“Can’s Jaki Liebezeit was
responsible for restructuring rock’s basic rhythm, influencing
countless bands including early Roxy Music, Talking Heads and Joy
Division. He devised a more continuous, open-ended alternative to the
Anglo-American blues-based, verse-and-chorus model. In the late 60s
and early 70s, while a new generation of heavy rock and prog
instrumentalists were showing off their virtuouso prowess, Liebezeit
and fellow Can members... devised a way of playing and jamming that
was about creating space, rather than soloing pointlessly. Theirs was
a style... that achieved its ends through loops and repetition,
creating a cumulative intensity.”
“In the midst of the horrors of our
current president's fascist tendencies, the passing of Jaki Liebezeit
– a musician deeply committed to the idea of harmonious flow –
reminds us of the true potential of creative democracy and equality
for all. RIP Jaki Liebezeit. RIP Love Time.”
Okay,'Bowie
still dead' may not seem an obvious news item. But its still hard to
think of much else. So here's something about one of my favourite
tracks of his...
”It's
too late to be late again
”It's too late to be
hateful
”The European canon is here”
Picture
this... an album that acts as a transition between two seemingly
incompatible styles, laid down quickly by a singer so strung out he
later couldn't even remember anything involved. Actually, scratch
that... it’s not so much in transition as occupying a kind of
schizoid state, it’s rigidly black-and-white colour scheme as
indicative as the jagged stripe of the now-iconic ‘Aladdin
Sane’ cover.
Not,
perhaps, the most promising of starts...
Bowie
recorded‘Station to Station’
late in 1975, between the Philadelphia Soul of ‘Young
Americans’and the Krautrock-influenced “Berlin trilogy” of ‘Low’,
‘Heroes’
and ‘Lodger’.
The title suggests some kind of transference between the two places;
and indeed, shortly after it was made Bowie abandoned Los Angeles for
Europe. However, the album rarely bridges
those styles, it mostly alternates between them – the white-boy
funk of ‘Golden
Years’, ‘TVC 15’
and ‘Stay’,
American as eggs over easy, intercut with the Europe-inclined
‘Word
On A Wing’
and the Nina Simone cover ‘Wild
Is the Wind’.
Yet
with the opening, title track the trains collide head-on. And
“collide” is the operative word; at over ten minutes, twice the
length of most of the other numbers, its construction is basically
the two styles, the American and the European, crashing into one
another. Surely this becomes the point where the centre cannot hold
and all this falls apart? The point where the drug-addled, has-been
star finally crashes and sinks somewhere mid-Atlantic.
But
its the opposite. By bringing together white and black, it gives the
album it's key, rending the rest of it (kind of) comprehensible. More
than that, it creates one of Bowie’s finest tracks. As Benjamin Aspray has commented at PopMatters: “If
‘Station
to Station’ boils a career down to an album, then ‘Station
to Station’
boils an album down to a song.” From
hereon in, we can focus on this track alone and miss almost nothing.
Though
joined only at the edges, the two sections oppose and mirror one
other. In the lyrics you can almost match the antonyms off like a
game of anti-snap; “lost in my circle” versus “I must become
one in a million”; “dredging the oceans” versus “mountains on
mountains”; and (most prosaic-sounding, but actually most important
of all), “here am I” versus “here are we”.
This
album is held to herald Bowie’s Krautrock era, and he said himself
“’Low’
and its siblings were a direct follow-on from the title track”.
