Sorry for the radio silence this month, friends! I’ve been hard at work on new content for January, including…
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From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade
It’s back, girls and boys!
I had so much fun reading and writing about the WildStorm Universe in November that I’m not quite ready to go back to just reading it, so I’m going to file the occasional continuing readalong post on a much lesser intensity and frequency because I so do not have the time or stamina to write about 126 WildStorm comics every month.
While I’m very eager to pick up all of the books exiting WildStorm Rising to check out their new status quo, I’m going to use the next few installments to review later WildCATs solo outings that fit into pre-crossover continuity – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade One-Shot, the Spartan: Warrior Spirit mini-series by Kurt Busiek, Zealot’s three-issue mini-series, and some WildCATs anthology stories.
This makes for a fantastic moment to pause and call out a really phenomenal blog: Weathering WildStorm. The author is undertaking this endeavor slightly more slowly than I have been, but he is doing it with the benefit of having read almost all of these books before. As a result, he’s got a fairly well-reasoned reading order that explains how these various side-stories fit. It’s by far the best one I’ve seen on the web in the four years I’ve been getting books together for this read!
Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade was published in August 1995, a hair later than WildStorm Rising, but per Weathering WildStorm’s guidance it directly follows either issue #13 or 14 (and maybe explains why the team was so ready for a break in #14-15). It follows up on Steve Gerber’s strong story in WildCATs Special #1.
The issue begins with an intriguing (and beautiful!) opening scene of all women, including Providence and Destine from Special #1 facing each other down in the remains of Yurgovia.
The next page is an ass-shot of Zealot followed by she and Voodoo fighting while dressed in their best Vampirella outfits. Those art choices are not just for the benefit of one splash page – this issue takes its “Skin Trade” name literally and gives a heavy dose of T&A whenever possible courtesy of artist Michael Lopez.
I’m tempted to write this one off as pure wish fulfillment, but there is considerable plot content tangled up with all the skin. Skin Trade turns Voodoo into a bit of a Mary Sue murder doll at points, but it gives context to her more active role in her own psyche in #18 and then on the battlefield in #19 and WildStorm Rising. It also greatly deepens Zealot’s history, if not her character, and creates a (largely unfulfilled) plot hook.
And, if you can tolerate a heaping of cheesecake, Lopez’s art is truly remarkable throughout the book save for a few pages with one bad inker on a solid team effort.
Final verdict? If you’re going all in on a sequential WildCATs read you ought to include this, but if you’re simply revisiting the high points of WildStorm you can skip it.
Continue reading for a recap of Skin Trade‘s plot. Need a copy? Check Amazon and eBay. As for what’s next, I still need a bit more of a breather to work out a schedule for my my leisurely readalong. [Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Voodoo/Zealot: Skin Trade
Song of the Day: “Head Underwater” by Jenny Lewis
It wasn’t obvious at first that Blacklight was the end of RK, but when Jenny Lewis followed it with another solo record and then forming Jenny & Johnny, I despited. Her soulful, alt-country Rabbit Fur Coat and and Acid Tongue were both solid, objectively good records, but they didn’t have the magic alchemy of Rilo Kiley for me.
I chalked up all the propulsive catchiness, killer riffs, and Fleetwood Mac overtones to Lewis’s RK co-writer Blake Sennet and kept Under The Blacklight in my heavy rotation.
Thus, I wasn’t paying all that much attention when Jenny Lewis dropped her lead single for The Voyager, “Just One of the Guys,” in 2014. It had a clever, star-studded video and still had the alt-countryish tinge. I’d buy the LP out of dedication, but it wouldn’t fill the Rilo Kiley shaped hole in my listening habits.
Then, I heard the first song on the LP, “Head Underwater” and understood that I was completely wrong about everything.
I’m not the same woman
That you were used toI put my head underwater baby,
I threw my clothes away in the trash
Somehow “Head Underwater” does almost everything that Under the Blacklight does in a single song in a tenth of the time. It accelerates from the soulful sunny pop of “Silver Linings,” passing the wistfulness of “When The Angels Hung Around” on its way to the breezy 80s Fleetwood Mac of “Dreams.” I half expect a sweep of wind chimes every time she says “magic.”
