Rethinking Music with Beck's Record Club

You wish... and so do I, to be honest

Imagine taking a group of musician with styles that only the most bizarre venn diagram would show overlapping traits. Then, put them in a room and have them cover another band's record. This is the goal of The Record Club, and the mission statement of the project goes a little something like this: 

Record Club is an informal meeting of various musicians to record an album in a day. The album chosen to be reinterpreted is used as a framework. Nothing is rehearsed or arranged ahead of time. A track is put up here once a week. The songs are rough renditions, often first takes that document what happens over the course of a day as opposed to a polished rendering.There is no intention to 'add to' the original work or attempt to recreate the power of the original recording. Only to play music and document what happens.

Beck started Record Club in June of 2009, but I didn't find out about it until recently. After watching some of Beck's old music videos online,  I let youtube cycle through videos on its own while I opened another tab on my browser to research for an upcoming article. At some point, a song that  I was unfamiliar with came on. Beginning with part of the original INXS song, "Gun in the Sky," the video goes into a reworking the song, beginning with a drum beat that could belong to an industrial band before Angus Andrew, of The Liars, starts singing. Scratchy guitar comes in to flesh out moments and is followed by a clumsy keyboard line that could be coming from a child's casio piano or melodica.

Joined by members of The Liars, Os Mutantes, Keyboardist Brian LeBarton, and St. Vincent, Beck would go into the studio to cover Kick, by INXS. While those musicians may all share influences like Talking Heads, Beatles and random jazz figures, they record with very different styles and unique approaches to melody and rhythm which sometimes result in the abandonment of them, as with Liars. With "New Sensation," reverbed violins and flirting background vocals come in to produce what tonaly sounds like it could have been a b-side from the Sea Change sessions. This aesthetic would carry over to the group's version of "Devil Inside," to remove all of the attitude INXS put into the song and replace it with a haunted sound.

Abandoning the others, Beck takes over all roles for a three track version of "The Loved One." Structurally, his version is close to the original, with electric guitar substituted for acoustic to end up with a song that reflects his "Mellow Gold" era.

It's not just Beck taking control through the whole experiment. "Never Tear Us Apart" is a nice collaboration that follows the original song closely and shows off Annie Clark's singing. With "Mystify," The group moves through upbeat to calm moments. The cover stays in the calm area, breaking it down and reworking it as a country song, with emotional violin, pensive guitar and thoughtful vocal delivery to make probably the best song from the session, except maybe for it's closer.

Ending the session and record is "Tiny Daggers." For this track, members of The Liars take control of the creative direction to make the song sound nothing like its original. Where other songs make it obvious that Record Club is Beck's pet project, "Tiny Daggers" sound like a Liars song, not a cover. With menacing drums, noisy electric guitars and a reworking of the vocals, something that doesn't at all resemble the source material comes out of the experiment to produce an angry song nine minutes longer than the original.

Beck and friends have done four other sessions, covering Velvet Underground and Nice, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, Yanni's Live At The Acropolis and Oar, by Skip Spencer. Videos are available on youtube and tracks are available on Beck's website. They're all worth checking out, but I think the version of Kick is the best one and hope Beck will return to do more sessions.

♪ How Do You Solve A Problem Like A Pop Song ♪

In 2012, Beck put out a record in the form of a book filled with sheet music. He may be an eccentric genius.

Beck's done it again. After winning a Grammy that caused a little controversy (Kanyeversy?), Beck decided to take a different approach to music with his new song, "Dreams." While the award winning Moon Phases is somber, moody and borders on depression, Beck decided to come back with a 180° rotation that had  his foot land on the kick drum. It's hard to expect anything from Beck, an artist that has used samples like a hip hop dj (Odelay), country like a boot wearing cowboy, and left field antics like he's Captain Beefheart (Stereopathetic Soulmanure). Expecting what Beck will do next is an exercise in futility. When he released a book of sheet music (Song Reader) for fans to play, he showed his audience that his next album may not even be an album.

While Midnite Vultures was a funk/rock masterpiece that could propel any dance party into 3 a.m., "Dreams" isn't funk as much as pop/disco ala MGMT. This new sound isn't surprising considering he's working with writers and producers that have made careers for themselves writing and producing for Kelly Clarkson and Beyonce. Though this new single is an unabashed, straight-up pop song, it's not as cotton candy as Britney Spears or princess party as Katy Perry. A little shocking upon first listen, it eventually comes off as exactly what you would imagine a pop song by Beck to sound like. With that, I'll leave you to press play and make up your mind.

Here's an interview Billboard did with Beck about his new song and upcoming record:

Culture Crop: Managing Mainstream Marijuana's Morals

Freeling rolls away her worries behind Reagan's back.

Cheech and Chong may have created the stoner comedy. Since then, movies like Half Baked, Pineapple Express and Friday have been fueled with silly jokes about weed and the people that smoke it. When people are smoking marijuana in movies or tv, it’s not often taken seriously. The theme of teenagers smoking in the basement of That 70’s Show and in Dazed and Confused show high school kids getting high as something to laugh at. In Poltergeist, the mother smoking in her bedroom, while she relaxes with her husband, was a set up allowing the tone of the movie to jump from calm to anxious. Using pot as a plot device normalizes the substance. Having the mother be a smoker didn't add to her character development, didn't give her character a vice to overcome in order to save her child and family, it didn't change the story at all. The mother smoking a joint was just dressing, possibly a relic from writers that were coming into their own during the summer of love. Though, this scene could have been a slap in the face of the Reagan's own republican perspective and the onslaught drug culture would face during his terms: look at the book Mr. Freeling is reading in the foreground while Mrs. Freeling is rolling up something for herself in the background.

"I learned it by watching you!"

By telling people to "just say no," in 1982, Nancy Reagan aimed the spotlight to a war on drugs that officially started in the summer of 1971. The 80's and 90's saw P.S.A.s filling airwaves. T.V. shows put out “special” episodes where a character has a special problem (domestic violence and A.I.D.S awareness were two big players in the P.S.A. game too). Drugs become demonized with the help of the media and writers eager to snatch from the headlines. Not every P.S.A. targeted children. One of the most memorable of these announcements directly targeted adults by warning them that a child's bad habit may be an imitation and perpetuation of what they see parents doing.

