Connections and Vectors and Degrees of Separation

So, I decided I needed to reread all of Gilbert Hernandez Love and Rockets Palomar stories before continuing my ongoing Favorite Comics posts. That's taking a little time, though the experience has been rewarding and worth it. But, in the meantime, I wanted to write about something else.

So I decided to write about Love and Rockets. The band this time, not the comic.

Well, sort of.

This past Sunday night I went to see David J perform at the Thunderbird Cafe, a little bar about a two-minute walk from my apartment. David J was the bass player for Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, as well as having an ongoing solo career, plus having played in some other random bands over the years. It was a really great show, featuring music from his entire career. I was a pretty big fan of most of this music at one time or another, so there were a lot of great moments for me last night.

But the main thing I want to talk about here are the random connections between people and events as we spiral around this planet of several billion people over time. During his performance, as he sang songs from his thirty-plus years in the industry, my mind started recalling all of the various connections I have with David J, though we had never met until last night.

This is rambling and out of any kind of chronological order, and probably of no interest to anyone but me, but I find these sorts of things fascinating. Bear with me.

I discovered Bauhaus late. They originally existed as a band from 1978 to 1983 when I was living in a place with no access to music that was, at that time, fairly obscure. I have since seen video of their live performances from the time, and I'm pretty sure, given my penchant for costumes and theater, that if I had seen them in 1979 I would have gotten into them. As it was it was 1986 before I discovered them when I moved into a college apartment with five other guys. One of them, Steve, had an amazing collection of vinyl records, most of which were alternative bands I had never heard of. To say his record collection changed my musical life is an understatement. That fall, 1986, Love and Rockets second album Express was relatively new and spent a lot of time on the turntable at the apartment. I got really into L&R. It took awhile to associate them with Bauhaus in my mind. I found Bauhaus to be more challenging for me, and it took longer to get into. At the same time I got really turned onto a band called The Jazz Butcher. David J had played bass on two of his albums between his time in Bauhaus and Love and Rockets.

About a year later (November 9, 1987 to be precise... thank you internet search engines), still at Edinboro University of PA, we discovered that Love and Rockets were playing at Indiana University of PA. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment road trips where a friend borrowed his father's van and 10 or 12 of us piled into it for a road trip. L&R were touring for their third album, Earth, Sun, Moon. We got to the Fisher Auditorium and for five bucks, if memory serves, saw not only L&R but another band none of us had ever heard of prior to that evening, Jane's Addiction.

Lookie what I found on the internet!

Two years after that on August 31, 1989 I saw L&R at the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh. The Pixies, who I had just discovered, opened. Say what you will about L&R, but they could pick great opening bands. The Pixies completely blew me away.

Then, twenty-three years later, I met David J at a bar near my house. We've been pinging around on this planet together for years. This was the same person I had seen on stage all those years ago and our individual trajectories had finally brought us to a very nice personal conversation. That's when I started piecing together all of the various overlapping vectors in our lives.

Back in 1986, at the same time that I was first getting turned on to David J's work, was when I was reading Watchmen for the first time. I didn't know then that David J was friends with Alan Moore and that they had worked together on various projects. I found out most of this not too long after the fact, but still. David had written the musical score for This Vicious Cabaret, a specific chapter of Moore's V For Vendetta, which I had read at this point. He was in a short-live band with Moore called the Sinister Ducks and recorded a song called Old Gangsters Never Die which came with a comics adaptation of the lyrics by Lloyd Thatcher (you can see it here http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/474540.html). Since then he has contributed music and participated in Moore's spoken word performances like The Birth Caul and Moon & Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels among others.

1986 is when I first met Steve Bissette and John Totleben, the artists for Moore's Swamp Thing series for DC Comics. For a couple of years I saw Steve and John on a pretty regular basis and hung out with them enough that they know and remember me years later. So even then I was only one degree of separation from Alan Moore, which I knew, and therefore two degrees from David J.

Around this same time (the details of this are a bit fuzzier because I wasn't directly involved) was when the Pixies were coming together as part of the Boston indy music scene. Among several bands that were part of that scene was a group called The Five who were originally from Pittsburgh (The Pixies used to open for The Five). I didn't live in Pittsburgh at the time, but I was coming here fairly regularly for comics and record shopping. One of the comics shops I went to was a place called BEM. Turns out, as I discovered many years later, the proprietor Bill Boichel was friends with the guys in The Five. So I was only three degrees from the Pixies.

