Don't Act Like You're Above Me--Just Look At Your Shoes

I've been a big Elvis Costello fan for 20 years or so, but it's nice to realize that I've gotten smart enough to see the seams and flaws in some of his music now. I listen to all of his albums at least a couple times a year--today it's This Year's Model, his second disc and the first with The Attractions as his backing band. On his first album he was backed by Clover, more of a country-rock session band, and while they did a fine job, especially on "Alison", The Attractions bring a lot more punch to the material. As such, This Year's Model still sounds really good despite the fact that quite a few of the lyrics sound like they were cobbled together and often don't make much sense. Costello's weakness has always been for clever-sounding rhyming couplets that are just small ideas in themselves, and then he strings them together with others for verses that don't really hold up to scrutiny. The driving Thomas/Thomas rhythm section, Nieve keyboards and Costello's own snarly guitar and furious or seething delivery get the lines over. Lines like "Sometimes I almost feel/Just like a human being" work in that melodramatic, adolescent way, but don't really mean much. Same thing with so many lyrics of paranoia and fascism in the early albums--that's an adolescent way to look at the world. Still, the over-the-top but consistent lyrics to the fascist-themed "Night Rally" are quite effective, with talk of a kind of Nazism made popular by a strong marketing campaign (armbands and 3D glasses, catchy tunes you'll be 'singing in the showers' (get it?)). Costello would get more overt in the next album with "Two Little Hitlers". Strong songs on the disc--and I'm counting the bonus tracks now--include the opener, "No Action", which uses telephone imagery to emphasize a "disconnect" between Costello's character and the woman in question: "Everytime I phone you, I just wanna put you down", meaning her or the phone, the ambiguity being the appeal. "This Year's Girl" is a decent slam at advertising-created supermodel stardom, and the fickleness and lack of compassion of the public. "Big Tears", an outtake, is one of the better paranoid songs, with its refrain of "Tell me who's/Been taken in?" and "Big tears/mean nothing/when you're lying/in your coffin" A really ragged and right vocal on that one. The anti-American "Crawling to the U.S.A." is a bit confusing but catchy, with a great double entendre about "taking liberties". "Pump It Up", "Hand In Hand" and "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" get over with great hooks, as does most of the disc, and "Little Triggers" is a slight but effective bitter ballad. It's also fun to listen to bonus tracks like "Running Out of Angels" to see how Costello tries to make something out of near-garbage lyrics and a couple chords. He'll often take a melodic bit or some lines and work them into a new song, usually to better effect but not always. More Costello soon. His latest, The Delivery Man, is one of his strongest efforts in years.

Made some notes on The Solution and printed out the 49 pages I have so far, in order to look at the whole thing and figure out how to rework and structure it. I haven't actually sat down and read the whole thing at once. I was thinking about how this one recurring menace wasn't really that clear in my mind, so I kind of figured out some background and motivation for them. That is, I always had their motivation, but it's ironic and contradictory with what they do in the story, and though that's intentional, I wanted to work it out a little better in my mind so that THEY could believe in what they're doing, you know? I don't want to say the name of these guys but it sounds cool, probably cooler than The Solution, honestly. Another reason I printed this out is that I think I make smarter notes with handwriting, and it seems more organic. Whatever works.

I was talking to ADD about THE INFANTRY today, which he's been enjoying somewhere along the lines of Casey's WILDCATS 3.0 work but he hasn't read #3 yet, which came out last week. I have a perhaps strange, protective feeling toward this book because I see in it what could happen (among many alternatives) to SUPERUNKNOWN, quite out of my control like work-for-hire is. Casey writes his scripts for this action-packed but mysterious, hard-edged superhero book, the first issue comes out lookin' good, and then there's two months before #2 shows up, for reasons I don't know. Clement Sauve and "Blond"'s artwork still looks fine, but man, that extra month is hell on a new book's momentum, right? Then, #3 comes out a couple weeks later, which is hardly ever a good idea because readers often feel like you're crowding them, like they were willing to spend the three bucks this month on your book, but six?! My feeling, and some might disagree, is that if you have a delay, then whenever the book finally comes out, that pushes back the next and the rest of the issues one month, right? But worse than the catch-up publishing is that #3 has a new art team. You have a new art team on the third issue--your book has big problems. I feel bad for Casey, who, work-for-hire or no, puts the effort in and certainly must have felt like he was signing on with a committed team of professionals, only to find Sauve and Blond either skipped out or couldn't meet their deadlines or whatever. I don't know the problem, but I do think that in this and most cases, it's preferable to suffer delays to keep the art team intact, rather than throwing in some fill-in artists just to keep the comics assembly line going. Readers aren't going to thank you for for it, believe me, unless it's the one-in-a-hundred occasion where the new guy/team is better than the one who started. Now, to cap it off, #3 shows the cover for #4 on the back and I see there's yet another new artist, Jim Muniz or somebody. To me, this sends a message that Devil's Due Publishing is more concerned with meeting obligations and cranking the shit out than caring about making a good book, crafting a multi-issue story to be remembered longer than a lunchtime. I'm not unrealistic; I know you have to make tough decisions and weigh a lot of things in publishing. DDP aren't evil or soulless or anything; it just means that a promising book has lost whatever momentum it had and is fast losing the promise of becoming anything. Do you really care about delays on THE ULTIMATES? No, because the book is worth waiting for and has a consistently great look to it. How great would Morrison's X-MEN have been if Quitely was given all the time he needed to draw every issue?