Calvin Campbell and thought, okay, sure, why not? In those days, of course, I still had a desire to Meet Interesting People– but that’s since been slaked in ways unimaginable. Serios never wrote me back–  it turns out that he died about half a year later. Too bad.

–

Jarett Kobek
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Ted Serios
[address redacted]

25 May 2006

Dear Mr. Serios,

Please forgive the intrusion of my letter—-I was hoping to inquire as to whether or not you are the same Ted Serios of Thoughtography? I saw some of your photographs on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on occult photography and was fascinated by them—so I endeavoured to read Mr. Eisenbud’s wonderful book on the subject of your Thoughtography experiments. Upon finishing the last page, I felt that I must try and find the man capable of producing such phenomenal and radical images with only the powers of his mind.

I should like to ask you very many questions on the topic and hope that you should be inclined to answer them. Before I begin my course, however, I would like to receive confirmation that you are indeed the same Ted Serios! Otherwise I could be sending very strange letters to an unsuspecting individual!

Many, many thanks in advance. I am,

Most Truly Yours,

Jarett Kobek

The above is a sixteen-panel page. It’s lively, incredibly paranoid and entirely of itself. Despite their failures at story-telling and entertainment, there’s never a doubt that every page and panel of Mr. A brings us into a unique world. I consider this an achievement of some kind. But I’m not sure of what.

Much has been written about Alan Moore basing the character of Rorschach in Watchmen on both Mr. A and The Question, a pre-Mr. A creation of Ditko. In its own way, Watchmen has a political agenda as extreme as Mr. A– the difference is that Moore’s politics are better disguised and on the side of pinko liberal righteousness, while Ditko is unafraid of seeming nuts. The narrative functions of Rorschach and Mr. A couldn’t be further from one another– Mr. A is a walking cipher, a morality tale that will mortally wound if he encounters a violation of his complex, yet painfully convoluted, code of justice.

To Ditko’s immense credit, there is never, ever a sense of wish-fulfillment in Mr. A.’s brutality. Rorschach, on the other hand, is the Dark Antihero at its most fully realized– the fascist vigilante appealing to the reader on a gutter level, inviting us to take a pleasure in the directness of his methods. I find that Rorschach destabilizes Watchmen– either you have a pinkboy liberal fantasy, or you write a gritty revenge comic. You can’t do both without compromising the moral purpose of your book. To any who would argue, I say: let us not forget the identity of the One True Soul in Watchmen, nor his noble reward.

Ditko’s concerns are entirely different– not crime, not man’s inhumanity to man, but the violation of a Randian Moral Code. Even if his beliefs strike me as an insane, I’m willing to take Mr. A at face value, and acknowledge that Ditko’s motivation, and its philosophical underpinnings, differentiate his work from the revenge fantasies of the decades that followed.

I’ve long believed that the 1980s rise of the Dark Antihero had more to do with the drug & crime epidemic of US Society than any real trends within the comics industry other than a disproportionate number of creators living in NYC, the epicenter. Is it any surprise that Giuliani Time killed the beast? Despite Ditko’s residence in Nuevo Gomorrah, his work clearly rests on a different foundation than the impotent rage of writers, artists and readers beset by a crime epidemic that they can not affect.

Thankfully, my obsession has yet to turn all-inclusive and is limited to Romance Comics from about 1968ish until 1973ish. Returning to the topic of an earlier post, this period fascinates because the entire aesthetic and look of the work mutates by encompassing the greater culture’s fashion and artistic trends. Presumably due to their subject matter (stylish middle class girls), Romance Comics proved unusually susceptible to the slow design bleed of the psychedelic era. Much of this mirrors developments in superhero comics– a break-out of artistic styles and experimentation– but, ultimately, no matter how wild Peter Parker’s bell-bottoms, the Spider-Man costume never changed. Romance Comics, desperate to stay relevant, required an au courant look and fashion sense. With the dawn of Mary Quant, and the eventual trickle down from elite to everyday fashion, Romance Comics got swingin’.

