antipopper

The image of Dead Girl gazing somewhat listlessly at her plate of four peas in the latest X-Statix has cheered me somewhat. So yeah, I was at the comics shop for the longest time today. Was sorely tempted to get the absolutely gorgeous X-Force hardback (which collects the current team’s run before they changed the name to X-Statix), even though I’ve got most of the monthlies. The reason X-Force/X-Statix works so well is its stunning ambivalence. Too many people confuse irony with disdainful sarcasm, and while Peter Milligan and Mike Allred have obviously made X-Statix a biting play on celebrity culture (in which our fallible mutant superheroes are actually a dubious marketing franchise), the soap-operatics genuinely work, just like New X-Men, the other X-title I read. Like all good pop, it still engages, and still loves its own genre. Keepin’ it, uh, unreal.

I was actually also tempted to get Ashley Wood‘s popbot collection, but was kinda put off by the self-conscious artsiness of it all, not to mention the slightly monotonous and fetishistic sexism (how many “kinky”, “half-naked women + robot” pictures can one draw, even if they are so fabulously rendered?). He has an undoubtedly terrific technique, especially when he draws like early period Andy Warhol, but it’s a little overbaked. He needs a breatheable framework for his talents — maybe something like the excellent Weak Tea Man (“enemy of Tannin, champion of the subtle brew”), which ran in a Sydney student mag about fourteen years ago, and was full of trashy meditations on having a huge tea bag for a head, and the totalising perils of modernist architecture (I kid you not — WTM has a tussle with Modulor Man, Le Corbousier’s universalist model of human movement as function). At the moment Wood’s art for Joe Casey’s Automatic Kafka is gorgeous, but that book seems to be an interesting but perhaps unwise attempt to out-Morrison Grant Morrison. Another superhero-as-franchise story, Kafka isn’t nearly as engaging as X-Statix, either.

On the weekend I finally got to tell Tanya that she reminds me of someone out of a Paul Pope book.

There, all the comics out of my system. Next.