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Once more, Tuesday is upon us. And, as we're into the second half of the month, that can only mean it's time to revisit the greatest exercise in free speech that humanity's ever seen.
It's the phoenix-like resurgence of the feature in which the first person to comment gets to decide what the rest of us should talk about!
It could be art, films, flans, plans, books, bagels, cooks, nooks, crooks, rocks, music, mucous, fairy tales, fairy lights, Fairy Liquid, fairy cakes, Eccles cakes, myth, moths, maths, magic, tragedy, comedy, dromedaries, murder, larders, Ladas, mystery, mayhem, Moorcock, May Day, Christmas Day, New Year's Day, Doris Day, Marvin Gaye, the Equinox, parallelograms, pomegranates, sofas, sodas, sausages, eggs, whisky, broth, Bath, baths, Garth Marenghi, Garth Brooks, Garth Crooks, Bruno Brookes, Bruno Mars, Mars Bars, wine bars, flip-flops, flim-flam, flapjacks, backpacks, see-saws, jigsaws, dominoes, dunderheads, flowerpots, flour pots, bread bins, bin bags, body bags, body horror, shoddy horror, doggy bags, bean bags, coal sacks, cola, cocoa, pancakes, pizzas, baking soda, sci-fi, Wi-Fi, Hi-Fi, sewage, saunas, suet, Silurians, Sontarans, Sea Devils, sins, suns, sans, sense, sludge, slumps, sunshine, slime or sandcastles.
But it could be something else altogether.
Only time - and you The Reader - will decide...
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20 comments:
No-one here yet?
Ok, what about the 90s?
You know - Tank Girl, Spawn, Sandman, Preacher, things can only get better, northern bleep, jungle, drum & bass, Blur v Oasis (neither for me), Trainspotting, I did not have sex with that woman, video shops, X Files, gangsta rap, hitting your 30s, etc etc whatever, any thoughts?
I saw 'Captain Marvel' recently - turns out, its one of the better superhero flicks - and I was struck by how it didn't really feel much like a 'period piece'...
-sean
Ah, the 90's. Interesting topic, Sean! I tend to focus on the 70's and 80's, generally overlooking the century's final decade. I was mostly out of comics, as I'd sold my collection in '91 to pay the bills a young father faces. But I did pick up a few, notably "Simpsons Comics" and "Untold Tales of Spider-Man ".
On tv, I was watching the X Files, Simpsons, and E.R. oh, and as I had young boys- also watched "Batman:the Animated Series ", "Animaniacs"...and "Powerpuff Girls".
Musically, my listening was Sting, Smashmouth, K.D. Lang and a lot of classic rock. On cd, not vinyl. By then I was only buying cds, which is beneficial now- they stillmsound as fine as they did 30 years ago!
I'd mostly given up Superhero comics by the 90s but there were many brilliant other comics throughout the decade. Off the top of my head:
Eightball, ACME, Black Hole, Love & Rockets (various iterations), Peep Show, Yummy Fur, Palookaville, Optic Nerve, Dirty Plotte, Cerebus (mostly good across the decade taken as a whole), Bacchus, Jar of Fools, Rubber Blanket plus loads I've probably forgotten.
Oddly, whilst I was mostly forward thinking with regards to comics, at the time, I was very backwards thinking with music. I lost touch with current music in the mid 90s, whilst travelling through Asia for six months, and generally haven't really embraced new stuff since then.
We must be due a dose of 90's nostalgia soon.
DW
DW, BBC Radio 4 has only just finished broadcasting its' "90s Season" so there has indeed been a dose of 90s nostalgia - a fortnight of 90s-related documentaries. Possibly that's where Sean got his inspiration for today's topic? Apologies, Sean, if that's not the case!
I stopped reading Marvel comics around late 1983 and I didn't start reading them again until 2007 so the 90s completely passed me by as far as comics were concerned.
Like Redartz, the 90s was the age of CDs for me - I bought my first CD player in 1989 and I bought tons of CDs all through the 90s but, unlike Red, all those CDs are now long gone, either binned or donated to charity shops.
90s TV? The X-Files, The Fast Show, Our Friends In The North, Queer As Folk, The Simpsons...
And my father died on September 2nd 1999...
...but at least the moon wasn't blasted out of Earth's orbit on the 13th!
Right around 1996 was when I pretty much stopped listening to and buying modern music. Some of the ‘last gasp’ music I listened to before throwing in the towel: Nirvana, Soundgarden, Chili Peppers, Faith No More, Letters To Cleo, The The, Peter Murphy, Kate Bush, Type O Negative (for a hot minute), Jane’s Addiction, the LOST HIGHWAY Soundtrack (with David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, Barry Adamson, et al), David Arnold’s nifty SHAKEN AND STIRRED : THE JAMES BOND PROJECT.