[Read more…] about Song of the Day: “Head Underwater” by Jenny Lewis
Children’s Book Review: Nightsong by Ari Beck & Loren Long
One of the critical stops on every one of our trips to the zoo is bats. Fruit bats. Insect-eating bats. We’ve even added adorable little vampire bats who live in a dark room and drink blood from a wee little dish.
Perhaps some parents would be slightly alarmed to have one of their toddler’s favorite animals be bats (especially the blood-drinking kind). I’m not, and not just because the first book I ever read was Dracula. No, it’s more that two of EV’s favorite books are the previously covered Stellaluna and today’s book, Nightsong.
Whereas Stellaluna is a story EV loves, Nightsong’s little Chiro the Bat became a persistent character for EV. He is absolutely adorable. She loves fussing over his cheeks and his chubby belly while we read the book. After a few reads, she began to talk about what Chiro was doing randomly throughout the day. In turn, she became even more engrossed in the book, to the point that she could easily recite it for us with the pages for reference.
This forced my hand on allowing the first licensed character into our home, as we discovered there is in fact a stuffed Chiro doll that one can acquire. Every day when EV takes a nap he flies up to a perch on the wall and hangs upside down, and each night he flights down to keep EV company while she goes to sleep.
Nightsong, written by Ari Beck and illustrated by Loren Long
Reading Time: 7-10 minutes
Gender Diversity: Male protagonist (easily gender-flipped) and mother.
Ethnic Diversity: Not applicable
Challenging Language: frightened, girths, gleefully, threatened, errands, strand, kin, textures, blanketing, sheltering
Themes to Discuss: being afraid of the dark, sound waves and echolocation, independence, self-confidence and mastery of skills, predators and insectivores, testing boundaries
Nightsong is a book about discovery and boundaries that is beautiful in every way – from its flowing prose to high-contrast, nearly-3D illustrations to its supple, glossy paper. The warmth and trust between Chiro the bat and his mother provides an awesome opportunity to explain boundaries and when it’s the right time to test and push past them.
Chiro the bat awakens folded in his mother’s wings in their cave home. She explains that tonight is the night he will fly out alone and use his “good sense” to find his way – only to the pond, unless his song is sure. At first Chiro feels scared and disoriented, but when he begins to use his echolocation it lights up the details of the world for him as clear as day. After enjoying a breakfast of bugs, Chiro feels confident enough to keep flying. He explores as far as the ocean when he sees the glimmer of the rising sun and knows it’s time to return home to his mother’s warm embrace.
Of all the wonderful elements of this 2012 picture book, Loren Long’s illustrations are the most noticeable. He draws an animated, three-dimensional Chiro who pops off of the black backgrounds of the pages. The efffect is so uncanny that I was convinced that the book contained some computer-generated graphics until I read up a bit on Long, a mega best-selling illustrator. The flecks of acrylic paint that define Chiro’s face at times suggest the detail of blown up pointilist painting in their minute size and deliberate placement.
Other books I’ve read from Loren Long range from fine to great, but the beautiful prose in Nightsong is truly remarkable. That’s the work of Ari Beck, a YA author, folklorist, and doctor of Comparative Literature and Culture. Beck’s writing is easy to read but not simplified, descriptive but never florid. It possesses a natural rhythm that makes me smile to read it. I never get tired of reading this book – it’s a rare one that I can read daily without complaint.
“Sense is the song you sing out into the world, and the song the world sings back to you. Sing, and the world will answer. That is how you’ll see.”
Out went this song over dark water then, again and again, each wave on the ocean rising up to greet him, each splash of sea foam becoming kin to him.
I am always cautious of books with adorable protagonists who like to misbehave. Even when a powerful moral ensues, it can take a while for it to sink in for a toddler even as they begin to emulate the silly or even dangerous behavior of the character they love.
