Angst in my Pangst

I have a feeling that Beatzo is about to die. About time, too.

The Apatow-a-thon continues. Watched 17 episodes of Undeclared on Saturday. This series is a spiritual sequel of sorts to Freaks and Geeks; while the latter was about high school, this is about a bunch of freshmen in college. The “undeclared” term refers to the status of an undergrad student who has not decided on a choice of major subject. Ran on Fox in 2001 and, like all Fox series that I’ve come to love, was cancelled after the first season. Not because anything was wrong with the show; apparently, Fox telecast episodes in the wrong order, confusing viewers and bringing down ratings. Worst part is, even the DVD set has the episodes in wrong order; halfway through episode 10, we figured something goofy is going on, checked Wikipedia, and proceeded to rewatch the episodes in proper order. One of the high points of watching this was the number of surprise guest appearances by quite a few of the F&G cast as grown-up versions. Apatow-regular Seth Rogen is one of the leads ( and also writes some of the episodes), and Jason Segel has a recurring role. Both of them are a treat to watch, my only gripe being that Segel seems to have been typecast as the dumped boyfriend in almost all his major roles. Case in point: the Apatow movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I also watched over the weekend.

Wish-list updates: The third ( and final) volume of Osamu Tezuka’s Dororo is out. As is the first volume of his seminal Blackjack, sixteen more to go. Amazon, ahoy!

And I see a solicitation for the second Omnibus edition of The Walking Dead, out 27th November. Ooh, yeah! Not buying the first volume of this omnibus is one of the greatest Comicbook mistakes I’ve made. Still trying to find a decent copy.

I just finished reading The Complete Zot, going as slow as I could. Each of the stories is followed by a commentary page by Scott McCloud, in which he would explain some of his motivations, give a bit of historical perspective to his work ( being very modest about his genius and all) and that would make me go reread the issue again just to take in the story from a fresh perspective. I never thought I would enjoy the series the way I did – in my mind, I had filed the book as ‘out-of-print curiousity’ rather than a work to be enjoyed. But once you get beyond the awkward figure-drawing and somewhat clunky dialogues, McCloud’s stories and characters radiate an old-wordly charm that is hard to explain. It is a beautiful mixture of fun superheroics and a melancholy coming-of-age story. The early issues are almost all set in Zot’s world, and the emphasis is more towards tweaking familiar superhero idioms – alas, if I had a rupee for every post-80’s series that tries to do this, I would own a Frank Miller Daredevil page by now. There are flashes of brilliance in these stories – the De-Evolutionary “Revert!” vaudevillian romp had me in stitches; it is hard to believe that a character like Arthur Dekko (and his completely-twisted worldview) could exist in a pre-Morrison Doom Patrol world; and the chilling 9Jack9 moment, where the character does the unexpected, leading to one of the most downbeat superhero endings I’ve ever read. But it is with the Earth stories, the ones in which Zot is stranded on Jenny’s (i.e our) world is where McCloud really cuts loose. It’s no longer a superhero story from then on, as individual issues are told from points of views of different characters, with Zot himself becoming little more than a presence in most of the stories. Every one of the earth stories deal with real-world themes – about adulthood, sex, same-sex relationships, responsibilities, to name a few. The book ends on a very open-ended note, possibly the best possible conclusion a series like this can have.

Oddly enough, similar themes as Zot can be seen in the TV series Freaks and Geeks. Saw all 18 episodes last weekend, based on recommendations from my friend Pablo. It was only when the credits ran at the beginning of the first episode that I realised this was a Judd Apatow production. And it had Apatow familiars Jason Segel and Seth Rogen in it. Set in a Michigan high school in 1980, and dealing primarily with the tribulations of the Weir siblings – Lindsay and Sam, the series is as much about their social universe as it is a delightfully retro look at life in the eighties. While primarily a comedy, F&G has just the right moments of drama to balance out the goofiness from time to time. The casting is note-perfect.The soundtrack is a delight, featuring bands like Joan Jett ( the title song ‘Bad Reputation’ is by her), Billy Joel, Gloria Gaynor, The Grateful Dead, Deep Purple, Van Halen, Cream, The Who – well, nearly every notable band of the time period.

