JOE BERNARDI

Digital strips

JOE BERNARDI — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:49:31 GMT

The rise of webcomics and four artists leading the way
In the not-too-distant past, telling someone you were interested in webcomics was met with awkward stares and changes of subject. (Trust me.)

In the not-too-distant past, telling someone you were interested in webcomics was met with awkward stares and changes of subject. (Trust me.) Web-exclusive comics have existed just about as long as the internet itself but, commensurate with the web’s early demographic, the early comics’ subject matter typically dealt in science-fiction, computers, and video games. Sluggy Freelance, Player Vs. Player, and the still-ubiquitous Penny Arcade were among the most popular. At that point, the internet commerce model was still too shaky to support any revenue generation.

Over the past few years, however, a small group of webcomic artists experimenting with diverse subject matter and stylish writing with a genuine interest for advancement of the medium have emerged as the new vanguards of the form. Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, Nicholas Gurewitch of The Perry Bible Fellowship, Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl, and Joey Comeau of A Softer World are some artists making their living from their relatively esoteric art.

These four artists are, in their own ways, paving the way for both artistic and commercial models on the internet. The success of their highly personalized, small-scale models seems to simultaneously laugh in the face of more bloated startups and paves the way for a new form of artistic distribution and commercial viability. By taking financial and artistic risks and just generally doing weird stuff, they’re in no small way changing what it means to be a cartoonist and a so-called “starving artist.” That might sound like exaggeration, but try not to be impressed at someone who can make their living creating a comic that regularly references things like “temporal presentism.”

DINOSAUR COMICS

Ryan North’s comic, Dinosaur Comics, is almost perfectly self-explanatory: it’s a comic about dinosaurs. DC’s most remarkable quality, however, is that North has used the same six-panel art every day in its four-plus years of existence; the dialogue is the only thing that changes. North, a twenty-six year old Toronto resident with a graduate degree in computational linguistics, freely admits that he can’t draw, opting instead for the relatively crude clipart that’s become a backdrop for jokes pertaining to everything from linguistic descriptivism to kissing. He maintains, though, that his choice of static art isn’t as restrictive as it might seem. “A month in I was going to change it,” he says, “but couldn't find new art that I liked. Keeping the same pictures every day isn't actually as restricting as I thought it was: Yeah, the pictures tell a story, but you can alter that almost as much as you want by simply adding narration that reads ‘THREE YEARS LATER:’ or ‘MEANWHILE, IN TUDOR ENGLAND:’.”

So much, so fast

JOE BERNARDI — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 19:13:11 GMT

Battles, Great Scott, April 5, 2007
Angular, mathy bands run the risk of boring their audience live.

Four chords and frustration

JOE BERNARDI — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:35:19 GMT

The Thermals, T.T. the Bear's, March 3, 2007
Testament to how commanding the Thermals are live is how they managed to get a crowd at T.T. the Bear’s moving to the point of stage dives.

Caught in a jam

JOE BERNARDI — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:48:28 GMT

Akron/Family, Middle East Upstairs, February 13, 2007
I have an odd soft spot for bands that have occasional fun at the audience’s expense.

The varied charms of a DVD magazine

JOE BERNARDI — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:33:51 GMT

Wholphin serves up aces
Wholphin , the DVD magazine from the creators of literary journal McSweeney’s and quarterly culture magazine the Believer , serves to provide the viewer with sights they had no idea they needed to see.

My house the music venue

JOE BERNARDI — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 23:04:34 GMT

What it's like running a rock club out of your basement
Within weeks in either direction of me moving into my house, nearly every small, independent-minded concert venue in the city of Boston was shut down. So we decided to open up.

Terminal Youth. Photo courtesy of Al.

It's nine o'clock on a Sunday morning. I exit my bedroom, which empties out into the living room, to go to the bathroom. On my futons, four longhaired, middle-aged Finnish men are awake and finishing off their individual cases of Natural Ice from the previous night. They raise their cans and grunt hello. I squint and point to Jypi's Motörhead T-shirt, giving a thumbs up. He smiles and raises his can a second time before killing it. I return to my bedroom and go back to sleep.

