havnt posted in here for a while, but i had an extra hour this morning, maybe ill try to make more short comics this summer
New books premiering at CaB: "2010 "which is a ten page Risograph book on 17x11 spreads, printing art i did in a lost sketchbook from 2010. i recently uncovered the forgotten art, It features Annie, Garfield Nick Cave and Snoopy. The book is funny, except for a new one-page intro, which is sad. (My first Risograph book, thanks to an awesome Panayiotis Terzis class at SVA. ) Im also premiering "Transformer 2", a 30 page Risograph mini comic featuring Rambo Spiderman the Human Torch and Stan Lee, and I'll have a new run of “Mr Incompleto” with a color center spread. And new t shirts. Im in row U20something, top floor at Mt carmel church, all day today. See you there
doing reproductions and water color art at my store, go to http://joshbayer.storenvy.com/
joshbayer reblogged
Some sketches and some in progress
Almost a year ago today Tom Posted this but I don't see the posting til now, incredibly honored
joshbayer reblogged
New title and let’s get rid of that box. #Rosalie
Last year I contacted Herb Trimpe and asked him to draw a book for a line of comics I'm editing and writing. We were able to offer him a decent page rate and astonishingly he said yes and I'll be publishing later this year what is (as far as I know) his last comic. Trimpe's work was everywhere when I was growing up, in reprints and in current books on the stands, and his swaggering, cartoony, monolithic, half-rickety, half-fluid characters were ubiquitous with what I thought comics were. He maybe was one of the first people I saw who liked to make his characters WIDE, the chunkiness that is so fun for cartoonists to express (everyone from Frank King to Crumb to Gary Larson is part of this tradition) is intact in Trimpe's pencils. The mouths were wide, the faces were wide, the fingers were wide. He was a Kirby protégé and was smart and humble enough to be proud of his ability to swim alongside his heroes without seeming to aspire to greater heights. It seemed to be fulfilling enough to be a steady artist, a provider for his family, a vet who served in Viet Nam, and a deacon in his church. Kirby was a leader, and Trimpe was like a soldier, but as much as he might have recognized himself as merely a professional, skilled at drawing everything from technical equipment to horses to architecture to sweeping urban panoramas, he wasn't merely a dependable illustrator. He also drew with the inventiveness and enthusiasm of a kid. A freedom that many artists will never have. Looking at his work, you know his personality as much as you know R Crumb's. It's warm and familiar. The correspondence he creates between the reader and the work is more like Crumb or Basil Wolverton than many of his slicker, smoother peers. And like Crumb, his stuff might reflect the real world at times, but it's never gonna let you forget it's a cartoon. As photocopies of his new pages began to arrive in my email last year, I was so heartened that in his seventh decade he was doing such peak work, full of the transitions, lighting and sequencing he was known for. "I have to tell you, I'm having a ball... it's the most fun I've had doing non mainline work", he wrote to me, and I was so glad. I would be happy for days every time I heard from him. I kept looking at the work. The lines were confident and powerful, his storytelling brimming with the sort of visual inventiveness that results from having completed thousands and thousands of pages of work before we connected. To me, getting approval from him, and from other professionals like Rick Parker and Al Milgrom, has been everything I'd hope for in comics, a seamless circle between the past and future. Only in a lopsided industry like this one could someone in my position at the low end of the ladder attract a string of creators with decades of experience and accomplishment behind them. Trimpe's work helped to keep the American industry afloat, in a very visible way. He was one of the top six artists at Marvel and one of the most steady and visible. He slowly was eclipsed by younger artists, but his contributions were undeniable and should have set him up for life. Last year, a page of art appeared on the market by a collector who had been hoarding it for 35 years, the final page of Hulk 180, showing the first appearance of Wolverine, which was inscribed to the collector by Herb. Apparently it had been given to the collector by Herb himself in 1983. The art resold for over 600,000 dollars, breaking a record for original comic art sales set a few years prior by a Frank Miller Batman page. The collector had said he was going to give a large portion of the money to an organization for older artists and I'd been hoping he secretly was going to give the money to Herb Trimpe to counterbalance the way he never took part in the massive profits his life work generated for the