0030: He Built This City (and he did a better job than Starship)

In the fall of 1983, the Los Angeles-based band X released the album "More Fun In The New World". It was sort of an ending to the first phase of their career. Ray Manzarek (better known as the keyboardist for the Doors) had produced all four of their albums at that point and this would be his last with them. It was also their last really punk flavored studio album. The next album would come out almost two years later and sound more polished, after playing and recording as country/folk group The Knitters (which more accurately foreshadowed the direction of the band from the late 1980's onward). Of course, in the spring of 1984 no one would have that perspective of hindsight, and to those attuned to the innovative in pop culture, "More Fun In..." was simply the latest album by the band most associated with the letter 'X'.

The reason I mention all this is because while futzing about [and I can't help but notice that the word "futzing" is not highlighted by that damned Spellcheck feature] looking for any early Mr. X materials not included in the recent Dark Horse Trade collecting Volume One (1984-1988), I found the issue of "Amazing Heroes" on the left. It's #48, June 1st, 1984 (it was coming out twice a month back then). If you'll note the date, then you'll realize that the black-and-yellow clock image is not a Watchmen reference. You might have to be a little more alert to realize that the hands are set at ten o'clock-- and that the letter 'X' is the Roman numeral for ten. Yeah, I know. I had been patting myself on the back for noticing that the crossed searchlights formed an 'X' when the clock face suddenly hit me and it became clear to me that the searchlights were a red herring.

The issue contains a ten-page article, in black and white by "Ace" MacDonald, who probably had the recent album in mind when he (or his editor?) entitled the article.

Patrick Cowley was an early proponent of EDM, purely electronic dance music. He was based in San Francisco and released his second solo album, "Megatron Man", on the small Megatone Records label in 1981. Megatone didn't have the means to manufacture and distribute their titles overseas, but the nature of the early EDM movement is that it had small pockets of ardent support scattered all over the world. Collectively that meant many potential sales but required licensing the album in about a dozen different countries to small labels also comfortable with pressing and distributing small quantities quickly. All of the other labels used the crude black and white jacket art by Jim Saunders except the Canadian label Attic, which replaced it with a full color painting by Dean Motter. That LP (Attic LAT 1132), released in 1982, is now considered the first public appearance of Mr.X. When the label Unidisc reissued the album on CD for Canada, they combined the two different cover art pieces into a single image for the inlay card. For some reason, the painted cover is reproduced in B&W in the original Vortex trade paperback "The Return of Mr. X" (ISBN# 0-921451-008, December 1986), despite the fact that it reprints the first four issues of the series in their original color.

When ibooks (the publishing company, not to be confused with the iTunes app iBooks) reprinted the first series in two volumes, they reproduced the cover painting in color, but somewhat smaller. In Volume One (ISBN# 0-7434-9334-6, October, 2004) it appears on page 8 with a wide black border on all sides. The text that appeared on the right side of the LP jacket is eliminated so that the image would more closely fit the dimensions of the book, a smart move undercut by the borders. Also, the color obscures details visible in the B&W version from Vortex.

The Dark Horse trade (ISBN# 978-1-50670-265-0, May 2017) reproduces the art in color with more of the detail and texture retained. It appears on page 6 in full bleed (the image extends to the edges of the page), but the left and right edges are shaved off. I might just have to find a copy of the vinyl.

Also on this page from the Vortex trade is the Paul Rivoche cover for "Vortex" #2 (03/83), the publisher's first title. It was a B&W anthology (although the cover was originally in color) and there was no Mr. X story inside, despite him being on the cover. That art appears in color and without the trade dress in the ibooks Volume One on page 10 and with far thinner white borders than the LP art got. It also makes page 10 of the DH trade, full bleed again but intact, also in color and before trade elements were added. Advantage Dark Horse.

There's much more comparing and contrasting to be done with the trades, but I've got to hunt down some more original source material. Sleep well. Or not at all.

0025: Hello, Motter...

...Hello, Fodder? Fodder for the blog at least. Last week I promised to find some obscure bits of early Mr. X that weren't included in the recent paperback edition of Mister X Volume 1 from Dark Horse. I found just that in a fund-raiser one-shot from 1986.

The name Artworx has since been appropriated by numerous Canadian businesses, including a glass-works studio in Barrie, a tattoo parlor in British Columbia and a home improvement advisor (sort of like the American Angie's List) in Toronto. The address listed in the indicia is about a half mile from Seneca college, in North York, according to Google Maps. The wraparound cover is a group effort, laid out by Anthony Van Bruggen with the characters' creators or featured artists drawing the individual characters. The complete credits can be found on the scan of the inside cover, below. For this post, I should point out that Dean Motter drew Mr. X (or "X!", as his sunglasses would have it) and the colors were provided by Paul Rivoche. Ken Steacy provided the colors and the logo for the project was done by Ken Steacy.

I don't know if it's a coincidence that in the 90's Toronto had a band named Pecola whose drummer was also named Gideon Steinberg (the editor who wrote the text piece for the inside front cover). If so, it must also be a coincidence that their bassist was named Craig Thompson, since the comics creator Craig Thompson ("Blankets") was working in Oregon at the time.

Anyway, Motter drew the Mr. X art seen below, from page 36 of the 40 interior pages, all B&W. This was for the same price as a Cerebus comic at the time, and they ran about 28 interior pages.

The scene looks like it may have occurred before issue #1, two years earlier, as Mr. X returns to Somnopolis. (He's already nomadic when the series starts.) Although this came out in the summer of 1986, I'm confident I've got some stray bits from even earlier.

I'm going to be sifting through more fanzines and benefit comics, as well as general anthologies. We'll see what gets caught in the Sieve.




























Ciao.

0020: Or more appropriately, "00XX"...

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.