Higher Science

The Storytellers of Empire By Kamila Shamsie

Yes. This.

(Source: mollycrabapple)

h/t to Laura Hudson. Purportedly from an okcupid profile.

The title alone probably gives you a pretty good idea of whether you’re going to laugh (and groan) at this single-serving site.

Hey creatives: this is what they think of you. From this week’s issue of Businessweek.

Voice of a generation and drugged-cupcake advocate Laurie Penny, taking on MPDG syndrome in America’s newest exported source of shame, The New Girl. Dear world: we’re sorry.

It’s been years since we’ve had a good old-fashioned boot party on the subject of emo, but something tells me that’s about to change. A newly reformed At The Drive-In’s headlining Coachella this spring*, and the record labels are surely hard at work on tenth-anniversary repackagings of classics like Weezer’s Maladroit. This means that it’s time to dust of another old chestnut of the early Oughts: Jessica Hopper’s essay “Emo: Where The Girls Aren’t.” Since the publication where it originally appeared had the brilliant business sense to go under years ago, it’s more difficult to find on the internet than it should be. [Here’s a link to a reprint] For the tl;dr crowd, the article documents how, as riot grrrl gave way to emo, which in turn gave way to Vagrant Records-style emo, women returned to being marginalized, as they had been before, in a scene that should ostensibly know better.

Is there anything that separates Dashboard Confessional’s condemnation of his bedhopping betrayer and makes it any more damning than any woman/mother/whore/ex-girlfriend showing up in songs of Jane’s Addiction, Nick Cave, The Animals or Justin Timberlake? Can you compartmentalize and not judge the woe towards women readily exemplified in most of the recorded catalog of Zeppelin because the first eight bars of ‘Communication Breakdown’ is, as the parlance goes, total fucking godhead?… Who do you excuse and why? Do you check your personality and your politics at the door and just dance or just rock or just let side A spin out?… It is almost too big of a question to ask.

Keep in mind, this is an article written a decade after Bikini Kill starred at Lollapalooza, a decade after Sassy magazine brought Kim Gordon and Ian Svenonius into the backpacks of suburban tweens, a decade after the war, or at least the first battle, was supposed to have been won. So what does this have to do with my 13-Point Plan To Destroy The Comics Industry,** aside from a reminder that critical darling Craig Thompson’s Blankets has some seriously questionable gender politics of its own?

That the comics industry, by and large, has never truly addressed its representational issues, both on the page and behind it, is disgraceful, yes, but not out of step with the rest of pop culture, for the most part. Even outside of the easy target of emo, Michael Azzerad’s seminal Our Band Could Be Your Life features thirteen bands, with several members apiece. Out of these dozens of participants, there are a total of two women (Kim Gordon and Heather Lewis). Even more discouraging is that hard-fought progress could be lost so easily. While this doesn’t make for a very heartening rallying cry, it does mean that the general lack of progress in the comics industry in the last, well, ever, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily lost any ground with the rest of popular culture. When Zooey Deschanel’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl is what’s supposed to pass for an independent woman on TV, you get the idea is that the struggle is global. Pick up a shovel and start anywhere.

* Okay, I’m genuinely excited about this.
** Apologies to Nation Of Ulysses

Mike Tyson, Philosopher.

Alan Moore, 1982

[the entire piece is worth reading, not just for watching an enfant terrible kicking over the money-changers’ tables, but for the fact too much of the commentary on sexism is, sadly, still relevant thirty years later]

(Source: glycon.livejournal.com)

One of the main arguments against Kickstarter, whether actively voiced, or merely implied, is that it wouldn’t scale. That “charity” or “patronage” is nice, but not exactly a business model.

Depending on who’s doing the accounting, Kickstarter, in aggregate, was either the third or fourth largest publisher of comics last year. It might have plenty of kinks to work out, but scalability is not one of them.

John Maus made the rockists of the world clutch their copies of High Fidelity in horror when he told Pitchfork last year that he didn’t regret the dying of the record store, and that he was “glad they all have little ‘closed’ signs on their doors now.” His argument mostly centered around the “oppressive” elitism of the forced interaction with the clerk, but also the inability to find what he wanted.

Does this sound like anywhere else we know?

I went to the comics store today on the way home from work, riding my bike uphill on a stretch (South Lamar) that’s picked off more than a few cyclists in the last year, with the intent of getting Fatale, the new Brubaker/Philips joint. Of course, they were sold out.

This, in and of itself, shouldn’t be cause for reading them the riot act, of course. Part of fetishizing physical media entails the possibility that you can’t always get what you want. However, there’s the assumption that comics shops are the lifeblood of the ever-financially fragile industry, and every attempt must be made to prop them up, lest the culture die.

Bullshit.

This wasn’t Bottomless Belly Button we’re talking about here. While it’s a creator-owned comic that’s not based on a toy line from the 80s, we’re still talking about a comic by the two most popular creators in the industry. As far as I can tell from the cover, it features femme fatales, Chtulu, and machine guns, which in the comics business, should be a surefire hit. And it was, judging by the empty rack at the store. But you know what? Unfulfilled desire isn’t feeding Ed Brubaker’s family. Money is, and despite my best efforts, I couldn’t give it to him today, and I don’t get find out what that femme fatale was doing with Chtulu and the machine gun. This is a failure on the part of the comics shop, and they are literally taking money away from Ed Brubaker’s children.

This isn’t the 90s, where collector speculation perverted the market. Publishers make money by selling comics, and stores make money by buying and subsequently reselling comics, and really both parties are barely doing enough of said selling and reselling for their own taste. Everybody loses, simply because the store didn’t have the foresight to stock enough of a product for more than eight hours. Same thing with the Swamp Thing hardcovers by a little-known Englishman named Alan Moore.

You know what they did make it a priority to buy? Eighteen varities of Fan Service and Chronic Masturbators Unite! (variant cover). They always said that if we bought better comics, we’d eventually get better comics shops. Like most free-market fantasies, this proved to be a little optimistic.

Just remember this the next time someone says we need to save the direct market in order to keep the comics industry alive.

And please, think of Ed Brubaker’s twelve starving children.