(The real stars of this period were DC. One amazing Steranko story aside– available in his Visionaries trade– Marvel’s romance comics of the late 60s/early 70s were ugly. Some Charlton ones were OK, but in the end it was DC who owned the dying genre.)

The change is best demonstrated visually. Here’s are covers from 1955, 1959, 1965, and 1966, respectively:

What I take away from these covers is their similarity. Yes, hair styles and clothes change slightly, but any one of these books could have been drawn in the same month as any other.

Here’s a load of dynamite from 1968:

Contrasted against the earlier examples, this cover demonstrates that while staying true to the genre’s basic themes of chastity and questions about true love, an enormous shift has occurred in both the look and plotpoints driving narrative. In many ways, this speaks to one of the chief virtues of Silver Age comics– a cheap medium’s ability to function on a purely iconic level.

Here are several great examples:

And, of course, the creme of the crop:

This cover of John Fred and his Playboy Band’s Judy in Disguise (In Glasses) is from the second printing of the LP; the titular song is pretty well done, and supposedly a parody of The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” If this commonly accepted piece of pop lore is true, then the song ranks as a massive failure. Nothing other than the mild similarity in titles would indicate its parody status. Not the lyrics, not the music.

The song interests me, but more so the album art. I’m conceptually turned on by design degeneration– the process by which subcultural and quote-edgy-unquote design motifs and elements get absorbed into the mainstream, and there’s no period in which this was more fascinating than the post-psychedelic era of 1968-1969-1970. In America, anyway, this involved biting directly from the 5 or 6 artists who had defined the Filmore/Family Dog era of posters. (Little known truth: by about ’69 most of the major artists had moved on to other things, leaving a whole new crop to produce successively less experimental posters for successively less interesting bands. For the record, I think the best artist of the period was the great Victor Moscoso.)

As I type this, I’m sitting beneath a framed version of this:

It’s dead on certain there’s no one else alive who loves this poster as much I do. From a design degeneration standpoint, along with cultural ramifications, there’s no better example of psychedelic artwork getting ripped off and abused by the Money Thresher of Mammon. Background: this is from Disney’s 1969/70 re-release of Fantasia, a naked cash-in on the druggie head-and-college crowd.

This particular image is too small to show all the details, but those orange blurs dancing down the yellow path at the left of the image are, in fact, magic mushrooms. Now in stereophonic sound! The function of the poster is a pure, commercial signal to the dope addled youth: this is what you want to see while high.

I believe this poster coincides with the period where Disney were unwilling to let young men with long hair into DisneyLand.

It’s hard to imagine a less necessary work. Dylan has long been a master of destroying his public persona through the medium of film. Remember: this is the man who gave us Eat the Document, Renaldo and Clara, Hearts of Fire and Masked and Anonymous. Rumor has it that Dylan kicked around the idea of an adaptation of “Rosemary, Lily, and the Jack of Hearts” and went so far to commission a screenplay. God. If only.

Anyway, the only significant thing to come from Haynes’s project is the commercial release of Dylan’s “I’m Not There (1956)” on the film’s soundtrack. This song was recorded by Dylan and The Hawkes/The Band during the so-called Basement Tapes sessions, and has been available previously only through bootlegging.