Even still, fighting a problem isn't about placing blame, it's about coming up with solutions and informing your target audience of the answers. A key element to getting your message to an audience is letting them know that it affects them, no matter who they are. When you show kids that not even their idols at Bayside High were free of troubles and pressures, your message gets a chance to resonate. Kids may not want to listen to parents, it's part of their DNA after all. Instead of having a sit down with your kids, taking them out of their routine to give them a talk that may be uncomfortable, why not have the talk placed into their routine? Better yet, why not have their best friend, Zack Morris, give it to them when he's over next time? It's sneaky! It's genius! It might have even worked on some viewers when Saved By The Bell gave over-achiever Jessie Spano her own  substance abuse problem. Under the pressure of acing tests and keeping up with clubs to look good for colleges while pleasing parents, getting ready for the big dance and being a teenager, Jessie turned to caffeine pills to keep up. In this special episode of Saved By The Bell, "Jessie's Song," Zack convinces Jessie that she doesn't need the pills, that the pills are the enemy. In this episode, the audience sees a teenager, faced with very typical problems, turning to drugs for an answer.

No one is perfect

By the end of the episode, the demon drugs are thrown to the floor and a good talk between old friends shows Jessie that she has loving people in her life to get her through problems, that she doesn't need drugs. The conclusion of this episode is that drugs are bad for your health, don't get you what you want, and, when Zack Morris (the personification of cool) is telling you to stay away from them, that they are not for cool kids, even if it's JUST caffeine pills.

Fast Forwarding to 2005, when the smoke from the Reagan era had cleared to elect one president that "did not inhale," and another that lived it up, Showtime put out a show called Weeds. Even though it was on a premium channel and it debuted after a legion of pot themed movies, Weeds came out on the small screen, the same screen that brought us all those Public Service Announcements. It may seem easy to write the show off as a prime-time soap opera, but it was more than just pretty faces captured in the flash of the California sun. Disregarding the relationships and sentimentality centered at the structure of a primetime soap, the show's basic plot shows something serious going on (growing?).

Weed is given a pin-up girl. how times have changed.

When the main character of Weeds, Nancy Bowtin, finds herself trying to keep her family in the same tax bracket they were in before her successful husband died, she decided to sell pot. Being the single mother of two children and choosing to sell drugs gives a tv show a lot of topics to run with, everything from how circumstances blur the lines of right and wrong to the which-batch-of-brownies-is-for-the-school-fund-raiser-and-which-is-to-sell episode (I'm not sure they did that episode, but they should have!). Still, what's most interesting is how Weeds shows a cultural shift, from the days of the P.S.A. and episodes with special lessons about drugs, to a time when pot is almost a central character in the show, one that is not only normalized but glamorized, and sold like hot rods (pictured left).

It's now well passed the 80's. The public service announcements that used to air on television are not very present and that may be because T.V. and movies don't have the same cultural cache they once did. More people are tuning into pay channels to watch shows produced with the creative liberties that were afforded to Weeds and The Soprano's. Still, even more people are being visually entertained by the internet. Like Weeds, High Maintenance doesn't focus on pot. Weed is the background noise of this series that just got picked up by Vimeo. The show is revolves around pot and wouldn't be the same thing without it, but the show doesn't try to make a statement about pot or its use.

If Seinfeld was a show about nothing, High Maintenance is a web series about a weed dealer biking through New York City. But Seinfeld wasn't a show about nothing, it was a show about a comedian and his group of friends that were over-grown children trying to behave like adults and failing miserably at it. With a show about a pot dealer, it's almost impossible not to have smoking in the show, but this show has no agenda. With legalization popping up in states and the promises of big money being the main focus of marijuana in the media, the plant is given a new life and cultural weight this century. Still, this show is not out to advocate. One episode starts off showing what seems to be a young couple, Heidi and Mark, in love. The camera shows the two new characters in their twenties set up a fort in the living room, eat meals together and talk about this and that between moments of affection. While this happens, Heidi is seen smoking marijuana occasionally. When Heidi leaves to pick up food, Mark, stays home to wait for their delivery man. Once there, the guy (yes, that is how he is credited) and Mark start catching up. Mark starts talking to the guy about Heidi. He reveals he met her online, that the past two weeks have been great before showing him a picture of her. The guy, a man about town, reveals that Heidi is actually "Homeless Heidi," a scam artist that uses unknowing men. All the times Heidi has been shown asking for money for the delivery food, or to pick up groceries or buy the pot, flood back to Mark and he knows the guy is right. In this episode, aside from the guy, pot smokers are shown to be deadbeats that are smart enough to con people, contrary to their easy going, peace-loving, absent-minded cliche.

In the episode "Helen," the show starts off with a man, in his late twenties or early thirties, lying on a bed with his sickly mother as they talk and watch television. The audience learns that the mother is bedridden and that her son, Patrick, cares for her. The camera watches as he shops online, grooms himself and accepts delivered groceries. We get to see into the uneventful life of Patrick before the guy knocks on the door. A cleaned, well dressed Patrick answers the door and invites him in. The two chitchat before it's time for an exchange. It's discovered that Patrick has a crush on the guy when he makes an awkward grab for the guys waist. The guy, always cool (for all intents and purposes, he's the personification of pot, which is assisted by not giving him a real name), brushes it off as no big deal by acting natural and leaving amicably. When the guy does leave, Patrick is shown throwing the bag of pot in a cigar box filled with others like it. The credits don't just begin to scroll, instead the guy is seen on the streets, enjoying the wonders of a parade on the streets of New York as a happy song plays. A massive divide is being presented between these characters. If the guy is a personification of weed, then Patrick, a man that never leaves his house, may be a symbol for closeted gay men. If pot was the plot device for silly jokes, then it has now become one to talk about, or at least hint at, bigger issues and look at complex characters with real problems that have nothing to do with substance abuse.

Ellen & Ruth watch birds while Saul gets high 

While the pot might not have gone to the person you expected it to in "Helen" (the sick mother), High Maintenance takes nine minutes to bring another look at how marijuana intersects with sick people. In "Brad Pitts," We are taken into the life of Ellen. Ellen likes to go out and watch birds when she's not at the office. Other than that, all we get to know is that she's having trouble eating and setting a date for the doctor. This story focuses on her making a solid friend in her community of bird watchers, and getting someone to drive her to and from her appointment. In the process, she happens to choose someone that knows the guy, Ruth and her husband Saul. Aside from the very serious tone of this episode, "Brad Pitts," manages to bring in comic relief. After Ellen and Ruth start to talk, Ruth suggests Ellen smokes pot to bring back her appetite. The laughs start when Saul gets in touch with the guy. Not able to get it himself, Saul calls the guy explaining how he'll need to bring it to Ruth by using profanity as he urges the guy to be polite to his wife and friend that have no real experience with dealers. The guy arrives briefly to help out the ladies and the laughs hit a crescendo when he gets a call moments after leaving because Ruth thinks she's gone crazy before the whole episode wraps with an element of closure as Ellen is seen eating ravenously while exit music plays.

