One of my favorite musicians passed away suddenly. However, unlike Bowie or Prince, I’m afraid very few people ever heard of him. Enough that he maintained a music and recording career for forty years, but still, pretty obscure.
Pat Fish recorded under the name the Jazz Butcher. It was, technically, the name of the band he led, but as the only consistent member of said band, it was pretty common for Pat to be referred to as The Jazz Butcher. His first album, In Bath of Bacon, was released in 1983. He was part of the post punk, new wave, pre-alternative, college radio wave of British artists. He released thirteen studio albums, several compilations, and two or three live albums.
I didn’t hear the Jazz Butcher until 1986. I had just started grad school and moved into an apartment with a bunch of other guys. One of them, Steve, had a record collection that changed my life. That first semester I was exposed to tons of artists that I had either never heard of before, or had only the vaguest awareness of: Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, Japan, Hoodoo Gurus... many, many more. Steve would simply put on a record and it filled our days. It took awhile for some of these to really register with me, at least in terms of recognizing who they were. There was a lot of challenging new sounds, and I admit a lot of it really had to grow on me. Some of it joined the list of my favorite bands. Some of it never grew on me.
In the midst of all of this new music, one album, one song specifically, kept catching my ear. "This is partytime, and we’re all having so much fun." But the tone of the song belied those sentiments. There was a sadness to the lyrics, as if simply partying just wasn’t enough to bring one happiness. The words were fun and ridiculous and conveyed a deeper sense of meaning than a first listen would indicate. They were, to use the title of a later Jazz Butcher album, Glorious and Idiotic. And, once I finally singled the album In Bath of Bacon out from the all of the others, I was a fan. Over the years his music became a very personal soundtrack to my life, one that I didn’t share with too many people.
There’s a lot of silliness in Pat Fish’s lyrics. He sings about Bigfoot, and goldfish, and buffaloes, and Shirley MacLaine, and alcohol. A whole lot of alcohol. But somehow he manages to never, at least in my opinion, devolve into simply a novelty act. Given his subject matter, this was a real possibility. But he rounded his oeuvre out with a lot of more serious fare, what I once heard him refer to as ‟Art Misery Songs.” These were a mix of heartfelt ballads and social commentary.He played with a wide variety of musicians. David J, bass player for Bauhaus and Love and Rockets was on two of the early albums. But his most regular collaborator was Max Eider, a guitarist with a singular, jazz-influenced style. Max left the band in the mid-80s and then rejoined around the turn of the millennium. The albums released between these events were good, but something, specifically Max, was missing. It was their collaboration as artists that lifted both of them.
I saw the Jazz Butcher in 1988 at Peabody’s Down Under in Cleveland, and again at the same venue in 1992. As I related in a previous blog, ‟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 managed 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 one of these.”
I saw them twice more, in 2000, once at a small bar in Erie, and again the next night in Pittsburgh at the Millvale Industrial Theater. This tour featured Max and Mr. Jones, the original drummer, so of course I got both of them to sign the booklet.
It took another twelve years, but I finally got David J to sign it as well.
Pat had a Facebook page, and few years ago I reached out and we became friends on that platform. Obviously, I didn’t really know him. But, he would occasionally comment on one of my posts, or wish me a happy birthday. He was friends with Alan Moore, of Watchmen fame, among many other things. A few years ago I reviewed Alan’s book, Jerusalem, in which he mentions the Jazz Butcher. Pat commented on my post in a very surreal, meta kind of way.
So this feels like a loss to me. Not really personal, except for the role his music has played in my life. I’ll miss just knowing he’s out there somewhere in England, still performing, singing ridiculous songs about elephants and broken hearts.
There’s an early Jazz Butcher song called Big Saturday, and though I forget all of the details, he told us in Cleveland in 1988, that it was cowritten by a girl he had loved who had died. He then performed the song Angels, in her honor, wherein he says, ‟It’s always Saturday in Heaven... Just one big Saturday in Heaven.” The song has broken my heart just a little every time I’ve heard it since.
I remember specifically the first time I heard To Bring You My Love twenty-five years ago. I was visiting an ex-roommate’s new apartment. We had spent years building a friendship based on comic books and music, something that has never changed. We were hanging out in his room. He had just picked up the CD and knew I would want to hear it.
It wasn’t the first time I had heard PJ Harvey, of course. When we lived together he had purchased all three of her prior albums, and I had seen the few videos that MTV played on 120 Minutes. While I liked Dry and Rid of Me neither had really captured me as a fan at that time. But something about To Bring You My Love resonated immediately. The sound grabbed my ear in a way her previous efforts had not. I probably couldn’t have told you that day that this would become one of my desert island albums, but I knew I was instantly in love.