Indeed, once in Berlin, Bowie would hang out with Harmonia until he'd
absorbed their influence wholesale. But that came later... While
still in LA, the yet-unseen Berlin came from films and other received
images. As exmplified by the name of a predecessor band to Harmonia,
Neu!, Krautrock took as its mission to break all connections with
what had gone before. The emphasis here is all
on the past - on German Expressionism, or the ‘Cabaret’ shtick of
decadent Weimar. (That stark black-and-white aesthetic, for example,
came from Expressionist cinema, to which he'd become almost as
addicted as the drugs.) While once he'd mythologised America from
Europe, now it's the reverse, and that past being his
past just makes the images shine brighter:
”Once
there were mountains on mountains
”And
once there were sun-birds to soar with
”And
once I could never be down”
It
also revived Bowie’s earlier interest in the pre-rock world of
chanson and cabaret music, which had already run to the extent of
covering Jacques Brel and Kurl Weill songs. Hence the reference to
“the European canon”,
a classical term which seems strangely archaic applied to modern
music. (Some internet discussion boards struggle valiantly to explain
why cannons are suddenly being fired.)
The
style is measured and almost intonatory, sounding almost restrained
when set against the orgiastic excess of rock music. Though no more
repetitive than most other kinds of popular music, its downtempo beat
and lack of release makes it feel repetitive - glowering and oppressive, as if the music is stalking
you.
When
words are set to this, the result is imagery that accumulates rather than progresses; “here am I, flashing no colour, tall in
this room overlooking the ocean”. Images are clipped and precise,
too composed to sound like a rock song, too stark to sound like
poetry. They build into the picture of a solitary figure, trapped
within its own grandeur, a prisoner of his own device.
Then,
just as you think the song must surely be over, it bursts into the
euphoric funky soul of the final section, a juxtaposition about as
arresting as seeing a statue suddenly break into dance. Live clips of
the time show a stage sparsely lit, which then explodes with
brightness as it reaches this half-way point. The words lose their
composure and take on the rush of conversation – “it’s not the
side effects of the cocaine, I’m thinking that it must be love”
is less Brechtian bon mot and more like something
you might have burbled in your ear at a nightclub.
And
the two sections combine into something so much more than the sum of
their parts. Like a sweet and sour, each taste is richer through
being juxtaposed with the other. Some call it transitional, some call
it completely unique in Bowie’s repertoire. Some call it commercial
and some experimental. Quite often, the same people call it all those
things at the very same time...
It’s
often a few listens in before you realise, in a perfect irony, the
words to the two halves are effectively swapped – like an exchange
of prisoners. It’s the stark ‘European’ section in which Bowie
describes his situation in LA, then its the funk which arrives to
announce “the European canon is here!”
Indeed,
for much of the first half, Bowie is simply reporting the facts of
his life in LA. He really did live alone in a big
house overlooking the ocean. Heavy cocaine use had driven him to a
state of near-complete psychosis and paranoia. (One of his delusions
being that witches were breaking in to steal his urine. Or, according
to others, his semen. Perhaps the witches weren't that choosy.)
The
key to the song is perhaps in the opening line (and original title)
“the return of the Thin White Duke”. This was of course Bowie’s
latest character, to replace and supplant Ziggy and Major Tom. But
this is the first we have heard of him - how can he be
returning?In the sense of coming
around,
rejoining the world, escaping the prison his life in LA had become.
Bowie
was at the time obsessed with occultism, and the line “from Kether
to Malkuth” relates to sephiroths (to you and me, points) on the
Kaballic tree of life. (He can be seen sketching this out on the
original back cover.) Kether, which translates to ‘Crown’, is the
apex of Kaballa, the divine essence transcending the merely human -
just as the crown goes above the head. Malkuth means ‘Kingdom’
and occupies the base of the tree; relating to matter or Earth. It’s
the only sephiroth held to not directly emanate from God.
Yet
in which direction is this “magical movement”? The Kaballa is
based on the expectation the adherent will attempt to climb
the tree, in the quest for divinity. Bowie is doing it the other way
around, reversing down a one-way street, descending
to Malkuth. This is the inverse of what he sung about in ‘Space
Oddity’ – the journey of a man back from beyond, into
the arms of ground control. Live,he would often accompany the line with a downward hand movement. “I must be only one in a million” means “I must become
only one in a million” – end my splendid isolation.