High Maintenance isn't a show about weed, it's an anthology about characters. These episodes range from five to fifteen minutes. In that amount of time, it's hard to tell big stories, but the perfect amount of time to take a look at a group of strangers. Like a collection of stories by Raymond Carver, with each new act of High Maintenance, the audience gets to peek into the lives of a person, or group of people, and see what makes these people move and stay together. As a viewer, you never know when the guy is going to make an appearance, only that he will. It's not the guy that keeps someone clicking the play button on each new episode, it's the writing and the insight. Without the internet, a show like High Maintenance may not have been given the room to breathe: there are no guidelines to length, the main character doesn't have a real name and he's barely in it for most episodes. It might also have a hard time getting commercial sponsorship.

With the internet, format is malleable and largely at the discretion of the creative forces behind a video or movie. Sponsors may not be needed, after all, this very website costs nothing to post to, neither does youtube. While the internet is filled with its share of people making big clicker videos that show people unboxing phones and giving tips from everything to make-up to videogames, the internet has opened doors for well-made, thought provoking shows like High Maintenance, even though it's a show about a pot dealer on the surface.

On the other end of the internet spectrum, exists the show Getting Doug With High. On comedian Doug Benson's video podcast / talk show, Doug and a group of people, mostly other comedians, sit around a table and get high. If pot was a supporting character or prop in the background for other shows, then it is the main character and setting for this show. Unlike most talk shows, there are not fascinating stories taken from the paper for the host and guests to discuss, just weed to smoke and a few marijuana related trivia facts to talk about. A guest comes on, smokes, talks about his or her first experience with pot, smokes, answers questions from twitter and smokes some more.

Doug Benson, professional stoner.

What makes this show worth talking about is that, despite its basic format and Wayne's World production value, it succeeds. In between the actual smoking, there's a lot of talking. With a room full of comedians, the talking tends to turn into funny off-the-cuff jokes. The show is unchallenging but that is why it's so good. Void of any pretense, whatsoever, episodes of Getting Doug With High have garnered more than 1 million views. Building an audience and branding himself through twitter, Benson proved that beyond the pot, he's a businessman that earned his show sponsorships with several companies and products advertising during the short segment breaks. While all the sponsors are for pot smokers (vaporizers and delivery services), this show is still finding a way to keep itself rolling in the green (pun intended). What's best about this show is that, despite Benson saying that he doesn't know how the show can be funny for people that aren't smoking while watching, it is. While it may be a novelty to virtually get high with comedians and actors, I can honestly attest that it's still entertaining to watch stoned comedians and actors joke around with one another while sober. After all, you don't have to be drunk to laugh at Drunk History.

It's hard to say how long before all of the United States will have Marijuana legalized, if it will be a good thing in the long run, or if it's way overdue. Still, the change in public attitude is seen in everything around us, from the teenagers in the park that don't fear a ticket (I'm writing from Philadelphia) to the movies in theatres and the shows on television and its successor the internet. A change is happening and starts with what people perceive pot to be. Some shows like Getting Doug choose to attach itself to the classic view and depict pot as a recreation for people to relax with as they joke with friends. The show Weeds used pot as the glue used by a mother to keep her family together. Now, the show High Maintenance uses pot as a plot device that gets the camera behind closed doors to take a look at how strangers live and talk to one another. In these times, there's as many way to use weed to tell a story as there are uses for hemp.

Imitation, Stagnation & The Digital Frontier: How To Get Away With Comedy In The 21st Century

A studio executive walks into a writers' room. The executive changes the direction of the sitcom. No one laughs.

It's fairly common to see trends emerge. Sometimes trends come from geographical locations, as with Hair Metal in the sunset strip, Grunge in Seattle or Gangsta Rap that radiated from Compton before moving to New York. Those examples just came from the 90's. California was the birthplace for psychedelic music in the 60's. With the assistance of radio and television, Jefferson Airplane's white rabbit and the Door's fire would cross the country and influence people that would take music in new directions, but it also spawned a wave of imitations as well. When a style becomes popular, be it  in cinema, music, fashion, it becomes imitated. When a record company puts out a Britney Spears, another company come out with a Christina Aguilera. This is the way competition works in commercial societies. This is even true for comedy.

The Three Stooges are Forever Funny

Since before video, competing comics have been stealing, borrowing, buying and copying bits and styles. When Charlie Chaplin hit vaudeville with a physical comedy routine that drew an audience big enough to turn him into a movie star, other performers were paying attention. Soon after, a string of acts including The Three Stooges came out to entertain and earn money with physical comedy. While Chaplin was more political and had the charm and spirit of an underdog that made audiences cheer for him, the Stooges weren't stealing as much as borrowing when they played scheming and violent characters that were constantly hoisted with their own petard. They were also making movies with sound, something Chaplin movies were lacking when his career would overlap with the Stooges.

Today, hollywood is putting out more sequels than ever, making it hard to know if audiences can't get enough of something good, or if executives don't know how to tell when the milk has spoiled. Guidelines can offer a checklist that identifies tried and true methods. But, when followed too closely, that checklist can be a guide to a circular path. This is the case with late night television. It's understandable that television executives would want to repeat the success of a show they are fortunate to have greenlit, but when they get too caught up in not wanting failure, you can easily get a product that clearly tries to imitate. When Stephen Colbert ended The Colbert Report, Larry Wilmore took over his time slot to create The Nightly Show, which comes off as a depressing imitation of The Daily Show and doesn't even bother to create a unique title for the show as much as bank off The Daily Show's success. The Colbert Report wasn't The Daily Show. While The Daily Show was busy mocking the subjects of major news stories and the cable hosts that discuss them, The Colbert Report took the format of a cable news show to satire far right commentators, specifically Bill O'Reilly. This difference allowed both shows to make fun of the same topics without fear of coming up with the same jokes.

