Sainthood Reps, Monoculture. It starts out with the sort of plodding shouting I associate with early Beastie Boys, the first rap band where I didn’t understand why the songs wouldn’t be better if they were sung rather than rapped. On later tracks, Sainthood Reps delve into doomy metallic crunch, with the same lumbering laxity. Which made me think of Rick Rubin’s passions for modern metal. So, an album made in an alternate 1986? Yeah, but too sluggish to register.

Yeah! By Peter Bagge and Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics, 2011)
Before there were the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there was Yeah! “The most popular band in the history of the universe”—except, unfortunately, on their own planet Earth—the pop trio of Krazy, Honey and Woo-Woo took the Josie & the Pussycats scenario of underrated, up-against-it girl band and took it to several extremes—more outer space than the TV cartoon Josie & the Pussycats in Outer Space, more distinct and clashing personalities than She’s Josie (the quaint teen comic where the Pussycats first formed), more gritty than Midvale (neighboring town to Riverdale).
Hard not to overdo the Josie comparisons, yet Yeah! is also the product of two great indie-comic minds, Peter Bagge of Hate and Gilbert Hernandez of Love and Rockets. Both men gave cartoon gravitas to confused modern teens and helped build a thriving college-age readership for their black-humored real-life-scaled adventures. This was their attempt to create and maintain a regular mainstream title for a younger audience, for a major publisher, DC. They made their deadlines, raised a few eyebrows, and lasted nine issues.
Yeah! is well worthy of reprinting by Fantagraphics, the usual publisher of Bagge and Hernandez’s best-known indie grungeworks. I collected Yeah! as it came out originally, and miss the splashy colors, but I like the strong blacks and whites of this book too. It’s a heftier volume than nine issues would seem to demand, reminding you that even ten years ago comics were still pretty fully packed

The band’s interplanetary adventures give them license for imaginative, outrageous concert set-ups. With their solo work, usually it’s Hernandez who can’t keep his feet on the ground and sends his Love & Rocket cast into

Here, Hernandez is the artist and not the writer, yet it’s Bagge—whose down-to-earth delineations of the Seattle and New Jersey youth scenes of the ‘90s nailed a generation of slackers and posers—who wastes no time freaking out in the cosmos. It’s a good writing/drawing combo.

Hernandez reads Bagge right. Pop music is a fantasy. Even the downside of the business is a fantasy. Having a band tour in a seedy rocketship, forced to don ugly costumes whenever they play Jupiter so the natives won’t revolt, having to compete with a derivative band called Haey! which is stealing their interplanetary thunder… Yeah, the tone is just right.

I dig Yeah! just as I did when it first came out. At the time he was launching this kid-friendly project, Bagge was also writing essays in defense of the current stream of bubblegum bands such as Spice Girls and Britney Spears. A lot of my admiration was thus mixed up in Bagge’s (and Hernandez’s) willingness to challenge the indie status quo.

A stronger recommendation for Yeah! would come from my daughters, who were aged eight and six when I brought the Fantagraphics Yeah! compendium home from the comics store a few months ago. They each read it cover-to-cover in one sitting, and it’s been brought on several long car trips. It’s right in the mix with their (and my) beloved Archie comics. They have no sense of irony or subtext when devouring Yeah! They just like knowing how the band will escape the Mongrel Mogul’s Halloween party.

The Binks are back. What, you didn’t know theyd been away? Yep, six months, starving frayed and crowded in a two-room apartment in a city that will not be named here because it does not deserve to be.
“We thought that’s what you did when you wanted to make it—leave.,” assesses Charlie Crown, the band’s percussionist/saxophonist. “But we really didn’t have anywhere to go, and no saving.” Which would be the other considerations in “making it.”
Well, welcome back, prodigal band. (Grand return concert Friday at Hamilton’s, with Th’ Wolfe and Der Lust.) If you make it anywhere, why not make it here?

Seasonal pop with Assinippi, The Pembrokes, Tinkertown and The White Island Shores at The Bullfinch… Tropical worldbeat potsmoking pop at Hamilton’s with E. Marion, Independence Gable and Pasque Isle… D’ollaire’s pretends the college kids are still in town by booking Long Plain, The Brocktons and Cuttyhunk. Who’ll go see that?…

We have formulated a plan to knock over a gas station.

Foreigner, Feels Like the First Time box set
For three minutes in the mid-1970s, Foreigner had the patina of hipness. That’s when the coldblooded video for “Cold as Ice” was broadcast as a short film on the coolest show on TV, Saturday Night Live. This two-CD, one-DVD set shows how Foreigner squandered that cachet. Instead of SNL, the live concert here will be broadcast on PBS. The obligatory “unplugged” set is pretentiously titled “Acoustique.” The other disk is, whoops, “brand new digital recordings” of Foreigner’s greatest hits, as interpreted by the band’s current line-up. Has that gambit ever worked, except as some legal runaround? For decades now, Foreigner’s featured only one founding member, Mick Jones. The rest of the current bunch were assembled to tour in 2004 or ’05: vocalist Kelly Hansen, guitarist/wind instrumentalist Thom GImbel and bassist Jeff Pilson , more recent recruit Michael Bluestein on keyboards and drummer Mark Schulman, who’s been with Foreigner on and off since 1992.
I won’t be listening to this ever. But I will note that Mick Jones did do one other cool thing since 1976—he co-wrote an award-winning Brit-rock pastiche “The Flame Still Burns,” performed by Les Wickes and Strange Fruit in the cult rock movie Still Crazy in 1998. That song is done by Foreigner for the first time on the acoustic disk.

