Just because music coverage on The Factual Opinion was sparse this year doesn’t mean we haven’t been paying attention. Nope! This year at Factual Headquarters, in preparation for our 2010 year-end music wrap-up, we’ve logged more man-hours listening to more music than every year before this combined (and there were four of them, suckas). Honestly, the year warranted it. 2010 was the caliber of music year that only comes along once a decade, if we’re lucky. 90% of the capital-M Major artists that released material this year brought their capital A-games, while the quality of the newbies’ material kept the old guard on their toes. It was as if everybody all at once figured out that the way to deal with the ever-failing music industry was simply to put out the highest quality product. For the last couple of years, it seemed to be going the other way: since nobody’s buying records anyway, it was like they thought they might as well phone it in and save energy for the concerts. But there’s been such a rebirth of musical creativity this year that it actually, literally gives me hope for the future of music itself.
Over the next ten days*, Tucker Stone and I are going to count down our favorite thirty albums of the year. We got together in person to hash out this list—so there’s some blood in these choices. There was little overall consensus. Most of us had to fight like wildebeests for our favorites, and the result is a deeply personal mix of overlooked gems and world-beating, monster albums. As usual, we’re going to wax poetic about each one, to see if we can convert you to some of our opinions.
Additionally, for the second year in a row, we’ve rounded up the TFO extended family—which includes Nina Stone, David Brothers, Matthew J. Brady, Tim O’Neil, Andre Harris, Sarah Engelman, and Josh Woodbeck, as well as the never-before-seen-in-these-pages Frankie Alvarez—and devised a list of our 50 favorite singles and tracks of 2010. As a whole, this crew isn’t quite as nerdy as Tucker and I (at least, not when it comes to music! Boom!) So, in the songs list, you’re getting songs that have resonated with a group that has had the good fortune of not having to keep up with blogs and shit. Together, we’ve come with a batch of songs that’s as far-reaching and accurate as any other year-end list I’ve seen so far.
Plus, there will be some surprises along the way—some sidebar explorations of genres and artists that had particularly notable 2010s. It’s going to be an extravaganza! It’s almost too much! And yet, 2010 has been a rich enough year to support it all.
Finally, for the last couple of years, I’ve posted a year-encapsulating, 100 song playlist in the intro to give a sense of the wide-ranging year. But it has always been in text form. This year, I’ve thrown up some links to a downloadable version of my 100 song mp3 mix, along with the track list on my tumblr. There’s a lot of overlap between it and our albums and songs lists, so feel free to use it to follow along and check out some of the stuff you might be interested in. In the meantime, we’re going to kick off the albums countdown in a hot minute with number 30. Please enjoy.
Batman Odyssey # 5 Written by Neal Adams Art by Neal Adams and computers Published by DC Comics
If there's any comic that can get away with mis-cutting the pages in such a fashion that four of them have the word balloons sliced neatly in half, thus resulting in a loss of text, it's this one. Sure, you'll miss some of the "jokes" as well as portions of the "plot", but truthfully speaking, the pleasures of Batman Odyssey aren't tangled up in those sorts of pedantic concerns. This comic is pure trainwreck fascination--why does Aquaman look like that, what's keeping Talia's breasts in place, why is Commissioner Gordon so quick to give Robin a ride, and seriously, is Bruce Wayne narrating this comic fully nude? And sure, you could get the same "look at this world's failure" thrill by reading the twitter feeds of Newsarama employees, but Odyssey is a route that doesn't produce a pesky "will these hands ne'er be clean?" attitude.
Shadowland # 5 Written by Andy Diggle Art by Billy Tan & Guru eFx & Victor Olazabu Published by Marvel Comics
Not much you can say about this one. It's the last issue of a mini-series where Daredevil was the bad guy, because he'd been possessed by a character last featured in Elektra: Assassin, which was a pretty decent comic that came out back when "taking chances" meant more than complaining about the treatment you got from American Airlines on fucking Facebook. You'd think this might be interesting to read--after all, everybody who read it hated it, and since everybody skipped Thor the Mighty Avenger and it was so wonderful that Jesus nearly came back to cook you a panini, you should always do the opposite of whatever everybody does and you'll end up only reading good comics. (Is that how it works?) Turns out a stopped clock is right twice a day, or whatever else it was that alcoholic vegan I thought was my father told me right before he said "come get these comic boxes out of the garage or I'll tell you exactly what it is that keeps me from loving you".