Like Red, I too liked K.D. Lang a lot, which inevitably led to me digging Patsy Cline.
In the Late 80s / Early 90s , I got heavily into Crime Fiction for the first time. The famous Black Lizard line was my main gateway to guys like Jim Thompson, David Goodis (a little too bleak for me), Harry Whittington, Dan J. Marlowe, Peter Rabe, etc. Other crime / hardboiled / noir writers I discovered and liked (and mostly still do): Rex Stout, Cornell Woolrich , Mickey Spillane, Richard S. Prather, the MacDonalds (Ross and John D), Hammett, Chandler, Bill Pronzini, James Ellroy, Andrew Vachss, Ed McBain, ‘Richard Stark’ (the Parker books are effing GREAT), Elmore Leonard, Charles Williams, etc etc etc.
Comics-wise….um….Yeah, PREACHER, YUMMY-FUR (tho I liked Chester’s earlier surrealist stuff more than the uncomfortable navel-gazing)…….HELLBOY…SIN CITY… I didn’t start getting into Morrison, Milligan, Ellis and that lot until very late in the decade…Moore and O’Niell’s LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN too….jeez, what else….
b.t.
Thanks for the topic, Sean.
My reading of comics was very limited in the 1990s; a few issues of the X-Men, one or two issues of other Marvel comics, a few Sandman TPBs. It all seemed OK but, as I've mentioned before, once the price of a comic went up to 65 pence, that was when I felt obliged to abandon ship.
I still listened to plenty of music in the 1990s. I'd say the mid-2000s was when I lost touch with what was happening chart-wise.
Such a fun question!
Comics - Charlie jumped back in, with both feet, after a 15-year draught with the DEATH OF SUPERMAN!
He enjoyed various Marvels, like RED mentioned such as "Untold Sales of Spider Man."
DC and INDEPENDENTS were his preferred choice though, wit the explosion of comics available.
DC reincarnated several QUALITY COMICS characters such as RAY and BLACK CONODR. The STARMAN got a nice run. And of course the 3-4 SUPERMAN being published.
For INDEPENDENTS Charlie enjoyed many a title from VALIANT, IMAGE, MALIBU...
It really was a lot of fun!
Charlie enjoyed early 90s "dance / party" music and then stopped paying attention once the two children were born.
Fav CDs included:
DEEE-LITE - Grove is in the Heart
INNER CITY - Good Life... Big Fun
CC Music Factory - Everybody Dance Now
Soul II Soul...
There may have even been a PET SHOP BOYS release in that time period IIRC?
Literature - Charlie discovered SPY NOVELS in the 1990s. Ended up reading all / most of:
JOHN LE CARRE
ERIC AMBLER - who started writing in the 1930s. I do highly recommend them.
And RUDYARD KIPLING'S "KIM" which seemingly is considered the first spy novel?
As an aside reading old books can be enlightening.
For instance, one Ambler novel "Epitaph for a Spy" written in 1938 has an American vacationer drafted into spying on the French navel port Toulon. Our "hero" is reading a magazine and reflects that, "Geeze - now they say cigarettes cause cancer. What next will they discover to be unhealthy." 1938...
Lastly, the first two americans two become Noble Prize Laureates in Economics were from Gary, Indiana.
IN the 1990s, I followed their advice and invested in comics, baseball cards, and Beanie Babies. After that fun experience, I can only giggle at those investing in bitcoin and NFTs LOL!
And indeed, the internet and stock market boom probably sums up the 1990s more/less.
The 90s were the height of fungibility Charlie, peak free market capitalism for the masses - in the twenty-first century the reality of the new feudalism has kicked in for the majority.
DW - will there be a big dose of 90s nostalgia soon? It seems like there should be, but while theres a push for it I don't know if its going to happen.
Thats kind of why I bought up 'Captain Marvel', which was obviously trying to play into a 90s boom, but... apart from the occasional reference - Blockbuster, slow internet speeds - it didn't come across. Maybe it would be different to someone who was a kid in the 90s, but it just doesn't seem like a distant time.
Maybe its like Matthew suggests, and it wasn't such a creatively fertile time, in terms of new developments.
I actually still have a 1997 Guardian obituary page - its on my wall - about William Burroughs and Fela Kuti, who both died the same day. Add to that that the passing of Miles Davis and Jack Kirby earlier in the decade, and it does seem like we were entering a new cultural era.
Anyway, what I want to know is, whatever happened to Ted McKeever?