And
what’s bringing him back is the power of love – but love in a
strangely pure sense. Love songs tend to be descriptive (“and then
she kissed me”) or seductive (“love, love me do”). But when
Bowie sings “I won’t let the day pass without her” there’s
one slight snag - as yet, there’s no actual her. Like Berlin, she’s a creation of his imagination he’s hoping will
manifest itself. Still stuck up the Kaballic tree, he is only able to
conceive of the Earth he wants to rejoin. He
wonders “who will connect me with love?”, as if love comes before
the lover - a mental state which then needs a physical person to
connect to, like lightning aiming at a rod. (Ironically, in telephony
a station-to-station call is one where “the caller is willing to
talk to anyone who answers”.)
Bowie
is tapping into an ancient idea of art, that it is not a device for
recording events but an act of sympathetic magic which aims to change
the life of the artist. (“Such is the stuff from which dreams are
woven.”) He is singing not to any lover, hoping to enchant them.
The Thin White Duke is throwing darts in his own eyes. He hopes to
reacquaint himself with love, to emerge from his drug-induced stupor,
simply by singing about himself as a lover, inventing a character
which he can them inhabit. (Compare to ‘Soul
Love’, “all I have is my love of love.”)
Bowie
once wrote a song called ‘Rock
‘n’ Roll Suicide’. We tend to want rock stars to follow the road of excess, crash their
cars and generally sacrifice themselves, become beautiful corpses to
look good on our posters. It’s a salacious tabloid desire, to see
them burn up for our entertainment, so we might feel a bit better
about sticking with our moribund day jobs. Yet what if they pass
through
that road of excess, make it out the other side? Even in ‘Rock
‘n’ Roll Suicide’,
death is ultimately rejected.
‘Station
to Station’ came out of a direct and personal need, a missing person notice
written about it's own author, a spell cast over himself that might
lead to his return. That urgency, that compulsion, is a large part of
its appeal. Yet if it’s a spell he wrote for himself, it’s not a
spell that need just be applied to himself. It’s quite genuinely
life-affirming. I have never, you understand, found myself trapped in
a big house overlooking the Pacific Ocean and a life of coke-addled
paranoia. Witches are not, to the best of my knowledge, after my
semen. But I like the idea that, were I ever in such a place, there’s
a magic spell waiting to free me.
I can vividly recall seeing David Bowie
on 'Top of the Pops' for the first time. As he sang
'Starman', he put his arm around Mick Ronson and
pointed out of the telly straight at...
...no, actually that wasn't it at all.
It was 1979 and it was 'Boys Keep Swinging'. At
which point I had absolutely no idea who he was. The track sounding
vaguely new wavey, I probably assumed it was a debut single. Yet it
was not the music but the video which so beset my young mind.
While in Berlin he'd often gone to see
drag queens, and been taken by the way they'd 'break out' at the
end of their act, sweeping off their wigs and smearing away their
make-up. So he made a video which went like that.
I don't think I even got it was the
same guy each time. But then I didn't get much. Were these the
“poofters” which playground bullies accused you of being before
shoving you, but of who no-one else seemed keen to speak? But then
they were singing jubilantly about being a boy, while pulling
off all that stuff. But then they were wearing it
in the first place... It seemed impossible to parse. Besides, are
they actually allowed to broadcast this? And why isn't my Dad
slamming off the telly in a fit of rage, like he normally is? This is
all really strange.
'Scary Monsters' was
only a year later. But a year's a long time at that age. And that was
my Bowie album, the one that happened for me in
real time, the one through which I found out who Bowie was. The
impact of the video of 'Ashes To Ashes' and the
others was immense, but that's been covered enough elsewhere. And
besides this time the music mattered too. And 'Ashes To
Ashes', despite its hit status, was atypical of the
irreverent playfulness of the album. It seemed thrown together with
cavalier disregard for the way music had always been made, with Bowie
intoning “beep beep” over the top like Road Runner. It
still made no sense. Songs came with sense-defying
titles like 'Up the Hill Backwards'. Was
'Fashion' a critique or celebration of the fashion
industry? Beep beep. But what had been befuddling now felt beguiling.
