267: the absent sad bangers
Hullo.
Out of Space
D36
Nimrod in disco flares
Links
Byyyyeeee!!!
NYCC was the last weekend, where Marvel released the news about the end of the Krakoan Age. Mark Brooks & Richard Isanove provides the teaser image. As many have said, you have to cheer for Jean and Scott's pose in the middle there.
I'm working with RB Silva on Rise of the Powers of X, which is a lot of fun. With Powers of X, he defined one half of the start of the Krakoan age, so having him here to end makes a lot of sense – especially as this is the book which is tonally most akin to Powers of X. I mean, no shit. It's called Powers of X. So lots of big structural time and space stuff, building off everything we've been doing.
I suspect the penny also drops for those who've been doing math on how many X issues I've said I have left to write, or yet to be published. I've seen some people thinking I was going to be on the books for longer – however, those maths were assuming that all the X books I was writing was one book. I'll be out of the X-office (and Marvel, for that matter) by the middle of next year.
But what a way to go out.
Three books were announced at NYCC, and I'm just going to quote all the solicits and share the cover art. Powers, as it's written by me, House, as it's where Lucas had to go to work (and I can't be more excited for him – he's finally going to get to draw extended action!) and Resurrection of Magneto because everyone needs to know where Al gets to complete his whole X-saga.
RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #1 (OF 5)
Written by KIERON GILLEN
Art and Cover by R.B. SILVA
On Sale 1/10And the fight for Krakoa has been lost in RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #1! Ten years ago, the mutants returned from their exile to try and reclaim the Earth from the forces of Orchis. They failed. Now, within the victorious Orchis with their gauntlet choking the world, Nimrod and Omega Sentinel put their plan within a plan into action. They are to summon their binary god to consume everything in their accession. All that stands between them is the X-Men. What can they do? They're the X-Men. They'll find a way. That's their power. So begins a story beyond time and space, with the rise of powers beyond our petty human intelligence.
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #1 (OF 5)
Written by GERRY DUGGAN
Art by LUCAS WERNECK
Cover by PEPE LARRAZ
On Sale 1/3Krakoa has just begun to fight in FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #1! Mutantkind has never had a greater fall. From the highs of Krakoa—their own glorious nation, a place where they were safe and happy—to the lowest of lows. Outlawed, hunted, killed, most of their kind missing or dead, and now, one their greatest leaders, Cyclops, is on trial facing a death penalty. Ready or not, the time has come for the X-Men to make their final stand against the forces that have struck them low. The day is now. The place is here. The tale of the house Xavier built will long be told…and few will forget this darkest chapter.
RESURRECTION OF MAGNETO #1 (OF 4)
Written by AL EWING
Art by LUCIANO VECCHIO
Cover by STEFANO CASELLI
On Sale 1/24It's a tale of Lifedeath in RESURRECTION OF MAGNETO #1! On Krakoa, resurrection from the dead was as easy as completing a circuit—but Krakoa fell. The time of easy miracles is over, and only the hard roads are left. Now it falls to Storm—as the epic conclusion to the Krakoan Age looms—to bring their oldest enemy home to fight against the FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X…but after all he did, and all that was done to him, can Magneto bear to return?
"When we killed Magneto, there was a plan," Ewing explained. "This isn’t going to be a golden egg, easy path to resurrection. This is the hard road."
Hashtag your comments on twitter #Fohoxrotpox, obv. No typos, or Omega Sentinel will hunt and kill you.
HEY! DIE GMS! ARE YOU GOING TO DRAGONMEET IN LONDON DECEMBER 2ND? DO YOU WANT TO BE PAID TO GM A MEGAGAME VERSION OF DIE? CAN YOU DO ANYTHING ABOUT MY CAPS LOCK KEY? I'M HAVING REAL TROUBLE.
Basically, RRD submitted to my nonsense and then Dragonmeet submitted to RRD's nonsense and now we're doing a 36 player game of DIE, with me playing an NPC, called Kieron Gillen. He's a real shithead.
We need 6 GMs to run the games. More details in the form – RRD are paying £50 to folks for doing it.
Hopefully will see folk there too – we clearly will need a bunch of players down the line.
My mum was up a weekend back, and Sunday night was the last of my surprise birthday adventures. We went to see RoboAbba. It's an ideal birthday present, as while I was fascinated by it conceptually, it's not as if I'd have gone and seen it if I hadn't been brought. Admittedly, this is increasingly true of any activity that's outside my house that doesn't involve Iris and a swing.
