Brainleak Station 12

Look: if you thought I was going to end on anything other than a bit of shameless self promotion then you’re even madder than you look. But this was always supposed to be a vague list defined solely by things I love: and I really love Visions.

It could have been worse, I could have plugged a little comic I did, or a series of drawings people seemed to enjoy, or whatever, but I figured that would be pushing it so I decided to stick to just the most important one.

Most of this music was written and recorded in 2010, but it finally came together in 2011 and we were able to hear it all and hold it and release it into the wild. So much went into these songs and I’m really fucking proud of them.

(And wait until you hear what we’ve got coming next year…)

Luke Haines, whose cohesively sprawling, ambitious, rather moving and proper fucking clever album, 9 ½ Psychedelic Meditations On British Wrestling In the 1970s & Early ’80s, spins such a disjointed web of musical and nostalgic themes before performing the near impossible by tying everything together, that it would have been a very strong contender for album of the year had this been a different kind of list, has been writing recipes.

I have to confess, I haven’t actually made any of the meals and can’t actually comment on how they taste, but if they taste half as good as they read then they will undoubtedly seal the deal if you’re attempting to pull. The recipes themselves are a rich stew of Luke Haines thoughts: music reviews, style advice, extended flights of fancy, drinking, reminiscence, turns of phrase and 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover style rhyming names, James. He even mentions food.

It’s a bit of an odd thing to stick on a list, but in the hands of a writer like Haines even something as functional as a recipe can be used as a vehicle for expression. And if that isn’t enough, they are really, bloody funny.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t written any recipes for a while and the blog has been mostly promoting his (superb) album, which actually leads us to tomorrow…

For 144 weeks (plus the occasional skip) Fridays meant Freakangels. A post-apocolyptic webcomic about a society trying to survive comfortably, starring a strange family and featuring some of the most evocative depictions of psychic abilities in a medium obsessed with superpeople.

Filled to the brim with the level of brilliant dialogue, interesting ideas and compelling twists I expect from Warren Ellis, this stands out as one of his best thanks to the atmosphere, pacing and heart. All of which worked largely because of the exceptional imagery created by Paul Duffield, Kate Brown and Alana Yuen.

Freakangels updated six pages a week, unfolding at a leisurely pace. This isn’t a comic concerned with stuffing as much plot onto a page as possible, instead building an immersive and atmospheric experience. I could linger on some of those pages for ages, just soaking up the imagery. Every page communicates so much without ever being less than utterly beautiful.

At the centre of all this is a utopian belief that problems can be solved, the world can be improved and ideals are worth holding onto. It’s easy to mistake Warren Ellis for a Cynical Old Bastard because of his mastery of the aesthetics of the Cynical Old Bastard - but reading a comic like Freakangels it’s hard to ignore the message that people can be better and that an intolerable status quo shouldn’t be tolerated. He also writes the occasional recipe, which is pretty much irrelevant, but is the only link I can think of to tomorrow…

Cat Vincent has done a lot of writing about hyperreal religions, creating your own mythology and the life altering impact of fiction. He’s been detailing his personal philosophy in the Guttershaman series, begun the Mason Lang Film Club and recently had a piece on the (rather creepy) Slenderman published in Darklore magazine. All fascinating, and well worth a look, but one essay on a particular piece of Modern Mythology had a very personal resonance with me.

My impetus for writing this list lies in how closely my sense of self is tied to the my relationship with creative culture. One of the most influential, and the franchise that spent longest as my Favourite TV Show, is Star Trek (initially The Next Generation, but I’m counting the whole lot). It introduced me to science fiction as fiction of ideas (as opposed to adventures with robots and ray-guns), it nurtured my nascent love of space and science, and it occurred to me recently that I can’t actually think of any value system/moral philosophy/religion/whatever that I hold higher than Star Trek at its most optimistic.

The high hope in humanity’s potential to be peaceful, curious, well rounded and harmonious still strikes me as a Future Worth Aiming For. A Post-Scarcity society is still about the only economic system I don’t hate; and while we’re still a long way off matter replicators and universal freedom from want, at least in the internet we’re seeing the first sparks. In Star Trek, a world with all financial incentives removed still functions, people still contribute to society, and – as this list shows – there are plenty of people contributing to the Internet’s culture of Information Post-Scarcity.

In Infinite Diversity, Cat focusses on the concept of IDIC, analysing the episode “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” and completely nails the strange mixture of strengths and weaknesses: the dramatic potential squandered, the high ideals that it doesn’t always live up to. He picks apart the less laudable aspects and shows what’s admirable about the utopian core. I love works of fiction built around a strong utopian core…

Space Shark by Chris G has its own twist on single page webcomics, spinning an epic sci-fi adventure by isolating the most potent moments of the narrative to form a slightly disjointed but rich and rewarding world. Also, it is set in space and the “hero” is a shark.

This year saw fantastic use of colour pushed further on already eye-popping visual style, with lots of texture and splatter. Each strip exists independently and tries something different, but re-reading them all I was struck by how well everything ties into a greater whole. (Even if it doesn’t always adhere to a strict continuity, the character relationships build subtly behind the bombast.)

This is the page that hit me the hardest. In terms of pure craft, it’s damn impressive: dynamic, straight-for-the-gut action, shot through with flashbacks which give the action breathing room to hit harder (loudQUIETloud) and ground it in an emotional significance. I actually found it kinda heartbreaking.