In 1990 a couple of friends and I made a trip to Cleveland where we saw The Jazz Butcher at a club called Peabody's Down Under. I met Pat Fish, the Jazz Butcher himself (the only consistent member of the band over their thirty year history), and I also randomly ran into my friend Joelle who had been one of the people crammed in the back of the van with three years earlier (Joelle now lives in New Zealand, opening up a whole new country of potential connections). While there I had Pat autograph the booklet that came with my CD copy of Scandal in Bohemia/Sex and Travel. These were his second and third albums, the ones David J played bass on. At the time this was a very rare German import that I had manged to get my hands on, and for years the only way these two albums were available. When I showed it to Pat his response was something like, “Where the bloody hell did you get this? I've barely seen these.”

A few years later I'm writing for In Pittsburgh Magazine and get the chance to do a phone interview with Frank Black/Black Francis of the Pixies. It ends up being my first cover feature article. One of the musicians opening for Frank at that Pittsburgh show is Reid Paley, former lead singer of The Five. Through a lot of mutual Pittsburgh friends I met and got to know Reid, as well as Five guitarist Tom Moran. At the time Tom was in an Alt-Country band called TheDeliberate Strangers. I saw them a lot and one of my articles about them in No Depression ended up being my first in a nationally published music mag. A couple of years later I met with Reid and some other people for hanging out and drinks at a local bar called the Squirrel Cage and Frank Black is there, just hanging out.

In 2000 the original members of the Jazz Butcher reunite for an American tour and a new album and I met the whole band at the Millvale Industrial Theater (as well as at some small bar in Erie whose name I don't remember). While there I got signatures from drummer O.P. Jones and guitarist Max Eider. Eider had also played guitar on David J's 1989 album Songs From Another Season.

I have a friend, a remarkable poet, by the name of Margaret (check her stuff out at http://margaretbashaar.wordpress.com/). I met Margaret as one of my customers at Phantom of the Attic when she was like twelve. Through her teen years we bonded over Elfquest and now that she's an adult I'm happy to call her a genuine friend. She is part of what for lack of a better term I'm going to call an artist's community that gathers at the Grand Midway Hotel in Windber, PA. The Hotel is home to a mixed group of artists, poets, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, and pretty much anything thing else creative you can think of. I have only been there once, to a really amazing Halloween party. One evening, while having dinner with Margaret the topic turned to music and I mentioned Bauhaus, or Love and Rockets, or something, and Margaret casually mentioned that David J hangs out there occasionally. She had met him one morning in the kitchen of the Hotel while he was attempting to make tea.

Small world.

Margaret and several other denizens of the Midway were at the show on Sunday.

And on Sunday night I completed my quest and got David J's signature on the booklet.

Twenty-two years in the making!

I could go on with these connections. One of Reid's albums was produced by Eric Drew Feldman, former member of Captain Beefheart and regular PJ Harvey collaborator. Reid and Frank Black just released a collaborative album. The lines drawn between musicians seem to connect that whole world, and if you end up knowing one of them your world just gets a little smaller. The same is true of the world of comic books, or of any one of a number of hobbies and professions. When these things overlap it's even more true. What I find most fascinating about all of this is backtracking the history. I was listening to David J, the guy who wrote the prototypical Goth song Bela Lugosi's Dead, and reading Alan Moore, the guy who wrote Watchmen, both genre-changing, significant pieces of Pop Culture history, at a time when they felt worlds away from my life. Twenty-five plus years later I know they weren't a world away, just a couple of steps.

And not to overstate something that we've all known since the advent of Kevin Bacon, that's true of everyone.

Anyway, I just want to end this rambling post with a quote from a Love and Rockets song called A Private Future. I've always thought this was really good advice.

Live the life you love

Use a god you trust

And don't take it all too seriously

Favorite Comics Part Eight: Love & Rockets (Part 1)

Love & Rockets (the comic book, not the band... for those who don't know, the comic came first), is very high on my list of all-time favorite comics, and one of the single most influential on my art style and approach to comics. Like a lot of books from this time period I didn't catch on immediately. My lack of access to a direct sales comics shop was the primary reason for this. It was only through the enthusiastic reviews of a couple of friends of mine who were more adventurous than I that I finally read L&R. I think I read the first four or five issues in one sitting. I've been a confirmed fan ever since.

While it's been on my list of books to write about for this project from the beginning, I have been hesitant to begin. A lot has been written and said about Love & Rockets, and I'm not sure what I have to add to the conversation. L&R by itself is a complex work, and my own reactions to it are complex as well. Trying to find a focus for this article has been difficult.

I have heard Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, the primary creators of L&R, referred to as “the most important comics creators of their generation.” This is a generation that includes Frank Miller, Alan Moore and a host of other significant writers and artists, so that is a pretty remarkable judgement, and one I don't completely disagree with. It is not just loved by fans, and they tend to be rabid supporters, it is one of the most critically acclaimed comics of the last thirty years.

