The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 71: The Score #4, 1990

And so The Score comes to an end. I have to admit, once Philip Sand's vocation was revealed in the book, I knew exactly what the mysterious "score" was going to be, but its importance was well-masked. (That's an in-joke for anyone who's read the series......ah, just me then). This is definitely a series I'll go back to, but I think it's also one that needs to be read graphic-novelly rather than serially. There's a certain pace to the story that I think necessitates its being consumed in one sitting. Part of this, for sure, is Mark Badger's art, which is just gorgeous. The constant fluidity and dynamism of his composition is a huge part of the flow of the narrative. Jones' writing is pretty solid too, and I'm curious to see if that carries over into any of his mainstream work. I find that you'll occasionally find a writer who is really good on the personal projects, but just phones it in on the work for hire. It's a pity, but I think a truth that can be applied widely over pretty much any field. I'm thinking here of James Robinson and his work on Starman, as compared to, unfortunately, just about everything else I've read by him. Bart chatted with me once about Art Spiegelman, and how he's basically a mediocre cartoonist who had one big hit. I think this happens far more often in comics than we like to imagine, but the pool of creators who get wide exposure is so small that instead of casting the net for the next brilliant work farther afield, the industry tries to replicate what is really just a one-hit wonder. If that makes any sense.

But I'll let you know how Jones turns out, should I happen to read any of his other stuff in the next little while. I'll be researching Badger a bit more too, as I'd like to see what he does in different media.

So, moving on....perhaps back to Kirby's 2001. I feel like I need to finish that series, and his Machine Man stuff is coming up relatively soon. The limited series by Barry Windsor-Smith was one of the first comics I bought at my local general store back in the dark ages.

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 70: The Score #3, 1990

I'll admit, I read the back cover of this issue before I read the issue itself. I needed a "The Story So Far.." This is not necessarily because the story isn't coherent or anything. It's just, in the midst of exam writing, the things I read/watch/listen to for pleasure don't get retained. Or only slight retained, anyway.

That said, I enjoyed this issue more than the previous two. I'm not sure if it's because I got the lowdown from the back cover, or just because the story really seems to be kicking into gear. I'm not very familiar with film composition theory, but maybe it's the third act where things have to start getting intense. Actually, that's probably true of many creative endeavours. The third side of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" ("Hey You" to "Comfortably Numb") is brimming with intensity. Whatever that means.

Here's an interesting thing about this comic, and one that's going to reveal a bit more about me than I usually divulge. There's a couple of characters in this series whose names are really familiar to me. First is the character of Sally Crane, a handler of Philip Sand, the main character, whose shadowy agenda comes clear in this issue. "Sally Crane" is also the name of Suprema's alter-ego in Alan Moore's amazing run on Supreme. Moore's work came a few  years after The Score, so I don't know if he may have read the series and liked the name.

Here's the sort of embarrassing part.

There's another character in the comic, a prostitute, named Tawny Stone. This is the same name as an amateur porn star from the early 2000s, of whom I was, and am,....um.....aware, I suppose. Again, the series came out a good 10 years or so before she made her debut, so whether or not the series had any bearing on that is hard to say.

The point being, it's odd to me that this series, which I've had for a really long time and never read, has characters whose names are familiar to me, and that was written long before the venues of that familiarity were extant. Which leaves me with a strange feeling that I quite like. Somewhere in The Invisibles, Edith says that an elderly magician's life is one long string of coincidence. Perhaps this is something like what it feels like.

See you tomorrow. Perhaps we'll forego Moon Knight and conclude The Score.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 68: The Score #2, 1989

Back to our regularly-scheduled program. So to speak.

The Score number two continues to build a cool sort of retro-future noir vibe, and Philip Sand's amnesia, and the myriad people who claim to know him and what was done to him, are weaving an interesting web.

It's a big web. And I'm not entirely sure I'm seeing the whole thing properly, but I'm trusting to the storytellers that things will wrap in a satisfactory sort of way.

I've been reading DeMatteis and Barr's Brooklyn Dreams of late, which came out of Paradox Press, Piranha's successor imprint. It's a thoroughly postmodern book, very much of the ilk of Shea and Wilson, or Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. The Score, coming from an earlier attempt at a literary comic publisher, oozes low modernity, the kind of thing you'd see in detective novels of the 30s and 40s, the pulps and such. There are arguments made that Herriman's Krazy Kat is our (meaning comics scholars') modernist text, but I think that because the medium is relatively young, we're experiencing a lot of these historic literary periods simultaneously. That bears a bit more thought than I have for a Sunday night, but I'll keep it in my head.

An issue featuring Moon Knight tomorrow. The contrasts are striking, but are definitely keeping things interesting.

The 40 Years of Comics Project: Day 64 - The Score #1, 1989

Moving on back to my recent predilection for Piranha Press productions for a bit. I've had this series kicking about in the collection for a while now, but just never got around to reading it. There's this subtle difference between reading a regular, 22-page comics story and reading a prestige-format publication (this particular one being 48 pages long). I think that perhaps it's a psychological thing. The prestige format was always intended to house a "special" story, one that, both size-wise and thematically, broke from the boundaries of the regular monthly comic. When I pick on up, it feels like I'm making a different kind of reading commitment. The first prestige album I ever read was the first issue of The Dark Knight Returns, which is 100% outside the bounds of regular comics, and really does take a different kind of reading commitment. So perhaps that's coloured my experience of them.

Anyway, The Score is set near-future (though, considering it was written in the late 80s, it's probably set some time in our past), in Hollywood, and follows an amnesic man staggering through the segregated and crime-riddled streets of Lower Hollywood. Inevitably he falls in with the stereotypical "crooks with a heart of gold" (or so we're led to believe), and becomes involved in a plot to bring down an even worse criminal. Oh, and part way through we find out that the man with amnesia used to be a rich rock star. So, really, it's not the most original story. We can all assume that this man, Philip, will learn some great moral lesson about the division of class, he'll fall for the kind-hearted hooker who rescues him early in the story. The Score is a tried and tested narrative in the annals of American literature (though the only one that's coming to mind right now is the Goldie Hawn movie Overboard). The important thing to note, though, is that this is not necessarily a mark in the negative column. There are certain stories that we tell and retell because the messages that they carry continue to be important ones. Further, when we can see that these stories, or versions of them, stretch back into our literature, it becomes apparent that the stories are dealing with concerns that, culturally, we might always have had, and that we are still struggling to address through the vehicle of our fiction. It's one of the reasons I've dedicated my life to its study.

Narrative aside, Mark Badger's artwork is pretty badass. He claims Kirby as an influence, and there's a few shots that just scream the King's name, but the stylized paintings push Badger into a realm of his own. There's a gorgeous small panel of a woman giving a man a blowjob (which I'll not repost here...you never know who's reading), and it's really quite beautiful. So again, the story's an old one, but in Badger's visual conception of it, we have a new take on an old tale. The neo-twenties future style of New Hollywood contrasted with the contemporary ghetto look of Lower Hollywood, the lush, painted colours as our focal character moves through what basically amounts to a child porn factory, all are given a disconcertingly soft and warm character by Badger's art. It's almost as if we're looking at a world through the lens of a man with amnesia....

The Score is a four-part series, all of which I own, so I'll be doing this series for the next few days. I think four issues is short enough that I won't run out of things to say about it, or feel locked into it. I really am going to have to figure out what to do about longer series. See you tomorrow.