Detective Comics Annual # 12 Written by David Hine Art by Agustin Padilla Published by DC Comics
The one thing that Batman hasn't had in common with other DC characters in the last few years is pretty obvious: people still want to buy monthly comics featuring him. Superman and Wonder Woman comics keep setting records for how many readers they can shed, Green Lantern is incapable of producing consistent interest if he isn't involved in some kind of everybody-in-the-pool crossover, and the Flash gets a new relaunch whenever somebody shouts "nobody puts baby in the corner" loud enough. Batman's ability to survive is only surprising if you're smart enough to ignore comics websites--the company has spent the last year rearranging chairs and titles so often that it seems like DC is being run by the guy who prints their business cards, so it's not a shocker that Batman's hasn't experienced a break-this-so-it-can-be-broken experience to claim as his own.
Luckily, Grant Morrison came up with an idea that's going to pay off handsomely: Batman Incorporated. It's an unlimited credit card for DC to pump out a bunch of half-cooked stories, because all a writer has to do is propose the opening of a Batman office in whatever random countries Morrison hasn't claimed for himself, and bang, DC has something to fill out all those random spin-offs that they seem incapable of saying "no" to. And sure, you might think that brand dilution is a concern, but if you think that, you're probably waiting on Santa Claus to get your parents back together, because everybody over the age of six knows that Brand Dilution is the only business model that DC's executive team remember from their Devry classes. On top of that, we've just hit a solid ten years of not giving a shit whether the art in continuity comics makes any fucking sense whatsoever, so DC's free to hire the cheapest possible hands to churn out the most random stuff they can find--like this annual for instance, which is apparently about Batman's fetish for hiring strangers and making them wear the ninja henchmen costumes left over from Batman Begins.
Uncanny X-Force # 2 Written by Rick Remender Art by Jerome Opena & Dean White Published by Marvel Comics
Reading Uncanny X-Force is like sitting attentively through a Harry Potter fan-video with a Garth Brooks spousal abuse soundtrack: every fiber of your being will tell you that what you're doing benefits you nothing, and yet you sink in deeper, intoxicated by the thought that you'll soon be swallowed whole. And while all of the credit may be due to Jerome Opena's Euro-inspired pencil of detail, it's hard to forget about Daken (he's the dark wolverine), which remains a visual feast, and yet reads as if all possibility of pleasure has been surgically removed. God knows if something like this—the wonderful trash, about a team made of crazies, led by a monster, hunting a little boy—can maintain, but for now, this is your donut, powdered with cheap speed.
B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: New World # 5 Written by Mike Mignola & John Arcudi Art by Guy Davis and Dave Stewart Published by Dark Horse Comics
And so we reach the conclusion of an action-heavy episode in Dark Horse's long-running B.P.R.D. series, and while the tale ends up being a particularly well-told piece of stand-alone pleasure, it's a bit curious--is this what we're doing, now? Monster-of-the-week stories, incremental movements in the lives of our heroes? Oh, it isn't a bad thing, if that's the case--hell, pick a television show that's still doing the once-a-week story well, name a comic, there isn't any comparison; this is the Mignola-verse, these are the one cherry bed left, a place where the visuals are a point of pride, where the stories are tightly plotted and no apologies (i just like art/i just like story) are required. It's a good comic, this one. But when something you love has been great before? You know how that story goes.
Widowmaker # 1 Written by Jim McCann Art by David Lopez, Alvaro Lopez & Nathan Fairbairn Published by Marvel Comics
This isn't actually a new mini-series, it's the next issue in a series that just got cancelled. Same creative team, same characters, and the story is a direct continuation of whatever happened in the last issue of Hawkeye & Mockingbird. Marvel tried this same thing with the Agents of Atlas franchise, and while it worked for a little while, it eventually didn't. This probably won't be any different--whatever it was that didn't catch on with Hawkeye & Mockingbird won't catch on in Widowmaker, but the whole point of the choice has nothing to do with actually pleasing anyone, it's just a numbers game. Widowmaker #1's first issue sales have to beat Hawkeye & Mockingbird's last issue sales, and then whatever mini-series follows Widowmaker has to beat the last issue sales of Widowmaker. That cycle will continue until it's no longer profitable to do so, and then some other title will receive the same treatment. One could argue for the book's quality--it is competently made--but none of that has any relationship to why it exists. And since Marvel is so blatantly going to treat it like a product, here's the only review that matters: it comes with paper and staples. On that front, your mileage will not vary.