Right now, I am blazing through The Big Bang Theory, and enjoying it tremendously.

A not-so-funny parody of Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome comic.

A neat feature comparison chart of the major music players on Windows – Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player and the somewhat lesser-known Media Monkey, which pips the others. Not too surprising for me, I’ve been using MM for nearly a year and a half now, after an eight-year relationship with Winamp, and I can vouch for its solid featureset and overall user-friendliness.

The Lagaan Box set has had its price reduced to Rs 999. Half of its initial cost. Well, what are you waiting for?

Slightly old news: Virgin Comics closes shop. Sort of. They claim there are plans to relocate to Los Angeles to be “closer to Hollywood”. Personally I think it was the mediocrity and the hype that did them in. Most of the comics I read were a confused mess. I doubt the writers involved even knew who their intended audience was. On one hand, they insisted on the strong authentic Indian experience, hyped up the reliance on Indian mythology, and came up with lumps of derivative storytelling that had more in common with fantasy cliches. Have you tried reading Ramayan 3392 AD or Devi? One was a puerile fantasy story that made the characters we know “edgy”. The other was a Witchblade rip-off, with Indian police inspectors wearing trenchcoats and skyscraper-ridden towns called Sitapur. The Sadhu, another series is described by some unknown user on Wikipedia as “comparable to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman“, which made me laugh out aloud. At the end of the day, Virgin comics was basically packaging superhero stories coated with a thin Indianised veneer and decked up with a lot of Photoshop filters. The irony is that the unavailability of the releases in non-metros in India. I have yet to see issues in any major bookstores in Hyderabad. ( MR had some second-hand copies, last I checked.)

Currently reading Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991 by Scott McCloud. Zot was a comic book published in the 80’s, written and drawn by McCloud before he took on the task of writing his trilogy of comic-book treatises. In a way, it’s a brave venture, bringing the series back in print after you’ve preached to the choir about various aspects of sequential storytelling – in the introduction, McCloud says the same thing, about his nervousness at laying bare the follies of youth before readers who are accustomed to seeing him as a comics guru. I have just begun the book, and it does not disappoint. There are glitches, obviously, but the overall package is a sturdy little relic. McCloud is vocal about the manga influence on this early work, and it shows in the pacing, the panel layouts and the action sequences. The storyline deals with a superhero from a comicbook universe arriving on “our” world, the work playing against the innocent Silver Age sensibilities of the character against mundane, real-world elements of the latter.

Two-morrows publishing, the folks who bring out really cool books and magazines on comics and comic creators, are having a sale on their site. Magazines like Rough Cut, Write Now and Comic Book Artist are on sale for 2$ each ( a 71% discount!), while the book section has upto 50% discountson them. Good stuff, wish the shipping charges to India wouldn’t be so high…

On a similar note, Top Shelf Comix have their annual $3 sale, where a number of bestselling graphic novels are offered at that price and quite a few others have discounts on them as well.

I have stopped buying CDs. They clutter up the house and I end up listening to the ripped mp3s anyway while the actual discs gather dust in the living room. To assuage a bit of the illegal-downloading guilt, I got myself an eMusic account. 11.99$ per month for 30 tracks, and they have a huge selection of electronic music AND almost all new Indian bands put up their music there. This month, I downloaded Shaa’ir and Func’s album Light Tribe, S&F being the most hyped Indian band EVER ( except maybe Raghu Dixit, whose album I didn’t enjoy at all ). These guys are mentioned in some way or the other in every Rolling Stone India issue, and one of their tracks featured in a free CD that came with the magazine two months ago. They even ended up making an appearance in ‘Rock On’. Shaa’ir is Randolph Correia, the lead guitarist for Pentagram and Func is Monica Dogra, and together they make for an amazing package, Func’s vocals and Correia’s grooves meshing perfectly in the electronica-fuelled tracks.