I don’t have the language to describe it in musical terms, and I realize that so much of what I love about it is personal and subjective. The word that comes to mind for much of the album is resonant. Polly’s voice is deep and echoing, vulnerable and powerful at the same time. The rhythms that underlie this album, on guitar as well as the drums, feel disjointed to me with emphasis in unusual places. I want to say syncopated, but my musician friends may disagree. The bass notes rumble with distortion, reverberating in the chest like a broken heart.
But for me it is not just the sonic qualities that make the album special. Through her lyrics and imagery PJ creates a mythic landscape worthy of Faulkner and O’Connor, gothic and rural in texture. Depending on the song Polly embodies the wronged woman, or maybe an angel working for God, or maybe a woman imbued with magic who you believe has her voodoo working. There is mourning: for lost relationships, lost children, and a loss of faith. She begins the album by telling us she has laid with the devil and by the end you not only believe her, you realize it’s the devil who is in trouble. There is righteous power in her voice, a feminine power, that of the goddess. When she says ‟I think I’m a mother,” I hear her stating not a biological fact (though that is certainly implied), but invoking the Mother who is the matrix of creativity, as well as destruction.
On that first listen at my friend’s apartment I remember saying to him, ‟I think she’s been listening to a lot of Nick Cave.” That wasn’t meant as a criticism or complaint. In addition to there being a sonic resemblance Cave, at that point in his career, had spent a lot of time creating music in a similar narrative world. For whatever reasons, this is a world that speaks to me. Some of it is, no doubt, just the movies and books I’ve been exposed to. Some of it is having grown up in a northern Appalachian home with our own folk tales of love and murder and angels and devils. It’s a world I feel in my bones.
Not long after this PJ and Nick recorded a duet version of the classic folk tune Henry Lee as part of his Murder Ballads album (the internet tells me Henry Lee, like many traditional ballads, has many different versions, and is based on a tune called Young Hunting). In the video PJ and Nick are dressed in matching black suits, emphasizing their shared traits. The video fairly sizzles with sexual tension and not long after they engaged in a brief love affair in real life. Nick managed to get a lot of songs out of it for his next album, The Boatman’s Call (well worth your time to listen to), while Polly, like with most things in her personal life, simply never talked about it.
This was also a period where PJ was experimenting with her stage persona. During Dry and Rid of Me she typically performed wearing basic black jeans and leather jackets, with her hair pulled back severely and very little makeup. To Bring You My Love was kind of her Glam period, in dress if not in content. On the album cover and in the video for Down By the Water she has big hair and bright red lipstick that matches her shimmery ballgown. In concert she would sometimes wear gold catsuits, or a bright pink bodysuit and gaudy fake eyelashes. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a sucker for stage costumes, as my love of Bowie and Alice Cooper and Adam Ant, among many others, attest to. The live clips from this era are some of my favorites of hers.
From Hooligan Magazine
I’m sorry to say I didn’t get to see PJ on that tour. If my research is correct she has only ever played the Pittsburgh area twice in her thirty year career: once supporting Live at Star Lake (or whatever it was being called at the time), and once supporting U2 at Mellon Arena. I have seen her several times since then in Washington DC. My first time was for her next album, Is This Desire?, at the 9:30 Club. I saw her twice when she was touring for Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, shows which bookended her jaunt with U2. The first of these ranks among my top concert experiences ever. In late 2000 PJ knew she was going to be touring with U2. She wanted to break in a new live band. Rather than mount a major solo tour she played a few, small, and relatively unannounced shows at small venues. I was on a PJ mailing list at the time and found out about a show at the Black Cat in DC, and somehow manged to score tickets. The Black Cat, while having a history of some pretty amazing shows, is essentially a small bar. I stood about three feet from the stage and about five feet from PJ. She brought me, and everyone else in the room, her love that night.
The next time I saw her was about ten months later with the same band at the 9:30 Club the night before 9/11. I remember reading a statement from her at the time that she had been awakened in her hotel room by what turned out to be a plane crashing into the Pentagon.
A trait PJ shares with some of my other favorite artists, most notably David Bowie and Nick Cave, is her willingness to experiment and never stand still with her music. Her career has been a constant change of sound, ideas, and presentation. This keeps an artist from getting stale, but also runs the risk of losing fans if they veer too far from made you love them in the first place. While I am still interested in PJ’s career, and will no doubt own whatever she releases next on the day it comes out, I do fully admit I have not been a big fan of her last few albums. She hasn’t done anything to just drive me away, but her output has not spoken to me in the same way as in the past. I’m a different person now, and so is she. The next album may be my favorite thing ever. Or not. I’ll still be there with her in some capacity.