I think that strip in particular was enhanced for me by using a Starfleet Academy analogue, it’s the sort of reference that adds an extra layer of mythology to what’s on the page, enhances the context of their back-stories and plays to my interests: Star Trek has always meant a lot to me…

Jamie Smart’s longform webcomic Corporate Skull kicked off in high style: with cavemen, shit suicides and the splatteriest photocopier incident of the year. It’s been getting progressively more mental and looks like it’s going to get even better. I’ve been enjoying it so much I felt compelled to draw my first bit of fanart for absolutely ages.

The screen is a less than ideal method of reading long comics, at least not with the same storytelling techniques that work on slices of dead tree: reload times, publication schedule, resolution, glare and aspect ratio are the big ones, but there are solutions. (Usually ones considered before the page’s creation - I recently read a bunch of comics that were put on the web after print and the reading experience was pretty awkward.) Jamie’s solutions are actually pretty simple/elegant - with the most glaring one being to make every page brilliant. Look at this or this, each builds the overall narrative forward but also delivers a self contained experience.

I suspect at least part of this comes from working on the Dandy (enjoying his Desperate Dan more than I enjoyed Desperate Dan when I was the right age to enjoy Desperate Dan is actually how I stumbled across him). For someone who can harness the power of ludicrous violence and improbable swearwords, he works magnificently on sweet, funny kids stuff. At a bookfair earlier in the year it was great seeing a crowd of kids clustered around Find Chaffy and thinking “hah, this is the same guy who drew Bear.”

The Dandy and Beano seem to be an undermentioned influence in British comics. I get why everybody raves about 2000AD, but having a pair of widely-available anthology comics introducing youngsters to comics with unruly kids, humour, characters as iconic as any American hero and dense storytelling (1 or 2 pages to get everything done), is surely pretty significant. Corporate Skull operates with an awareness of what a single page is capable of, so every update is worth reading. Of course, there are other ways of making webcomics work one page at a time…

Christmas day means repeats, right? Good thing too, because some brilliant stuff is always going to be left off a list like this. Fortunately, I can sneak in a list I wrote in July, which (still won’t make the list complete, but) does cover a couple of serious omissions, and everybody will forgive this blatant piece of cheating because it’s Christmas! Proper choice tomorrow…

For now, I’ll leave you a newly coloured comic I drew on this day last year and, as always, wish you a Merry Fucking Christmas (And A Happy New Year).

None For The Crow by Dustmotes is a gorgeous ep: a spacious layering of lovely sounds at the incredibly organic end of electronic music.

What especially gripped me was the wonderful use of negative space.

Drilling a beat through to a listeners core is usually desirable, the simplest way to add emphasis being to just turn up the volume. What Dustmotes does is far subtler, having impact not by hitting me over the head but by dropping me into the beat.

Everything is drenched in static, an electric fog across the whole ep. The impact arrives with a momentary drop through the static to a beat at the bottom. Sort of the opposite of the usual percussive, brief burst of white noise. It’s a technique used across the ep, perhaps most effectively on In Here, combining with handclaps to pull along a drifting ambient space. I find the idea of anti-beats hidden in noise incredibly appealing, and happily they’re used here as part of a beautiful overall effect.

I first heard Dustmotes working with Texture, which along with things that aren’t there leads us nicely to tomorrow…

It’s always a good idea to remember the important things in life: friendship, adventure, science, crime, chess and growing up never growing up. We Are Become Pals, written by Joey Comeau and illustrated by Jess Fink, captures it all in an incredibly sweet, funny, invigorating way.

I love Helen and Jane so much. They’re the best kind of troublemakers: smart, curious, loyal and with no tolerance for boredom. Each chapter is a little burst of wonder, illustrated with energetic charm. It’s the sort of story that makes me smile and laugh and well up and laugh more and leaves a spring in my step.

It’s also marvellously restrained storytelling, building a vibrant view of two characters and their friendship, showing everything without ever adding anything unnecessary. Sometimes, what’s left out is the most important…

Some things are more revealing than others, but every action is, to some extent, influenced by our past, by our thoughts and feelings. One of the key functions of creativity is to find a better way of expressing those thoughts and feelings. Not necessarily deep thoughts or especially personal feelings, but “what looks good” or “what makes a good story” are personal nonetheless. How effectively anything is expressed varies greatly and sometimes what gets expressed is very revealing – not always intentionally.

How we relate to other people’s creations can be very revealing as well, Colin Smith’s blog TooBusyThinkingAboutMyComics is both a source of in depth analysis of a range of comics and a rather personal expression of his relationship with those comics.

Possibly the most revealing single piece this year was inspired by a bad Green Lantern comic. Not the most promising grounds at first glance, yet from the poor storytelling of ignoring how a characters past affects their present actions, to the wider issues of racial politics, moral obligations and real heroism; he unearths an unsettling message and reveals a range of issues that are important to him. It also ends on an important argument as to why all that matters. Why a disposable pamphlet about colourful men hitting each other does have a responsibility that shouldn’t be ignored. Because all creativity is revealing: and in examining the deeper political content of these comics Colin ends up reveals an admirable moral outlook in himself.

He’s actually embarked on his own end of year list at the moment, which, as with mine, is not actually listed in order of preference (what a crass notion) and, as is usual at TooBusyThinking, is going to be a bit longer than forecast. The list is a pretty good summary of his core themes (clarity, diversity, a consideration of moral and political implications, etc.) and warm hearted recommendations of comics that shine under his analysis.

And if you like warm hearted tales, there’s always tomorrow’s choice…