industry. I don't know what the result of the sale was but it would be so satisfying for Herb to know his work had brought about a long term security for his family that was the dream of almost everyone in his generation. A lot of my own comics are about creators of the past. I've always been fascinated with how people face age and the changes life brings on in its third act, and the difference between the face of public figures and their interior life. I've done stories interpreting a fictional version of the Marvel Bullpen, showing my versions of Steve Ditko, Bill Mantlo, Bill Everett and Stan Lee, and mostly they are protest cartoons about the way creators are treated as disposable. The whole time we worked together I wondered if Herb ever saw the comic I did about him, "Trimpe Survives" (earlier published as “Trimpe Loses”), that I did in 2011, a year or two before I contacted him. I kind of doubt it, but you never know. It detailed a metaphorical battle by Herb to stay alive in a barren wasteland, surrounded by flesh-eating Image Comics-style adversaries. The comic ends with Trimpe, determined to outlive the younger predators waiting on the horizon and drawing, (as he did in 1992), an issue of a Fantastic Four Unlimited in the style then made popular by his younger competitors. This instance of a creator of his stature attempting to stay current when work was disappearing is just wrong. I never forgot it. When we began to collaborate, I was afraid he'd think I was making light of a painful period of his career, and that I was taking a shot at him. I never broached the subject. The vibes were running positively and I didn't want to screw it up. But I'd always thought I would eventually get a chance to tell him how much admiration I have for him, how his career is a testament to the triumph of personality over slick modernization. I never wanted to explain that I meant no disrespect portraying him as a man whose head was attached to Godzilla's body, since that could have been seen as a jab at him, you know, the "old dinosaur" of comics. I was responding to the portrait of himself he'd etched in his article in the NY Times, in which he described a world that had left him, at age 56, seemingly condemned to obsolescence. It seemed traumatic but I thought he fought back with resourcefulness, self-reflection and bravery, and I always wanted to tell him. But I thought there'd be time later. Clearly Herb had many, many good years left in him. Man, I'm so consumed with loss right now. I've been sad all week. I never met him, but I feel like I've lost a friend.
make yr cmics dream come true
joshbayer reblogged
Episode 46 & Interview with Josh Bayer Part 1
This week, we bring you a little something different. We had the pleasure of interviewing cartoonist and teacher Josh Bayer about his work and had so much good material we decided to split it across 2 episodes. Here will be part 1 of the interview along with regular reviews by Joshua Malbin, Alexander Rothman, and Andrea Tsurumi. This episode is now available for download from iTunes. Direct RSS link for Android users here or listen online here.
Mr. Incompleto and Theth by Josh Bayer
Made this for the great comics critic Robert Clough. Wished him a Happy Birthday on facebook.One of my biggest things ever for me as a a cartoonist has been to read Clough write about me. im lucky and grateful to have his support for my work ive done so far
plasmatics lyrics from future Theth
drawing from the MET on Thurs
subway drawing from tonight
joshbayer reblogged
Hi there, I think everyone writing for bin crawler is pretty busy but I’m back to report some important blogging about the comics found lurking in the bins, and here’s a new column, so get ready to read it. ‘Cause I’m about to write it.The comic I wanna discuss is THE BRUTE it’s got a Dick Giordio cover, I like the way The Brute is balancing on one leg and he’s about to bring the hammer down and is really gonna hurt. Typical to most Dick Giordio art I’ve seen, there’s at least some evidence of a secret psychosexual ecstasy lurking within the image or behind the veil. Look at the cop on the far right , balanced like he’s engaged in an act of frottage ( that’s vigorously dry humping to the point of ejaculation, if you don’t know) with the back of that car as he levels his rifle at the Brute. I have a Giordano issue of “The Joker “where he fights The Creeper which gives new life to the term ” you and I are gonna Tangle assholes “which is is a gross but interesting term I heard in a book somewhere, and is my way of saying that lots of pencilers have subliminal