That wasn't always so. When the first Fantagraphics issue came out in 1982 a reviewer for Amazing Heroes, R.A. Jones, was less than receptive. I'll let his words speak for themselves;

So, Jones seem to think L&R was dated and hopelessly rooted in the past, when what actually happened was that L&R was the vanguard of a new generation of comics creators. While thoroughly immersed in the comics traditions that came before, a much broader spectrum than the Underground Comix Jones refers to, L&R presented a unique outlook and voice that has changed the approach to what comics can be. Rather than a pastiche of a dated past it represented a future not yet fully understood or comprehended.

The reasons I feel this way are mixed in with my experiences of reading the book. But, there are a few things I can say in general. L&R was post-modern. The Brothers Hernandez (and in the earliest days of the book, brother Mario contributed as well), threw everything they knew and loved into their work. Their influences came from the traditional superhero comics, but they seemed to incorporate everything they read: Romance comics, Archie comics, Sci-Fi. Their characters lived in a world where everything that existed in comics existed. The day-to-day lives of the characters were the normal stories of people with jobs and families and relationships, but it was easy to imagine that the Fantastic Four were fighting giant space monsters just over the horizon, that you could run into Betty and Veronica at the local fast food joint, or that the neighbor kid was Dennis the Menace. As a comics fan of their generation who had grown up devouring all of these it was as if the Hernandez Brothers had delineated the world I had always lived in in my head, and somehow it all fit together.

And it wasn't just comics that served as an inspiration. Anything they were fans of made its way into the comic. Monster movies, music, television, and wrestling (particularly the masked luchadore tradition), all went into the mix.

The cover of a police lineup of fantasy figures with a real woman in a housecoat summed this up. It was intriguing and stood out as being something very different than what we had seen on the racks before.

This drawing by Jaime was inspired by the Punk Rock artist Raymond Pettibon and his artwork for the back cover of the Black Flag single Nervous Breakdown.

The Hernandez Brothers were among the first distinctly Hispanic voices in comics. They related that cultural heritage in the form of traditional imagery and folklore handed down to them through older generations as well as through their own urban experience as Hispanic youths in America. Their approach was also multicultural. Though most of the primary point of view characters were of Hispanic origin they were not the only character types present, especially in Jaime's work. The Punk Rock culture of Los Angeles that provided the backdrop for his stories guaranteed that many other races and cultures were represented as well.

It's important to me to redefine the term multicultural for my purposes here. What I mean by Culture in this context goes beyond specific racial or religious backgrounds. I want to expand the definition to include any culture or sub-culture one finds oneself a member of, in this case specifically, Comics as a sub-culture and Punk Rock as a sub-culture (though there are many others included as well). If I were to completely simplify the primary themes of Love & Rockets I would say that it is the continuing story of the attempt to define oneself, within the strictures of the various cultures to which you belong and identify with, and against the expectations they bring with them. A recurring idea is that as characters grow and age, which they do in this series, they often become something they never dreamed of in their youth.

While the cast was large and varied, both Gilbert and Jaime focused on female point-of-view characters, and both managed to create some of the most fully-realized women characters in comics. Their protagonists were real, with a fully human spectrum of emotions, motivations, strengths and flaws. Unlike the standard, idealized superheroine form, the women who populated L&R also showed a full range of body types, and just like real people, their bodies changed over time.

Some of the varied female residents of Palomar.

Maggie Chascarillo at various points in her life.

They were also able to present the reality of human sexuality in ways that always felt real and not exploitive. There were characters who were straight, gay and bi-sexual, transvestites and transsexuals the polyamorous and the chaste. There were characters in committed relationships and those who were promiscuous. Characters were tempted and fell in love and fell in lust. Sex was presented as powerful, life-changing, emotionally messy, romantic, prurient, ridiculous, embarrassing, hysterical and confusing... just like it is for all of us in real life. It was a topic that stood on equal footing with everything else that went on in the characters lives. There are scenes I'm sure some people would view as pornographic (and the book is really not meant for kids, for a variety of reasons), but if L&R is porn, then so is the life of everyone I know.

L&R can be difficult for a new reader to jump into. Like Marvel and DC, at this point the L&R universe has a long history. Reading the latest installment has great meaning for me, but only because I have watched these characters grow for thirty years. They are old friends by now, and I know the back story that has brought them to their current place. If you don't know that back story, it's just events happening to strangers. Even though the series has been collected in various formats over the years it's not as simple as saying “Start at the beginning.” Unfortunately the original format and printing history can make it difficult to follow, though it has gotten better than it used to be.