R.E.B.E.L.S. # 23 Written by Tony Bedard Art by Claude St. Aubin, Scott Hanna, Rich & Tanya Horie Published by DC Comics
In this comic, the reader discovers that one of the rewards of being promoted from cadet status in the Green Lantern Corps involves "customizing" one's uniform, and there's probably no better indication of the tediousness of the Green Lantern concept than that moment, as "customization" revolves around re-arranging the black and green colors on a form-fitting bodysuit. At one point, a character mentions that the rings "choose" their bearers based off "how good power rings are at reading the content of your character". Following that one down the logical rabbithole, part of one's "character" is tied up in being an unimaginative douchebag? To its credit, that seems to be one of the main narrative threads of the R.E.B.E.L.S. series--that Green Lantern's are a bunch of boring tools, and the only mature response is the one the main character of this series so frequently delivers: reminding them of this constantly.
The Incredible Hulks # 618 Written by Greg Pak Art by Paul Pelletier, Danny Miki & Paul Mounts Published by Marvel Comics
Here's the background plot for this issue: some bad guy named "the chaos king" made everybody in the world go to sleep, and then he made all the dead people rise up to "walk the earth", and then the Hulks showed up to fight them. (But first the Hulk cries.) If it mattered that this is the third time in recent memory that a super-hero "event" story revolved around zombie characters fighting living super-heroes, then this might be a subject of ridicule. As it is, the only way to figure out whether this is laughable or not would be to play catch up on a bunch of series that are so toxically unfriendly they should probably just rename the cross-over "Go the FUCK AWAY", and that ain't happening, at least not until they cut the number of Hulks in this book to a manageable number. Like eight.
The Boys # 49 Written by Garth Ennis Art by Russ Braun & Tony Avina Published by Dynamite
Whereas a recent issue introduced a never before seen omniscient narrator who showed up to give a scene extra melodrama it most certainly didn't require, this issue contains a confusingly plotted flashback sequence that strains the dwindling goodwill that's been extended towards The Boys for the last year. Now that it isn't just the art that's falling apart, it's starting to seem like Dynamite's "editors? nahhhh" methodology might not be that great of an idea.
Wolverine The Best There Is # 1 Written by Charlie Huston Art by Juan Jose Ryp & Andres Mossa Published by Marvel Comics
This is the new Wolverine series. It's a thought project designed to make you believe that serious Wolverine comics focused on topics like "the animal inside" and "the cycle of violence" are what Wolverine comics should always be about. This way, anytime someone complains about comics where Wolverine talks a lot, has girlfriend trouble, grieves over whichever fellow X-men is currently on coffin rotation, or basically does a bunch of boring shit like cry a single tear and let Spider-man get away with asking him out for "sushi and talking" (that actually happened), Marvel can point at this The Best There Is thing and say "look, we did one that was just focused on exploitative violence, and it was a piece of shit, you don't know what you're talking about." It's a mean idea, but it's not a bad idea. It'll probably work too, because this is totally the piece of shit you'd need to prove that point.
