Aggregator aggravator

August 26th, 2011

SPECIAL “BAD TOUCH IN GOOD COMPANY” EDITION!!!

Like I said last time, it’s been a while since we did one of these, eh? Still, that’s alright – it’s not like there’s been another Royal Wedding I could have sniped at or anything!

Anyway, enough of that (You’re telling us! – Ed) – I want to put some filth in you .  Best take your shots first, unless you actually want to catch something…

  • FRESH SCALPEL DEPT: So, this is easily the best thing I’ve found on the internet recently – an archive of unused covers that Carlos Segura created for The Filth:

    These images are rawer and more hysterical than the finished designs, which always maintained a clinical distance from the horrors contained within. I think that was probably the right decision, but some of these test designs attack the “tabloid pornography” aspect of the series with a feverish intensity:
    Like Dan McDaid said on That Twitter the other night, it’s enough to make you feel slightly unwell.
  • TOO FUNNY FOR COMICS DEPT: If you’re still not tired of jokes about Chester Brown’s “comic-strip memoir about being a john” Paying For It, you should probably check out this Johnny Ryan piss-take (link via Sean WitzkeEd).  Like Ryan, I just can’t wait for Brown to try to write sequel after living life on the other side of his regular interactions.  Somehow I think Getting Paid For It: Two Hundred Empty Pages Stained With Tears might not generate the same amount of attention that the moon headed goon’s current book has (Oh, so we’re making ugly jokes now? Classy stuff there! – Ed).
  • STILL TOO FUNNY FOR COMICS DEPT: I love being able to get regular doses of Kate Beaton excelling in the genre of Kate Beaton, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a physical copy of Hark, A Vagrant (That’s all well and good, but Amazon are still on my shit list because of the Wikileaks thing though pal – Ed). Also, this joke involving Rogue from Strange Tales is the best X-Men I’ve read since the end of Grant Morrison’s run:
  • MINDLESS NEWS, SPECIAL “TALES FROM THE MILLARDROME” EDITION: An exclusive source close to famous Scottish comic book writer, swimming instructor, and creator of the first mp3 blog Marky “Mark” Millar has revealed to us that Millar has a new movie in the works. Based on a doodle that Millar drew on the inside cover of  The Art of War while on holiday in Earth 2, the film will be called MMP3, and it will cover the period in the early 2000s where Mark Millar took a break from being a deluded, kill-hungry dick writing comics to create the first ever mp3 blog. Apparently Tony Scott is attached as director, and has been heard describing the movie as being like “Bad Boys meets The Social Network times two” at several high profile swim meets (Seems to me that you’re being both rude and kind of mental here Dave – Ed).
  • GOOD TIMES IN BAD COMPANY REDUX: I know I already mentioned this in my last Aggregator post (I’m not sure you did until five minutes ago, but oh well – Ed), but just look at Milligan leaning back into the couch, giving cool answers through his shades, and tell me that the whole Strange Days crew aren’t part of of the lineage of working class art-pop stars Owen Hatherly describes in his new book on Pulp:

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  • TOO PULPY FOR COMICS DEPT: If you’re at all interested in Pulp or British pop in general, you should definitely give Uncommon a try. Here’s Hatherly laying out his thesis in an essay for the Guardian:

    From the early 1970s until the 1990s, hundreds of musicians from working or lower-middle class backgrounds, many educated at art schools, claiming state benefits and living in bedsits or council flats weeks before they found themselves staying at five-star hotels, were thrown up in the UK. From Roxy Music to the Smiths, from the Associates to the Pet Shop Boys, all balanced sexuality and literacy, ostentatious performance and austere rectitude, raging ambition and class resentment, translating it into records balancing experimentation with populist cohesion; it was possible to read the lyric sheets without embarrassment. You could dance to it.

    At some point in the 1990s this literary-experimental pop tradition disappeared. Some reasons are structural – workfare schemes meant that claiming the dole as a “musicians’ grant” was less and less practicable, art schools were absorbed by universities, council flats were unobtainable for any but the desperate, and squats became rarer, so the unstable alliance between bohemia and estate was broken. The result was a striking homogeneity of class as much as of sound. In October 2010, according to an oft-cited statistic, 60% of artists in the UK top 10 had been to public school, compared with 1% in 1990.

  • If you don’t care about any of this stuff, that’s okay – we can sort that out for you!

  • NEW ADVENTURES IN McCARTHYISM: Bob Temuka on Brendan McCarthy on Judge Dredd (link via Andrew HickeyEd). If that isn’t enough to get you clicking, this image should do the trick:
  • MINDLESS SELF PROMOTION DEPT: And while I’m on a roll, here are two excellent essays on Carla Speed McNeil’s “aboriginal science fiction” comic Finder, one by Matthew J. Brady, the other by some guy who’s going around calling himself Illogical Volume. Both of them are well worth your time, as is McNeil’s comic.

Anyway, that’s enough of that for one day (Agreed! – Ed). Hopefully you’ll let all of these horrible little seeds take root in your skull, safe in the knowledge that in a few days time you’ll end up looking like this:

Beautiful, isn’t it? Breath with me now: AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

(Don’t worry folks, we’re going to make sure Illogical Volume has a “wee lie down” now – hopefully he’ll be on better form next week when he writes his next two Finder essays!  – Ed)

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