While I have not been as enamored of her later work she has recently been giving new life to some of her old. This summer saw the release of the Demo versions of her first album, Dry. These were recorded by Polly on a 4-track recorder in her home studio, I believe before she had a recording contract. They are sparse, and bring a new experience to these seminal and formative songs. This not the first time we have heard her demos. My memory tells me that she was, ultimately, not happy with the production of her second album Rid of Me and not long after its release she also released and album entitled simply 4-Track Demos, featuring her own recordings of most of the album (plus a couple of extras that didn’t make the cut.
This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of To Bring You My Love, and a couple of weeks ago she released the demo version. What struck me most upon listening to it was just how fully formed it was in this early raw version. For many of the tracks, most of them actually, the differences between this and the official release are incredibly subtle. I can tell these are different vocal tracks, but mainly because this is one of the albums I’ve listened to most in my life. The guitars and drums are nearly identical. The biggest difference is on the final song of the album, The Dancer. On the demo version the guitar has a Spanish Flamenco tone and rhythm, which was replaced by a more droning, quickly strummed electric guitar. What was weird when I heard this though was that I had to actually go back and check to make sure I wasn’t imagining this. The Flamenco guitar was indeed not present on the version I was familiar with, but somehow it had been implied by the rest of the song to such a degree that I imagined hearing it, so uch so that the Demo version, while different, still sounded like something my brain already knew. Now, by this point of her career Polly had access to better equipment and had more studio experience than with demos for Dry, and that probably accounts for a lot of the fidelity of this project, but I think a lot of it was simply the strength of her vision of what this album was meant to be from very early on.
In some ways I’m disappointed with the Demos version. I was expecting something more raw, or something in a more formative state. It’s so close to the studio album that only someone really, really familiar with it can really hear the differences. I guess I am that person, and digging through the subtleties of this has been rewarding, just in a different way than what I expected. It is insight into the process of one of my favorite artists, and taking it along with the demo versions of PJ’s first two albums it’s fascinating to see how quickly she grew, as a songwriter and musician as well as in confidence and skill.
To Bring You My Love was a critical success, if not a giant financial one. At the end of that year it was celebrated as the ‟Best Album of the Year” by the majority of the music press. I remember seeing PJ on many music magazine covers (remember those?). MTV, who I’m sure played the video for Down by the Water at least twice nominated it for ‟Best Female Video” at their annual awards show. But that was the year of Alanis Morrisette and Jagged Little Pill and no one else stood a chance to get that little astronaut statue.
Twenty-five years later it's still an album that is lodged in my heart and brain. Like all of the music we claim as our own, the music that defines portions of our lives, my thoughts and feelings about it are wrapped up in things beyond the songs. It became a part of the soundtrack of my life at that, simply because I played it so much. It still reminds me of specific people and places and events. Playing now involves a little bit of time travel to a special time.
A
couple of years or more ago I spent some time on the blog discussing
some of my all time favorite comics. They overwhelmingly represented
the past, mostly from the 1980s. These books are the ones that helped
form me in my early adulthood. I have read many, many comics since
then but it has felt like very few have inspired the level of love
that I have for the old stuff. That’s part of getting older and the
same paradigm seems to apply to music and books and movies and
whatever else that helped make you the person you are.
As
a comics retailer it part of my job to keep up with new releases so
that I can make smart recommendations. I admit to a little bit of
burnout. There are a lot of comics coming out these days, and many of
them, particularly Marvel and DC, seem to this old reader to be a
continual rehash of stories and concepts I have read too many times
before. It felt like it had been a long time since anything had
captured my imagination. But, I’m happy to report, that in the last
few years there are several ongoing titles that I have been happily
engaged and genuinely excited about. I’ve been feeling the need to
write about new loves rather than, like the publishers, rehashing my
past. I’ve just been a slacker about actually writing. But last
week at San Diego Comicon something happened that told me to get off
my ass and write about something.
Giant
Days won the Eisner Award for both Best Ongoing Series and Best Humor
Publication. I’ve been hyping Giant Days to anyone who will listen
for a couple of years now. It’s a book that just makes me happy. I
was excited to see that it received the Eisner nomination, but I
honestly thought it might be a long shot. I know I love it, but I was
unaware of it’s reach and impact. I feel a little giddy that it
won.
Yes...
I said giddy.