Listening to Abba churns up a lot. They're not a band which was significantly played in the house growing up, so the memories are primarily societal ones. It was an unsurprisingly crossgenerational crowd. People as old as the band and people younger than the holograms appear, having the time of their life.
There' s a lot here for simulacra fans to consider. As the holograms took to the stage, we burst into applause and turn to C and say “They're not here. Why am I Clapping?” C turned to me and, wet eyed, said “Why am I crying?” My immediate response was: why do we cry to pop records? A recording isn't here either. Still – I spent the performance strung between being disturbed and excited, and generally lost in Abba thought and feelings.
From when did I love Abba?
Afterwards, we were talking about when Abba actually kicked in for each of us. For mum, it's a band who've been there alongside the stuff she was following. C mentioned how for the 90s kids, the one-two punch of Muriel’s Wedding and Pricilla Queen of the Desert l did a lot to recontextualise them. I talked about Erasure doing Abba-esque, which did nail a flag there. I didn't mention what I think is the big influence for me – when Taylor Parkers wrote about Abba generally and the funeral The Visitors specifically (“The Visitors is the ABBA album that Alan Partridge doesn't really play that often”) for the Unknown Pleasures booklet they stapled to the front of Melody Maker in 1995.
A quick google reminds me how many people that little book hit hard. A bunch of fine music critics right at the end of the period when the British music press would pay for fine music criticism, just going for it, going to bat for a great lost album, and convincing whole readerships. My mature love of Dexys was absolutely born by Chris Roberts' piece on Don't Stand Me Down.
I think my Abba love was condensed there too.
So. Voyage. Their catalogue is deep enough that you do begrudge the tracks from the new album they play as it means you won't be getting some of the absent sad bangers (which is probably the most Live Band Experience in the whole thing). There's a couple of clear filler sections, which don't involve the band and look exactly like the sort of arty puzzle-platformer which Edge will inevitably over-score. There's at least one section (it's the one which they use for the tron-esque promo) where the band look actively ropier. Closer up, the big blow up screens don't show the work at its best – when they show the real Abba at the end, the mistake is clear – you should distort it like a real recording, not have it pixel perfect. There's certainly moments where I think I'm dancing to a PS5 cutscene. Bjorn always looks a bit weird and off, but I suspect that's just Bjorn.
But fucking hell, when it hits, it hits. It's a glorified pop video, but pop videos are amazing, and this is amazing.
Their best material is mostly their Divorce Pop, and the material which is circling the emotional drain towards divorce. Sometimes the Pop is so striking that you forget the absolute melancholia which drenches it. Until the chorus hits, I'm thinking Gimme Gimme Gimme A Man After Midnight may as well be the Associates. Even after the Chorus hits, you see the loneliness that powers it. Even the lighter material is fun. Waterloo once again makes me wonder why there wasn't a string of pop singles about Napoleonic Battles (“Our first kiss/Was my Austerlitz”).
There's a moment when a 40ft Frida looks me in the eye and says “Don't go wasting your emotion” is the sort of thing I'd have written a whole Phonogram arc about. It felt like an admonition from a goddess. “I'm just a trick of technology. Why are you falling for this?” she says, as I fall for this, yet another trick, because what is art but a trick that you fall for?
There was one where I did forget it wasn't a live experience. Dancing Queen, because Dancing Queen is a lot for me. I thought of Parkes' observation that there's perhaps no place in the pop canon where a word is more loaded with emotion than “Tambourine” in the chorus of Dancing Queen. I think of that every time I listen to it, and think there really is nowhere to go after that than the overwhelmed Oh yeah.
There was a couple of years where I only listened to Dancing Queen in a single context. 97-98, in one of the cheesier clubs I frequented. Like all Bath clubs, it was a basement venue, speakers piled up as if they believed if you played music loud enough you could scare away the damp.
When they dropped Dancing Queen, I went and danced by the speakers. It was loud enough that the harmonies and strings where loud enough to become white noise, and it became this angelic My Bloody Valentine throb you could dance to and disintegrate in. For a long time, if I was asked, I would say that was my absolute paragon of what music can aspire to be.
Yes, this was the period I mined for the intense unbearability of Lloyd in Phonogram. “Abba played like Mogwai” would certainly be on the list of bands Lloyd-me would do. Lloyd-me was smart enough to realise that to play Abba like Mogwai you'd also have to be able to write songs like Abba, and that was never really going to be something he could pull off.
While the multi-generational aspect is a joy, it also made me sad. Retromantically worshipping this ghost of a band – hell, not even that. The comparison between live footage of the period and now shows how much more polished roboAbba are in their moves, in a manner at least informed by modern bands. It's what Agetha and Fridda would be trained to do now. It's as if Abba fell through a hole in time. It's not Abba. It is Abba now, an Abba that never was, but is, as if Stalin edits photos to have better choreography. It'll be Abba every night this plays.