-sean
I pretty much stopped buying most DC and Marvel US comics in the mid 1980s, but by the 1990’s I did read Giffen and Maguires Justice League regularly. I also picked up Swamp Thing and Pete Bagge’s Hate and Neat Stuff now and then as well as Usagi Yojimbo and the UK magazine/comic Deadline. But my main comic buying in the1990s was based on nostalgia as I picked up lots of old 1960s/early 1970’s UK comics line Pow, Wham , Smash, Valliant, Lion , Buster etc from a great wee shop in Glasgow (rarely paying over £3 a comic). Other comic related stuff I liked in the 1990’s was the Batman cartoon series.
Music. I picked up lots of old reissued CDs by 1960s /1970s bands that I missed at the time (Jethro Tull, Creedence Clearwater Revival etc). I quite liked most of the Britpop stuff like Pulp, Suede, Elastica , the Vere etc. as well as The Proclaimers (late 80s but big in the 1990s) and bands like Muse, Soundhgarten, Nirvana etc . I also attended a lot of diverse gigs including Prince, Bowie, the Mekons, Skatalites, Echo and the Bunnymen, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Siouxsie and the Banshees and errr…………….Gary Glitter!
Literature, I discovered Charles Bukowski – that was about it for me on that score.
Films lots of good ones I liked including Forrest Gump, Goodfellas, The Matrix, Philadelphia , Fargo, Groundhog day , Schindler’s list, Leaving Las Vegas etc etc -I didn’t like Trainspotting or Tank Girl (liked the comic though).
DC, sorry. Not CD.
Charlie doesn't sense a lot of love for the 1990s comics' scene. Charlie is wondering if he enjoyed the 1990s so much because he punched out around 1976-ish and missed out on the 1980s?
Man did I look forward to the weekly / bi-weekly issue of the Comic Buyers Guide if only to read up on the Todd McFarlane - Peter David debates! (I sense McFarlane has amassed a small fortune and David is on hard times?)
MCSCOTTY - I am curious about those UK comics you were buying for $3 each (I can't find a UK "pound" sign on my keyboard). I was thinking some/many of those titles were also in Hardback Annual form b/c I have Valiant as an annual from around 1970. Is my annual the same as what you are referring to but in comic book format?
Charlie, Yes the Valiant weekly comic spawned the annual. The annuals were imho never as good as the weekly comics especially the Valiant which was a great wee comic. Most of my purchases at this time were the weekly comics I only bought 2 Annuals (hardback) Wham 1967 and Lion 1969 a
Thanks Matthew, that was an interesting piece about McKeever, particularly the stuff he had to say about the role of editors (my understanding is that Archie Goodwin was also keen to get Alan Moore to write for Marvel, which would seem to have been a no-brainer given that he was working for them in the UK at the time, but Jim Shooter vetoed it).
Its a shame someone like McKeever doesn't feel theres a place for him in comics anymore, but it does seem to be the way the field has been headed for some time. The idea of a publisher like Marvel or DC setting up a whole line of comics to put out new stuff by interesting creators that they'd be paid proper page rates for and actually own seems absurdly far fetched these days.
-sean
Yes Colin, I have heard some of that 90s stuff on Radio 4, and it might well have subliminally informed the topic.
Btw, bringing things back to the 21st century, if anyone's interested the first clip of Kenneth Branagh as Boris Johnson is up online -
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOYOOuUuFjU
-sean
One thing I did really appreciate in the 1990s was really well done superhero cartoons. In particular, I massively enjoyed the Spider-Man cartoon which was quite faithful to the comic book. Though it didn’t have the jazzy background as the original Spider-Man cartoon did in the 1967 time frame, it was quite good in art and the storytelling quite good.
Anonymous- oh yes, there was a great world of animation in the 90's! As you mentioned, there was Spider-Man- my boys loved it. I enjoyed the stories, but was spoiled by that jazzy score from 1967.
Then there was the Fantastic Four, and even Iron Man.
Of course DC had the great Batman series. And Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon offered some good stuff too. Dexter's Laboratory. Samurai Jack. Johnny Bravo. Pinky and the Brain. And my personal addiction, "Tiny Toon Adventures! Loved, loved, loved that show...
Red' and Anonymous - I loved the cartoons of the 1990s as well but have no exclude for watching them as I have no children -I'm just a "big wain" at heart - As I noted in my first reply one of my related comic book passions was the “Batman the animated series” cartoon (the Bruce Timm designed ones) which for me is still the pinnacle of animated superheroes. Other favourites of mine were Samurai Jack, Freakazoid (Bruce Timm again) Swat Katz, Animaniacs and Disney’s Gargoyles cartoons. And yes I even liked the Powerpuff Girls as well.
Who can forget that excellent piece of animation where Yakko of the Animaniacs sang about every country in the world pointing to them on a map - genius educational and fun.
Nations of the World - With Lyrics - Animaniacs - YouTube
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