Bossypants
By Tina Fey (Reagan Arthur Books, 2011)

I’m not the biggest Tina Fey fan. I feel respect, admiration, but also the frustration that, as SNL newsreader, Mean Girls screenplaywright and 30 Rock creator, she’s settled for too many easy laughs and obvious set-ups. I guess you could say that about this book too, since it’s in the conventional memoir format, without any of the envelope-pushing provocations of, say, Sarah Silverman or Dave Eggers.
Yet despite its shortcomings, I had to stop reading this book in bed because I was giggling and chortling so frequently that my wife couldn’t get to sleep. The wisecracks disarm you here in a way they don’t in Fey’s other comedy media. She’s also much more endearing here than I’ve found her to be in her movie or TV projects. The chapter in which she exalts her father while attempting to analyze and justify some of his conservative and un-PC impulses, is not just well-crafted but crafty. The book could easily have been a knock-off, the obligatory literary stage in a mutli-pronged celebrity career. Instead, it’s so moving and mirthful it knocks you for a loop.

The Taw Rats were “The Taw Rats (featuring Joe Smith)” for so long that, when Joe Smith stopped being featured, they didn’t quite know what to do. So they did nothing for a well. It wasn’t as if it was false advertising. But one former admirer of the band in particular got upset anyway: Joe Smith.
Smith, as we overheard the other night from an adjoining table at the Bullfinch, wants the Taw Rats to change their whole name.
“What if we just find someone else to feature?” was one hilarious burst of words the erstwhile bandmates got to fit in edgewise during Smith’s rant. Which led to an outpouring from the once-permanent “guest guitarist” about how crucial he was to the band.
We’re already gathering evidence to the contrary: Smith wrote none of the Taw Rats’ (few) original songs, rarely rehearsed with them, and did none of the businessy things like booking them or sticking their fliers on phone poles.
The rest of the arguments will be fought in public. Expect The Joe Smith Band (featuring Joe Smith) at a pub near you. Not to mention the newly formed Not Featuring Joe Smith Band (formerly The Taw Rats).

Why does Gar always seem to have so much money? He says it’s something to do with taxes.

Neon Indian, Heart: Decay
Winding dance music about decay seems like it’s everywhere. Based on this short burst from a forthcoming album, this one’s distinguished by a misintuitive mix that places certain beats and airy noises much further up front than you expect. But it’s still mood than substance.

I got me this neat Deadman badge from Midtown Comics in Manhattan last month. Put it on the bowler hat, rare honor for a badge.

I would’ve been a charter member of the Deadman fan club if they’d ever had one. I was there with mourning-bells on when the character first appeared, rendered by Carmine Infantino and then by Neal Adams, in Strange Adventures Comics. I was six years old, but the Comics Code Authority was on the case, making sure that kids could not possibly be creeped out by the adventures of a brutally murdered ill-tempered circus aerialist who could swoop into the bodies of living people and take over their souls quicker than he could say “Boo!”

Deadman is now a revered cult hero, hardly the first dead comics hero (that would be The Spectre, a quarter-century earlier) but among the hardiest. Back then, there were no “cult” heroes, only poor-selling ones. Nobody at the schoolyard cared whether you read Deadman. It was something uncool you kept to yourself. Ditto Len Wein & Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing and E. Nelson Bridwell & Joe Orlando’s Inferior Five and Bridwell & Bob Oksner’s Angel and the Ape.

Deadman rated a National Lampoon parody (in which villains are stopped by a plummeting lifeless corpse), drawn by Neal Adams himself. Dave Bullock revived (resurrected? Reburied?) for the cool Wednesday Comics miniseries a couple of years back. Neil Gaiman used him for the supernatural superhero miniseries The Books of Magic. Deadman’s got staying power, which I guess in his line you call immortality.

But mostly the cool DC characters of this ilk are used to remind us that DC operates an entire universe and not just a stock ensemble company that wears nothing but “S” insigniae or batcowls.

Every time there’s a cataclysmic worlds-changing event in comicsdom, that’s when the minor stars get trotted out, usually unrecognizable except for their costumes. The grief-stricked Elongated Man of Identity Crisis. The uncharacteristically subtle Swamp Thing of Brightest Day Aftermath. The suddenly overbearing Oracle once Batman died. And now—for Flashpoint, a multi-comic reinvents the origins and working relationships of dozens of DC mainstays—a Deadman who isn’t even dead yet and already has a too-fast-to-live attitude.

The supposed cleverness in this reworking is sheer obviousness. Boston Brand, destined to be Deadman, is a circus acrobat. Hey—so were the Graysons, the trapeze-grabbing clan which begat Batman’s sidekick Robin (aka Nightwing, aka Batman).

On the other hand, the cover of the first issue of the three-issue Deadman Flashpoint series is pretty cool—circus postery, with nice use of white space.

And they gave me a Deadman badge about it. Something I’ve been waiting for all my, uh, life.