Born to a destitute existence,
J.Hues quickly rose to the prominent level of uncomfortably poor. His real name
is shrouded in secrecy but if you ask him he might tell you it's Jason Hughes
(Dammit!).
Nothing much happened until he
graduated from college with a completely useless degree in English, and then...
nothing much continued to happen. Subsequently, J.Hues found himself working
at a toy store. Later, through some strange accident he fell sideways into the
IT field and has been trapped there ever since.
To keep his sanity, he writes:
novels, poems, comics, grocery lists, checks (too many checks), fake doctor's
notes... Maybe someday he'll get paid for all this.
A genius in his own mind, J.Hues
uses various grammatical no-nos to mask his complete and total inability to
craft a single genuine or unique idea. He's never happy unless he is blathering
on with his own obnoxious opinions and ideas. Wait, are you still reading this?
Read the damn column already!
“Why is it that sometimes you can’t give away your crap, but if you stick a price tag on it, someone will steal it?” —me, based on a true story – go ahead and try it!
IN MY HAPPY PLACE
When I say Tank Girl do you think of Lori Petty and a disastrously-received movie from the mid-nineties. Well knock that crap off! Does that mean that you won’t pick up the new Loeb/Lee Batman because Adam West ran around in blue underwear in the sixties… or even worse, George Clooney ran around in rubberized nipples in Batman and Robin. Please do not judge a solid comics character by the crap that Hollywood generally produces based on them. Just as a novel is never as good when it’s put on the big screen (though this gap is decreasing indicating that either moviemakers are getting better, or novelists are writing their books with the full intent from the beginning of getting it made into a movie and tailoring their script to easily translat—my money’s on the latter by the way), comic books are never quite as well translated. Don’t believe me, go rent Captain America and The Punisher.
Now I’m mainly talking about superhero comics here, and lets face it to Hollywood and the country at large that’s what comic books ARE (and if you believe Texas they’re for children only, but we’ll touch on that later). Tank Girl was never a superhero, she’s just a punk (in a literal sense too!). You know how I love to get free stuff and then turn around and plug it right here, I get free grub (AKA comics) you get free plug (AKA publicity). It’s a win/win situation… unless of course the book in question is a giant turkey of a publication in which case I get a wasted evening (as I am obligated to read fully and respond here) and you get bad publicity. Then it’s a lose/lose. Don’t worry kids, this one’s not a lose/lose!
The one thing I hate about these reprints of European material, is that they always feel this bizarre need to mutate the original size into the American comics size standard. This usually leaves thick bars at the top and bottom (not unlike a widescreen presentation on a standard screen television).
This week I got to look at Tank Girl 3 by Titan books. A collection of early to mid-nineties ‘Tank Girl’ stories by a wide variety of artistic interpretations creates a pretty eclectic collection with only two things in common. They’re all weird and they’re all by Jamie Hewlett (of Gorrilaz fame) and Alan Martin, though you’d never know it to look at the vastly different approaches they take to each vignette. You know, I really enjoy this kind of crap too. Funky, avant garde, unexpected, off the wall and nary a spandex-clad buffoon in sight. I say ‘hear, hear’ and I’m not even British!
Reading something like a drugged-out cross between MAD and Heavy Metal this turned out to be quite an enjoyable romp. What it really made me do was want to go and find a longer-more epic story featuring Tank and the gang. And then on the end, they show me an ad for their next collection, Tank Girl: Odyssey, which promises to be a majorly f*ed take on Homer’s classic. And if you’re thinking about the donut-munching fat yellow man then you are a buffoon and I can not help you.
Oh and there’s a really slick introduction by the writer, Alan Martin (because when they asked Jamie Hewlett to do it he just drew a bunch of naked dog-people screwing) filled with photographs that had me checking myself for trackmarks on my forearms while I was reading it.
The bottom line is that those bastards at Titan Books have suckered me in with a freebie and now I’m going to have to track down the other Tank Girl collections and see what else they’ve compiled. Oh, and for those of you who get anal about such things, and possibly remember the old Caliber Comics problem of trades collapsing into a pile of loose pages in your hand (can anyone say Exit), this is of the highest production quality. Great coloring, glossy magazine-stock pages (you can tell I’m a printer can’t you) and nice sturdy covers… with glue that holds the pages in. And let’s face it, isn’t that why we use glue, to hold things together.
That and it smells really good too.
ROUND 1
It’s a beautiful day. He walks into a shop and starts to wander around. He notices right away that there’s a wide variety of entertainment mediums represented here, from video games to movies to books to magazines to CDs and even comic books. How interesting to see these mediums side-by-side. As he walks through the book aisles he come across a section he’s always found amusing… Erotica. He picks up one or two flipping through them laughing at the “author’s” attempts at sensuality with sexually explicit language.
Moving over to the movie section, he again notices along the new releases a plethora of films that could only be determined to be ‘soft porn.’ With such titles as ‘Bondage Babes’ and ‘Babe’s Toyland’ and their scantily clad “actresses” gracing the cover licking guns and other phallic symbols. They’re alphabetized along with the rest and it’s kind of funny to see such a jarring transition from, for example, Snow Falling on Cedars to Snow Seductress to the deluxe edition of Disney’s Snow White. In the music section, they are segregated by genre, but he recognizes some of the hardcore metal and rap albums with their large parental disclaimer warnings.
