The Factual Opinion

Comics Of The Weak

Detective Comics 835
Written by John Rozum
Art by Tom Mandrake

It’s nice to see Tom Mandrake & Denys Cowan (currently working on the abysmally written Batman: Confidential book) performing the art services on Bruce Wayne and his clan of Gothamites.  It’s like 1992, all over again.  Still, somebody should tell Rozum that archenemies attacking during daytime isn’t as original as this issues boilerplate voice over seems to think it is.  Still, considering this storyline is just a plate filler to give regular Detective writer Paul Dini time to finish up his next crop of stories, this sort of route Batman storyline is relatively well told. 

The Exterminators 20
Written by Simon Oliver
Art by Darick Robertson & John Lucas

The Exterminators continues to have low sales, a factor that, unfortunately, seems to be brought up every time the book is mentioned around these offices.  Still, Simon Oliver seems to fully comprehend that the low sales aren’t a reflection on the stories he’s telling—and he’s right.  Why people are buying Ms. Marvel and Fables, yet not picking up this terrific comic, is a question best answered around the same time somebody explains why it was that Hollywood executives thought Hostel needed a sequel.  Oliver could try and change things up for sales, but he clearly cares deeply for the work, and his integrity as an artist continues to be a reward—this comic, quite simply, has never been a disappointment.  Hilarious, smart and a joy to re-read:  if more comics were like this, then there’d be a lot happier fat guys on Thursday morning.

World War Hulk 3
Written by Greg Pak
Art by John Romita Jr. & Klaus Janson

In the first issue, the Hulk beat Black Bolt, Iron Man, and a healthy portion of the Avengers.  In the second, he bested the Fantastic Four and the rest of the Avengers.  In this issue, they send the Army after him.  What?  Isn’t the order of that a little off?  Shouldn’t the Army have gone first?  Why does the Army keep going after the Hulk, anyway?  Has the Hulk ever come remotely close to losing against the Army?  This comic blew.

Nightwing 135
Written by Marv Wolfman
Art by Jamal Igle & Keith Champagne

You know what?  Maybe saying that World War Hulk 3 blew isn’t really fair.  After all, if that were true, than how does one define how terrible Nightwing 135 was?  It was just god-awful shit, like a sandwich made out of hair.

Outsiders: Five of a Kind: Week 1: Nightwing/Boomerang 1
Written by Nunzio DeFilippis & Christina Weir
Art by Freddie Williams II

Freddie Williams has a really interesting art style, which he seems to enjoy using only to illustrate the most mundane, forgettable stories.  The best things that came out of this story, yet another in the long line of “All young heroes must constantly talk about proving themselves to their elders, because obviously there isn’t anything else in the universe to talk about.”  Also, no matter what anybody does, even if they raise Franz Kafka from the grave, with pencils by Da Vinci, nobody, in the universe, is going to be able to pull off making Captain Boomerang into a character that normal human beings care about.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #20

Various Artists
The Wild Style Soundtrack

There was a time when soundtracks didn't matter, when movies got their lifeblood from a pop reference here and there, but it was composers who controlled what accompanied the sex, the car crash & the betrayal.  Sometimes a film like The Graduate would roll around, but it wasn't until the Denis Leary vs. Emilio Estevez blockbuster Judgment Night that a films music totally eclipsed the movie it encompassed.  (Technically, that's a completely absurd statement.  True, but completely incorrect.)  Wild Style (the soundtrack), like Wild Style (the film), takes some serious liberties with it's portrayal of William Wallace's battle for Scottish independence--the worst being a grossly homophobic portrayal of one of England's finest Princes--yet it is still one of the more compelling, and visceral, portrayals of epic war seen in American cinema.  Winner of multiple Academy Awards, Wild Style (the film) would seem to be one of the most unlikely of films to be outclassed and ignored in favor of it's soundtrack, a veritable cornucopia of the state of hip-hop at the dawn of it's era.  Grand Wizard Theodore, The Cold Crush Brothers, Fab Five Freddy and Double Trouble all show up, adding so much heart and excitement that it, quite literally, makes the current state of cynicism that laces too much hip-hop appear as the embarrassment that it is.  It's completely incongruous to a film that seems designed to cause Mel Gibson as much physical damage as possible.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #21

Mark Stewart & The Maffia
Learning To Cope With Cowardice

The joke around The Factual Opinion offices (alright, fine, it was Tucker’s joke) is that the title of Learning To Cope With Cowardice is actually a reference to British playwright and actor Noel Coward.  What makes this especially funny (funny in an extremely geeky way) is that Cowardice—Mark Stewart’s debut album as a solo artist after the dissolution of the Pop Group—is essentially a dub album cobbled together from disparate elements of black music (reggae, hip-hop) and American culture (Woody Guthrie, Walt Whitman.)  In other words, musically, Stewart moves about as far from the image of the iconic, dapper British gentleman as possible.  Politically, too.  It’s right there in the song titles: “High Ideals And Crazy Dreams,” “Don’t You Ever Lay Down Your Arms,” “The Paranoia Of Power.”  With the help of super-producer and reggae legend Adrian Sherwood, who would keep Stewart at the forefront of his On-U label’s roster, what emerges is as subversive and forward-thinking as anything else that came out in 1983.

-Marty Brown, 2007

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #22

The Replacements
Hootenanny

It's not Let It Be, that's for damn sure--but if there's one old chestnut that never gets tired, it's when you say "a bad Band X album is still better than a good one by Sting."  It's a raucous, fuck-all-y'all album that sounds like a drunken compilation of the best wedding band you've ever heard.  It's goofy, it's dumb, and if Mike Patton was singing, you'd think it was a garage version of Mr. Bungle--but instead it's the dulcet tones of Paul Westerberg, so it sounds even goofier.  Unlike Let It Be, there's no flow to the Hoot--it's just a ramshackle group of songs, some good, some great, some that are just...well, still better than Fields of Fucking Gold, that's for sure.  It also contains a song from the Say Anything soundtrack, which means it contains some of the DNA laced within every white guy with "feelings" that was born in the last 20 years.  Basically, if you've ever worn out a pair of Converse All-Stars, you've heard something off this album.  Don't worry if you don't remember--you were drunk at the time, and Erika Fedyk had just told you that you were too nice to "go out" with.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Top 25 Albums of 1983: #23

Cybotron
Enter

In a nifty twist on typical American racial politics, a small army of black club kids in Detroit spent the early 80’s co-opting the anglophilic (anglotastic?) dance-floor sounds of Kraftwork and Giorgio Moroder.  When Juan Atkins and his Belleville posse began crafting music for that audience, he gave birth to an entire genre.  In 1981, Cybotron’s “Alleys Of Your Mind” single had announced Detroit techno as an already fully-formed sound—scuzzy and robotic, with an offbeat sense of humor.  On Cybotron’s debut album, Enter, Atkins and his band mates Richard Davis and Jon 5 expanded the sound of their early singles into a deeply funky blueprint—one from which today’s techno rarely strays, and one today’s techno rarely matches.  You can also hear Cybotron’s influence all over today’s pop landscape—“Enter”’s synthesizer workouts show up across Daft Punk’s Discovery, for example, and Robyn’s “Konichiwa Bitches” would be unimaginable without its Atkins-like techno foundation—but the real fun in hearing Enter isn’t playing Spot-The-Influence; it’s witnessing the arrival of a new musical art form that sounds just as vital today as it must have then.

-Marty Brown, 2007