3:AM Magazine

Comics Reporter interview Wondermark’s David Malki: ”I think it’s cool that other people have appreciated this work in the same way that I do. People like to bring up Max Ernst to me a lot, whose work I finally looked up after having never seen it. He was doing almost exactly what I do! His stuff is awesome, and I’ve even seen a few images I recognize among his work. Seeing his stuff is really inspiring. I’m not familiar with Shane Simmons, but I’m a big fan of [Terry] Gilliam. And there are other people who’ve used Victorian clip-art to make comics or other things. But I still feel my work is different enough from any of these others that I’m able to feel out my own way.” More illustrated jocularity + Harvey Pekar & Rick Veitch’s Next-Door Neighbor + At CBR, Jonathan Lethem on Omega the Unknown: “I’m never thinking about what I or my characters might have to tell to ‘society.’ It just isn’t a term I think in. The story has some themes, I guess: conformity, franchising versus the small businessman, mediated versus ‘real’ experience, etcetera, but those are pretty much just what sneaked in when I wasn’t looking. In writing it, I concerned myself primarily with the character and material directly — teenagers with problems, evil robots, corrupt and borderline-autistic superheroes, hamburgers, that sort of thing.” + An interview with Jordan Crane: ”From now on, I don’t care if I never learn anything more about drawing. I just care about writing, and being engaging as a writer. I mean, that’s your f—ing job. Whether you look at someone like Stephen King or someone supposedly “good” like Flannery O’Connor, both of them, aside from their numerous differences, are engaging. That’s the hardest thing to be, the most important thing to be.” [via Comics Reporter] + Unshelved, a comic book club [via LHB] + Gary Groth on Ralph Steadman.

[Image: Tove Jansson's art for The Hobbit / Comics Reporter]

26 important comic books, how they got Golden + Paul Karasik profiles Will Eisner: The best Spirit stories crackle. These noir-ish picaresque tales have a jazzy sense of New York humour. Eisner drew it as he knew it.” + Standard Attrition, the Vertigo group blog + Coming soon, Beasts 2 + Sausage and Carot, Simone Lia’s new comic for DFC + The mighty Mark Kermode talks to Jamie Hewlett: “Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I remember we filmed [Tank Girl] in Arizona, in this extreme heat, and Rachel [Talalay, director] had just discovered that she was pregnant, which made her very emotional and snappy. So there was Ice T, dressed as kangaroo, and Malcolm McDowell, who was incredibly bad tempered the whole time, constantly rowing with Rachel, and key bits of the movie just got missed - they simply forgot to film things.” + Empire magazine’s 50 greatest comic book characters [via Forbidden Planet Blog] + “Chris Ware is to the contemporary comics world as John Updike is to American (prose) fiction.” [via Journalista!] + Pádraig Ó Méalóid hangs out with the Moore family: “A very tall, skinny, and exceptionally hairy man stood up and said, “You must be Pádraig. It’s a pleasure to meet you at last.” This was Leah’s father, Alan Moore, which you all may know I am a big admirer of. Deirdre was even more surprised that I when he then shook her hand, saying, “And you must be Deirdre.” I just felt that the whole thing was all wrong. Alan shouldn’t have been telling me it was a pleasure to meet me: instead, I should have been grovelling in from of him, going, “I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy.” + And don’t forget to check out Pádraig’s interview with Alan Moore.

[Woland, from Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejba's The Master and Margarita]

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight opens in the UK next weekend. Novelist Alan Bissett considers the history of the character all the buzz surrounds:

Frequently rated among the greatest fictional villains of all time, the Joker is the same chaotic trickster who appears in every culture, from Loki in Norse lore to the Judeo-Christian Lucifer, or the Dionysus of Greek myth, inspirer of ritual madness. His literary antecedents are Shakespeare’s Fool, happily ridiculing King Lear; Professor Woland from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, a lurid showman who wreaks havoc in Stalinist Moscow; and Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs. Indeed, the idea for The Joker first came to Bill Finger after seeing Conrad Veidt in the film adaptation of Hugo’s book, a German expressionist nightmare with a permanent smile.

A classic piece of pop-culture design himself – with his fixed grin and chalk-white face – we can see the Joker’s visual influence on V for Vendetta, Stephen King’s It and Bono’s ‘Mr MacPhisto’ persona from U2’s Zoo TV tour. His anarchic spirit cackles in Tyler Durden, Jack Sparrow and Andy Kaufman. If Batman is the classic anti-hero then the Joker is surely an ‘anti-villain’, charismatic and colourful, a glam-rock hood thumbing his nose at authority. Politically, he is an anarchist. Philosophically, he’s exisentialist. His art school is surely Dada. He doesn’t commit crimes, he commits ‘performances’. Life for the Joker is a cosmic farce, the only logical reactions to it being laughter or murder. Batman’s great dilemma is: how do you defeat someone who cares nothing about his own existence? In The Dark Knight we see the Batpod speeding towards a raving Heath Ledger. ‘C’mon!’ taunts the Joker, ‘Kill me!’ Batman bottles it, swerving at the last moment. The Joker, we sense, is almost disappointed. Even the great supervillains from the comic world – Lex Luthor, The Leader, Doctor Doom – are mere variations on the mad scientist theme, hellbent on world domination. The Joker doesn’t want to run the world. He wants to fuck with its head.