The insulation around some of the pipes in my basement is asbestos, but it’s the least dangerous kind. “White” asbestos, as it’s known, poses no real health risk unless it’s agitated.

Unfortunately for my lungs, then, bands play my basement roughly once a week. Some are from Finland. Some are from Long Island. Some live upstairs.

The Finnish guys: they’re a band called Kohu-63. They’ve been together since 1981. They played about fifteen feet as the crow flies from my bed and the show attracted about fifty people. I don't know what "Kohu" means and until they played my house I had only heard one of their records once. Why, then, my basement?

Within weeks in either direction of me moving into my house, nearly every small, independent-minded concert venue in the city of Boston was shut down. Art spaces, a record store, other houses, and even a small bar ceased hosting bands. Allston’s Reel Bar, Re: Generation Records, the Lilypad in Cambridge, and a house known as the Cuntree Club were all casualties of the same period of under three months. Necessity, as it turned out, was the mother of five Finnish men as old as my parents playing Discharge-inspired hardcore at my house.

When the dust settled and the information about my basement started to reveal itself, the various operators of some of the venues began to come to us with show proposals. A friend who booked shows at the now-showless record store knew a band called Diswar, who were on tour with Kohu-63. It evokes the sequences in old sitcoms where split-screen telephone conversations would go on and on, with each new person hanging up and calling someone else.

Even when the venue climate is relatively barren, bands from Boston can always get local shows — it’s not so easy for bands from a few states away to keep their finger close enough to the city’s pulse to know who to ask and, for the time being, my roommates and I have no problem hosting them.

Hump Day?

JOE BERNARDI — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 21:09:21 GMT

Ketman, Tristan Da Cunha, Thunderhole, and Paparazzi, Great Scott, January 10, 2007
It’s reassuring to know that one can walk into a small club in the middle of the week and still see four local bands without being bored or disappointed by any of them.

Final countdown

JOE BERNARDI — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 21:39:39 GMT

Dan Deacon, MassArt Pozen Center, December 7, 2006
Everyone should be more like Dan Deacon.

FUBARdcore

JOE BERNARDI — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:46:55 GMT

Canada's Fucked Up makes hardcore safe for indie rockers
Fucked Up balances their use of "artier" methods with a desire to make hardcore dangerous again.

Fucked Up

Things I learned in Toronto:

The CN Tower is not much taller than the Pru
There is a place on earth where $5.75 for a tallboy of Molson is considered a fair trade.
Fucked Up is the most interesting band in punk rock.

Note that I didn't say "best.” It's not about who’s heard what record, who's the savior of what, or who just sounds like Negative Approach. Leading up to the release of their first LP (after five years of existence) and the weekend of shows celebrating it, Fucked Up had established a "where-will-they-go-from-here" cult of personality that has the likes of Jarvis Cocker and Bloc Party clamoring to namecheck them in interviews.

The entire band works under assumed names that change at random. The current lineup (as far as I know) lists Pink Eyes on vocals, 10,000 Marbles and Gulag on guitar, Mustard Gas on bass, and Mr. Jo on drums. Gulag used to call himself Concentration Camp. The band claims to have a manager who wields and immense amount of influence despite never having seen them live. In spite of four years of steady releases, the band has never toured their home country of Canada.

This year, Halloween weekend coincided with the vinyl release of Hidden World, their debut LP. Until now, their releases have been limited to seven-inch and twelve-inch singles, collected on 2004's Epics in Minutes.

Upon my arrival at Friday's show it was apparent that, on top of the price of admission, it was essential for everyone (myself included) to buy the Hidden World double LP, the two show-exclusive seven-inches, and the extremely limited, possibly-show-exclusive 12-inch for a total of 35 dollars Canadian. I am told it took four people 45 minutes to set up Fucked Up's merchandise table. With the consent of the band, fans handmade and sold Fucked Up handbags and Fucked Up umbrellas. Until recently, the band refused to even make T-shirts.