But being sad while loving is the most Abba of emotions. Sure, Dancing Queen destroyed me (a song so happy it absolutely becomes bittersweet due to the death haunting it, that the time of your life will end, along with the time that is your life) but Winner Takes It All? Fucking hell.
I did look to see if they were smart enough to show a twinge of guilt in Benny and Bjorn's faces when Agnetha sings it. Alas, they didn't. I really can't think of an act of greater emotional sadism in pop than writing that for your divorced wife, except perhaps her sing it every night, forever, maybe long after she's dead, because now she's made of light.
They were stars. Like the stars above us, the people they were are long dead.
If thought of like that, it's appropriate.
All we see of these stars is the light left behind.
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Perverse returns! Chrissy's e-anthology of poetry, the anthology which provided 2 of the 5 poems in last year's Forward Prize, returns. Here's the first part – I especially like And so, I started to dress up as a shark. Sign up here.
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The new Friday is out! Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martin and Muntsa Vicente reach issue 8. That's an incredible body of work. It's frustrating to see this not get as much chat as one would hope, as it's just really strong.
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Thought Bubble is coming. For the faithful, it is a time of pilgrimage. Not to the con, as good as it is. But to the majestic toilet in the Majestic Hotel. Chris Mole has pulled together an anthology of comics about it. It's kickstarting soon. I'm doing the bookend story, in the mode of crypt keeper. Sign up here to be told when it launches.
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I think reading Nick Cave's Red Hand Files has become the closest I get to going to church, in a good way. Here's Cave giving advice on grief.
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The Fandomentals interview Dead Ghost Productionsabout their DIE RPG actual play, Replay. I still haven't managed to listen to this, but an actual play rpg about an actual play rpg playing an rpg about playing an rpg is clearly a great idea. Or failing that, an appropriately DIE one.
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I try to avoid talking about Musk, but Ed Zitron is on rare form here.
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Copies of Teeth have arrived at comrade Rossignol's, so I'm looking forward to getting hold of mine soon(ish). However, Jim interviews co-designer and artist Marsh Davies about the whole process. I obviously know Jim well, so it's fascinating to hear more about the half of a team who I don't.
As I didn't have anything out last week, I decided to use the time I would have used to write a newsletter to send a quick one out to Substack to try and encourage the folk who've signed up there since I stopped posting to come here. It took the form of a Best Of post, where I link to a bunch of stuff I've written here. Here it is, as I suspect that a bunch of you will find it useful – either because you joined after it, or because you just didn't notice the content in question. God knows with all the newsletters, that's easy to do.
So welcome to everyone who joined us. Howdy.
However, after doing this I've discovered that if I imported the list from Substack, everyone who previously joined this list and then left wouldn't be re-added to the list, meaning I could have just moved everyone across without bothering folks. I haven't done yet, as I'm still thinking through possible problems with it (also, I'm lazy) but I suspect I will.
Work has been complicated – it is a house of illness, so less has been done, due to other duties coming into play. But stuff has been done – I've finished issue 3 of Rise of the Powers of X, which I'm happy with. It's a sort of issue structure I like a lot, and I know RB will draw the hell out of it. I'm approaching the end of the first part (and likely the hardest part) of script for a big non-games project – ideally I'll hand over a draft of that by the end of the week. I handed over a draft for my adventure for the second DIE Scenarios – Love is a Battlefield, which I may talk about next time some more. It's basically a 2 player die scenario structured around a wargame map.
But as much stuff has been done, as the end of the year starts to approach, a number of deadlines have tightened. There's a lot of DIE RPG deadlines in this space, including public performances (While I know what I want to do roughly for both Tbubz and Dragonmeet, I have yet to actually write them). Most importantly, last week I realised I didn't say to the artist of TPF that I would have a script by the END of November. I said they can have a script by the START of November.
So, yes, that's scrambling, which is probably for the best. A tight deadline is usually good for me, and I know almost everything about the first issue. Let's just write the bastard thing and see what it feels like.
(I also had a really pop idea for an action comic, which I'm ignoring for now, though it is all kinds of tempting. The major problem would be kidnapping Dan Mora back from DC.)
Anyway – lots of stuff, lots of deadlines but just enough time to do everything, if I hold it together.
Unless I get the house plague and lose a week.
You can imagine that monkey puppet giving you side-eye meme here.
Kieron Gillen
London
18.10.2023