Since their topics and structures came from cable, it's fitting that both shows aired on cable channel Comedy Central. Also, these shows probably wouldn't be able to get away with some of the bits they do on network. Something else to consider is that Comedy Central (a member of the Viacom conglomerate) has no ties to the cable news networks and companies it mocks, which make it clear from hurting the reputation of the Viacom family and sponsors tied to Comedy Central. Being on cable, these shows have freedom and less restrictions from censors. These freedoms give The Nightly Show no excuse to not go for a more original and daring feel, to do something that separates itself from The Daily Show, beyond the comedy-infused roundtable discussion it steals from Bill Maher.

Granny Smith or Golden Delicious?

Debuting in the morning hours, censors and sponsor obligations didn't prevent David Letterman from pushing the boundaries of what was appropriate for tv, familiar to what came before, or even interesting to viewers. Johnny Carson may have been the first person to take advantage of late night, making The Tonight Show something special by bringing out out drunk guests and including sexuality to an audience that grew up with a black and white TV set, but Letterman really exploited what late night hours could do. Letterman's morning show wouldn't last long. This didn't mean his style needed changing to make people laugh. The format stayed the same when executives realized it worked better in late night, perfect for the slot after The Tonight Show, which it would compete with when letterman moved to CBS. Wondering "will it float?," and "is this anything?," a brand of irreverence dominated the comic style of Letterman for over thirty years as a TV host that didn't mind if Justin Beiber or Cher weren't behind the jokes they would be a part of. In a lot of ways, Late Show with David Letterman created the template for what late night TV would become once Carson retired. Looking at current late night shows, it's clear how Conan O'Brien, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon all grew from Letterman's style of comedy.

Comedy by Conan, a new style?

The current cast of late night hosts build on approaches Letterman stylized for late night audiences, but each has a different flavor that prevents them from being direct imitations. Everybody's best friend, Fallon is the late night Mr. Nice Guy and the cute one. O'Brien is the class clown and the smart one. Kimmel is the rebel, employing his family and kicking his first season off with an open bar, as if he was still hosting The Man Show. Seth Meyers is the oddball in the group who took a lot of his Weekend Update bits with him when he signed on to host Late Night.

Though these shows owe a lot to Letterman, it's hard to say they are imitating him as much as being strongly influenced by him, and continuing on the new late night formula. When Conan and Meyers took over Late Night, they were taking on a show Letterman created, and facing a time slot Letterman set a precedents for and a demographic he mastered appealing to. When Fallon took it over, he did the only thing he knows, the thing he still does as host for The Tonight Show, he acts kind of silly, but clean and gets starstruck when he interviews big names.

Pardon my French

One part of late night that Letterman didn't directly influence was The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Prior to Ferguson, the show would be hosted by Tom Snyder and Craig Kilborn. With Snyder, the show would focused on serious interviews. With Craig Kilborn, the original host of The Daily Show, humor  was brought from behind the host's desk and the show started to more closely resemble a late night talk show. With a minimal budget, Craig Ferguson debuted with a new style of comedy that would turn The Late Late Show into what could be thought of as Wayne's World if it was actually funny. It's no surprise that it's Letterman's own production company, Worldwide Pants, that put Ferguson on the air. Not like Letterman in style as much as attitude, his timing can ignore traditional meter. Unrehearsed, Ferguson's cold introductions were improvised. Remaining loose, Ferguson would act first and think second. Letting profanity fly, he had editors dub over bad language with a sound effect of him saying "ohh la la" in a French accent and put a French flag over his mouth, a clever way of saying "pardon my French."

Geoff Peterson, gay skeleton

Fallon and Leno would keep a clean show that could appeal to many people, but Ferguson didn't mind getting dirty. Discounting the role of censorship, Ferguson would also shun political correctness. Creating recurring gags from bits he improvised, Ferguson decide to make fun of his producer, regularly calling him a racist when he would tell Craig certain words would be dumped. When a group of girls would be sitting in the front of his audience, he would identify them as sitting in "lesbian row." He would even question men on their presence when they sat in lesbian rown. Not directly mocking lesbians or undermining racism, his style of comedy would constantly be putting topics into an unsafe territory that could easily offend anyone that didn't think he pulled off the joke. This isn't just the result of a comic mind that went on stage as Bing Hitler early in his career, it's something that happens in comedy clubs, the place where jokes are born breathing or stillborn.

Ferguson created recurring characters like Sid the cussing bunny, Secretariat (two interns in a horse costume), and his sidekick, Geoff Peterson, an animatronic skeleton with a voice that sounds like George Takei's. When Geoff Peterson (voiced by Josh Robert Thompson) made it to the show, Craig Ferguson's iteration of The Late Late Show developed into something late night television had never seen, a show  filled with innuendo, unplanned antics and (intentional) awkward pauses. Ferguson's style kept the show on for ten years, twice as long as runs of previous hosts. It's unfortunate that Ferguson left late night when CBS gave The Late Show to Stephen Colbert instead of him, something that costed CBS a lot of  money. It's unfortunate because Ferguson was a refreshing and unique talent in the late night world. It's also unfortunate because his replacement, James Corden, has turned The Late Late Show into a rip off of the british talk show, The Graham Norton Show.

What's the deal with facebook? Sure,
there's faces, but I don't see any books!

When shows that are as original and successful as Letterman's and Ferguson's get put on the air for long runs, it begs the question why studios and executives are currently making the same thing and repeating formulas in such great numbers, as with The Nightly Show and  Late Late Show with James Corden on TV and the string of sequels released in the theatres. Is it to build a franchise? Is it to continue with a property it's already acquired? Is this a fear based decision that prevents studios from taking a chance on something that may fail and lose money because it upsets an audience it tries to challenge? With a culture that is getting more and more sensitive, comedians have taken notice. Bill Maher has been commenting on this for decades, even naming one of his shows "Politically Incorrect." But, Maher is a comedian that has built a reputation and audience by pushing buttons and upsetting people. Jerry Seinfeld, on the other hand, is a comedian that has a reputation for being clean. That said, it's not to be taken lightly when Seinfeld was on Colin Cowherd's ESPN show and talked about how political correctness is changing people to the point where words like "racist," "sexist," and "prejudice " are used by people that "don’t know what the fuck they're talking about.” If this is a buzzword culture that America is turning into, it's important to realize that the people using these words, even if they are misappropriating them, believe in them. To this end, it's understandable why the media may want to adjust their programming to be sensitive to members of its demographic, stick with proven molds. With Fallon so well liked, it's no wonder CBS wants it's own nice guy in Jim Corden, or that they have him use the Graham Norton format of bringing all guests out at the same time, something new to American TV, but a hit when Norton uses it on BBC.