Somehow, it made my sort of no sense.
But if one year was a long time, then
try three...
By 'Let's Dance'
Bowie was performing dance music in big suits and arenas. He played
the nearby and newly opened Milton Keynes Bowl, and many of my
schoolmates went. If I say I tried to stop them I'm not really
exaggerating. The fervour with which I reviled and denounced it all
seems somewhat ludicrous looking back. Martin Luther had a softer
reaction to Papal indulgences. The night of that gig, I'm sure I must
have placed myself in a chair and deliberately not
gone.
(Besides, what was to follow suggested
I should really have held onto my ire. 'Tonight'
made 'Let's Dance' sound a whole lot better in
retrospect. In the Seventies Bowie had used music as a bridgehead for
everything he wanted to do. By the Eighties it had become a day job
he was stuck with. He later called the period a “netherworld of
commercial acceptance”.)
But however absurd and self-righteous I
was being, isn't that what popular music is for?
Not chin-stroking connoisseurship but the chance to assert your own
identity via the positive and negative reflections of album covers?
And Bowie knew that more than most.
Even if I wasn't in the first audience for 'Starman',
even if I didn't get the full force of the thing, I got enough of a
deflected blow to get it. Bowie wasn't doing it
for you, like a car-crashing rock star you could
live through vicariously. (Even if he did all that too.) He was doing
it so you could too. You didn't have to be the
person everyone had always told you that you were. You could create
your own self and then inhabit it. When I asked my workmates for
their favourite Bowie era everyone said their era.
Even when that meant dates in the Eighties or early Nineties. Which
is crazy talk. But only if you're doing it by assessing the music.
"My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014)
Let's
not start pretending now he was a particularly likeable person. Many
who worked with him found him unbearable. But he changed the face of
music to a remarkable degree, not just a member of the massively influential Velvet Underground but probably the most influential
figure in the band. He managed to take influences, both musical and
literary, that were then well outside the sphere of popular music and
run with them. And the results were never affected or
self-consciously artsy but powerful and gutsy. (His maxim was “one
chord is fine, two chords is pushing it, three chords and you're
playing jazz.”)
He
made music truly rooted in the place that spawned it, downtown New
York. (Brooklyn-born, Reed was the native New Yorker of popular
song.) It kicked off the Seventies years early, when most were barely able to keep up with what was happening in the Sixties. And, though in their brief and tempestuous history the Velvets
only made four albums, they were so wildly different from each other
that subsequent bands have made whole careers out of copying just one
of them. I love the Beatles and (in their heyday) the Stones, but
most of the music I listen to now has more of a Velvets influence
than both of those put together.
His
subsequent solo career was admittedly uneven. Perhaps due to his
drink and drug habits, though I also suspect he was enough of an
egoist to imagine whatever he did must be great. But the highlights
among them... well, not much is higher. Consider - 'Berlin',
'Metal Machine Music', 'Street Hassle' and 'New
York.' (Curiously, spaced out fairly evenly rather than
coming in a block.)
There's
no point pretending I can throw up something quickly that could do
all of this justice, because I can't. Should I ever get the time to
pursue my inclination to write something about my all top 50 albums,
it will almost certainly include a Velvets and one of his solo
albums.
Sometimes
the brightest lights really do hide beneath a bushel.
Kevin
Ayers, who
sadly died earlier this week, was perhaps not the most household of names. He shunned the limelight and eschewed a music business career
to a degree eclipsing even his sometime compatriot Robert Wyatt. His Wikipedia
entry describes him as “a
self-imposed exile in warmer climes, a fugitive from changing musical
fashions, and a hostage to chemical addictions.” Never prodigious
in his output, in the Nineties and Nighties he managed an output of
one album per decade. (Neither of which I've heard, to be honest.)