tendencies that worm their way into (what some might describe as) cookie cutter superhero art. Though superhero comics have always expected an almost military level of discipline and conformity from artists, a penciler or inker has a lot of ways to declare individualism within those confines. In fact, if comics prove anything it’s that it’s almost impossible to supress an artist’s persona on the page, though I’m sure you can find some interesting examples where that it does occur…. Open up a 1970s comic and look around at all the personality in evidence.; Herb Trimpe loved to eschew delicacy in favor of big windmilling action, in a way he’s not too different than the big footed stylism of Crumb or Segar. and then someone like Michael Golden, his character’s bodies reflect a complex interpretation of action, with motions often being interpreted somewhere between the muscular exaggeration of DaVinci and a sinewy electric guitar like improvisationalism. Ramona Fradon is all Fluidity, with tons of smooth swoops. Buckler mostly exhibited a sense of struggle in his work compared with someone like Steranko who exuded confidence and polished craftsmanship. Despite how that sounds, in many ways I prefer Buckler. Steranko was the eagle we dreamed of being, Buckler is more of the earthbound warthog we actually are.That brings us to the wonderful eccentricity of Mike SEKOWSKY. Sekowsky remains a figurehead of pure comic book labor. His name virtually STANDS for Work. he was by all accounts a very fast artist; I read that he might have been faster than Kirby, that Kitby was maybe slower because he’d spend sometime thinking before he tackled a page, whereas Sekowsky would just do it with no premeditation. Despite his success within the field, he was haunted by Demons that rendered him unemployable by the 80s. I read an amazing, sad story about Sekowsky’s erratic latter years. This is someone who once had dependablly churned out stories like a machine, he was mostly associated with Justice League of America with all those characters jockeying for space , he did that book for like a decade! So it’s all the sadder that I read in “Back Issue “magazine about an unreleased mini series he was commissioned to draw in, I think,1987, starring Black Canary. It was the sort of low risk, low prestige comic assigned to either somone at the end of their career or at the beginning. The writer was 21 years old , a young man named Greg Weissman, and the artist was meant to be Sekowsky but he lost or destroyed the script and didn’t pay attention to details, unaware that CatMan was a preexisting character, ( like Batman, but had cat ears) and Cheeta or some other female cat lady character was the other nemesis. despite their long standing history he simply made up cat characters for the book, like were-cats,which may have worked just as well, but that’s not the action of someone who respects the writer’s vision, so… He also ignored the current costume of the star of the book( Black Canary who at that point was wearing a headband with shoulder padded jumpsuit look, her old costume having been dumped a year earlier). Most people don’t like that costume, but i don’t care about it. you can read other nerd blogs if you wanna hear predictable bullshit like people crying about Black Canary’s stupid costume getting traded out for the other shitty costume. They’re both fucking stupid. The point is Sekowsky was missing details any novice would be attentive to. Sekowsky proceeded to lose the last two issues scripts -apparently turned in an entire issue of just scenes that he made up. Fuckin’ fight scenes. The job was scrapped, because of all these blunders and never was published. ( More like Black CAN’Tary, amirite?)As I said, I read this in an issue of Back Issue Magazine where Greg Weissman confirmed it and I have never been able to forget it. I copied a page from that article in this space. So you can look up at the top to see it. To think someone could devolve from that level to to this raises the same question I’ve asked other bin crawlers so may times, which is : what is it about comics or the comics industry that often makes people so crazy? For every retired professional who seems well adjusted and content to have done creative work their entire career instead of an office job, there are scores of creators who end up ruined or just bitter. Anyways. Back to 1975. Atlas comics was famously an attempt by Martin Goodman to make one final stab at success that would match or outstrip Marvel. But it all fell apart by the end of 75 and all the books folded after 4 issues. My friends and I are excited by the issues, but now that I’ve collected a few thanks to Roger’s Mysterious Time Machine comics, I find them hard to get through. They say that in mass entertainment, you start by appealing to a broad audience,eschewing subtle characterization and ambiguity to win
over the crowd.Maybe that’s the problem with these books, they all feel like generalities, not really the type of story I am used to. This one by the Brute is nice to look at,though, in fact all Atlas books are. The inking