However, comedy is something that historically makes people uncomfortable. Comedy clubs are often underground, dark and filled with people that are drinking. Taking the gas out of unfortunate truths, jokes often come off as insensitive, but if they were sensitive they wouldn't be jokes, they would be basic observations. It's not easy to go in front of a group of people and make them laugh. It would be even harder to make them laugh by catering to each person's emotional response. This is why comedians don't think about what someone will tweet or write on a blog in response to a joke. It becomes a numbers game, appealing to the mass audience while ignoring who gets upset. When people tweet about offensive material, they can build steam, and that is why buzzwords and hashtags bring a backlash on comedians. When Bill Maher brought up the Seinfeld quote on his show Real Time, guest Jeff Ross addressed the idea of political correctness and comedy in a significantly more serious way than he speaks to anyone he roasts on Comedy Central specials:

Jeff Ross, seriously funny.

“Why do comedians have to water down? Comedy is medicine, it’s the best medicine. Laughter: you don't want it generic, you want it potent. We have a responsibility to shine a light on the darkest aspects of society… I once did a show for sensitive people; they wanted to become better at taking a joke. That’s what was so great about roasting criminals. I was curious if they would laugh at themselves. I think that’s the first step towards rehabilitation. And some of these PC police should try that, not taking themselves so seriously, not taking EVERYTHING so seriously.”

When you remove the mass commercial appeal and formulaic constructs used by television, you get the freedom to do and say what you want without the fear of serious audience members and their backlash forcing executives to pull the plug on a show. Without focus groups reshaping a program, creative talent gets the chance to go down unfamiliar and exciting roads. Going down these new paths are the routes people take to grow and bring about evolution. Where programming like The Howard Stern Show is fueled by upsetting people when they turn complaining callers into their own joke, other shock jocks that imitate Stern don't have an audience as big as his and aren't afforded as much leverage. Opie and Anthony never got rewarded for their stunts, they only got canceled and fined. Being dangerous, or moving against the grain in new and creative ways has become harder and harder, even with comedy. Still, there is possible to get away with new styles and approaches to comedy that have no regard for sponsors and demographics.

Doug Benson, likely high right now.

Comedians get to shift their direction with the internet, a place where being canceled isn't a concern. Youtube has given Doug Benson, Sarah Silverman, Reggie Watts, Natasha Leggero, Norm Macdonald and many others free range on VPN's Channel. There isn't a television network alive --cable, network or premium-- that would air Doug Benson's Getting Doug With High. With a singular premise of inviting comedians and celebrities to his set to smoke pot and see what happens during their conversation, Getting Doug With High can get tens of thousands of viewers in a week, hundreds of thousands in a month and over a million within a year. Eight months since it's live broadcast, the Jack Black episode reached over 1.5 million hits. With a barebones set, Benson's show has gotten sponsored by companies that make smoking accessories and helped brand him as a comedian who tours with his stand-up routine, does podcasts and a live event called Doug Loves Movies, where he talks over movies, ala MST3K, while an audience watches the movie with him. 

The show they never wanted to air.

With VPN, the Jash Network has released a series of videos that allows Sarah Silverman, Michael Cera, Tim and Eric, and Reggie Watts to let their comic sensibility run free. Keeping budgets small and working with their friends, the role of money isn't as important as it would be if these videos were being produced by a big name studio or tied to a company that would broadcast them to a large audience over the air.  With the internet, creativity is the only thing needed for these comedians to make their videos. In 2012, Silverman made a pilot for NBC called Susan 313. It was produced by Ron Howard and never aired on television, but it was placed on youtube with the permission of 20th Century Fox before it was made private. Focus groups may have prevented the show from airing, and Silverman doesn't hold any hard feelings. In the introduction she made for the episode she posted, she says, "they probably did the right thing,  but we liked the show," to make it clear that posting the video was just a way to share it with her fans. Putting Susan 313 on Youtube may have been the first step in seeing Youtube as a platform for Jash, a new way to release sketches directly to fans.


The internet is now a place where comedians with experience in movies and television go to work on passion projects they release as videos and podcasts, and where their fans get to enjoy them at their most raw. After Marc Maron's podcast, WTF, became a success, IFC gave a him a show that reinvigorated his career as a hipster icon. On the internet airwaves, Maron and his guests are permitted to say whatever they want on a show that will cross-promote his IFC show and stand-up. In this way, Maron is actively using the internet to build a brand just like Doug Benson. It's no surprise that this freestyle approach to comedy is turning the digital landscape into a poaching ground.

Two politicians walk into a
bar... wait... let's start over. 

Even though well-known comedians may be using the internet to it's fullest potential, the web is the best place to find up-and-coming talent while it's still untouched  by corporate hands. Jash and VPN is the place for the pet projects of Silverman and her friends, but Funny or Die is the user-based content driven website that asks anyone with an idea and a camera to make people laugh. Operating as a production company, Funny or Die has the potential to change the face of comedy, or at least give comedy new faces. Drunk History is probably the most successful thing to come from Funny or Die. Originally a series of shorts, Drunk History records drunk comedians as they narrate historical events for people to later act out. With enough popularity, the show has made two seasons for Comedy Central and  been adapted into a U.K. version. The positive reception of Drunk history, and Funny or Die as a whole, had HBO buy a stake in the site and commission 10 episodes for original programming. Funny or Die also gave Zach Galifianakis a place to release his hit Between Two Ferns. 

"It must kind of stink  that you can't run  like three times."

Galifianakis used his show to deconstruct a talk show format with an unscripted dialogue between celebrities. These conversations often came off as a direct attempt at making the celebrities angry, bringing up past relationships with Brad Pitt, asking Natalie Portman for her number or trying to place his hand on the crotch of Michael Cera. The success of Between Two Ferns is great for two main reasons. First, it directly profits from the hollywood milieu it exists to mock. Secondly, it wasn't supposed to be watched in the first place. Originally, the short was meant to be part of The Right now! Show. The pilot wouldn't get picked up, so the short was put on Funny or Die where it found a new life.  Regardless of antics, intentional rudeness and non sequiturs, the show became so popular that President Obama would appear for an episode that has over 11 Million views, Comedy Central would release a special, Between Two Ferns: A Fairytale of New York, and it would receive two Emmy nominations, and win one, at the 65th annual event. With its Emmy, Between Two Ferns has proved it's possible to make a show that will get ratings, famous guests and earn critical acclaim by using the internet to push boundaries production companies are too scared to push.