Over in the comics section, he finds all the usual suspects from Archies to the DC and Marvel mainstays, but while trying to find the latest Fables, he’d heard some really good things about it, he noticed there were no Vertigo titles present. A quick look for that Bendis fellow’s Alias proved the same result. So this store doesn’t carry the mature comics, he wonders? “That’s pretty weird,” he says to the surprise of the middle-aged gentleman thumbing through the odd Spider-Man titles strewn about. Thinking back on the movies and books, and recalling the enticingly explicit text he wonders if they are maybe kept somewhere else. After all, naked pictures are a lot more blatant than naked text. He determines to ask before he leaves.
The magazines are as you would expect them. Categorized by type with the ‘adult’ magazines stuffed in colored plastic so you won’t be tempted by the lasciviousness of the cover-honeys. He thumbs through them and then notices a gentleman coming out from an almost hidden alcove.
Rounding the corner he is surprised to find an ‘ADULTS ONLY’ section to this store. Walking in, he’s surprised to see quite a large section of the store he hadn’t known was there. He’s immediately distracted by the volumes and volumes of beyond explicit pornographic videos on display. Laughing, he even discovers there are pornographic computer games. He had no idea! He notices that a store clerk keeps periodically poking his head in; probably to make sure there are no kiddies.
It is as he is thumbing through an old collection of Hustler magazines that he remembers he was looking for Fables earlier. As he looks around at this almost disturbingly surreal pornographic alcove, he thinks that this isn’t really that great a place to have those kinds of comics. Then he notices that they’re not here either? Wow, he thinks, those books must be selling even better than I thought.
But a quick chat with the clerk proves him otherwise. The store was forced to stop carrying any comics that were not deemed appropriate for children of all ages. Due to a precedent-setting case, comic books have been legally defined as a children’s medium, so even carrying books that are deemed inappropriate carries stiff fines and possible jail time.
“But I’m an adult. Can’t you sell them to me?”
“Sorry man, they can’t even make ‘em anymore.”
But what about the adult books, and movies and music and magazines and video games? There are children’s books and movies and music and magazines and video games. But alas, apparently those mediums were defined as mediums for people of all ages and thus could produce material for all age demographics. Comics weren’t and can’t.
So what happened to books like Fables and Alias? Turns out most of them were canceled, though some were translated into Primetime Network Television Series, movie hits and even novels. Most of the top writers have abandoned the medium.
That doesn’t seem right? How can an entire entertainment medium be defined in such narrow terms? Has this ever happened before? Of course not, it’s ridiculous to even think about. Imagine if music was defined as an adult’s only medium. No songs could be written in any other format or fashion than strictly for adults. It would never happen.
Then how did it happen in comics? That’s a good question my friends.
Idiots of the world unite! Texas first, the rest of the United States next!
ROUND 2
S
P
O
I
L
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R
W
A
R
N
I
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G
I think I may have left the milk out last night.
ROUND 3
It’s so brilliant it will work. The issue of Spawn that was solicited in January 2002, for March 2002 shipping, finally shipped a couple of weeks ago. Issue #120 just came out and issue #131 is the latest one solicited. This is obscene. So I propose a boycott. We can send a message and nobody will get hurt or lose sales. We have enough trouble anticipating our customer’s desires and needs two months in advance; asking us to do it ten months or so in advance is downright unreasonable.
So here’s the deal. If we can get enough retailers to band together and stop ordering Spawn for the next six months, we just might hit a nerve in a place Todd feels, his wallet. It’s no mystery that the book has been slipping down the sales charts. How could you order today for a book shipping next September (or so)? Imagine if Spawn received absolutely zero orders for the next six months, coupled with letters to TMP that we will start ordering this book again if he will cancel all of them and resolicit in a more timely manner.
He needs to cancel #131 and solicit #122 instead, but he’ll never do it because he just doesn’t care about his customers (the retailers) and his fans are probably unaware of the challenges this situation puts retailers in. So it’s quite simple. He can solicit #132 next month, but nobody order it. #133 and nobody. It won’t take long for him to realize there’s a problem. We let him know he needs to cancel these books and solicit #123 next month and then #124 and then we’ll place our orders again. We can keep it up as long as he can (folks we’ve got like eight months of wiggle room before we even chance missing an issue (if we boycott issue #132, it won’t ship until October 2003 at the best anyway)). Todd resolicits and gets his orders and the retailers get a more reasonable gap between when an order is placed and when it ships.
In the long run, nobody loses anything and everybody wins, after all more confident retailers will order more books! Damn sometimes I’m so brilliant I scare myself!
A little bird once told me that the key to comedy is to keep it short, and so I bid you adieu, I’m having roasted ‘little bird’ for dinner tonight!
K.O.
disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this column don’t necessarily represent those expressed by any sane and rational adult; they barely represent the views of the author and they barely resemble coherency as it is; nevertheless this column is chock full of satire and parody (as protected by laws protecting such things) and as such don’t sue me. look at it this way, this is all for fun, don’t believe a word of it (even if it is true), don’t take it too seriously, and if you do take it, take it all with a grain of salt—better yet have the truck back up to your house.