It’s
about three young British women in college and their wacky adventures
with friends. It’s fun and funny and touching and real. I’m
really not the demographic I think Giant Days is aiming for, though
there are definitely reasons I like it. I tend to describe it ‟as
more adult than old-school Archie comics and far less adult than Love
& Rockets.” I’m a big fan of both of those and Giant Days
just hits a sweet spot that captures elements of both for me. My own
comic from long ago, Grey Legacy, was the story of young people in
college, albeit in more of a sci/fi fantasy setting. This was created
much closer to my own college and grad school experience. Years later
when I produced a short run of a comic strip set in the same world I
focused on a young woman named Brix and her wacky adventures with
friends, but even then I was aiming for the audience of Chatham
University students. Obviously there is something in this trope that
speaks to me.
But
back to Giant Days...
Daisy
Wooten was home-schooled and as a result is socially awkward and
slightly naïve. She’s also brilliant, ridiculously optimistic, and
highly organized. She tends to act as the conscience of the group.
Susan Ptolemy is a med student. She’s overworked, down to earth,
cynical, and sometimes a little mean and impatient with foolishness.
Esther DeGroot is the beautiful Goth girl that everything comes easy
to. She’s a whimsical force of nature, lucky, creative, and the
object of every misplaced male crush. She’s also much smarter than
she gives herself credit for. In spite of their differences they
develop a beautiful friendship.
Somehow,
I relate to elements of all three of them.
JohnAllison, the creator, writer, and sometimes artist of the series has a
long history in comics. He has been creating web comics since the
late 1990s. Giant Days is a continuation of some of the settings and
characters that appeared there. His characterizations are deft and
his comedic pacing is immaculate. Giant Days is a genuinely funny
book. But the characters are not merely cartoons. We feel for them
and become emotionally invested as they go through relationships and
heartbreak and deal with the pressures of school and impending
adulthood. In a recent story someone’s father dies and the story is
deep and heartbreaking and incredibly insightful about dealing with
grief.
I
can’t say enough good things about the main series artist MaxSarin. Their drawings are full of life and energy. The characters are
animated and feel as though they are always in motion. Sarin is a
master of body language, subtle and not so subtle. The facial
expressions can be wildly exaggerated, utilizing all of the tools of
cartooning, but you are never taken out of the reality of this world.
The drawing make you feel what the characters feel. When Daisy cries
it is hurt down to the level of her soul.
As
a middle aged man I’ve wondered why this appeals to me so much.
Some of it is just sheer admiration for the craft of making good
comics. Even though I am many years removed from the college
experience I am surprised at how many moments in the series, like in
every issue, something happens that has a direct corollary to
something I have experienced in my own past, or speaks to who I am
now.
I had this exact experience with a tripping friend
once. I was in the role of Esther that time.
This is an uncannily accurate description of me.
A
large part of the appeal is the nostalgia factor. That’s something I
think anyone can relate to. That time in your life, whether it was in
college or high school or some other setting, when you were
officially an adult, but still hadn’t figured out what that meant.
The time when you were experiencing all of your firsts. When
everything felt heightened and was tinged with importance in ways
that can never be completely recaptured as you get older. When you
first started to meet people who would be your chosen family and you
can’t imagine life without them in it. For younger readers, those
who are the age of the characters, it mirrors their life. For those
of us who are older it reminds us of just how important and formative
those times were.
In
1984 I began a journey, one that ended this week. It didn’t begin
as my journey. I was merely a companion, myself and thousands of
others, to a stranger who would become someone I felt I knew. Over
the last thirty-five years his journey became symbolic of my own,
shedding light on my own life in the way all great stories do. Though
his personal, real life journey continues, the story he was telling
is now over. I want to talk about endings.
Mage: The Hero Denied #15
This
is not the first time I’ve written about Mage: The Hero
Discovered and its creator Matt Wagner. I’ve talked about it in
more detail in a previous blog and written about it academically for
Salem Press (though the links in that blog are now dead so
you can’t see it anymore). This comic book series began in 1984
and I was there with the first issue. At that time Wagner said that
he envisioned Mage to be three distinct story arcs. This
week, after thirty-five years and large gaps in production the final
issue of the final series shipped. It was the conclusion of a story that I have been anticipating for a long, long time. No spoilers, but
I was satisfied with the ending. It wrapped up the various plot
lines, encapsulated the feel of the entire series, and stayed
thematically consistent with everything that went before. In its
ending it conveyed that even when a specific story ends, life goes
on.
But
I’m not here to do an analysis of the narrative. This is more
personal than that. There are specific plot and character elements
I’ll go into here but, if you want to know ‟what happens” I’m
sure you can find many articles online, or you could, preferably,
read it yourself.
I’ve
read a lot of comics. I’ve been doing so my entire life and for the
last twenty-two years I’ve worked at a comics shop which give me
access to everything that comes out. As much as I love the medium
most books I read are an ‟in the moment” thing and then
forgotten. That is more true now than when I was younger, of course.