With each generation, styles and tastes shift. The idea of appropriate, marketable and trendy content changes with the times. While nudity used to be something only in magazines, it became common in movies and worked its way onto television with the right camera angle. But once an idea becomes popular, it's here to stay. The only difference is that with the internet, the judgement call is being taken out of the hands of people in suits that try to repeat proven formulas. The power is now in the hand of the internet audience to decide if something is funny or if it will die. In the digital age, audiences are telling television and movie studios what they want, because youtube is the new focus group and a hit count is the new Nielsen rating.

Black Mirror: The Present Tense of The Future's Digital Dystopia

FAIR WARNING: This article contains spoilers

Right now you are using what Charlie Brooker calls a "black mirror." You may be using more than one if you have a television on in the background. Black mirrors are the screens of smartphones, computer monitors and televisions that are making up the new ways people digest media and communicate with one another. In the 21st century, people are using social media and text messages to talk to each other instead of making phone calls. While print media is on the decline, information is being published on the internet. Even television has moved from traditional broadcast formats, with writers and actors developing programming for Netflix and Youtube, bypassing network TV. While technology changed the way we do things in very noticeable ways, it comes with side effects that may not be as obvious. It is the side effects of technology that Black Mirror chooses to talk about. It's common for science fiction to examine complex ideas and offer parables to give readers a glimpse of beautiful worlds. Black Mirror uses the science fiction genre to explore the impending horrors the digital age brings closer while making unsettling futures to create satirical dystopian realities we may live in one day.

Charlie Brooker explains it all.

In many ways, Black Mirror gives Brooker the opportunity to continue his lambasting of modern culture and its relationship with television. With a six part mini-series entitled "How TV Ruined Your Life," Brooker rants on how television shows have warped people's notions of beauty, given them expectations of life they will never see, and generally misinformed them throughout their lives. It's just a little funny that these mini documentaries were produced for television. The series is on Youtube (for now), and would be a good introduction to the way Brooker uses cynicism, sarcasm and vitriol to make his point. He makes the same points in Black Mirror that he makes in How TV Ruined Your Life, only he does so with hour long dramas in what may be the best anthology to come along since Twilight Zone. 

There are no elements of the future in the first episode of Black Mirror. Flying cars and laser guns are nowhere to be seen and android police play no role in the world of  "The National Anthem." In a lot of ways, it has a visual tone of an Aaron Sorkin drama, with his signature "walk and talk" style building a fast paced world where the characters are constantly moving and information is flying at the characters and audience at an unbelievable rate. Sound familiar? When you take a step back, it is dark view of our current world that we are looking at. "The National Anthem" opens with a wake up call, literally. The Prime Minister is woken by colleagues to find out the Princess has been kidnapped. Posted on Youtube, the ransom video shows the princess, tied up, reading a demand letter that says she will only be released if the Prime Minister has sex with a pig on live television, by 4pm. Even though the British Government takes down the video from Youtube and urges local media to not give the matter attention, it's new media that takes over and lets the video  and story go viral.

"The Princess & The Plea"

The episode soon moves to the setting of a television news room. When the producer mentions that adhering to the D Notice, which has kept the story from breaking on the air, a smart mouthed member of the show lets everyone know that "facebook's coverage is pretty comprehensive." This is where the heart of the episode comes out. Local people are shown glued to their televisions and smartphones for updates while discussing the kidnaping and terms among  themselves. It's the screens (black mirrors) that act as the driving force behind the reality these characters live in. With cellphones, televisions and tablets updating the politicians, journalists and viewers, the audience watches people addicted to black mirrors as if they were watching a news story develop in real time. "The National Anthem" has its events mirror a real news story, with constant coverage and speculation turning horrific events into reality TV which is brought to light when Mrs. Callow address how people react to a world where such misfortunes are used as building blocks for the 24 hour news cycle, saying: "I know People, we love humiliation."

The audience watches the people living in this version of England, as they go from screen to screen for information, getting feedback from people on Twitter and Facebook, watching a TV journalist use her phone to send racy photos to a member of the PM's staff to get undisclosed information that puts her life in danger as she searches for footage that will draw in more viewers. Every step of the way, black mirrors move the story to its frightening conclusion. By the end, the event is revealed to have been masterminded by a prize-winning artist and a broadcaster notes that an art critic referred to it as "'the first great artwork of the 21st. Century,' in an event in which we all participated."

In an interview with The Guardian, Brooker says the following: "If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects? With "The National Anthem," the side effects present a culture that is so obsessed with cable news and social media that it fails to see how they are being used by the artist that is also manipulating the prime minister. The world of "National Anthem" shows a culture where the participation of viewers that "love humiliation" create Mr. Callow's fate, a culture where the audience watching the Prime minister and the audience of "The National Anthem" are blurred and suggested to be the same.

Hot Shot is forced on Bing for the Fifteen Millionth time

Black Mirror goes on to put its audience in the show with episode two. "Fifteen Million Merits" shows a future world where people either ride a stationary bike to earn merits or clean up after the cyclists. In this future, the highest aspiration available to people is to earn enough merits (15 Million) to use for a ticket to participate on a reality TV show, Hot Shot, that will give them a new life or embarrass them in front of the world. Personal values and the importance of human connection is questioned where people spend merits on accessories for their avatars, to play video games, eat and skip commercials put on the screens occupying their surround walls.

In this dystopian future, Bing wakes up every day to mount a cycle. While the people around him play games, build their avatars, and watch pornography as they cycle, he is uninterested by the digital options, and pays to avoid ads that urge him to be a consumer. Bing lives a mostly solitary life until Abi joins the cycling team. Struck with her beauty and vocal talent, Bing uses the merits he inherited upon his brother's death to buy her a ticket to compete on Hot Shot. While people watch her sing from their room, their avatars take up space in the theatre, make facial expressions and mime their movements. Even though the audience enjoys her performance, the judges convince her to become an adult actress. This leaves Bing heartbroken, meritless and just as alone as he was before meeting her.

