Monthly Archives: March 2015

Archie

Riverdale Book Review

’Tis the time of year when periodicals are obliged to share their audited circulation information publicly, in small print in the back pages. It’s a law, so that publications can’t, for instance, lie about the size of their readership when soliciting advertisers.
I find that I am in a rather select club. I subscribe to all the regular Archie Comics titles (the ones featuring Archie and friends, that is, not the same publisher’s Sonic the Hedgehog or superhero series), and I’m noticing that none of these titles have more than 1000 subscribers or so. That’s worldwide, apparently. Total paid circulation of each Archie title tends to be in the 40,000 or 50,000 range, though well over twice that number of copies may be printed, returned by newsstands and presumably recycled. That process is as it always has been, though the numbers used to be much larger. Digital comics must take up a lot of the slack, as do variant covers and other enticements that goose sales of titles that last for only a few issues or a few years.
There used to be dozens of regularly published Archie comics. With this year’s cancellation of the Life With Archie magazine and the Kevin Keller Comic (which was the last vestige of the old Veronica title), there are now just eleven. Seven of those are digest magazines filled largely with reprints (not that I’m complaining; I’m really enjoying the reprints these days). Two are the slick, adult-oriented horror comics Afterlife With Archie and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. That means Archie is now publishing just two all-original comic-book sized comic books in the trad Archie mode: Archie (published monthly) and Betty & Veronica (bi-monthly).
I remain a loyal subscriber. In fact, I’d happily subscribe to a lot more Archie titles if they existed. But I get that I’m select audience—one of a thousand.

Music reviews

Scribblers Music Review

Frank Black, “How You Went So Far.” I was a big fan of Frank Black and the Catholics, not least because the rhythm section hailed from the Mark Mulcahy-led bands Miracle Legion and Polaris. The Catholics albums are where Black stopped being quite so ahead of his time and instead showed his roots—folks and blues interests which had been buried in the intense mixes of the Pixies and his solo albums. There are more complex lyrics, and they’re more intelligible. There’s nuance in the guitar playing. There’s no fear about slowing things down a bit, or letting a guitar solo go for more than two bars. The Catholics has a Beatles White Album feeling of basic appreciation for the classics—surf, folk, soul, FM rock. “How You Went So Far,” a previously unreleased demo which Stereogum has premiered in advance of a Frank Black & The Catholics—The Complete Recordings box set due out April 20 on the Cooking Vinyl label, is a fine example of how thoughtful and balanced and controlled Black’s songwriting was in this period. The Pixies fierceness and the solo poppiness may have been lost, but some remarkable depth was achieved.

Uncategorized

The Saner Saint

The 1989 TV movies of The Saint, starring Simon Dutton as Simon Templar, got released on DVD last year. I missed the announcement because it wasn’t mentioned on saint.org, where I’m used to gettting all the major Saint news. So I’ve only just picked these up, at a decent discount from Amazon. The disks, which have only been available as bootlegs until now, have been nicely packaged by Acorn, the same company which released all the ITV Roger Moore Saint episodes from the ‘60s, and which I also respect as an expert distributor of theater-themed DVDs (from a documentary about Kenneth Branagh and Derek Jacobi doing Hamlet to the miniseries of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Chronicles) and some of my famous British mysteries (Rosemary & Thyme, anyone?).
There’s a lot to like about these Saint movies. It’s really the only Saint series that gets to take its time. When the generally wonderful hour-long Roger Moore series was basing its episodes on Leslie Charteris short stories, they fit nicely, but when they tried to adapt one of the novels, like Plays With Fire, to a single episode, the results are forced and frenzied. The George Sanders series of B-movies aren’t much longer, and there aren’t very many of them. Some of them also make up ridiculous non-Charteris plots. While it’s true that the Dutton Saints aren’t based on specific Leslie Charteris stories, they’re true to the character in a way that, say, the Val Kilmer film of The Saint just eight years later profoundly was not. Dutton’s Saint enjoys the thrill of the chase. He likes showing off his cooking skills. He likes hobnobbing in multiple languages. (Good thing on that last one, because these movies were made for international distribution, with multi-cultural casts; some actors are dubbed into English while others are not. An amusing viewing experience at times.) The leisureliness of the Dutton Saints suits the character, suits the complex plots, suits the medium. If only they hadn’t gone for that lush romantic musical soundtrack which desperately dates the series—it sounds even earlier than late ‘80s, more like Macmillan & Wife or Hart to Hart. Which brings me to another point: Dutton’s Simon Templar unapologetically sleeps with a lot of women. That’s not so true of The Saint from the books, or from Roger Moore’s Saint (though there is an episode where the cops burst into his hotel room and find him with three women in bed—his unshakeable alibis). I don’t think it’s a given that Simon Templar sleeps around the same way James Bond does. But some adapters simply assume, and make it so.

