3:AM Magazine

Not so much Brazil’s answer to Billy Childish as posers of the question, but Bahia’s The Futchers‘ frontman Rodrigo Chagas‘ Top 5 Buff Medways songs are:

1. ‘Troubled Mind’
2. ‘No Mercy’
3. ‘Sally Sensation’
4. ‘Fire’
5. ‘Medway Wheelers’

“Call all hippies boring old farts and set light to them.
Suddenly you’ve become a novel idea and you’ve got people wanting to join in.”
- Malcolm McLaren

It continues, this time with a write-up in the latest edition of UK men’s style mag Arena:

THE OFF-BEAT GENERATION

While the media continues to obsess over MySpace’s continued influence over the music industry, a new generation of internet-based writers are currently revolutionizing the world of fiction…

Young, untamed, good-looking and as influenced by punk rock as they are by Proust, a new wave of loosely-linked writers dubbed The Off-Beat Generation have been blitzing the ‘net with stories and poems via MySpace and supportive sites such as 3:AM Magazine to organise events and gain publicity.

Though the writers share certain literary and musical influences it is the energy, attitude and constant communication between the Off-Beat writers that unites them. And now in 2007, the mainstream publishing world is finally catching on to this Year Zero approach.

Central to the scene is Blackburn-born, New York novelist Tony O’Neill. One time keyboardist for Brian Jonestown Massacre and Kenickie, 28 year old O’Neill has survived crack and heroin addiction and two marriages to pen a wealth of material that far exceeds his younger years and is drawing comparisons to William Burroughs and Dan Fante. His gutter-dwelling UK debut Digging The Vein (Wrecking Ball Press, £9.95) is as raw and confessional as you could ever hope to read.

“I started writing because I was sick of my favourite writers all being dead,” explains O’ Neill, author of three books. “Just like everything else, the publishing world is run by committees and by the time a book has cleared the marketing departments it has been reduced down to something about as appetising as a re-heated Big Mac. Maybe we should make pipe bombs and try to orchestrate an overnight change? The internet is still the playground of the crackpots though, the misfits, the freaks and the occasional genius. I liken it to the first wave of punk bands playing at CBGB’s. Most of the audience is just other writers, but it’s a chance to develop, to experiment and sometimes scream abuse at each other. It is - although I can taste vomit as I say this - art for arts sake.”

First discovered by Dennis Cooper, who published his acclaimed debut Victims at 23, Berlin-based US wunderkind Travis Jeppesen is influenced by “poetry, pornography heavy metal, kitty cats and chaos”. Occasionally scatological and always provocative, his new novel Wolf At The Door (Twisted Spoon) is the type of dark poetic journey into Europe that only an American abroad could write.

Meanwhile, representing the London wing is Heidi James, author of the forthcoming novel Carbon (Wrecking Ball Press, £9.95) and owner of Social Disease, a new print-on-demand publisher intent on nailing the Off-Beat literature of cyberspace to the page.

“All the print magazines considered my work too ‘difficult’ for the ‘market’,” laughs James. “With online publishing you aren’t expected to be a commodity-shifter so you’re free to experiment and take chances, you have the freedom to fuck up. It’s just a shame that a book deal legitimizes a writer, like you’ve suddenly ‘made it’ and crossed over from cyber space to papyrus.”

Born out of boredom, blogging and an appreciation for the absurdities of life, New York-based 23 year old Tao Lin’s tireless and twisted online postings earned him a book deal that saw two books published simultaneously, a novel entitled Eeeee Eee Eeee (the sound dolphins make, apparently), in which Elijah Wood is murdered by a dolphin and a collection of stories, Bed (both Melville House). As well as flooding literary sites with his words, Lin can also be seen disrupting readings while dressed as a bear and gluing his flyers onto the major corporate buildings of Manhattan.

It’s such a combination of playful mischief-making within their promotion and the deadly intent of their writings that is establishing The Off-Beat Generation as the writers of tomorrow.