Like a lot of media consumption the majority of it can be enjoyed
while engaged with it, then easily discarded. There are those that
deserve further study, of course, and those that reward multiple
readings. It is an art form that comes with all of the problems and
expectations and joy that can be associated with any other art form.
But for everyone who loves this stuff, I assume, there are those few
titles that become a part of your life. Heart books I have called
them in the past. Those books that speak to something more personal.
Mage
is one of those series for me, perhaps the biggest one. At the time I
couldn’t have told you why it spoke to me as strongly as it did.
I’ve had a lot of time to think about it since. Mage appeared in
the early days of the Direct Market, an innovation in comics
distribution that allowed for more diverse content from a wider range
of creators. I liked a lot of the books I saw then simply because
they were not the traditional Marvel and DC superhero fare. Mage was
a unique mixture of superheroes, fantasy, myth, and Arthurian legend,
all things that I was into. What made it different at the time was
that it was all took place in a contemporary setting. The popularity
of the genre we now call Urban Fantasy has made this approach much
more common, but back then it felt unique. The protagonist, Kevin
Matchstick, was a young man wearing jeans and a t-shirt, someone I
could know, or more importantly, someone I could be.
This
is a core part of the connection. The story opened very differently
from most. We didn’t get an explosive fight scene. It was very
understated, but it’s was definitely the hook that reeled me in.
Kevin meets what appears to be a homeless street urchin and proceeds
to have a very personal three page conversation with this stranger,
revealing his doubts and anxieties, the kind of questions about life and identity
that most people have in their early twenties. It turns out that the
homeless man is Mirth, the avatar of the World Mage... Merlin, if you
will. This Meeting With the Mentor serves a
dual purpose, one that
works on a meta-level. For Kevin, his meeting with the Mage launches
him on his personal journey of self-discovery. For me, and probably
for others, my meeting with the series Mage brought me into
the journey as well. Mirth spoke to Kevin and Matt spoke to me
through Mirth. In this way the series became a mentor for those
engaged with the narrative. It did for me at least.
What
I didn’t know at that time was that Matchstick was an avatar of
creator Matt Wagner. He looked just like him. Since that time Wagner
has called the series and ‟allegorical autobiography.” He took
elements of his own life and fictionalized them. Over time, the more
you knew about Matt, the more you could recognize in the narrative,
and the more personal the story became. Over the years, because of
his other work in the comics industry, through interviews and letters
pages, we saw elements of his life outside of his work seep through.
Because of these, and because of the personal nature of Mage, an
illusion of intimacy was created. This happens a lot with artists,
though I think it is probably more obvious with musicians or actors.
Through their public persona and the work they create we feel like we
know them better than we actually do. This feeling is heightened when
we can see ourselves reflected in their work.
2009 San Diego Con.
I
don’t know Matt, not really. I have met him in real life exactly
twice, once at a convention in Ohio in the early 90s and once at San
Diego Con in 2009. During the 80s and early 90s when I was trying to
get into the comics industry through self-publishing I sent copies of
everything to several receptive creators, Matt among them. He always
wrote back, even if it was just a postcard. He was supportive and
friendly and those things felt really important at the time. A few
years ago when I was researching my article for Salem Press he was
gracious enough to answer a bunch of questions for me. He would
probably recognize me if I walked up to him at a convention. We’re
friends on Facebook. I feel like I know Matt, certainly more than he
probably feels like he knows me. But all I really know is what he has
revealed to me through the allegory of Mage.
Matt
and I are contemporaries. I’m about three months older than he is.
We grew up with a lot of the same cultural touchstones, and it’s
obvious to me we read a lot of the same books and comics and shared
many of the same interests. It’s part of why I could so easily
project myself into the series. As time went on some of these
interests became more well-developed. Matt has said many times that
he was unaware of the mythologist Joseph Campbell and the idea of the
Hero’s Journey when he began working on Mage, even though in
retrospect it is amazing how closely Kevin’s path follows this
pattern. Campbell came to prominence in 1986 through a series of
interviews with journalist Bill Moyers (available in print form as
The Power of Myth). This series was eye-opening for me and still
qualifies as one of the most influential books of my life. It pulled
together so many of my interests and the ideas I had been having
about them and gave me a language and worldview that still resonates
with me today.
One
of these ideas is that of a personal mythology. Psychologist Carl Jung asked the
question, ‟What myth are you living?” The idea is that each of us
reenact recurring motifs in our own personal story. We are the
products of our culture and for good or ill we can all become caught
up in unconscious behaviors due to the social structures we live
in and the stories we have been told about our place in it. The
benefit of knowing the myth you are living is so that you can break
out of harmful patterns of behavior and self-delusion and adapt a
story for your life that is healthier and more fulfilling.