When
he is remembered now it's as a founder member of the legendary Soft
Machine (though he left after their first release), or for the live
album 'June 1st 1974'. Featuring John Cale, Brian Eno and Nico as well as
Ayers, it's virtually the trump card to bring out when know-nothings
claim nothing happened in Seventies music before punk. Though Ayers
headlined the gig, ironically these days he's probably the
least-known name of the line-up.
You
could call that unfortunate, but really - it was the way it
had to be. Ayers' musical explorations were
undertaken the way previous generations of well-bred Englishmen had their
more literal explorations – the preserve of the gentleman amateur.
Where he was going, that was the only way to get there.
Quality
was admittedly uneven. But the point was to tread the most eccentric
of paths. Tracks were too playful, too song-based to be labelled as
underground, experimental or avant-garde. But they were too quirky,
too idiosyncratic to file under pop. They'd often sound like the
soundtrack to some hip Seventies children's show, broadcast from
behind the looking glass. (See for example 'Girl On a Swing.')
A compilation album was called 'Odd Ditties'
(after the working title of 'Up Against the Dried Fruit at
Tescos' was nixed), which probably sums things up better
than I ever could.
Okay, so another great from the classic era of American comics is gone, the like of which we won't see again. Are we really at that point where only Ditko is left? Classic Kubert anecdote, being told off by Carmine Infantino for not wearing a tie to the DC offices. Everything you need to know about his art style is in there. I mean, just look at some, the seeming roughness which gives everything a vibrant urgency, yet not a single stroke out of place. He was one of those artists who could make it all look so easy, until you actually tried to copy him.
Radical
DIY film-maker, maverick artist and Brighton cultural institution
Jeff Keen died on 21st June.
To
be honest there isn't much to add to the
Guardian obituary by William Fowler, who apparently
collaborated with him.
“Keen's
interest in myth, surrealism and romantic painting complemented his
love of movies and comics, and he continually absorbed new references
into his work... [which] was often more appreciated by skaters and
punks than followers of the canonical avant garde. The extreme, short
edits in his playful, visceral films have helped to keep his work
fresh and alive; they still zap with energy decades later.”
It's
not pop art in the Lichtenstein sense of isolating images from pop
culture and making them contemplative... there's an engagement
with pop culture, even if sometimes a critical one. There's probably
a parallel between his work and William Burroughs, or for that matter
noise bands such as Lightning Bolt.
Fowler's
also correct to explain Keen's work as “expanded cinema”, with
multiple projections fusing with live performance or, in one
memorable performance at the Phoenix gallery, drawing on the screen
while the film was still being shown, like he couldn't keep his hands
still any longer. As
only said recently of a Sunn 0))) gig, the experience is
unYoutubeable. Though even seeing one of his films you feel like the
images are bursting through, not trapped within the frame.
As
is said in a thought balloon clipped from a comic which adorns the home page of his website
“I... I feel like I'm surging with power!”
Martin:
As your president, I would demand a science-fiction library,
featuring an ABC of the genre. Asimov, Bester, Clarke.
Student:
What about Ray Bradbury?
Martin
(derisively):I'm
aware of his work...
From
'Lisa's Substitute', The Simpsons
Acclaimed
science fiction author Ray Bradbury died today.
Once,
deep in my youth, I thought science fiction was about cowboys
battling aliens, and wanted to read nothing else.
Later
I decided science fiction was actually about boffins battling
ignorant hordes and was written by Clarke and Asimov, and I wanted to
read nothing else. I threw away the cowboys battling aliens, and
never missed them.