Batman & Robin # 17 Written by Paul Cornell Art by Scott McDaniel Published by DC Comics
The big question with comics that are often referred to as “fun” is what the fuck “fun” actually means. See, some people use the word “fun” to refer to comics that don't have rape or giant vagina shaped monsters in them, comics that focus on people patting each other on the back and grinning like Bruce Vilanch just showed up on a unicycle, while other people just use “fun” to indicate that they read something really fucking stupid, knew it was fucking stupid, and still enjoyed it without feeling the need to come up with arguments for why the people involved in said thing's creation are some kind of collective of geniuses. When “fun” is used as a slam—as it should be for this comic—it can be in reference to dopey shit like a couple of people jumping into an open grave to have a conversation, in which it's revealed that the open grave is a crime scene that's now rendered completely useless in terms of evidence gathering. But dopey shit isn't enough: for “fun” to be a slam, the comic should also have 1) jokes that aren't funny 2) a general failing to conceal the mercenery nature of the product and 3) i don't know. Like this:
Invincible Iron Man # 32 Written by Matt Fraction Art by Salvador Larroca & Frank D'Armata Published by Marvel Comics
We're out here on the edge of the pop consciousness, making trips to the seventh sector, this is just what Kirby would've dreamed off if he had lived in a bisected digital mind, retweet that, yesss, and this: it's talking, baby. The talk-talk-talk. Underscore it, if you feel it. I'm saying--wait, i'm saying. Talking. Talk. -- I've never wanted to be in comics, more, you know? Like: living the dream. My super-hero power is making up arguments why what I do should be called art. -
See, some people--i call them "fanboyz"--they complain to me baby. Baby baby, I'm telling you that they complain to me. They say: Nothing ever happens in Iron Man comics. Wait-Aziz is calling. -
Nevermind, I text him later. Bananaphone. I was saying? - Oh yeah, nothing happening? Fix the way you read, that's the program. The action IS there--it's in the salt, the meal is prepared. I have the the matrix on lockdown, i rub them with oils. The three kings, you understand language. - The art? I don't look at it. Its like--is there a better word than Chi? Chi seems retro. I'm more about the futuristic. But chi: i can't look at art. The words are art enough. Them shits flow like the river Styx. One love.
New Character Parade By Johnny Ryan Published by Pigeon Press
This is what looks to be the first "book" to arrive from Pigeon Press. Similar in format to Ryan's Comic Book Holocaust and Klassic Komix Klub, New Character Parade is a collection of one-page gag strips--many of which were previously available online--which stretch the boundaries of what some might find tasteful. (There's a few rape jokes, plenty of racial slurs, the occasional fecal/penile/clitoral humor.) In keeping with his non-Prison Pit/Blecky work, Ryan's gag comics are a hit-or-miss kind of experience, with the ratio on this one skewing funnier than it was in Holocaust or KKK. The misses need little introduction, you can usually just check the last panel: if it seems clever or odd, it's a good one; if neither, it probably isn't.
The big change to be found is in the hits. Whereas the most spot-on strips in the previous collections derived their zing from the painful accuracy of their victim's satirization (Art Spiegelman's attempts to "borify" his comics even more, the politically correct update inherent in giving Captain America "AIDS breath"), the best moments in New Character are when the comic takes bizarre left turns, abandoning the offensive for the strange. The first time it happens--when an attempted chainsaw rape results in an absurdist shout out to "generation stink", complete with fist bump--the pace built by the prior pages is thrown off, leaving the reader completely unprepared for "The Chris Benwah Story", which might be the darkest piece of comedy in Ryan's entire career. Here's a taste of that:
There's no comparison, even to Johnny's 9/11 strips: this is harsh. From there, the book jarringly reverts to form, with the next page delivering a lazy (and toothless) attack on the Pope. And while nothing else in the book ever gets as dark as "Benwah", Ryan's contempt for "popular" humor quickly returns, with a one panel punchline focused on the idiocy of Larry The Cable Guy that contains such withering disgust ("git 'r done" being the obvious byproduct of castration) that one questions whether Ryan just isn't as irritated by the Catholic Church as he is by a comedian who eats out the lowest common denominator. But as the book continues, the strangeness starts to dogpile.
The comics above have nothing in common in terms of "plot", they don't share the same punchlines, but what they do all have is an unbelievable weirdness, a wholesale rejection of the types of jokes that Ryan's done so often before in this type of work. Oh, you'll still find plenty of funny, mean shit here: Ronald Reagan's Oval Office assault on Q-Bert will fill a gap that most would take to their graves, and there's something inherently satisfying to the concept that Kenny Loggins lives inside everyone's toilet. But then there's "Casino Splatz", with a street hustler (dressed like a silent movie villain) being forcibly inducted into the Maggot Brotherhood by way of a Prison Pit style body possession, or an openly desperate plea that Americans never forget their inalienable obligation to "kick it up a notch". The joke in "Neato Keitho" isn't that he was trying to rape the infant descendent of Hitler, it's that he used his last breath to apologize to the American flag for failing to give it the revenge he knew it deserved.
In mainstream comics, there's no reason to concern oneself with intent: they exist to make money, they have no other purpose. But in the outskirts, in something like this, where Ryan's reputation so far precedes him (and his content precludes so many of the regular channels)--intent and motive become an active component of the work while reading it, no matter its unknowability. "Why did he go that far" might be the popular one, but that's usually a sham question, designed just so that his critics can smugly respond "because he's not any good". The better question, the interesting one: Why is he doing it like this, now?