Smoke a.k.a Dhruv/Ashutosh’s Smoke Signals was the second legit download album of the month. I loved the few songs I heard for movies like Bombay Boys and Snip!, as well as random RSJ albums, and recently, there was this animated video on one of the music channels that featured a song called ‘Summertime Rocks’ from this new album, with guest vocals by Kailash Kher. The rest of ‘Smoke Signals’, as I found out, was not bad at all! The overall mood of the album is really Indian, but with a very eclectic soundscape. ‘Yaad Tumhari’, a thumri by Shubha Joshi, is a pure classical number at first, but then a subtle rock guitar riff plays in the background, along with a very very soft percussion track that never overpowers the tabla. But that’s followed by ‘On and On’, a funkily mixed rendition of Mahalaxmi Iyer’s vocals chanting a shloka – the vocals are heavily processed, and the carnatic violin sounds like a mad combination of an electric guitar and a phat synthline as the song progresses. The rest of the songs are similarly unpredictable. Rags Khote singing Bangla in a French accent in ‘You’re So Beautiful’. The African-sounding ‘The Final Frontier’. The very unlullabylike ‘Lullaby’.

Both the albums, incidentally, have been released by Blue Frog records based out of Mumbai. The company grew out of a live club, and now has its own sound labs, a music production house, and A&R services. I believe Dhruv & Ashutosh run it, or are at least major stakeholders in it. The site looks well-designed, and so far, in addition to S&F and Smoke, the label has brought out albums by John McLaughlin, Sanjay Divecha and Vivek Rajagopalan. They do sell CDs online, as well as mp3 tracks and also have a licenseable audio library for use by corporates.

Of course, the No-CDs policy does not apply to Rahman albums, hoo-ah!

News of the day: Batman: Arkham Asylum, currently under development for the PC, X-Box 360 and the PS3. The screenshots look nifty, the gameplay details are encouraging, but what increases the chances of this being really good is the fact that Paul Dini is scripting it. Dini, along with Messrs Bruce Timm, Alan Burnett and Eric Radomski, is responsible the single-greatest screen adaptation of the character – the nineties’ show Batman: The Animated Series, and he’s also a fairly competent comicbook writer, having tackled Batman in the ongoing Detective Comics , and also on standalone books like Batman: War on Crime.( But wait, Dini wrote Countdown too, right? Goddamn, the game is going to suck.)

Grant Morrison is the current writer on the ongoing Batman title, and a couple of nights ago, I caught up with the latest issues. So far, Morrison has brought startling developments to the character – his first four-issue arc ‘Batman and Son’ gave us ninja man-bats, a new love interest ( called Jezebel Jett) and a son. Old-timers will remember a graphic novel called ‘Son of the Demon’, which was published in the late 80’s, drawn by Jerry Bingham and written by Mike W Barr. It had Batman teaming up with Ra’s Al Ghul, overcoming his hesitation in courting Ra’s daughter Talia, who always held a candle for him, and well…doing it with her. I read this story in ‘The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told’, a compendium that was one of my life-altering relics, because it introduced me to the Joker, the Monk, Calendar Man, Neal Adams, Dick Sprang, Alan Brennert, Earth-2, Man-Bat and taught me the Spanish word for Batman ( “El Hombre Murcielago”, hooo-ah!). The page where Batman and Talia go for it is indelibly etched in my brain, the way things-you-see-at-age-eleven ought to be. Too bad somebody at the library, where I read this book in the first place, tore off the page after a couple of months. And no, it wasn’t me. ( I just flicked the book, much later)

So anyway, ‘Son of the Demon’ was apparently a more well-written story than ‘The Killing Joke’ – does not really matter now, does it? – but what came out of it, after the fight scene with the bad guy Qayin and Batman’s stony-faced farewell from Ra’s and Talia, is Bat-baby, the child that Talia had claimed she miscarried. At the end, the child is adopted by an anonymous couple, Batman goes on with his life, and Dennis O’Neil, the Bat-editor-in-chief declared the story out of continuity. That is, it never happened, it was a hoax, a grand trick played on thirteen-year-old minds by evil DC writers, an imaginary story, as they all are.