especially is spontaneous and expressive. And the dot pattern that Pablo Marcos produced to indicate body hair was really interesting, I’m still not sure how he achieved it, there’s sort of a pebbled blot effect that looks like the dots were produced using emulsifier fluid, but I’m not sure. The thing about Sekowsky is that behind the scenes he was always accused of drawing action carelessly. When someone is slammed against a wall in a Sekowsky comic, there are legs and arms splayed out stupidly, with an absence if idealization. There’s none of the rippling heroic anguish I think that editors expected. if you look at the bodies here, they have an awkward helpless look when the Brute throws them around. The inking is so elegant though, the motion seems more fluid than in other Sekowsy drawings. Sekowsky once was asked by an editor to make the movements prettier and he allegedly responded, looming menacingly;”Why don’t I throw you out that window and we’ll see how pretty you look .” Sounds like a cool guy, would have liked to have hung out with him.i feel like I would have gotten him, but probably not. Instead you can find me hanging out with other bin crawlers. They don’t really get me either but close enough. Whatever keeps you afloat and one step ahead of the bottle or whatever doom awaits you should you slip. Til Next time, Bin Crawlers
IAW
joshbayer reblogged
THE WORST ROM ISSUE
I’ve read every issue of ROM, some multiple times, and because I love the series so much, I’m afraid the task of reviewing ROM is just too great. And so, I’m here to review the worst one. I fucking love Rom! I first found ROM at the comic store I worked at, we had two issues in stock, one was the one which guest starred Luke cage and Power Fist and the other one was the one where Rom is all underground and he’s tracking “the missing link”… I ignored Rom back in the ’80s and all the way up til a few years ago… I recognize that Mantlo turned it into such an epic personal journey for his characters and presumably himself. It’s my favorite overlooked series along with Michael Fleisher’s “Ghost Rider.” I remember well sitting in the toilet at the comic store I worked at, the staff were really good natured about all the shits I took at work. Anyways I was reading issue 26 and… You know how it is when you are reading a comic and it’s like you forgot how to read comics? Like “what the fuck am I looking at?” the images and words just swim around and you have no idea whats going on. Before I dug into the series, that’s how I thought Rom would be but it wasn’t… I got sucked into it pretty quickly after really applying my concentration. Since then I’ve read every issue, some people know that in my secret identity as a non blog crawler, I love Rom.
However, now that I’ve finished the series, there’s only two or three that I couldn’t contend with. These comics are wordy and hard to read. (even with the best issues, they all take two readings to figure out what’s going on). This one maybe was harder than usual, maybe it’s because of the Marc Bright Art, maybe he didn’t have the same collaborative rhythm that Sal Buscema and Mantlo enjoyed.
This one starts with a scene of Rick Jones at the scene of a clean-up exercise in the aftermath of an infestation at a hospital. Military dudes are dragging away dead aliens from ground zero, trying to be really inconspicuous but the sheets keep getting pulled away and alien arms flopping off the gurney, its funny or scary depending on how you wanna look at it. The Military guy describes a situation where the populace’s would be exposed to their friends and neighbors secretly being transformed into monsters. “If we were to reveal the truth to them….How could any social order survive such a shock?”
Theres been a lot of times I’ve questioned that phrase “social order.” What’s a social order. Is that where the powers that be provide you municipal services as long as you submit to working class wage slave system, enjoying the fruits of institutionalized racism, rape culture, and a death loving cop serving corporate ruling class. Then again, I was raised to hate myself, on every possible level. Maybe I’m seeing things through a dirty prism, and to other people things look different? Yet, theres a lot of people who see it in worse terms. Basically it’s easier to live in America than it is to live in a third world country. It’s easier than a country plagued with famine. And you can be destroyed pretty easy if you slip here too. Just not as easy as elsewhere. But if there’s someone who would see the world in shades of order and disorder, it’d have to be a high ranking American military officer.
The depiction of the police state ready to turn on the people is prevalent in Rom, it’s visited in issue 28 when a Black community sees cops patrolling the fringes of their neighborhood ostensibly protecting them from a fugitive Rom. An old man, looking at the armed forces keeping them penned behind barricades asks if the cops are maybe actually barricading them in, in case the crowd becomes an unmanageable “mob,” in case the community becomes the threat.