Matt
put his personal myth on paper and shared it with all of us. By doing
so he set a precedent for his readers to do the same. As we saw
throughout his series, it is possible to be living several different
myths at the same time. It’s also important to acknowledge that
everyone around us is doing the same thing. We may be the protagonist
of our own story, but we are also the supporting cast in the lives of
others.
It’s
important to note here that while the story of Mage, and that of
Kevin Matchstick, is over, Matt’s life isn’t. Without spoilers,
while there is a definitive end to the series it is implied that life
goes on for our protagonists. Endings are important. It’s part of
what is missing from mainstream comics. Great myths have their
ending, but as licensed corporate characters none of our modern
superheroes get to have that. Every character at Marvel and DC have
died at some point, only to be resurrected (an overstatement, but you
get my point). Big events happen and then are quickly forgotten. We
all say we want continuity, but with an eighty year history and
characters that never really age we can never really get that. Not as
long as people are making money from the products. We continue on
with what Stan Lee referred to as the ‟Illusion of Change.” We
can never get true closure.
Endings
are difficult in real life. Even when the result is a good thing,
such as leaving a bad job for a good one, or moving to a better
house, it is still stressful. Change is hard. When it is the end of a
relationship or a life it can be emotionally catastrophic. Experiencing these in our fictions provides a catharsis from a safe emotional distance. That is but
one of the lessons of empathy we can learn from them.
I
watched as Matt, metaphorically through his avatar of Kevin, grew in
strength and power and came into his gifts as an artist and
storyteller. I saw him when he fully embodied that power, when he
served as an inspiration for a generation of other creators and
shared his path with them, creating opportunities for others to share
their own journeys and find their own power. I saw him age and
discover new challenges in life, just as I was doing in my own. I
have joked with him that I have always identified with Mirth more
than Kevin, and maybe that is because part of my path has become that
of the Magician. As a writer and artist and educator I embody more of
that myth than I do that of the Warrior or the King. Through Kevin, Matt has shared his family with us and his experiences as a father.
That part of the recent series became more profound because it was
colored by his now adult son Brennan, who wasn’t born when Mage
first appeared.
So
it goes.
I
recently taught an Intro to the Graphic Novel class at the University
of Pittsburgh. I taught some of the canonical works that everyone
teaches, like Maus and Persepolis and Fun Home. I did a section on
the superhero, of course, with Batman Year One and Watchmen being the
primary texts for what I wanted to do. I finished the section with
Mage. Hey, it’s my class, I can teach what I want! I may be the
only person to have done this, and to be honest, I questioned if this
was just my favoritism coming into play and if there was anything of
value to discuss in a college level comics class. Looking at the work
through this lens I was able to use it as a way to talk about myth
and Arthurian legend, Jungian psychology, Campbell’s Hero’s
Journey, and the genre of Urban Fantasy. We also were able to touch
on a different way to do autobiographical comics, comparing it to
some of the other books I mentioned. Where Watchmen and many other
books of the time are famously a deconstruction of the tropes of the
superhero I argue that Mage (and a few others, like Scott McCloud’s
Zot!), are a reconstruction of the trope clothed in a modern setting.
However you look at it, the title was a great success in class and
gave us a lot of material to discuss. At the end of the semester
several students referenced it as their favorite thing we read all
semester, and I know I made a couple of avowed fans. The journey Matt
documented still speaks to certain people.
So
now what? What do I do now that I have seen the end of something I
have anticipated for thirty-five years? Is my life that different?
Not really. The only thing I no longer have is the anticipation. I
trust that Matt will continue to create new material, not for Mage
but for other projects. As a fan of his work I still have things to
look forward to.
I
also now have the entire story of Mage. I have a new anticipation,
that of rereading it. I have gone back to the original
many times over the years and as I have grown and changed and aged I
have discovered new things in the narrative. It speaks to me in
different ways at different points in my life. Now that there is more
of it I believe this experience will only increase.
Thank you, Matt, for sharing your journey, for inspiring me and many others. Thank you for being a friend in a very meta sort of fashion. Good luck in all of your future endeavors. You have let Mage go, but your well-earned power as a storyteller remains.
I
became aware of something new last week, partly due to watching the
Super Bowl. I’m not a huge football fan, but given the Pop Culture
cachet of the event and the commercials I feel like I should at least
be aware of it. So, I usually at have it on in the background
while I’m doing other things. This year one specific commercial drew my
attention.
There’s
a woman drinking Michelob beer in a mountain setting. She’s
whispering, which is probably what drew my attention. But then she
starts tapping her fingernails against the bottle, and dragging it
across the tabletop. The focus of the commercial seems to be the soft
sounds of the beer pouring into the glass and the fizzing of the
bubbly foam. The quiet nature of it is what made me pay attention. I
thought it was kind of weird for a commercial, and then promptly
forgot about it.