With a new mission, Bing puts in as many hours on the bike as he can. Opting to eat the leftovers of other cyclists and watching every commercial, a montage shows Bing earning enough merits to gain an audition on Hot Shot. With everyone's avatar joining the judges as they watch, Bing begins to dance before taking a shard of glass to his throat. In a long speech, Bing address the judges, the audience of Hot Shot and people watching Black Mirror, the people the avatars are a stand-in for:

"All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That's how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves, is buying shit. What, I have a dream? The peak of our dreams is a new app for our Dopple, it doesn't exist! It's not even there! We buy shit that's not even there. Show us something real and free and beautiful. You couldn't. Yeah? It'd break us. We're too numb for it. I might as well choke. It's only so much wonder we can bear. When you find any wonder whatsoever, you dole it out in meagre portions. Only then until it's augmented, packaged, and pumped through 10,000 preassigned filters till it's nothing more than a meaningless series of lights, while we ride day in day out, going where? Powering what?"

When Bing addresses the judges, with the excerpt above, it is no longer him. These words are from Charlie Brooker and sound like the commentary he uses on How TV Ruined Your Life. The judges and avatars that face Bing are the real world. This speech nearly breaks the fourth wall to comment on the consumer culture of Black Mirror's audience by placing them in the future where they are cogs in a machine, earning merits to be spent on non-existent things that are constantly at reach and being dangled in front of them with their own black mirrors.

With a twist ending, Bing gets commissioned by a judge to makes his own show, where he rages to an audience about the world they live in. Though Bing is seen finishing a show in his nice apartment, drinking orange juice from a pitcher instead of a packaged container, the episode ends with him just as alone as he was in the beginning. Regardless of class, "Fifteen Million Merits" shows a future so burdened by consumerism, filled with people that live through dopples and absent of real experiences, that even winning the game show that everyone tunes in to can't help change who someone truly is, or influence their quality of life.

With four more episodes and a Christmas special starring Jon Hamm, Brooker went on to give more focus to dystopian futures fueled by man's relationship with technology. These episodes have a recurring theme of how technology will make us more distant from one another, more focused on our technology and more interested in our new eyes than the world we're looking at. But it's the first two episodes that actually bring the viewers in by giving them analogues through the avatars of "Fifteen Million Merits," and viewers of "The National Anthem," that make those episodes so life like that it's hard not to see how the side effects of technology have already begun to take root.

For anyone interested in Black Mirror, you can buy the dvd box sets or find them on Youtube before they're taken down.

Advertising Comics: Grunge Rock, Flannel, Whatever

Part One: An Introduction To Dizzy Virtues

From a time where I can remember little more than flashes of fantastic and enticing images printed on a pulpy stock of paper that would smear when wet and absorb light, comics have been a part of my life. It wasn't long before superheroes got old to me. At that time, DC's Vertigo imprint brought a perspective and aesthetic that mirrored the tone of the new alternative grunge culture, even though most of the writers were from across the pond. Today, the paper has changed along with the talent. Karen Berger, the person responsible for cultivating the talent that would change the face of comics, is no longer the editor for Vertigo. Today, Vertigo still prints stories that don't belong in the same continuity as most of DC's other properties. The only difference today is that Dark Horse, Image, IDW, and many other publishers that knew Vertigo was on to something, have started publishing stories with a Vertigo feel. When Vertigo started out, it wasn't a completely new style. While it's hard to say where it officially began, Heavy Metal did something that caused Marvel to respond in turn with the Epic imprint which would publish two great stories that Vertigo would reprint: J. M. DeMatteis' Blood: A Tale and Moonshadow. A little spooky, a little sexy and a little "other,"one thing I loved so much about the Vertigo line from the 90's to the early 2000's, which I affectionately refer to as the Berger books, is that it seemed like anything could happen. There was something about the titles that was undefined and almost improvisational. But when you look back at the books that were coming out together, it's obvious they were all meticulously cultivated in the same lab. There was something about reading those titles that felt dangerous and I don't think it had anything to do with the presence of profanity or the occasional nude figures. It was the overall tone of the time, the cultural shift of the 90's where teen angst didn't only bond high school friends, it had a fierce presence in the beats of pop culture, fueling the movies, music, television and comics of the time.

The faces of Vertigo moving into your local comic store

At some point in the 90's, cynicism, greasy hair, Seattle, torn jeans, flannel, black and white photographs, Kurt Cobain and the term "alternative rock" coalesced in an orgiastic marketing strategy that birthed the term "heroin chic" live on MTV to be discussed on daytime television by men with slicked back hair and women in pant suits. This was the culture of the 90's. This was the world Vertigo spoke to and of.

Calvin Klein Models: "Nothing gets between me and my needle."

It's impossible to know how much of the general aesthetic of Generation X came from Seattle before being co-opted by marketers. Would acid-washed jeans and mismatched clothes have lasted and been as popular if the visually hypnotic media of television, film and magazines weren't as common? Would "extreme" have been such a ubiquitous adjective? It's not important to find an answer. What's important is to identify the markers that created the aesthetic, the attitude behind the generation. Or is the attitude something the generation was shown and then imitated? It's a slippery slope with a chicken/egg dilemma. Disregarding the answer, if there actually is one, the look and feel of the extreme/grunge culture was everywhere in the 90's. Two teenage characters from Rosanne, Darleen and David, not only dressed in the style of the 90's, but cover the walls in the 90's aesthetic found in posters of two comics that are benchmarks in 90's comics: Neil Gaiman's Sandman and James Robinson's The Golden Age.

With The Golden Age, James Robinson brought superheroes into environments where moral ambiguity take the place of justice and absolute authority to examine characters with human flaws dealing with drug abuse, guilt and power-hunger, similar to how Alan Moore used Charlton/DC characters in Watchman. The Golden Age is a book that looks at the aftermath of WWII on the superheroes of its era. While the story doesn't take place in the 90's, it's a perspective on classic heroes and the possible lives they lived after WWII that became popular in the 90's. After all, how better to appeal to a cynical teenager, frustrated with recycled superhero stories, than to show him an alternate history where heroes are just as crooked as the people on color television, with cops that are caught beating unarmed men on the news and voyeuristic real-life scandals on Hard Copy? The book also launched Robinson's version of

Starman which casted an actual member of Generation X in the lead role. After taking a look at the characters of the past through a present tense perspective, Robinson had Jack Knight inherit his father's Starman mantle to recreate the superhero in a modern and very 90's fashion. With a leather jacket, blue jeans, tattoo and bad attitude that stemmed from the resentment of having to take on the role of Starman, Jack has to pick up the pieces from the mess his father left behind. While not a Vertigo titles, the new Starman (along with titles like Hitman), gave readers a taste of the time by using characters that live in, look like and act like the 90's. Similar to the flagship Vertigo titles filled with offbeat characters, Starman and Hitman (a character in an interracial relationship that virtually lives in a bar and kills people for a living) don't play well with the rest of the toys in the chest.

