On Sunday night, BBC4 broadcast WHAAM! Roy Lichtenstein at Tate Modern,
Alistair Sooke's documentary focused on the career-spanning
retrospective of the pop art giant currently running at the London
gallery. Here's the link to the full documentary, running for a week on BBC's iPlayer.
At
the 35 minute mark, artist Dave Gibbons turns up to debate with Sooke
on the age-old issue of Lichtenstein's plagiarism from comic books, all
while standing in front of Lichtenstein's WHAAM!, the painting
appropriated from a panel by Irv Novick. Gibbons makes a spirited case
for the superiority of Novick's original image over Lichtenstein's,
while the host Sooke argues for Lichtenstein, all the while thumbing
a-little-bit-too dismissively through an issue of DC's All-American Men Of War
#89. Sooke's main argument for the superiority of the pop artist's
work over the comic artist is that his researcher picked up a ragged
back issue of the original for under six pounds, while if WHAAM! went to
auction, it would sell for tens of millions of dollars. To Gibbon's
credit, he states he'd take the six quid comic over the multi-million
bucks canvas. I dunno Dave, $45 million could buy an awful lot of comics. Or sports cars.
For a full take-down of Lichtenstein's thievery from comics, there's always David Barsalou's Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein.
I don't think there's a single panel in that collection that doesn't
contain more power and dynamism in its execution than Lichtenstein's
"transformation" of them.
The thing about calling these things "the Best Of 2012" is they're really just "the Best Of 2012 that's available through Spotify right now". But sod it, it's a flavour of what I've liked this year. I've noticed this year has been a hip hop-light, garage rock and torch songs-heavy, kind-of-vintage.
Phillip Bond drawing Doctor Who comics. If there was ever something more definitively Bad Librarianship than that, I don't know what it was.
Sorry I've been derelict in my duties here for a while, but I've been blogging over at Robot 6. I'm sure you've all got that site bookmarked already, it's one of only about two blogs I'd ever have neglected this place for. Posting here may become more intermittent, though I'm sure I'll still post the less-newsworthy and more idiosyncratic stuff here.
I loved this image Dan McDaid recently ran over at his blog. Judge Dredd, the apotheosis of how the cynical Europeans view the USA, gets the drop on Captain America, the embodiment of how a pair of optimistic second generation immigrant Jewish kids viewed their homeland.
Seen a lot of stuff I've considered buying these last couple of weeks, instead of clearing my credit card balance.
1. "Still Sane" by Incwel. Appeals to my inner iconoclast and some recessive, vestigial, hard-to-kill, Ulster protestantism. God save your mad parade!
As a public service for those of you who (in all fairness, probably correctly) hate and fear Facebook, I thought I'd re-blog a couple of new pieces by Jamie Hewlett that Alan Martin has recently posted.
Brendan McCarthy sent along a link to this Ditko blog the other morning, singling out this entry in an email with the subject heading "The Door To Eternity".
I love Gordon Rennie and Tiernen Trevallion's Absalom in 2000AD. It's a strip that does that Mignola thing, examining the hinterlands between folklore, history, and horror, but it does it resolutely from a British tradition. It also marries a classic disillusioned UK police procedural tone into this mix, making for a strip that hits all kinds of the right pop culture notes for me. It's like THE SWEENEY rewritten by Ramsey Campbell - Rennie even invokes Jack Regan by name within. Or maybe Ian Rankin having a punch-up with Dennis Wheatley round the back of John Constantine's gaff, if you can forgive me yet another terrible dissimile.
Anyway, now that it's about to be collected as an album, I'm recommending it thoroughly. Buy it, you'll thank me for it, it's the best thing published by Rebellion since CRADLEGRAVE. Here's the cover, and Tiernen successfully manages to condense the strip's entire milieu into one image - it's Scary Old London Town (Cobbles! Spellbooks! Demons!), but it's modern, too (Graffiti! Tesco's bag! Burberry coats! Adidas trackie!).
Here's a recurring theme of this blog I haven't revisited in a while - trawling Paul Pope and Phil Bond's Flickrs for new work.
Anyone reading my Twitter feed will have an idea of the calamities that have befallen my family lately - anyway, in reaction to this chain of events, I spent a few hours up in my parents' attic checking on the lifetime of accumulated pop culture errata, mainly to see what I could do without, to be honest. I've been re-reading old copies of DEADLINE and THB ever since. And I threw Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming's HELL ON EARTH on the "to keep" pile.
Coming soon: more Ebay auctions, I guess. Anyone want a first edition of Hunger Dogs?
Came across these two tracks on various blogs over the last couple of weeks: Beck produced by Jack White, and the fairly unlikely combination of the affable Iggy Pop and the curmudgeonly Ginger Baker collaborating for a Black Keys tribute LP.
And remember - VOTE KLAMS!
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| 1. Good to see The Strangeness Of... back in action. |
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| 2. Is EVERYBODY LOVES TANK GIRL already out in France? My head hurts. |
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| 3. In other Tanky news, howzabout Rufus Dayglo's poster for the Glasgow Comic Con? |
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| 4. Fixing the lack of What Not reblogging here for a while, that's a beaut by Devilpig. |
| 5. Robert Ball does a poster for EPIC KILL. |