I’m
not a car guy. My Dad is a car guy. He learned to drive in a used
Model T when he was twelve years old (he was born in 1919, just for a
point of reference). He drove a Jeep across Europe in World War II
and drove a dump truck as a job for thirty-plus years. He’s not
really a hobbyist, but he knows cars. He still pays attention to them
and has what to me seems an amazing amount of knowledge about makes
and models that I just don’t have. The following is a typical car
conversation between us:
Me:
So while I was in California my friends let me borrow their car so I
could drive down the coast to Monterey Bay.
Dad:
What kind of car was it?
Me:
Ummm... Blue?
The
make of the car is the least interesting part of that story to me,
but not to Dad. He doesn’t understand how I couldn’t know what I
was driving.
But,
because of Dad, by default I’ve absorbed some car guy
characteristics. I lived in the middle of nowhere where getting your
driver’s license as soon as you possibly could was not only
expected, but a requirement if you wanted any kind of social life at
all. The nearest town with a movie theater was fifteen miles away. I
was in school every day with friends who lived over forty road miles
away. So, the day I turned sixteen I applied for my learner’s
permit and a few short months later had my driver’s license.
I’ve
driven a lot of cars and covered a lot of miles in the last
forty-some years. But, I’ve always thought of a car as a tool, a
really expensive hammer, if you will. It’s not a status symbol.
It’s not an extension of my personality (except in some ways
everything a person owns or does is an extension of their
personality). It’s not something that brings me a specific kind of
pride. It’s a tool that gets me from point A to point B and makes
my life easier. In terms of expense and frustration, it can also be a
burden. I’ve owned cars I’ve hated. I’ve owned cars I’ve
loved. I’ve owned cars I don’t even remember anymore. At some
point they’ve all let me down.
I
have a complicated relationship with cars.
My
first car was a green 1973 (I think), Plymouth Satellite, a two-door
monster of a car. I have no idea how I ever learned to parallel park
in that thing. Dad had been driving it to work six nights a week, so
it had a lot of miles on it when I inherited it, along with the
attendant mechanical issues that go with mileage. This car had a
specific issue with soft plugs. What the hell is a soft plug, you
ask? Wikipedia describes them, by several different names, like this:
Core plugs are used to fill the sand casting core holes found on
water-cooled internal combustion engines. They are also commonly
called frost plugs, freeze plugs, or engine block expansion plugs.
The problem with them, at least for me, is that if they rust through,
which they did, or simply blow out from pressure, which they also
did, your car immediately loses all of its antifreeze, overheats, and
leaves you stranded. This happened with my Satellite a dozen times or
more.
And
here my troubles began.
Every car I’ve ever owned, and there have
been a lot of them, have been used. Some of them have been great,
others, not so much. All of them have come with their share of
problems. Dad insisted that I learn basic maintenance, and I’m
eternally grateful he did. I can change tires and change my oil. I’ve
gotten pretty good at diagnosing problems and even fixing some that
are more involved. Once, when I had just left home to drive to DC for
a weekend, I noticed my battery light was on. I went home, thought
about it, realized it was probably my alternator, walked to a parts
store, replaced it myself, and was on the road less than two hours
later, much to the amazement of the friends I was staying with.
Maybe
it’s true of every driver, but I have a litany of car stories.
I
have hit a deer twice in my life, though neither time caused much
damage to my car. The deer weren’t so lucky. Several times I have
broken down miles, or even hours away from home and had to be towed
and wait for someone to come get me. Fred and I sat in a rest stop in
Ohio for around nine hours one Saturday, unable to get in touch with
anyone back home who could do anything. My pal Zordon (of Mighty
Morphin’ Power Rangers fame), twice drove for over two hours to
rescue me.
I
broke down on 79 North, and after meeting someone I’m sure may have
been an angel (in the Wings of Desire sense, anyway), the woman I was
going to visit came to get me and drove me back to Pittsburgh. I
called Dad and arranged for him to rent a tow hitch so we could go
get the car and tow it back to our mechanic. Right before he arrived
to pick me up the next morning I got a call from the state police
telling me that a driver had fallen asleep and crashed into my parked
car, totaling it while I was away. I had done nothing illegal and was
parked well off the road, but my car was a goner. In that case it
worked out. The insurance value of the car ended up being more than I
had bought it for. Ever since, whenever I’m having car trouble I’ve
been tempted to just park along the highway and hope for the best.
I’ve
run over a Christmas Tree and been rear-ended by a dead man.
