On May 31st, 2017 the long-awaited paperback edition for MISTER X volume 1 finally arrived in stores. Before going on to my regular comics dealer for a reserved copy, I stopped by a bookstore across the street from (and named after) a famous Ivy League university. They sell used books in the basement and the local international clientele occasionally sell things that haven't been in the area for a while. While in the stacks I overheard a young woman asking the staff for help finding specific titles which I recognized as the sort of things you'd expect to read in a college level course on communication or mass media. The last on the list was the nearly inevitable "Understanding Media" by Marshall McLuhan. Just as there are millions of schmucks in the world who recognize the phrase "To be, or not to be, that is the question..." but couldn't tell you that it comes from "Hamlet", so it is that just as many have heard the phrase "The medium is the message" and don't know that it comes from "Understanding Media". Even though communications technology and human habits have changed considerably in the 50+ years since it was published, the book still has a lot to offer about making sense of how media work, how we use them and how our use impacts both the sender and receiver of information. The first MISTER X comics series began 20 years after it was published (or more appropriately, "XX years after it was published"). But the character had been haunting the comics community for about a year prior to that. It was very much attuned to the retrofuturist zeitgeist of the 1980's, at a time when audiences were watching remakes of "Breathless" and "A Man And A Woman", MISTER X was a combination of "Alphaville" and "Metropolis" (which itself had just been restored with a modern soundtrack and playing in theaters again). Stylistically, it was more in line with "Diva"(1981) and "Subway"(1985), actual French films rather than remakes. Like "Understanding Media", it had the feeling of being the real deal amidst a miasma of others just going through the motions. Both, ironically, argued that ultimately content is irrelevant; McLuhan did so explicitly, MISTER X did so implicitly as most of its stories became about the events orbiting the attempts of competing parties to get answers to mysteries that never get completely solved or else lead to other mysteries.
Every week this month I hope to include a little something about Mister X as I try to research to sources of every scrap of ephemera connected to him and see how much of it has found its way into my collection. Most people's favorite bit of trivia about him is that he debuted on an album cover (spoiler: I don't have it). I just found my own new favorite bit. It's not the gag panel above, although that is kind of funny. That was the cover art for "Comics Interview" #39 from 1986, which contained an interview by Marty Herzog with Dean Motter, creator of Mister X and artist of the panel above. in the interview, Motter says that he initially studied fine arts in college (in London, Ontario) but gravitated to commercial art and design. Two beneficial things came from this: an animation house in Toronto drew talent from candidates in that degree program and one of his instructors was Eric McLuhan-- son of Marshall.
This would have been in the early 1970's (Motter was born in 1953, according to the article), and Motter mentions that over the next few years, Eric kept his father's work organized and helped him prepare it for publication, going as far as describing it as "ghostwriting", which is where the interview continues in the scan on the left (taken from p.64).
Marshall died in 1980, but "Laws Of Media" was eventually published in 1988. Motter even references it in the afterword to the trade collection of "MISTER X: RAZED" many years later. That tells me that throwing together some abstract doo-dads for the dust jacket wasn't just a resumé building commission for him. He was paying attention at the time, enough that it stuck and remained stuck after decades.
I picked up the trade and the good news is that it corrects the missing and out of order pages that plagued the two-trade set published by iBooks last decade. The bad news (for me, not you) is that I now have to go through all the ancillary artwork and text and find out if there's anything unique in the old trades before I trade/sell/donate/recycle/make-post-modernist-snowflakes-from them. If I find anything, I'll let you know here.
As I said in an earlier post, I may pick something other than music for my next post on 'comics in other media', since I devoted so many posts recently to one musical group and I do in fact have a DVD lined up. I'll also be writing more about Marvel's extra-length and reprint Silver Age books and Mister X, so I'll want to balance all of that with some DC and American independents. One source of inspiration came when Paul Simon performed recently on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He played live with Bill Frisell, who is not only a national treasure as a musician, but if he picks out his own album sleeve art (instead of delegating design choices as many artists, perhaps wisely, choose to do) then he has excellent taste in art. He has collaborated with one of my favorite comics artists on more than one occasion, so you may see him mentioned here again before the fall.
Every week this month I hope to include a little something about Mister X as I try to research to sources of every scrap of ephemera connected to him and see how much of it has found its way into my collection. Most people's favorite bit of trivia about him is that he debuted on an album cover (spoiler: I don't have it). I just found my own new favorite bit. It's not the gag panel above, although that is kind of funny. That was the cover art for "Comics Interview" #39 from 1986, which contained an interview by Marty Herzog with Dean Motter, creator of Mister X and artist of the panel above. in the interview, Motter says that he initially studied fine arts in college (in London, Ontario) but gravitated to commercial art and design. Two beneficial things came from this: an animation house in Toronto drew talent from candidates in that degree program and one of his instructors was Eric McLuhan-- son of Marshall.
This would have been in the early 1970's (Motter was born in 1953, according to the article), and Motter mentions that over the next few years, Eric kept his father's work organized and helped him prepare it for publication, going as far as describing it as "ghostwriting", which is where the interview continues in the scan on the left (taken from p.64).
Marshall died in 1980, but "Laws Of Media" was eventually published in 1988. Motter even references it in the afterword to the trade collection of "MISTER X: RAZED" many years later. That tells me that throwing together some abstract doo-dads for the dust jacket wasn't just a resumé building commission for him. He was paying attention at the time, enough that it stuck and remained stuck after decades.
I picked up the trade and the good news is that it corrects the missing and out of order pages that plagued the two-trade set published by iBooks last decade. The bad news (for me, not you) is that I now have to go through all the ancillary artwork and text and find out if there's anything unique in the old trades before I trade/sell/donate/recycle/make-post-modernist-snowflakes-from them. If I find anything, I'll let you know here.
As I said in an earlier post, I may pick something other than music for my next post on 'comics in other media', since I devoted so many posts recently to one musical group and I do in fact have a DVD lined up. I'll also be writing more about Marvel's extra-length and reprint Silver Age books and Mister X, so I'll want to balance all of that with some DC and American independents. One source of inspiration came when Paul Simon performed recently on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He played live with Bill Frisell, who is not only a national treasure as a musician, but if he picks out his own album sleeve art (instead of delegating design choices as many artists, perhaps wisely, choose to do) then he has excellent taste in art. He has collaborated with one of my favorite comics artists on more than one occasion, so you may see him mentioned here again before the fall.
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