Having heard this news, I went looking for internet transcriptions of the song. Each one that I found was atrocious. As such, I’ve gone ahead and put together what I think is about the most reasonable and accurate rendering of the lyrics that can be found, along with explanations of the weirder lines. Words and phrases surrounded by double question marks indicate unresolved confusion on my part. Lines followed by asterisks indicate firm judgment as to what’s being said. Here:

“I’m Not There (1956)”
Bob Dylan

1 Ev’ry thing’s all right
2 And then she’s all the time
3 In my neighborhood
4 She cried both day and night
5 I know it because it was there

6 It’s a milestone but
7 She down on her luck
8 And she day makes her lone (*)
9 And but ??to make too hard to buck??
10 I be then (*)

11 I believe where she stopping
12 If she wants time to care
13 I believe that she’d
14 Look upon deciding to care
15 And I go by The Lord in ways (*)
16 She’s on my way
17 But I don’t belong there

18 No, I don’t belong to her
19 I don’t belong to ev’rybody (*)
20 She’s my prize-foresaken angel
21 But she don’t hear me cry
22 She’s a long hearted mystic
23 And she ??dare?? carry on
24 When I’m there she’s all right
25 But when she’s not when I’m gone

26 Heaven knows that the answer
27 She’s don’t calling no one
28 She’s the way, a sailing beauty
29 For she’s mine, for the one
30 And I lost her, hesitation (*)
31 By temptation less it runs
32 But she don’t holler me (*)
33 But I’m not there I’m gone

34 Now I’ve cried tonight
35 Like I cried the night before
36 And I’m leased on the highs
37 But I dream about the door
38 So long, she’s foresaken
39 By fate, worse to tell
40 It don’t hang ??proclamation??
41 She smiles fare thee well

42 Now I went out ??(undecipherable)??
43 I was born to love her
44 But she knows that the kingdom
45 Weighs so high above her
46 And I run, but I race
47 But it’s not to fast to ??slim??
48 But I don’t perceive her
49 I’m not there I’m gone

50 Well it’s all about diffusion (*)
51 As I cry for her veil
52 I don’t need anybody now
53 Beside me to tell
54 And it’s all affirmation (*)
55 I recede but it’s not (*)
56 She’s a ??lone hearted?? beauty
57 But she gone like the spot
58 And she want

59 Yes, she’s gone like the radio (*)
60 That shining yesterday
61 But now she’s a-home beside me
62 And I’d like to here to stay
63 She’s a bone forsaken beauty
64 And it’s dont trust anyone
65 And I wish I was beside her
66 But I’m not there I’m gone

67 Well it’s too hard to stake-in (*)
68 And I don’t far believe
69 It’s ??all bag?? for to musing
70 But she’s hard, too hard to leave
71 It’s alone, it’s a crime
72 The way she won’t be around
73 But she told for to hatred
74 But this ??long forsaken?? clown

75 Yes I believe that its rightful
76 Oh I believe it in my mind
77 I been told like I said
78 When I before carry on the grind
79 And she’s on bet to told her (*)
80 Like I said, carry on
81 I wish I was there to help her
82 But I’m not there I’m gone

Notes:

8. “makes her lone.” Lonely would be better, but alas, that ain’t what the man sang. The -ly suffix is dropped.
9. Fairly certain that “to make too hard to buck” is accurate but can’t be sure.
10. “I be then” is what’s sung. Given the structure of the other verses mostly ending with some variation of “I’m Not There,” it’s possible that this was improvisation gone awry.
15. 95% certain this line ends “in ways.”
19. Other transcriptions have Dylan singing “to anybody.” An accurate listen offers “ev’rybody,” a contraction used throughout his work in the 1960s and at the beginning of this song.
23. “dare” seems reasonable here, but isn’t the sound being made. Update: Sam Tregar suggests “deign.” It’s closer than dare, actually, but still not right.
30. I’m willing to render the final word as “hesitation” because this sounds more like a vocal stumble than a nonsense placeholder.
32. “Holler” sounds closest. Could be something else but I’m hard pressed to say what.
40. “Proclamation” is how everyone else transcribes this. I can’t tell.
42. Absolutely no idea.
47. Absolutely no idea, but it does sound a lot like “slim.”
50. A rare instance of a complex idea tracking from one line to the next. Dylan makes a sound a lot like “diffusion” and this makes logical sense, as the next line ends on “veil.”
54. “Affirmation” sounds right. Could be different. Makes sense with the following line.
55. “Recede.” Dylan starts singing “receive” and puts an “-ede” sound on the end.
56. Best guess.
59. Other renderings have this as “rainbow” instead of “radio.” Rainbow would be nice, as the next line would then inform this one, but sorry. He sings “radio.” Welcome to the world of Bob Dylan.
67. Definitely “stake-in.” No idea what it means.
69. Almost certain this line is as rendered. “All bag” is too difficult to say for sure, but “to musing” sounds right.
74. If anyone knows what kind of clown, please, please, please, email me.
79. An accurate rendering of ungrammatical English.