Morrison chose to bring the story back into it-was-all-true-dom, with minor modifications. Damian Wayne is the newest addition to the stable of Bat-children that infest Bruce Wayne and his dual identity, and the boy has not quite a chip as much as a gigantic wooden plank on his shoulder – not so strange as he has been brought up by the League of Assassins. On his first night at Wayne manor, the boy beheads a (albeit minor) Gotham rogue called the Spook, and subjects Alfred and Robin to humiliating bouts of child abuse. The four-issue arc sets into motion a number of sub-plots, including one decidedly odd plot-line about Three Batman Ghosts, which is tackled by Morrisson one by one, in the issues to come.

Issues 659-662 were fill-in issues by the team of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, and while I have been a fan of these creators in my younger days ( loved the Shazam miniseries they did, and their Spectre run hit a lot of highs, too), I safely skipped over these issues, which featured a storyline called Grotesk. When one has had a dose of the Morrison Mojo, it’s hard to settle for anything less, meh.

Batman 663 is the famous ( or notorious, depending on which fan you ask) all-prose issue, where Morrison merges hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness writing with John Van Fleet’s experimental panels. The story “The Clown At Midnight” is one of the Joker and his minions, and is narrated in a florid, demented style that rips your brains apart. Van Fleet’s art usually works for me, but here, they look like video-game screenshots.

Issues 664-666 continues the Three Ghosts of Batman subplot that was laid down in the first storyline. Hubba hubba, things seem to be getting better in Morrison’s Bat-verse. Bruce’s dalliance with Jezebel Jett continues, and at the same time, there is trouble in Gotham, with a Bane-like character preying on hookers. And we learn of the Black Casebook, a diary that recounts all the unexplained phenomona Batman has encountered so far in his career. Flying saucers, ghosts, vampires and the like. It was while I took this in that I got an inkling of what Morrison is trying to do with his run. If I am not wrong, he is trying to bring EVERY single non-Elseworlds Batman story ever told under the “It-actually-happened-here’s-the-explanation” umbrella. That means the Black Casebook refers to the silly period in Batman’s career in the 50’s and 60’s when writers were experimenting with making him a sci-fi hero, pitting him against aliens and robots. One of the earliest Batman stories, that of the Monk( this featured in the “Greatest Batman Stories” collection), was about vampires and werewolves. I cannot imagine you would understand the kind of chill I get when I see Joe Chill ( sorry, couldn’t help that) making a reappearance in the pages of Batman, or in seeing Bat-mite pop up in a cameo that’s furthest one can get from camp.

The run concludes in the future. Say what? Morrison does a time-hop with the storyline, jumping an undisclosed number of years in the future. Issue 666 has heavy Biblical undertones, and in the future as laid down in this issue, Damian Wayne is now the Batman, having renounced the assassin’s doctrine and adopting his father’s crusade in a world that seems to be spiralling towards Armageddon. There’s tragedy underwrit throughout this single issue, as we get hints of what really happened to Batman and his legacy, and the end-game is the showdown between Damian and the Third Ghost of Batman, in which we meet the Dark Knight’s greatest ally. Amazing, amazing story!

With Batman 667-669, Morrison teams up with artist extraordinaire JH Williams 3. Minor digression: JHW3 might just be the greatest artist working in comics today. Don’t take my word for it, go check out this series called Promethea. Only this guy could have rendered Alan Moore’s treatise on magic in the nuanced, hypnotic meld of storytelling and eye-popping beauty. He brings a design-sense to his work that borders on maniacal, with panel transitions and page layouts that leave you gasping for breath. In this storyline, ‘The Island of Doctor Mayhew’, Batman and Robin fly to a Carribean island and rub shoulders with a campy bunch of heroes from around the world, who call themselves the “Batmen of All Nations”. This is where my theory gains further ground, because you see, the Batmen of All Nations appeared in a 1950’s story, and Morrison used some of the characters ( the British heroes Knight and Squire) in his JLA and JLA: Classified run. The story becomes a murder mystery involving an organisation called ‘The Black Glove’, as one by one, the characters are murdered, and Batman has to find out the killer before it’s too late. This run is my favourite of Morrison’s chapter so far, and while I thought it was a throwaway arc, subsequent issues reveal it as being far from that.