The bill for the weekend was diverse, ranging from the to the furious, assaulting Providence natives Dropdead to catchier, garage-rock offerings of Brutal Knights and Regulations. Sunday's bill in particular stood out, as it paired Toronto post-punks the Creeping Nobodies with Pennsylvania's thugged-out sneakerheads Cold World.

Outstanding sets of the weekend included Allentown, Pennsylvania's Pissed Jeans, who taught Friday's crowd of roughly two hundred that, when wailed over a sea of feedback, the phrase "I've got boogies!" can be a rallying cry. Much is made of Fucked Up's reluctance to "ace" any particular subgenre of punk or hardcore, but Pissed Jeans are even more difficult to pin down. They're just as influenced by the Jesus Lizard and the Stooges as they are Black Flag and Nirvana, and they are one of the best live bands in America.

Making the cut?

JOE BERNARDI — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 21:30:09 GMT

The Slits, the Apes, Life Partners, Squids, and Adrian Orange, Great Scott, October 30, 2006
The Slits were a band attached to a time and a place.

The Slits were a band attached to a time and a place. The Clash’s Mick Jones tuned their guitars when they didn’t know how to do it themselves. They had a Peel Session before everyone had one. Vocalist Ari Up’s mother was (and still is) married to Johnny Rotten. A reunion seemed bleak at best and nonsensical at worst. No doubt on the strength of their classic 1979 album Cut, the Slits (okay, original bassist Tessa Pollitt, Up, and four scabs) drew a packed house at Great Scott last night.

The evening opened with Adrian Orange, (a/k/a Thanksgiving) playing his trademark fractured pop. He’s the heir apparent to the “skinny, handsome pop musician affecting awkwardness” throne. I mean that as a compliment. The set differed from his typical stripped-down solo material with the addition of Washington-based backing band Lake.

Next were Boston locals Squids. The all-female post-punk outfit takes its most obvious cues from modern acts such as Erase Errata, but the foundation of their sound lay firmly with the night’s headliners. The Squids’ bass player noted that the show “was a night where [they] have to acknowledge who inspired [them].”

The Apes

Life Partners, another local band, followed. The group — made up of drums, guitar (or, more accurately, a clear Flying V), trumpet, a floodlight, and two keyboards — played what could be construed as either noisy rock played by a pop band or pop played by a crazy person. The final undercard act was Washington DC’s the Apes, who play heavy, riff-oriented rock with a Hammond organ and shrill, soulful vocals. They performed their style competently, but at around minute twenty-five of near-falsetto, I got the idea.

At about 12:30, the Slits took the stage. The two original members were trying their best to look the ages of their younger companions, but Up’s waist-length curly dreadlocks and Pollitt’s baggy black hockey jersey did little to assuage the audience’s concerns. The band only played three songs from Cut and the set was very heavy on Up’s reggae and dub influence, even diving into her strictly dancehall solo material.

During the duller points of the set, my attention focused itself on the younger members of the band. I have never seen a performer want to be on stage less than the lead guitarist of the reunited Slits. At one point, Up asked her to play a solo during a song and I swear I saw her roll her eyes. During the would-be encore, Up admitted that the group had not rehearsed any of the Slits’ other older material, and after being dragged out following an a cappella dancehall performance by Up, the band played “Shoplifting” for a second time.

Breakneck nostalgia

JOE BERNARDI — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 21:17:38 GMT

Paperrad releases a DVD
New England-based art collective Paperrad has released their first full-length DVD, and, if you were cooler, this is what you would see when you closed your eyes.

Lost in translation

JOE BERNARDI — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 19:20:30 GMT

One man's quest to translate the sequel to Earthbound
They don’t make games like Earthbound anymore.

A screenshot from Mother 3

They don’t make games like Earthbound anymore.

Released by Nintendo in 1995, Earthbound is the story of Ness, a typical suburban boy who lives in a town called Onett. One night, a meteor crashes into a mountain near Ness’ house. That’s when a bee named Buzz Buzz appears from the future and declares that the Apple of Enlightenment has predicted Ness will save the world from a formless malevolent force known as Giygas. On said quest to save the world, Ness encounters everything from an enemy called a “Diamond Dog” to music that samples Monty Python. Earthbound offered quirks and oddities that, to this day, have not been matched.