Later
still I discovered Ray Bradbury. It was insightful and imaginative
and funny and satirical and horrific, it was packed with vivid images
and it speculated not about rocket propulsion drives but the human
condition. Above all, it was literary. Suddenly, there was no longer
any reason why a science fiction writer shouldn't spend more time
constructing a sentence than constructing the plans for a rocket
drive. Science fiction became about widening your mental horizons,
not narrowing your expectations. I threw Clarke and Asimov to the
same place I had thrown the cowboys battling the aliens. I had Ray
Bradbury. I wanted to read nothing else.
Unsurprisingly,
I got past the age of just wanting to read Ray
Bradbury. But throw him away? I have his books on my shelf to this
day. Some things just stay with you...
On the Freak Trigger site Mark Sinker has posted a tribute page to Martin Skidmore, writer and editor of so much about comics and myriad other subjects, who sadly succumbed to cancer last July. Even if you didn't know Martin or his work, it's well worth a read, and the wealth of links will give you an inkling into why he's so missed.
My own more modest tribute, 'A Good Amateur Table Tennis Player',is here.
News is in, alas, that the celebrated British cartoonist Ronald Searle has died aged 91, at his adopted home of France.
The BBC quote Simon Winder, from his publisher Penguin saying: "We are all extremely sad to hear of Ronald's death. He was a marvellous, remarkable man and a great artist. I can think of nobody who did more to ridicule and undermine 1950s Britain, and [his work] will endure forever as masterpieces of comic anarchism."
"In Baffin's Bay where the whale fish blow The fate of Franklin no man may know The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell Lord Franklin along with his sailors do dwell"
Alas news is in of the death of legendary folk guitarist and ex-Pentangle member Bert Jansch. I saw him live precisely once, after Pentangle reformed three years ago. Reports suggest his personality matched his music - he described himself as "not one for showing off", and his guitar-playing is understated and unassuming. Listen to it for thirty seconds and it can pass you by, listen to it for three minutes and it becomes transfixing.
From back in the day, Bert playing 'Rosemary Lane' solo plus the Pentangle classic 'House Carpenter'...
For anyone who hasn’t yet heard the sad news, Martin Skidmore died this Tuesday, July 27th. He has been suffering from cancer for some time.
Martin edited and wrote for the influential comics zine ’FA’ between 1984 and 1989, which he’d recently brought back as a website. (Though, typically ominverous, he was involved in much else on-line including an extensive website devoted to the Japanese arts.)
I’ve said before (here and here) how big an influence ’FA’ was upon me back then. In fact this may be yet another time when Martin is able to put things more sharply and succinctly. Steve Whitaker, another important figure from that crowd, sadly died in 2008, so Martin wrote him a tribute. Reflecting on his early days in comics fandom, he commented:
“I was cocky enough to… imagine I had some idea what I was talking about but I soon realised, from talking to Steve, how little I knew... I never worked out how Steve knew so much about comics. He wasn’t one of those people who had filled his head with one thing to the exclusion of all else, but he knew more than seemed possible…. But really, it wasn’t factual knowledge that affected me so much. We’d talk about comic writing and art, and Steve’s understanding of these was incomparably more sophisticated and advanced than mine... he could talk interestingly about art and music and movies and plenty more, besides comics, and he was generous… with his time and knowledge, always keen to discuss and explain.”
Though I’d agree with every word Martin said about Steve there, I could equally apply each one to him. I can remember the first few times I met him, still wet behind the ears, and being quite taken aback by how someone so well-read and sharp-witted could take such an interest in what I had to say! (To this day, I think he must have published my awful early reviews out of sheer generosity of spirit.)
An anecdote might sum Martin up best. Back in the day, a notorious blowhard wrote a damning screed to ’FA’, backing up his sanctimony with a list of his qualifications and accomplishments: “I am a man with a mensa-tested IQ of 156 who can speak or read French, Italian, German, Spanish, Latin and some Sanskrit, who is writing a book which...” well, you get the idea.
Though ferociously intelligent, Martin did not rise to this challenge. Instead he simply dismissed the baseless rantings “and I say that as a good amateur table tennis player.” He found their author “a fool, because that’s the sort of person who generally grossly underestimates everyone else.” He was simply too smart to play smart.