The more that I hear the Thin Wild Mercury, the more Dylan sounds like what he was: a callow jerk in his mid-twenties. Having recently been a callow jerk in his mid-twenties, it’s a little too familiar. I prefer the work surrounding the period. Perhaps in my mid 30s I’ll be down on Planet Waves. “I love you more than money!? I love you more than blood? A little touch of your love? I’m goin’ back to New Orleans and puttin’ on Another Side of, dammit!” says the Future Self of 2012, just before the Mayan Calendar blows up the world.

Anyway. Back in the late 90s, I had a laugh with my friend Sam Tregar, author of CPAN module HTML::Template and its companion book, the rivetingly titled Writing Perl Modules for CPAN. The joke was that one should break up with a woman at the exact moment when she informed you that she believed “Like a Rolling Stone” was about her life. The theory being that this association bespoke a deep psychological problem that no amount of Love & Companionship could ever make right. Why would anyone want to be the subject of such a hate filled song? Or willingly admit a narrative similarity between their life and the song’s (apparent) protagonist?

But hello, part of why people are so nuts over the song is its profound superiority to any other piece of music from the First Rock period. God knows it is the best song of its decade, with a quality that prefigures Blood on the Tracks, an album of songs & lyrics of such astonishing quality that one is tempted to believe that Dylan was being ghosted by God. As with any work of Real Art, “Like a Rolling Stone” bares no real traces of its creation; it feels as though it has always existed, like Dylan (in his own words) “pulled it out of the air” and laid it down.

(Fear not, aspiring artists–”Like a Rolling Stone” took a lot to laugh and a train to cry. There’s a very documented history of Dylan struggling in the studio. The Bootleg Series, Vol 1 has an outtake of the song in 3/4ths time & accompanied by a harpsichord. So. Masterpieces are always made.)

I think the confusion of “Like a Rolling Stone” comes from the often unrecognized fact that the song contains two narratives– there’s clearly the very familiar, but never better rendered, venom and bile of Bob Dylan towards an unknown woman who hasn’t lived up to his (impossible) expectations, which is the A Story of the verses, but then there’s also the B Story of the chorus. The writing here is incredibly tight; in five repeated lines, Dylan manages to achieve a story as consistent and well rendered as the first, but one that also bleeds into and seemingly informs the A Story. Which is to say: you can listen to the chorus and think it’s about the same person as the verses.

With that in mind, you start seeing why a lot of people think the song is about themselves. Informed by the A Story, the B Story can be read as a ballad of the open road, of the freedom of being out on your own; it’s almost as if the chorus functions as a counterpoint to the verses– okay, yeah, Miss Lonely, you had to make juice with it, but here you go, you’re away from that darkness now, you’re out living the hipster dream of 1964, and by the way, how does it feel? The inferred answer being: “Well, redemptive and pretty good, actually.”

I’d argue the opposite: that the B Story is, if anything, Bob Dylan’s address to himself. It’s a cry of pain in the existential mirror of the Chapter One in a first novel. It’s about the dark side of the American Dream– I don’t mean some HST fantasy where hobo midgets dry hump your leg while you’re on acid & cops beat you for daring, daring! to dream, but rather what happens when America shrugs and allows you to make it; when you push yourself so far into your own destiny that you’re forced to realize, oh snap, I done done it and it ain’t no different. There’s no direction home because there is no home, and not in some grand delusion of being a pilgrim on the expeditionary road to oblivion, but being so bored & lonely & lowdown that every possible option is exhausted and you can’t figure out where to go or what to do, because ain’t it gonna be the same anyway? And how does it feel?