Save an occasional cameo by Ness in other Nintendo titles and an infamously scrapped Nintendo 64 sequel, though, the game remained perpetually under the radar aside from an extremely dedicated cult following.

In late fall of last year, more than a decade after Earthbound’s release, creator Shigesato Itoi announced an EB sequel seemingly out of nowhere. About half a year later, the game saw Japanese release on April 20, 2006. This past spring and summer, the stateside fan community waited anxiously for the announcement of an American release of the game, dubbed Mother 3.

The announcement never came. Enter Austin-based software engineer Cliff Spradlin.

“Some of us have been waiting over a decade (for an EB sequel),” says Spradlin over Instant Messenger from Austin, where he’s a student at the University of Texas, “so when the actual release date was announced at the end of last year, I realized I had the technical ability to convert Mother 3 to English.”

Spradlin, 20, is the webmaster and project manager of mother3.org, a website dedicated to translating the entirety of Mother 3 without the aid of Nintendo or any other gaming organization. The mother3.org team started with three and has since risen in size to about eight, but the project is a true labor of love for Spradlin, who makes clear his adoration for the game: “Earthbound was a real joy when I was growing up,” he says, “and I really wanted to [translate] its sequel not only for myself, but also for others who have been hoping for it to be released for so many years.”

Man or Mega Man?

JOE BERNARDI — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 19:19:44 GMT

An old friend returns
There’s a new Mega Man game.

IT’S LIKE YOUR COUSIN: Still the same as always, still doing okay.

Remember the last time you saw your extended family? You had to talk for a little while with the one cousin who’s about your age, with whom you, in your youth, spent innumerable hours at family gatherings. Remember how you realized, again, that though he’s a nice guy, he’s the same exact nice guy he was when you were both nine? Still, though, on the ride home, you felt satisfied that he was doing okay, that he hadn’t screwed up too badly. You gave yourself a pat on the back for being concerned.

There’s a new Mega Man game.

Mega Man ZX takes place several generations after the previous Mega Man story arc — that of Zero and X — left off. Having saved the world only a few hundred years earlier, Zero and X have died and somehow been forgotten. You begin your adventure as a delivery boy or girl who is, you guessed it, quickly ensnared in a robot-based maze of political and industrial intrigue. (Yes, you can choose between two characters. Yes, they have all the stereotypical differences of boys and girls in games. He is stronger but slower; she’s agile but takes more damage. The story difference is negligible.)

Turns out Zero and X aren’t dead; their essences have simply been converted into small robots, called biometals, that can take the form of suits. Using these suits, you can access the abilities of both Zero (energy sword, flowing blond hair) and X (chargeable blaster), engaging in the boilerplate activities that have sustained the Mega Man brand for more than two decades.

Not much has changed since we last visited the Mega Man universe. The bad guys are still (thank God) manufacturing giant wasp-shaped robots en masse, pretty much everything can be jumped on, and defeating a boss allows you to steal his power. The biometal system adds a new dimension, however: defeating a boss nets you his suit. Each suit comes with its own set of physics and unique powers not limited to the traditional “HARD KNUCKLE” or “ATOMIC FIRE.” I am very glad, for example, that a Mega Man has finally come along in which a harpoon can be used underwater.

ZX also features a world map, a small arcade of unlockable mini-games, and NPCs that can be approached and talked to. Although navigating the game’s giant expanse of territory sometimes proves unwieldy, it’s refreshing to see the move away from “pick-a-boss” territory and toward a more Metroid-esque open-ended system.

The Thermals

JOE BERNARDI — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:48:06 GMT

The Body The Blood The Machine | Sub Pop
It’s difficult to get excited about a concept album nowadays.

Pop punk and lavender briefs

JOE BERNARDI — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 17:59:59 GMT

Witches with Dicks, Movers and Shakers, the Reel Bar, September 17, 2006
The band's ridiculous name and reputation for hilarious stage antics tends to overshadow the fact that they are one of the best up-and-coming pop bands in Boston.