After this scene of Military action, we join Rom, who has arrived on the outskirts of Beaver Falls, Ontario, a town originally built on coal manufacturing, now on it’s last legs, filled with an unemployed populace as coal demand has slowed drastically… and now secretly plagued by a Dire Wraith infestation. While we don’t get a good look at the townspeople, I imagine it being like Gummo, filled with drugs and violence and kids wandering around unsupervised. We turn to a sequence where Alpha Flight discovers glowing salmon eggs, on the verge of hatching, buried in the deeply toxic waters Beaver Falls. Are these the result of Wraith reverse biological engineering? Yes, and later, half demon fish men will emerge from the eggs to try to kill everyone.
The amazing thing about this comic is how effectively the horror sneaks into the narrative, Mantlo understood that horror should be penetrating and psychological, he wrote about the vulnerable being tainted by a polluting malevolent force; babies, children the natural world, hospitalized convalescents - there’s a lot of sequences all the way through ROM dealing with cellular transformation and corruption. At the same time, Rom represents this seductive but inherently troublesome idea of a crusading metal zealot… so the whole story has a fascinating lack of moralistic center just as often as it’s a fairy tale about good and evil.
Anyways this issue was a tie into Alpha Flight. I was pretty excited by Alpha Flight, as a kid, they had a really appealing energy to me… I was into how they made being a dwarf look cool. Maybe the idea of a really tough little guy makes sense to a kid, maybe thats why Wolverine was appealing too. I remember not being into it when I read about his painful battles with his disease… But anyways I don’t wanted go on too much of a tangent. So, Rom had a history of teaming up with all the lower selling book characters. Mantlo especially made the Shang-Chi team up excellent. (I think I’ve never been able to read the Dr. Strange issue, so maybe that should be my next review) This one’s treatment of Alpha Flight is a little awkward. It seems hard to get every character to do something meaningful, but they do a good job with Marina especially.
Marina is portrayed swimming through grossly polluted waters, the text describes how hard it for her gills to extract oxygen from the foul water. I’m not sure if it’s because of pollution from the coal plant the town lives off or because of the sick magics the Wraiths use to transform the world around them into a syrupy black swamp similar to their home. The Wraiths are presented like a parody of the dehumanizing propaganda employed in wartime. The Wraiths are portrayed as being not just evil, but as a maggot/cockroach like race that is the source of all things painful, poisonous, toxic, and is somehow tapped into black magic as well as science. It probably would have been stronger if the Wraiths had eventually been portrayed with some empathy, but those empathic glimpses seem rare and rarely occur except when the Wraiths sell out and choose to live as human. Theres a great moment very late in the series when the Wraiths, rounded up by Rom are shown shrieking piteously as he strides towards them, terrified by his terrifyingly self righteous silver visage. It does read almost like a white power fantasy about the white warrior’s crusade to conquer an “inferior” non-white race.
I’ve always wanted to believe it was a knowing critique of Reagan era crypto fascism, but am not sure what Mantlo would say today, he’s famously been silenced by a traumatic head injury since 1992.
Maybe Sal Buscema could provide some answers, as he was the central artist in the book, but if there’s anyone who seemed like he could care less about the scripts he was given to illustrate, it’s Sal Buscema, and I mean that in the most respectful way possible. Its just that Sal was a comics machine, doing as much as he could.
The comic is a two parter, but manages to hit all it’s marks, getting the team it’s needed exposure, showcasing all their abilities, and then moving into the twist ending, where the team restores the mutated salmon back to their native state and then they all died unable to live in the waters they thrived in as monsters. Evil is triumphed over but even the short term victory is virtually worthless.
What did I learn from reading this issue? That even the worst ROM comic is fucking amazing and fascinating. The other comics on the list of my least favorite ROMS WILL be tackled in future Bin Crawlers. Stay tuned true believers. Stay true til death , true believers. IAW
joshbayer reblogged
STORY TIME
reblogging as a preamble to a dreary text post i’m about to let loose
I'd love to use this content as a comicbook if Claire would let me
joshbayer reblogged
Why I picked these comics.