The change could be Prison Pit, it could be Angry Youth # 14, but more likely, those are mere outgrowths of a more exciting development: he's moved on. He's written the best shit joke, his best rape gag, his funniest story about two kids who kill one another. What he's doing now--toying with a formula he arguably perfected back in the early pages of Comics Book Holocaust--is exploring the tangential gags that made that last issue of Angry Youth such a revelation. (You might not remember how Boobs Pooter's joke finally ended, but few forget that throwaway moment in the middle, when a paramedic looked at his partner and said "Are you crying?")
It doesn't seem to have totally caught on. For some reason, Ryan includes two painful strips near the book's conclusion--one made up from the ceaseless stream of negative comments left on his Vice comics, and the final strip, where a man happily abandons suicide after hearing that Ryan has shut the project down. Both the strips aren't funny, worser still, they seem a bit clueless, as if Ryan was disappointed that he failed to find a large audience for hyper-offensive shaggy dog stories, anti-jokes, and a gleeful depiction of a horrible double murder.
He'll never be everybody's cartoonist--there's too much he does that people will get turned off by, too little time for his fans to continue the fruitless conversations about why dangerous comedy enthralls them more than observational bullshit and corny pop cultural referencing. But the truth is that he could've kept going, dropping a yearly Prison Pit and a couple of self-published "Fuck Spiegelman, Wolverine Too" comics, and the praise would have kept rolling in. Instead, he's letting his past triumphs stand behind him, and plunging forward. And if it seems clumsy at times, even embarrassing, it's a price worth paying.
Dracula: The Company of Monsters # 4 Written by Daryl Gregory, Story by Kurt Busiek Art by Scott Godlewski & Stephen Downer Published by Boom
Have you seen a lot of Shakespeare? Like movies or plays, or both? I had a time that I was really into reading, seeing, and performing that stuff. If you're new to Shakespeare, I find that one generally wants it straight, as in full classic style, proper pronunciation, period settings, relatively uncut. But after you've seen Midsummer a few times too many, they usually start to crave seeing it done in a new way.
And that's the really cool thing about Shakespearean plays - they're wide open for interpretation. Except for the lines, the "enter" and "exit" instructions, you can go anywhere with the entire play. The most common thing I've seen people do to change it up is to switch time periods. They'll set Midsummer in the 1950's or Hamlet in the modern day. And it can be really clever (some of the film versions) or really boring (a community theatre Midsummer I saw in the early 90's.)
I mention this because I feel like we've got a similar thing happening here with Dracula. It's as if our writer friends got serious and said, "Okay, we want to do vampires. And we want to do THE Vampire of vampires. But we can't just start telling a modern day Dracula story - that doesn't get me going. We have to come up with a reason for the old Dracula to be in this world again, so find a way to "bring him back" and that'll be our new story." I appreciate this. I like it, even. And although I started reading it here in issue #4, I can still pick up on what's going on.
It's a tale of darkness, you know the drill--darkest parts of ourselves and the darkest of creatures of the night--gotcha. I was hooked from the first page. I didn't put the comic book down or look away, I didn't even look at my watch. And although I don't know why the people in this comic have awakened Dracula and brought him to America, I can see that it wasn't for a particularly good reason, and it was exciting to watch a good kind of evil triumph over a bad kind of evil? Dracula was the victim in this case. No one likes to see victims lose. It's irritating.
I enjoyed the art. Not only does it tell the story well, but there's all these pointed lines and hard angled, and for whatever reason, that kind of style really supported the basic wickedness of the story. I don't know why that is, psychologically, but it happened to mere here. The faces are just a tad more sharp or gaunt then they are in other comic books that I've read - the chins are pointier, all the jaws are drawn clenched. Somehow, that gave the overall book an uncomfortable tension that is perfect for this genre. I don't know whether or not that was an intentional choice or simply the way these guys usually draw - but whatever. It's there and it underlined everything, while subtly reminding me of the fangs and sharp nails. Dracula may have fangs, but everybody else has their own sharp edge--it's an even playing field.
I felt neither a sense of elation nor disdain in regards to this comic, but I liked it. And yeah, I'll totally read the next one. Probably.
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