The next couple of issues veers into editorial-mandate territory, as we find ourselves in the middle of a storyline called ‘The Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul’. Yes, Ra’s had died in a book called ‘Batman: Death and the Maidens’, and apparently, editors found it necessary for him to come back from the dead. The story arc is one of those Bat-title crossovers that piss me off a great deal, and they usually feature a lot of Bat-proteges running around trying to save each other from certain death. ( Ha, ‘certain death!’ is a nice name for a band) This one’s not much different. A lot of things happen, everybody lands up at Nanda Parbat, which is a favourite Bat-hangout, and Zombie Ra’s appears. I was too pissed off to take all of it in, partly because I had read it a couple of months ago and didn’t like it then, and I didn’t think I would like it now. And I was right, I didn’t.

Once Resurrection ends, the main storyline kicks in, called ‘Batman RIP’. It’s still going on, and I imagine it’s going to be really freaking good, from the two issues I read. All of Morrison’s stories so far have set up the Batman RIP storyline and apparently it will have grave ramifications in the hero’s life. I am looking forward to reading this series at one go, so I gave up after those two issues. And believe it or not, the central conceit of RIP is that its events are based around a 60’s single-issue story called ‘Robin Dies At Dawn’, also featured in “The Greatest Batman Stories”. Zur En Arrh! Commisioner Vane! Simon Hurt! Possibly you would enjoy RIP without knowing about all these references, but face it, it’s time to brush up on DC lore, if you want to enjoy Morrison’s Batman in the months to come. I am a happy man, because I had given up on reading a good Batman comic in the last couple of years and now Morrison is imbuing him with a fresh perspective and motivations. Neil Gaiman apparently will write a 2-issue Batman story after RIP, called ‘Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader”. Bring it on, DC! Earn my respect and money, goddamnit.

I am just done with the first draft of this gigantic article on electronic music, and I had this burning desire to listen to the Boom Boom Satellites loud. Really really loud. Instead, I stumbled across this singer/songwriter called Pop Levi who sounds like he’s going to be on my playlist for the next few days. Delicious, unapologetic pop music!

There’s a new bookshop in town called Books and Beyond. Apparently a part of Spencers’ Retail, it’s opened at Ashoka Metropolitan Mall in Banjara Hills, the same place that has the Apple Store. I met a friend on Saturday who raved about the stunning collection they have, and how he picked up the complete Basilisk volumes from the graphic novel section there. Intrigued, I made my way there Sunday evening. No manga volumes to be found, but I did pick up the latest Artemis Fowl ( AF and the Time Paradox, and it’s the pressure of writing the huge-ass article that has prevented me from doing a marathon read-session. That shall be remedied today). AND, I found this little hardcover edition of Lyra’s Oxford by Philip Pullman, the companion book to the His Dark Materials trilogy. It was pointed out to me, just as I picked it up, that the book had a “Signed by the author” sticker attached to it, and yes indeed, when I opened it up, it was autographed. Phew! Made my week. Buoyed with optimism, I proceeded to spend the next hour looking for more books tagged with the same “signed by” label, found a generic young adult book or two that I wasn’t really interested in, so just bought the two.

But Books and Beyond has a pretty cool selection. Other than the mandatory shelf-warmers, there was a complete set of the Flashman novels, a couple of books from the Dresden series by Jim Butcher, and Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale as well, though incorrectly filed under “classics”. I look forward to see whether they maintain the catalogue, or if it goes the Crossword way and degenerates into greeting-card world.