Awful, apparently.

And where do you go?

To a basement, to upstate New York, where you hide out and reincarnate as a 19th Century Mystic, a slightly less gay Walt Whitman. One of the roughs while everyone’s dressed in ascots & paisley.

His personal history– ah, now there’s another story.

Kerouac was a New England boy made on the mean streets of Lowell, MA. He went to Columbia on a football scholarship– and while there, fell in with the dissolute crowd of junkies, queers and 8th Avenue hucksters who contributed mightily to the creation of the Writer of Renown. He died a delusional alcoholic, apparently thinking that Allen Ginsberg was a Nazi agent and trying to fight Kurt Vonnegut’s son, but for a while, Kerouac was the American Dream, what another now-deceased American Writer would have described as “pure Horatio Alger.” He was also French-Canadian; part of an ethnic group of New England immigrants that are often overlooked and forgotten.

So while there’s the Mythic Kerouac, there’s also the Lowell working-class kid who ended up dubiously labeled as a generational spokesman. In previous posts, I’ve written about poor Bob Dylan, Kerouac’s heir in this questionable honor. It’s fascinating that the two midcentury figures saddled with that terrible weight both were of ethnic & family backgrounds as far from the American mainstream as you get could get. (While, of course, remaining a “White.”)

I haven’t gotten through the 100+ pages of critical apparati of the Original Scroll, but the image on the back of the dustjacket is amazing. The most frequently circulated photos of Kerouac play up a young rough with an indistinct, James Dean glamor. The image in question, coming from later in the man’s sad life, was chosen, I assume, because it depicts Kerouac holding one of his famous scrolls. Fair enough, but it’s also the only image I’ve seen of the man (and admittedly I am no student of his iconography) where his ethnic, social, and geographical origins just spill out all over the picture. You can see Lowell, you can see the French-Canadian, you can see the football scholarship.

A great picture:

When I first heard that Bush had defended, and in the New York Times, the branding of members of his frat, it seemed like another hilarious example of the man’s astounding ability to manipulate his public image. How could an Andover/Yalie old-boy with a Connecticut Senator (and possibly Nazi profiteer) grandfather and a former President father position himself as a Washington outsider?

Now, after Abu Ghraib and post-Guantanamo it just seems revelatory.

Here’s the original article:

With Dylan, this started early– “Mama You Been On My Mind”, “Farewell, Angelina”, and the masterpiece “She’s Your Lover Now”– and has continued throughout his whole career. Think “Up To Me”, “Abandoned Love”, and “Blind Willie McTell”. The appearance of “Mississippi” on Love and Theft, a track originally recorded for Time Out of Mind, makes us wonder if Dylan isn’t still at his old tricks. (Although it’s just possible that Dylan may have been in the right, as producer Daniel Lanois reportedly had layered polyrhythmic drumming on the Time original.)

With Tuesday’s release of The Lost Tracks of Danzig, a 2CD set of outtakes from the history of Glenn Danzig’s eponymous band, we must report sadly that we have found another sufferer of Bob Dylan’s Disease. Some of my readers might, of course, wonder if there is any genuine qualitative difference in any of Danzig’s output– ain’t that all just some gol danged heavy metal crap?

Well, no.

Glenn Danzig has had some strange luck– the Misfits were great, but what in the hell were they? A band so weird that it took suburban kids 15 years to turn them into a cheap psychobilly cliche. Samhain? Well, jeez, I love Samhain but even I can’t tell you what the heck that was about. And then, yes, finally, Danzig. Again the odd luck held– the first album was released in ’88, the second in ’90. Both surfed on a wave of accessible, radio friendly metal, getting Glenn Danzig a house in Los Feliz but tarnishing his reputation as a metal goon, something the man’s endless cock of the walk posturing has done nothing to abate.