This week 3:AM briefly commends to your attention:

* Portishead - Having blown away a decade’s worth of cobwebs, Portishead’s Adrian Utley talks to Dazed and Confused about his love of noise. Plus recent wonder The Rip has been covered by some familar faces.

* Lowbrow art - Mining the creative underground, Juxtapoz, Sketchy Pad and Creep Magazine are bringing talking apes, octobots and sinister balloons to an otherwise grim summer.

* Werner Herzog - As if we’d ever need one, here’s a reminder of the magical chilling world of Werner Herzog.

* 1927 Cabaret - Before the joys and horrors of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival begin, highlight of last year 1927 Cabaret have returned from the road and remain as beguiling as ever.

* Googoo g’joob - He was the eggman.

3:AM’s Lee Rourke on the return of British avant garde fiction:

Ever wondered what happened to British avant garde fiction? Well, it seems to have found a home in London’s conceptual art world.

Given the homogenised state of modern literary fiction today, it’s hard to believe that an experimental (British) literary avant garde ever existed. Yet, back in the 60s a number of writers - most notably BS Johnson and Ann Quin - almost managed to convince the literary establishment of their day that there was something more to the British novel than we were led to believe.

Looking back at their remarkable work these days, long after their working-class bluntness and radical modernism forced most critics into paroxysms of derision, it’s difficult to imagine it reaching the top of a publisher’s slush pile, let alone making it all the way into print. We’ve known for a long time now that marketing departments don’t want to deal with multifaceted and circuitous fiction - because we rarely see it.

However, a new generation of experimental voices can now be heard, thanks mainly to publishers such as Book Works, a publisher that has embedded itself firmly in London’s art world. Book Works have just published their first two titles, in a series of nine, on its Semina - “where the novel has a nervous breakdown” - imprint. Semina takes its inspiration from a series of loose-leaf magazines issued by California beat artist Wallace Berman in the 1950s and 1960s.

[..]

I’m hoping that such a venture will not send critics and readers alike back into the safe embrace of contemporary literary fiction, and that once again literature can begin to forge ahead into new directions. It’s about time we ignored the grumblings of a past generation of critics (too many to mention here) who tired of our old avant garde’s investigations and embraced, once more, the notion that fiction doesn’t always have to strive to be “literary” to be authentic.

Further: Richard Marshall reviews the Semina title One Break, A Thousand Blows! for 3:AM / Stewart Home, Semina commissioning editor, in conversation with Bridget Penney

”We’ll never be reasonable to anyone ever again. It’s war from here on out.”

the eXile – the Mark Ames-edited Russian newspaper that ran into trouble a while back – returns in a new guise:

We were never like the others: the fake-alternative, fake-angry papers. That’s why our spectacular death has pissed off so many people who never had the nerve to go where we went, and who always wanted to see us snuffed out—quietly, without a fuss. We lived out our name as we lived out everything else. We’re now in true eXile, just as we’d announced from the beginning 11 years ago—and that is why we’ve named the new online webzine that we’re launching today “The eXiled.” It’s now an accomplished fact.

But our job isn’t done. We’ve got a lot of bile yet to be pumped, a lot of unfinished business—and thanks to our readers, we’ve got a little pot of money to fuel our insurgency against what we can only describe as “the fucks.” You know who we’re talking about here.

How will “The eXiled” differ from our now-abandoned Mother Ship, the USS eXile? For starters, we’ve pulled out of Russia for good—we’re not going to stick around there and see what the ministry experts think of our literary golden shower into Medvedev’s mouth. Like the pro-Chechen site kavkaz.org, we’ve moved our servers out of Russia and to a secure location that’s more appropriate. Which in our case means that we’ve moved our operations to Panama.

Yes, Panama. Just because we like the sound of it. Fact is, Russia just ain’t fun anymore. We’re bored of all the overpriced low-quality nonsense that governs every aspect of that birch-infested bog. We’ve moved to somewhere a little nicer, where we can exchange our mud-stained parkas and boots for loose-fitting short-sleeved Hawaiian shirts, and where we no longer get harangued into “bonding” with the locals via their filthy peasant drug alcohol, because we can bond with Pedro and Manuel via their clean pure white rock cocaine, a far superior and more noble substance. I mean, everyone in Panama smiles all the time! A cynic might say “That’s because they’re fucking cokeheads!” to which we could only reply, “Cynic!” Unless we’re on coke, in which case we’d answer, “Haha! Yeah, you’re totally right. In fact, I never thought of that before…”

So, what do you folks out there in reader-land have to look forward to here? Death. But before you die, we at The eXiled will be there to hold your hand and make sure your last days and months on this planet of ours really, really hurt. We’re the doctor who refuses to give you morphine for that tumor eating its way through your pancreas, telling you, “We don’t think it’s right for you to cop out and get high simply because you’re in excruciating pain day and night, and you’ll continue to shriek in pain until you finally die from shock in about four months, which is really three months and twenty-nine days more than any living creature could possibly bear. So, suck it up, you nation of whiners you!”

As part of the London Lit Plus festival, 3:AM are hosting an evening with novelist and film-maker Chris Petit, tomorrow at the infamous Wheatsheaf Pub.

Chris Petit is the director of cult British road movie Radio On, recently re-released on DVD by the BFI, and author of the essential London noir Robinson and the thrillers The Psalm Killer and The Passenger.

3:AM in Conversation: Chris Petit
Upstairs at The Wheatsheaf
Wednesday 16th July 2008 from 7.30pm