FF 78: I saw a reprint of that FF 78 when I was a kid in the mid 70s. I think it was one of my first opportunities to grasp abstraction. I remember staring at the black dots making up the figures and the slash of black down Ben Grimms face… Even the symbolic floating giant heads were a departure from logic. I remember going “no no no this is wrong!” and then realizing at some point I was actually denying I liked it. Even as a six year old, I was aware how perfect it was and knew that the fact that I couldn’t stop staring at it meant something. I always remember this comic.
1980s John Byrne Fantastic Four with Galactus on the cover: This stands in for all the comics I wanted to read but didn’t. In the early 80s I saw this same FF galactus cover in a store. I bought it along with two other comics but my parents ripped it up before I could read it. All the comics I wasn’t allowed to read in those years were like this irresistible object. The pull towards comics, the idea of comics, symbolically as a goal in the distance, made them more desirable the further I got from them. This is still in play today. I guess they’re like my fetish object. A lot of people ask me why my parents wouldn’t let me read comics. I think, since comics were all I was interested in, it was an attempt at “conversion therapy” on their part. Either that or I was just a bad kid in general who was on constant restrictions. Whatever, I ended up just more gay for comics as a result. I still haven’t read this comic.
Raw 8: My dad bought Raw 8 in 1986 when I was living with him in this weird apartment he had when he and my stepmom separated, and I had a job at Rax Roast Beef which is just like Arby’s but only exists in a couple of states so you might not have heard of it. My room was the large utility closet, but even though it was called a closet, it was really obvious the place was designed so single parents could cram an extra person in. Well, they got back together in early 88 anyways. My dad mostly got Raw cause he thought Art Spiegleman was legit because he’d done this important book about the holocaust. Not sure what he thought of all the formal experimentation, but I remember really being interested in this issue of Raw and also wanting to love it more than I did. My favorite story in there was the Kim Dietch/Simon Dietch story about Waldo overdosing, and I always think of that Dietch story about junkies and cats sticking cat turds in dime bags that was drawn like no one else. At first I kind of turned my nose up at that story, but I was wrong, it’s the fucking best. I honestly think that Deitch story was TOO unpretentious for me at the time. Similarly to the Kirby cover for FF 78, it took me a while to stop denying it, as it broke too many rules, was too dumb. Maybe it was after I got into more punk and less new wave, I understood how much character this story had. (My second favorite artist in the book was Jerry Moriarity.) So this story was important to me. The rest of the work in the book doesn’t stick with me the same way, and that reaction remains pretty consistent to this day. I like what I like.
AGONY: The appearance of Maus on the scene meant that all the other books with the Raw imprint were also getting more distribution. That’s how I ended up getting a copy of Agony by Mark Beyer when I was 17. This book represented a real departure from the comics I had mostly known, it represented liberation and also set a new bench mark for writing and detailed inking that I despaired at ever matching. I immediately did some more primitive comics which no longer exist, but the point is that I got excited enough to try them. The thing with copying Mark Beyer is at first you think this is fucking easy then you notice how insanely intricate his inking really is. It can make you give up if you’re not careful. I love Mark Beyer and I think I was exposed to him at a vital point, when everything was still coming together for me. IAW
joshbayer reblogged
I’m back,I haven’t reviewed nothing since the thing about Richy Vegas I wrote and now i’m back and i’m writing about movies.
This movie pirate channel my friend Chad told me about is great, and this website has a lot in common with old comics bins, there’s a lot of old movies I’ve never heard of before, like Slayground with Peter Coyote, and old ones I hadn’t seen in ten years like American Gigolo.
But the one I want to talk about is The WarLover. Its based on a novel, so its got a depth to it that screenplays sometimes can get away with not having. Stars Steve Mcqueen as Buzz Rickson and Its about a guy who loves war and has let his extreme definitions of masculinity disfigure him to crazy extents where everyone loves and hates and fears him and pities him and contemplates the nature of what it is to go through life taking only what you want and giving nothing because thats what he does. But what if ultimately what you *want* is either your own way or self annihilation? (thats what you call a classic win win!)”Ricksons a good example of the fine line that separate a hero and a psychopath,”the camp doctor says at one point.