Both albums offer a uniquely weird blues based rock structured around a super crunchy guitar sound and The Voice’s lyrical throwaways on the motifs that have consumed Danzig from, we presume, early adolescence– skulls, blackness, blood, demons and women. Then came Danzig III, an album I like, but which really is kind of metal, and then the live album/double-EP that gave us the ’93 single of “Mother”, solidifying forever Glenn Danzig’s reputation as Metal Dude. The follow-up was Danzig 4p, a great album and the most successful of all of Danzig’s experiments. (It is also almost certainly the only major label release to reference the Scientology off-shoot The Process Church of the Final Judgment.)

And then came the darkness. With a demonic host of malign and bloody skulls, Danzig fired the band that’d been with him for all four albums (and was the final Samhain lineup) and made 5: Blackacidevil, an album of Trent Reznor fanfic about three years too late. Then 666: Satan’s Child, and then 7: I, Luciferi. The less said of either, the better. 2004 saw a happy return to form with Circle of Snakes. The Voice sounded terrible on the previous two albums, and while weaker with age, it’s fine on Circle; the major problem being production. For whatever reason, the album is poorly leveled on big systems while sounding just fine on headphones.

And that was supposed to be it: Circle of Snakes was the last album by Danzig, the band. But Glenn Danzig, the man, had a vault full of inverted crosses and unreleased tracks, and he began rumbling about releasing them, and so he has. And I am here to report that The Lost Tracks of Danzig is significantly better than anything since Danzig 4p, and also that Glenn Danzig has Bob Dylan’s Disease.

The first disc is all Danzig 1-4, and yeah, of course that’s going to be great. But the second disc has outtakes from 5-7, and they’re so much better than anything on those albums that unless you accept mental insanity as a defense, it’s impossible to figure out why they were omitted in favor of the tracks that comprised the original albums.

Music may be the only artform where murdering your darlings constitutes a mistake. That’s weird, but how else do you explain it? Actual insanity? Monstrous egotism? The total inability to discern one’s own efforts?

I have no idea! But boy I really like The Lost Tracks of Danzig. This is all.

Here are the significant appearances of Martin Sharp’s artwork within the film. The first image contains a reworking of Sharp’s famous Bob Dylan poster. The last three are of the reworking of OZ #15′s cover, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the other images have direct antecedents as well. The last capture is the only place where we learn the name of Turner’s band. Turner’s Purple Orchestra. Well, yes. It was, after all, the sixties.

P.S. Buy the DVD! Ignore the hideous box art!

The article was written by Bob Levin, author of the Air Pirates book, and has since been reprinted in another of his books. I haven’t read the latter, but I’m sure that like everything by Levin, it’s fascinating, informative, and poorly written. I wouldn’t mention the quality of writing if Levin hadn’t himself poked fun at Hayes’s supposed grammatical errors. Glass houses, kids.

Another resource for much of Hayes’s art is this site. There’s about five pages of 15 scans each, but no complete stories. Still it gives one a taste of the artwork. The cover of Hayes’s first comic, Bogeyman #1, pretty much sums up the distance between he & his contemporaries:

Is there any other early underground cover as stark?

And for the hell of it, here’s a few more images:

(The promotional flyer for Bogeyman #1.)

(The Bogeyman hisself.)

(I assume this is the front page of CUNT #1.)

I’m mystified that Fantagraphics has yet to issue a collection of Hayes’s work– from Levin’s article, it seems that the entire output totals less than 150 page. If they’ll give Victor Moscoso his own book (where the posters are great but the comics kind of boring), why not Hayes?

Thanks in advance!

(P.S. I was wrong in the last post. More than 100 copies of Cunt were sold.)