Three
years ago, on the way home on New Year’s Eve, my car died. It was
the transmission. I knew immediately because this was the third car
in my life where the transmission went bad (by contrast, my father,
who has been driving since the age of the Model T, has never had this
happen). Fixing it would cost more than the car was worth, so I sold
it for next to nothing and quickly, and probably foolishly bought another
used car, pretty cheaply. Well, you get what you pay for. It was a
mess. Rusted out underneath. There was a leak somewhere so the trunk
was always damp. I kind of hated it, in ways I had never hated a car
before. My mechanic flat out told me it wasn’t going to pass
another inspection.
One
morning, on my way to get my new driver’s
license, I discovered the driver’s side window was halfway down. The motor had
burnt out, so it wouldn't go up or down. I knew, based on personal
experience, that this was going to cost a lot of money, certainly
more than a car that wasn’t going to pass inspection was worth
anyway. As soon as I got back from the license center I went online
to look for something else.
I
had been thinking about looking into a hybrid. I liked the
environmental aspect of it, but I was also fond of the better gas
mileage. A good friend of mine had a 2008 Toyota Prius that I had
ridden in and liked. I figured even a used one was out of my price
range, but on a whim I thought I would look just to see.
And
there it was, the first car that popped up in my search. A 2008
Toyota Prius, solid black and beautiful... and in my price range.
Okay, the upper end of it, but still there. With very little
deliberation I called the dealer to make sure it was still there then
drove out to take a look at it, my side window still stuck in the
halfway position. I test drove it, I loved it, and they made me a
deal I simply couldn’t pass up. So, in June of 2017, I came home
with the first car in my life that I truly loved and was genuinely
proud of.
This
story doesn’t end well.
A
little over a year later, last summer, I was t-boned by another
driver and my car was totaled. It could have been far worse. There
were three passengers in my car, and two in the one that hit me,
including a child. We all walked away without a scratch. My side
airbags deployed, which I’m sure saved Marcel and Derrick from
severe injury. This was my first serious accident ever, and the ‟What
might have happened” still haunts me. No one blames me, and no one
was hurt, but I still feel just a little nauseous if it comes up. The
possibilities of that alternate reality are truly frightening to me,
even though they are not real.
But
my car was done.
I found myself genuinely mourning it (fully
realizing that I had to the luxury of mourning only my car). All of
the other cars I had sold or lost over the years just felt like
breakups. You know, we had a good run, but it’s time to move on.
Some were harder than others, but it was usually a mutual decision.
This one felt like a death.
The
timing was bad, not that there would ever have been a good time for it. The
accident took place the evening before I signed my contract to teach
at Pitt, a mere three weeks before classes started. I had a vacation
planned the following week, so I was out of town and couldn’t look
for a replacement right away (I was in California, where I once again
drove my friend’s car... you know, the blue one).
I
bought another Prius, bright red and four years newer. It’s a
little smaller. I like it, but I don’t love it yet. I feel a little
guilty about that. It feels like a rebound car, because I’m not
really over the last one. But, we’re getting used to each other.
I’m getting better mileage. We’re sharing the road. I haven’t
had any car trouble yet. It’s not the love at first sight I
experienced with the last one, but I know it’s better than any
other car I’ve ever owned.
Maybe
my relationships with cars have always been complicated because I’m
not a car guy, and they can feel it. Until the last one my approach
was utilitarian. I took them for granted. No one wants to be treated
like that, even if they are inanimate objects. I’m never going to
be like Dad, but I can probably be a little more
attentive. Wash them more often. Be proud of them. Don’t just pay
attention when they’re giving me trouble. Be grateful for their service and their protection. Check my oil.
I’ve been incredibly neglectful of my blog this year, and in general I’ve been less productive as a writer. Not that I didn’t do anything, but I was feeling a little burnt out in terms of topics in this forum. I wrote and submitted a couple of pieces of creative nonfiction (that were rejected), that might end up here, unless I can find another place to submit. One of the longer pieces that was originally planned for the blog ended up being a part of a much larger work that also may be serialized here at some point. I wrote a couple of book reviews for the Post Gazette, and had a couple of pull quotes from previous reviews published in the paperback editions of the books I reviewed. I wrote a memoriam for Stan Lee for Legacy.com. The most unexpected piece of professional writing I did was to contribute the new, official entry for the character of the Black Panther for World Book Encyclopedia.
But, my blog suffered. It’s been a more introverted year for me in general, so I guess I just haven’t had much to say in public.
My biggest achievement of 2018 was that I taught an Introduction to the Graphic Novel class at the University of Pittsburgh as an adjunct professor this fall. Though I have been making contacts and seeding my name there for a few years now, when it happened it happened very quickly.