McQueen walks through the movie in a performance that’s got the relaxed naturalism thing down. He acts like Captain Kirk with greater psychological depth and looks like Brody from Homeland, (like, exactly,) and says stuff like “I’ll never leave, I’ll be here til the last bomb is dropped, and maybe i’ll drop it.” His whole aura is ambiguous hazy fog, and he moves slow, like he was in a dream. He’s clearly an insane narcissist and clearly is meant to hold a sort of Manson like magnetism over his audience.
The movies shot well, fulll of beautiful photography and artificial sound stages, has the same sterile nightmare quality of ”Man who Shot Liberty Vallance.” The fakeness is also a great feature when they get into a dogfight with the Nazis and the burning ships falling into the mountains below are obviously miniature toys. Actually the toy airplanes look a lot like something they’d do on SNL as a joke. its still better to my eye than whatever they’re doing in the Hobbit or whatever is out now.
Depictions of modern sexuality are largely featured in the movie, meaning you get that the soldiers and the local English women are fucking, its heavily suggestive for a movie made in 1962, with the soldiers all exploring the dark sides of their sexuality and enjoying relationships with women who date Americans partially to make the best of limited options, the same way that the factory workers in an Officer and a gentleman go out with with the guys in Richard Gere’s officer school. the sexual politics are a reflection of their times, so they don’t go to any great length to illustrate who these women were before the war and what they wanted out of life, but it at least portrays the suggestion that people who have had their home bombed wanted something different and are just doing the best they can.
The movie goes back and forth between focusing in a romance subplot, but always returns to Steve Mcqueen’s character, He’s the WarLover, the walking contradiction at the center.
But that’s the two halves of the movie, half of it is about War and the other half is about love. Romance takes many forms in it, one part is the type of romnticism that the film’s characters use to relate to the imperiled world around them. As Shirley Anne Field’s character Daphne says to Robert Wagner, “You’re such an American; a Romantic.”
Daphne , though she’s dating Robert Wagner, acknowledges in a candid moment she’s attracted to Buzz but don’t worry, that doesn’t mean shit because she knows better, he’s no good. Why? Well the movie takes pains to explain Buzz is a scumbag, making him virtually kick dogs so you know he’s a shit.The truth is he embodies the type of cold hearted excellence that makes half of America, with its AynnRand-ian fixations, forgive him anything. It’s like Harvey Pekar once said, the only thing America won’t forgive is a loser, thats why John Gotti was a hero until he went to jail, until then people loved him like they love Jesse James. The other half of America thinks the legend of the self possessed white warrior is at best ridiculous and at worst is everything thats wrong with the world today. Its a divided world.
And I’m divided, I don’t know how I feel about the movie. I definitely think its better than a lot of other old movies and love the parts that are dripping with venomous punk nihilism.
But then again, Punk nihilism is just another Romantic idea. Its a veneer of romance on top of something else. Look, here at BinCrawler, we will never hesitate to share our jumbled thoughts with you, no matter how conflicted they are, and that’s the BinCrawler guarantee. I’ve been thinking about Romanticism a lot lately. I don’t think I can look at the world free from a romantic veneer, I started when I was a kid and I’ve never really stopped. i started living through super heroes when I was a kid and continued through Punk rock heroes. I still do it today and I’m not young. Unless Im put in a concentration camp or something, I’ll probably never stop viewing the world, with all it’s ugliness and beauty as something that I can only understand by thinking about a Husker Du song or something. Romanticism is bullshit but i need it, it’s like a drug that makes things ok.
The scene that first really lets you understand Mcqueen’s essential romanticism occurs about forty minutes in when a bombing attack strikes while he’s at a tavern. and he stays behind to drink while everyone else hides in a bunker, dragging along a petrified officer to keep him company. The tavern keeper leaves the place unlocked because none would be insane enough to drink when death is falling from the sky. Mcqueen strolls outside and looks up into the bomb filled sky and yells, ” when you build a bomb big enough to destroy Rickson, come back and blow up the WORLD!” You can see at that moment, underneath the ambiguous haze he customarily wears around his face there is a sort of excitement and defiance. It’s a big showy performance only this time the only real audience is himself. He really believes his bullshit. After all how can you be a war lover if your hearts not full of the type of Romanticism that suppresses a greater horror. IAW