[Image: Tim Leary's Neurocomics, 1979]
[Forbidden Planet]

The cast for the adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen—the “Citizen Kane of comic books“—has been announced: Jackie Earle Haley will play Rorschach/Walter Kovacs, Patrick Wilson Nite-Owl, Billy Crudup becomes Dr Manhattan, Malin Akerman The Silk Spectre/Laurie Juspeczyk, Matthew Goode as Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is The Comedian [thanks to Kevin Weldon for the heads up] + “What I like about [graphic novels], apart from the pictures, is their immediacy, wit and sly brevity, and the way they can deliver quite dazzling changes of tone without ever seeming clunky. To me, it feels as if there is nothing they cannot do: that, as Dave Eggers has put it, far from being literary fiction’s halfwit cousin, the graphic novel is actually its ‘mutant sister, who can often do everything fiction can, and, just as often, more’. If there is a better book about the experience of growing up during the Iranian Revolution than Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, I’ve yet to find it.” Rachel Cooke thinks this whole graphic novel business might just catch on. + Too late, say the LA Times, at least for the monthlies: Dying media don’t come much dying-er than monthly comic books. From the great post-silver age watershed to the who lost Junior controversy about how this classic kids’ medium became a forum for middle-aged comic-shop losers; from the death of Charlton Comics to the government war on head shops, all funny-book stories are variations on a single theme: a depletion that’s been going on so long, and moving so slowly, that nobody’s even sure if there ever was a boom time. To find a sadder tale, you’d have to look to the never-ending death of the American newspaper. [The Beat] + “It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a graphic novel in possession of a good plot must be in want of a movie adaptation,” Douglas Wolk writes in Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Oregon Live find out more: “I wanted to do something along the lines of what Pauline Kael has done for movies. I wanted to write a book that was readable by people who were interested in ideas as much as the specific things I was writing about.” [See also, Wolk's Book Notes for Reading Comics and an interview with Wolk in The Phoenix]

[from Cover Browser, an archive that aims to
catalogue every comic book cover]
[Veer]

Comics Reporter interview Adrian Tomine: “I’ve always gravitated towards authors or filmmakers who put a real emphasis on dialog. Those are the kinds of things that I keep going back to, and discovering new things about. You hear it said of certain artists that they have a “natural gift” or an “ear” for dialog, and I wonder if that’s true… like, does this stuff just come easily and naturally to them, or do they just work harder on it? Because in my case, I know that all the dialog is really thought out and revised and even kind of “performed” out loud. I sweat over it.” + The Chicago Tribune talk to Paul Hornschemeier: “I remember having an argument with my mother when I was 10 or 11. My exact line was, ‘I don’t care if I’m eating Cheez Whiz on the streets of San Francisco living in a gutter, I am going to draw comics!’ [Bookslut] + As colourist, Hornschemeier is working with Jonathan Lethem on Omega the Unknown, which Lethem talks about here: Reading comics as long as I have was a huge head start, but it wasn’t everything. I needed to feel my way into the form. You quickly realize that in a sense it’s not a written form. The words are important, but the more important part of my work is giving Farel Dalrymple these assignments to draw. I think the dominant part of the comic book experience is the visual. One reason why I’ve been slow has been that I really have to do this job of storyboarding and visualization in my head, in order to make to my storytelling work in the medium’s terms. [LHB]

[Bill Burroughs, from the Big Book of Weirdos]
[Journalista]

Matt Groening interviewed by the LA Weekly: “In my little Japanese calligraphy pen which I misuse to make that scribbly look. It says Life Is Swell. Why? Well, I got sick of the word ‘hell’ as a comedy term about 15 years ago. But it was my trademark, my thing. So I was looking for a positive election in which I would change the name. I even put it in the strip. I can’t remember which election it was — Gore or Kerry — but I said, ‘If the election turns out the way I want it to, I will change the name of the strip to Life Is Swell.’ Then I kept it Hell until after the 2006 election. I thought, ‘Okay, I’m happy enough with the midterms, so I’ll change it in 2007.’ Like I said, nobody notices. I just think ‘swell’ is a funny word.” + A Q&A with Alison Bechdel [Maud Newton] + Time interview Neil Gaiman. + The Washington Post profile Peter Bagge [BoingBoing] + Peanuts by Charles Bukowski [Ed Champion] + Newsarama talk to Jeff Smith [Journalista] + NY Mag excerpt Osamu Tezuka’s Apollo Song [Bookslut] + 3:AM’s David Thompson links to Frank Miller’s NPR piece on patriotism and real-life supervillainy from 2006.