This is a test to see if I have one of my systems up and running. This is also a photo of one of my bibles for the Official Continuation JAMES BOND graphic novels I did for the Ian Fleming estate and Dynamite Comics, VARGR and EIDOLON. Worth looking those two books up for the great art by Jason Masters.
HARD TO BE A GOD is an insane film.
Here’s the deal. In the future, scientists from Earth are inserted into a humanlike society on another planet to observe it. So far, so Star Trek, right? It’s based on a Strugatsky Brothers novel from 1964. The Strugatskys were brilliant — you’ve heard of STALKER, based on their ROADSIDE PICNIC. Anyway, this guy is inserted into the place as Don Rumata, a regional ruler. And he and his fellow observers are their to study a society in a permanent medieval dark age, where an Enlightenment/Renaissance never seems to happen. It’s a stuck culture.
Because it kills anyone who learns how to read and write.
There are no framing shots of Earth. We’re immediately immersed in the medieval village, in all its muck and slime. I have to note that it is beautifully shot in monochrome, with a deep, rich range of greys. I should also note that if it were in colour it would be even more astonishingly gross. The past was pretty disgusting, and HARD TO BE A GOD really wants you to know exactly how disgusting.
The camera is an extra in the crowd. It pushes its way into scenes. Characters look into the lens. Into our face. Because, as Don Rumata is a secret observer from Earth, so are we.
With a big, eccentric and charismatic turn from Leonid Yarmolnik in the lead, we lurch and stagger through this terrible, time-locked world that kills its brightest, leaving it to the depredations of the venal clubs of mediocrity.
Director Alexsei German’s films were mostly about the Stalinist era, and it’s not hard to see HARD TO BE A GOD as a Stalinist allegory. I was, here in 2019, also put in mind of recent comments about “the end of the expert” and “the death of expertise.”
The film is an immense experience, sometimes exhausting, often awesome, always surprising. And caked in muck. There’s nothing quite like it. You would appreciate it, I think. It needs to be seen.
The whole album is great, of course, but this feels like a good one to close out the night with. G’night, reader.
Yes, it was co-created and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, and I will die on the weird poisoned hill that is VALHALLA RISING and its perverse glory. But as far as I’m concerned, the banner for this imminent new series on Amazon Prime is that it was co-created and written by my friend Ed Brubaker, better known to you as the creator of Captain America’s Winter Soldier and the line of CRIMINAL crime graphic novels with Sean Phillips.
Feast your eyes. Give thanks.
I accidentally sort of invented a weird cheap comics format in 2005.
This is just slightly technical. Comics are printed in what are called signatures – eight pages to a signature. Comics have generally been four signatures, 32 pages – either with a cover on a different stock, or, increasingly from the early 2000s, what are called “self-cover” – the cover is on the same stock as the interior signatures.
Comics were getting expensive — there was the beginnings of pressure to go from a standard $2.99 to $3.99 — and also getting less dense. So I came up with something stupid. A three-signature self-cover comic. So the whole thing, including the covers, was 24 pages, all on the same stock. And the story inside was sixteen pages of comics, with backmatter notes to fill out the page count.
(None of this was radical. Previous to, say, the early 1980s, many comics still contained only sixteen or seventeen pages of material. History is there to be learned on and stood upon to reach for something hopefully new.)
I set up many difficult problems for myself on this book, with the additional work involved to make it look not-difficult. The main one was this: each issue would be a self-contained story. A new reader could join the book at any point, not be lost, and get a complete experience out of it.
And it sold for USD $1.99.
Oh, the hate mail I got from retailers.
Until the first issue went to a fifth printing.
And my email instead filled up with shock and pleasure at a comic that wasn’t trying to gouge their pockets.
For various reasons, that project came to an end. My friend and co-creator on that book, Ben Templesmith, went on to bigger and better things, became completely independent and runs his own show through Patreon now. https://www.patreon.com/templesmith
LIke I say, I set myself a whole bunch of things to solve, and this was one: in 1984, Alan Moore did an interview in a fanzine called Arkensword, and the interview is not, to my knowledge, online, but there was a bit in there that hit me so hard that I’ve been quoting it ever since: that you can walk into a conics shop with the change in your pocket and come out with, in Alan’s phrase, “a real slab of culture.”
Most things you want to read are $3.99 now. Laying down a line of books in this format at — well, it’s fifteen years later, so say $2.50 — would be a significant statement.
Image produced, to my memory, three series in this format. The other two gave you Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, Matt Fraction, Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon.
So, you know, don’t tell me the format is bad and evil and cannot add to the culture.
(all notions herein Not Fully Baked)
I mean, seriously.
It is apparently the “Greubel Forsey Quadruple Tourbillon GMT” and if you have to ask what it costs then you can’t afford it.
I am fascinated by the fully baroque high end of watchmaking: that point where they threaten to entirely fall off the map and vanish into the Here Be Monsters of “yes but what’s the fucking time”
(“I’m Sorry But What The Fuck Is This Thing” may turn into another series)