Rock Gods

Rock Gods #365: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene

The Poor Turns’ debut disk got an unexpected early release—or an impossibly late one, depending on what side of the road you’re on.
The delays were all in the studio—scheduling mishaps, equipment breakdowns and at one point the breakdown of an engineer (poor Mark Hammersmith’s heart episode). That’s par for the studio course, except that this was a spring-themed album (Turn of the season, see) and was thus kind of on a deadline.
Miraculously, time was made up on the production end, where the cancellation of a big-label order meant that a lot of in-limbo projects got rushed through.
Good thing, since “BGB” is already getting radio play. Also good since the band had scheduled a CD release party at the Bullfinch, then taken the “CD release” status of the gig, and can now put it back on again.
Now if only it would stop snowing.
Tonight: The Percy Phones at the Bullfinch, with the cool retro synths…Private party at Hamilton’s, no music so didn’t even bother to crash… Or Refuse at D’Ollaire’s, with an all-new set that will totally turn off their above-ground fans…

Archie

Riverdale Book Review

I am suddenly curious about Archie’s Weird Mysteries. I had little interest in the show when it originally aired from 1999-2001—my cable provider didn’t carry the PAX channel on which it aired, I had tax liens which affected how much I could spend on comics (not to mention food) in general, and the cartoons were kind of an Archie aberration in terms of style and flow.
Having finally felt ready to partake of this curious precursor of such recent supernatural Archie adventures as Afterlife With Archie and Chilling Tales of Sabrina, I found that I could buy a box set of the complete 40-episode series for less than eight dollars on Amazon.
I watched the entire first disk—three hours and ten episodes long, plus a bonus episode of Sabrina the Animated Series—in two sittings, while doing listings work at my desk. It makes for excellent background viewing: colorful, easy to follow and, at least to me, effortlessly appealing because it involves Archie characters.
There are in-jokes for fans, such as a reference to Archies vocalist Ron Dante. The central Archie characters maintain the characteristics of their comic book counterparts, as distilled through golden age of Hollywood stereotypes: everyteen Archie is the hero, Jughead his goofy sidekick, Dilton the scientist who explains things, Betty the damsel in distress, Reggie and Veronica the wild cards who, when afflicted by supernatural phenomena, may use their newfound powers for evil or egocentric means.
Not nearly as bad as I’d always feared, Archie’s Weird Mysteries ends each episode with a reminder that all these horror scenarios are happening in the supposedly sleepy town of Riverdale, and that small-town nature is neatly conveyed in a manner which the old Life With Archie adventure comic books couldn’t always manage.
Still, Archie’s Weird Mysteries has some weird premise: Archie is a teen journalist who writes a weekly column about strange doings in his hometown. The column is popular and well-read (it’s even followed by an X-Files-like duo of government agents who appear in the episode “The Jughead Incident). Yet in every single episode, Archie’s friends remain incredulous that there could be such things as, say, werewolves, when they’ve already apparently dealt with mummies, ghosts and demons, and been affected by spells or potions that have rendered them gigantic, invisible or zombie-esque. Unlike the original Scooby Doo series, where there was good reason for the Mystery Machine gang to be eternally skeptical of supposed supernatural chicanery, in Weird Mysteries actual monsters, ghouls and space aliens commonly cross paths with Archie et al.
Archie’s Weird Mysteries is second only to the golden age Archie radio program as the longest-running broadcast series to feature the Riverdale characters. It’s far-fetched and a truly bizarre use of this largely reality-based comic book ensemble, but somehow it doesn’t hurt the legacy at all.

Music reviews

Scribblers Music Review

Sufjan Stevens, “Should Have Known Better.” He’s been missed, not least because in his early career he seemed so prolific. Remember when all the talk about him was how Michigan and Illinois were just the tip of a 50-album project covering every state in the union? “Should Have Known Better” presages Carrie & Lowell, the new album due on March 31. It’s a confidently constructed pop song that hearkens back to early Stevens but with richer, deeper production. Like so much Stevens stuff, it goes on longer than anticipated, given how simple and direct and quiet it is. The extended sense gives it a transcendence, a meditative quality augmented by the pebbles-in-a-pool video.