L&R was originally a magazine-sized black and white comic. It is important to note, for those of you who have never read it, that its contents were never simply one big story. L&R was essentially an anthology featuring separate stories by each of the brothers. Over time both Gilbert and Jaime developed recurring casts that they focused on (loosely speaking, the Palomar stories and the Locas stories, respectively), but they both contributed tales in each issue that had nothing to do with their longer, continuing narratives.

It was obvious in the beginning, like many young creators, that they were experimenting and had not yet found their voices or their style. If you pick up the original issues, or read the original trade paperback collections that presented the issues as they first appeared, the experience can feel a little choppy and unfocused and are likely to make the uninitiated wonder what all the fuss is about.

More recent collections have streamlined the experience, collecting each of the brother's main stories separately.

This is probably the best way to read the best work by both of them, or only the one you're most into, but all of the extra stories, those outside Palomar or Locas, are missing. 

While not as essential, the lack of side characters like Errata Stigmata and the adventures of Rocky and Fumble lessens the overall L&R experience.

Errata Stigmata

That's Rocky and Fumble in the lower right.
The central figure is Cheetah Torpedo.

I'm pretty sure I haven't done justice to the series. It's difficult to talk about just why this book has been so important to me. Part of it, the part that a new reader simply can't experience, is the concurrent growth of the series with my life. These characters have been with me for thirty years now. As the circumstances of my life have changed, as I have grown from a twenty-something to a fifty-something, these characters have gone through similar changes. They feel like old friends, friends with whom I have an investment of time and emotion. I go about my life and they go about theirs, and once a year or so we get together and get caught up, discovering what has happened in the meantime, and learning more about each others journey. To new readers my old friends are simply strangers with an interesting past. For me, they are people I have shared the road with, just like real people in my life. There is a difference between hearing someone's story and feeling like you have shared it.

It's impossible to talk about L&R without considering the contributions of Jaime and Gilbert separately. While both are instrumental to the overall feel of the book, they are, in the end, very different creators. I plan on spending time with both the residents of Gilbert's Palomar and the cast of Jaime's Locas in the next couple of posts, reminiscing with these old friends of mine. I hope I can convey why I love them.

Love and Rockets and all associated characters are copyright by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez.

Bang-Shang-A-Lang

I've been on an Archie kick recently. Yeah, that Archie, the perennial teen humor comic. I read Archie when I was a kid. I read pretty much all comics democratically. I watched the Archies Saturday morning cartoons. The Archie comic Madhouse changed its name to Gladhouse and served as my introduction to hippy culture (through the parodic eyes of the older men who wrote the book).

But, like most people I guess, I outgrew Archie. Archie and the Riverdale gang didn't care. They continued to be published and have their adventures for a new generation without me, just like they had been doing for years before I was born. Archie first appeared in Pep Comics #22 in 1941 and got his own title in 1942. It's still being published, making it the third longest running comic in history (the other two being Detective Comics and Action Comics respectively). Over the years Archie has produced a number of wonderful and influential writers and artists, too many to go into detail here. My own comics art has been moving into a more simplified and iconic direction, and the Brix strip I've been archiving here is the best example of that. As a result I've been looking at a few of these artists more closely. Bob Montana was the original artist on the series and established the basic look of the characters.

But it was Dan DeCarlo who solidified the style and became the most recognizable Archie artist. I really love his clean lines, uncluttered composition and solid inks.

I also really love the work of Harry Lucey. There's a wackiness and animated feel to his take on the characters that I find charming.

I came to these artists backwards. I've never hidden the fact that Jaime Hernandez of the comic Love and Rockets has been a primary influence. I think that's pretty obvious in any of the various Grey Legacy projects that Fred and I have done. Jaime has always talked about the influence of DeCarlo and Lucey and it took me awhile to really go back and look at what he was talking about. I'm glad I did.

And it's more than just the art. The stories I've been reading are great. The simple love triangle of Archie, Betty and Veronica lends itself to endless variation. The relationships and friendship among all of the characters is truly timeless. Many stories turn on a very simple punchline, some completely subvert traditional storytelling and cross the fourth wall into the surreal.

In the late 60's the Archies were a real band. Okay, they had actual humans playing the instruments and singing, but they were billed as The Archies. The song Sugar Sugar was the #1 pop song in America in 1969. There was this weird promotion where breakfast cereal boxes would have a playable record on the back of the box. The grooves of the record were actually embedded in the cardboard with some kind of plastic/vinyl. You could cut the record out and play it on your record player. I remember doing this with the Archies.

I also remember buying the single of Bang-Shang-A-Lang, with the b-side of Truck Driver. I haven't heard those two songs since I was 9 or 10 years old. Yesterday I downloaded an Archies Greatest Hits album. I still knew all the words to Bang-Shang-A-Lang.

For the record, I'm neither a Betty or a Veronica. I completely understand Archie holding on to both of them.