Nightsong gracefully avoids this problem, although it’s so subtle that on my first few reads I was disappointed when Chiro extended his flight past the boundary of the pond that serves as his insect breakfast bar. It begin with Chiro’s mother explaining exactly when he ought to push the boundaries she’s set for him – only when his song feels sure. We never get a moment of Chiro thinking to himself, “my song is sure,” but we do have the sureness threaded into the language throughout the book as Chiro’s self-confidence grows. As a result, his boundary-pushing is not only with permission, but it feels entirely organic for the character.
There are few books in our collection that have been read as often as Nightsong, and none of them are in quite as pristine condition. This is simply a beautifully-built book, from the matte soft-touch cover to the weight, glossy pages. It’s especially impressive considering just how soaked in black ink the entire work is. I’d usually expect a book like that to fray and fade, but Nightsong remains just as inky and beautiful as the day we brought it home.
That darkness means these illustrations aren’t particularly bright, although they are high contrast and cheerful. Some kids simply may not warm up to all the black-backgrounded pages. Also, the charm of the book is very much in the richness of the language rather than any particular cleverness of plot, so if you’re not going to give it a spirited read I could imagine it falling a bit flat.
Ari Beck and Loren Long have created a flawless, timeless classic in Nightsong that is so enduring that my child talks about Chiro even when the book is safely shelved away. It is one of my go-to gifts for babies and toddlers.
35-for-35: 2016 – “Mountains” by Dirty Holiday
[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]This is actually a post about the 36th song from 35 years of my life.
I’ve never understood how “Best of the Year” lists can come out in December. There’s a whole extra month of things that might be the best! There’s more year – more context – that hasn’t happened yet!
The lists should come out in January. I blame Christmas. Some might say I have declared a war on it.
I think “Best of Year” lists should come out in the following January, or maybe even March or April. Who can even know the shape of the year without a little time and hindsight? How many of these 35 songs would I have chosen right at the end their years rather than after? In many cases, I hadn’t even heard them year.
I don’t know what hindsight will tell me about 2016. It was tempting to pick “Blackstar” or “Lazarus” as a reminder of those brief first 10 days of 2016 when it seemed everything was possible before the sad, awful mess of this year set in. Maybe in hindsight one of those will be my song of 2016.
For now, my pick is a song from just two weeks later. Actually, it was the first thing I heard other than David Bowie after his death. The song is “Mountains” by Dirty Holiday, a moniker for one of the many projects of Philly singer-songwriter Katie Barbato.
It also happens to be EV’s favorite song of the year.
This will forever go down as the first song I discovered and loved at exactly the same time as EV. She was sitting at our dining room table the first time I played it from my laptop, and as she requested Dirty Holiday’s Nobody’s Sober EP again and again it grew to be our favorite song amongst a strong crop.
There’s something about how the song picks up from a bluesy, acoustic strum to something larger .The arrangement and production is a perfect fit for this tune. In particular, I’d describe those organ parts as “lurid” – so swirling and colorful that there is almost something prickly and sinister about them, lending a different meaning to Barbato’s tossed off “da dut da” above them.
One Wednesday over the summer I brought EV to the Academy of Natural Sciences to see the dinosaurs for the first time. However, in documenting the story on the blog this summer, I skipped my favorite part.
EV and I reached the intersection of 19th street and Walnut, where 19th is interrupted by Rittenhouse Square. As we crossed from the west side to the east, we very literally bumped into Katie Barbato and her husband Matt. We hugged hello, and then I leaned down to introduce EV.
“EV, this is Miss Katie.” Then, it dawned on me that EV knew exactly who Miss Katie was. “EV, it’s Katie Barbato.”
Here is an artist’s rendering of EV’s face in that moment:
Katie, Matt, and I chatted about Katie’s record and my purple hair for a few minutes while EV hid behind my legs in awe. There we were in the middle of Center City, and her papa was talking to A ROCK STAR FROM THE IPOD. She did not say a single word to Katie or Matt, but as soon as we said our goodbyes the only thing she could talk about for the rest of the day was, “Did you know that I met Katie Barbato?”
Requests for “Mountains” saw an uptick after that, which I didn’t even think was possible.
You can buy the entire Nobody’s Sober EP at BandCamp for $4. It is five songs long and each song is way better than a dollar, so that is a steal.