Rest in peace, amateur table tennis player. It was good to know you...
Postscript: Photos of Martin, myself and Neil (apologies, can’t remember his second name!) at Comics Friends United 2009. (Martin had neck trouble that day, hence the hoody.) Also one of Martin’s last outings, at a London Comic Mart (which alas I couldn’t make), with visible weight loss inflicted by his illness... Both from the photostream of Martin Hand, aka World Of Agwu.
As most of you will have already heard, the comics artist Gene Colan died last Thursday, June 23rd, at the age of 84.
I have to confess, I never liked his work as a child. I was such a Marvelite that I just wanted “the Marvel look”, which meant in essence copying Jack Kirby as closely as possible. Even plodding, bog-standard hands like Don Heck or Sal Buscema gave some third-rate impression of Kirby. My least favourites were Colan and Steve Ditko, who didn’t even seem to be trying to look like the King!
I sulked my way through 1974, when Marvel UK branched out into ’Dracula Lives’ and ’Planet of the Apes’ - an unwanted digression from their superhero core. My juvenile face would scowl at the titles in the newsagents and my young brain hark back to the happier days when ’The Avengers’ and ’Spider-Man Comics Weekly’ could be exchanged for pocket money. Kids can be somewhat conservative...
I finally succumbed to Colan’s talents through the Chiller Pocket Books published between 1980 and ’82. Despite their diminished size and risible reproduction standards they reprinted ’Tomb of Dracula’ - the very strip I’d turned my young nose at only six years earlier! (The same title also got me into Gerber’s ’Man-Thing’, but let that be a story for another day.)
But it was later still before I realised just how much the Marvel look had stifled so many artists’ careers – shoehorning them into emulating Kirby no matter how poorly suited they were for the job. In a bizarre reversal, my two favourite artists from Silver Age Marvel bar Kirby became Ditko and Colan – precisely because they were able to forge their own styles in the face of all this editorial pressure.
Colan was to comment later: “Stan [Lee] would say whatever book he thought was selling, he would have the rest of the staff try to copy the same style of work, but I wouldn’t do it. I’d tell him if you want Stevie Ditko then you’ll have to get Stevie Ditko. I can’t do it, I have to be myself. So he left me alone.”
While Kirby was kinetic and forceful, Colan was a master of mood and shadow. His world was one of tempestuous winds, cloaks and coats billowing around semi-defined figures. With Kirby everything looked so solid, it made it all the more impressive when someone was hurled through a wall and it collapsed into shards of flying bricks. With Colan nothing looked solid, everything was in flux.
For that reason, the supernatural ’Tomb of Dracula’ is commonly cited as his best work for Marvel UK. (A title Colan lobbied to get.) He needed to be on something strange or eerie, ’Doctor Strange’ or ’Daredevil.’ (At the time Marvel’s spoiler product for ’Batman.’) His regular superhero work was normally ill-fitting for him. (Then again if he never made ’Iron Man’ very interesting, neither did anybody else.)
Those cheap Chiller Pocket Books gave me another advantage in appreciating Colan. They were only in black and white for cost reasons, but fortuitously his work always looked best without colour. (In later years, as printing improved he’d even eschew his work being inked.)
He said himself: “It was really a black and white medium when I grew up. Most of the films that were in the theatres were all black and white... Aside from that that’s how I saw everything anyway. I wasn’t into color. It never occurred to me to have anything colored, so I drew it in black and white and if they wanted to add color to it then go ahead.”
With Kirby gone, Gil Kane gone and now Colan, it makes me wonder how many of the great Silver Age comics artists are left. There’s Ditko, who may live forever out of sheer cantankerousness. Joe Kubert should probably be in there was well, but with me being such a Marvelite he never hit me at that impressionable age.
Whichever way, there will never be another Colan...