Maybe Starman and Hitman don't play so well with the other characters in the DCU because they were new characters without 40 years of backstory to draw from. Maybe it's because they were Americans created by men from the United Kingdom. While both titles are very different than the other superhero books being published in the 90's, they couldn't really fit in with Vertigo either. Starman and Hitman may have been the bad boys of the DCU, but Tommy Monaghan and Jack Knight only pushed the boundaries.

Are you ready for Vertigo?

Vertigo, on the other hand, is the place boundaries would be beaten, broken and forgotten. While there's a lot to say about what Vertigo did to comics, the point here is not to break down Sandman, The Invisibles, Shade, The Changing Man, or any other title. Instead, the purpose here is to look at the general aesthetic, the visual and narrative tone, to show the ways they mirror and are an extension of the 90's culture they reflect and capture, to look at the way the books were publicized, with their covers and advertisements.

Making comics that weren't intended for children was not a product of the 90's. R. Crumb and the rest of the Haight/Ashbury scene made that clear in the 60's. But when Zap came out, it was mostly found in head shops, not comic shops, and certainly not published by DC. The challenge Vertigo faced was in talking to a mature audience while the kids are still awake, grabbing the attention of readers that may be ready for something new and keeping readers that may be outgrowing super heroes by offering them something they hadn't seen before they walked away from comics for good.

The cover for Preacher #1

For the most part, if a burning church was seen in a comic book, it would likely be there to give a superhero the opportunity to save someone, to right a wrong and (no pun intended) play god by saving the lives of those in danger by putting out the fire with super powers before throwing the perpetrator into a courthouse or prison cell. It was a new sensation to see the image of a burning church on the cover of a comic, where someone dressed like a priest is smiling in the background with hands clasped in villainous intent, all painted with realistic details stressing the believability. For this cover, the caricature-like images of superheroes are distant. When Glenn Fabry painted a cover for Preacher, it was clear the story behind the cover would be something you don't see in superhero books. A main theme Garth Ennis wrote about in Preacher was the role of certain elements in pop culture as artifacts of an American religion, but another thing Ennis did was uncover the horrors in American culture by digging under the surface. Those horrors are made perfectly clear in the first cover of Preacher, which is destructive, blasphemous, scary and begs the question of what kind of bizarre story and characters await. Not only would such a book and cover not exist on your average DC book, it wouldn't look like this without the 90's changing the cultural attitude towards censorship and what made for audience appropriate material. In the early 90's, shows like N.Y.P.D. Blues pushed the boundaries of what could air on television with its notorious reputation for broadcasting scenes with nudity and realistic violence. Ellen Degeneres made headlines and caused controversy when her character came out as gay. My So Called Life challenged how people viewed teenagers with a cast of high school misfits that questioned the motives and actions of their parents as easily as parents questioned their children. This was a family drama unimaginable to the audience of Father Knows Best. While the shape of television was changing into something more similar to a movie, comics that were more like books started to fill comic shops with the Vertigo imprint. More importantly, these covers lacked the approval of the Comics Code Authority.

Cover for Sandman #1

With the term "graphic novel," comics were given a makeover that tried to make them get the public to think of them more as literary books with pictures in them. Still, comics are the books that beg you to judge them by their cover. The cover of a comic is the first point in advertising. If the cover doesn't give a potential reader a good idea of the story that will be found under it, then it has failed. The cover of a 400 page novel does not work the same, it's supposed to provide an image that generates a tone that reflects the story of the book in some way, while the blurbs on the back do the job of giving a reader a description of the story within. With Vertigo, an interesting phenomenon in comics happened, the covers didn't always act like comic covers, at least not the way comic covers usually acted. With Sandman #1, Dave McKean hints at what will be within. In a multimedia style that blended digital photography with original paintings and illustrations to form beautiful, rich imagery, Mckean asked readers to dream about what could be in the pages of Sandman. This is a technique and style that Mckean would repeat every issue of Sandman, adding to the mystery, allure and general tone of the book.

Vertigo ad from 1993

It would be this tone that gave Vertigo comics a distinct style, feel and general attitude. And those are the elements that Vertigo would use to advertise itself. Like the Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground albums in an older sibling's record collection, Vertigo wanted to give readers stories they didn't know comics could tell. Vertigo's goal was to make its audience question how the horror genre worked while it casted a shadow of question on what comics were and could be. Looking at the advertisement (left) featured in DC comics the month before "Vertigo" would be printed on the cover of Sandman, Shade, The Changing Man, Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Animal Man, and Hellblazer, the flagship titles are given the element of danger with a black, white and red splash page that dares readers to take a look by asking the subconscious to fill in the hidden face with a mental image of itself.


Part Two: Rebelling Without A Cause

Using alcohol, cigarettes, mysterious masks, John Lennon's sunglasses and an ankh, Vertigo caught the eyes of people in comic shops. Partially because of the newness of their titles, but mostly because the intrigue that Vertigo wrapped their books in, titles like Hellblazer, Sandman, Mystery Theatre, and House of Secrets would attract a young adult audience with an artistic approach that was different from what they were used to.

By taking on characters and titles from DC's history, Vertigo reworked the mythology to appeal to a new group of people that most likely never heard of those titles, or couldn't afford to read them. The comics boom of the 90's created collectors out of fans when comics from the 1950's to 1970's started selling for five or more figures. Though the fade of looking at comics as investments would end as soon as the people buying three issues of the new number one figured out the golden and silver age books sold  for such high prices because of their scarcity, the surviving copies of original titles Vertigo was bringing back were expensive and trade paperback collections weren't as popular.

With the new House of Secrets and Prez offering different looks at old characters and titles, and Sandman Mystery Theatre taking a much darker look at the classic character fans were familiar with, Vertigo made it clear that it was publishing books that had never been seen before, comics that gave a reader with predictions "a good hard kick in the assumptions."

Originally the title of a horror anthology that debuted in the 1950's, House of Secrets titled a book for the first time in almost twenty years when Karen Bergen decided Vertigo comics would let Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen reinvent it for a new generation in 1996. House of Secrets advertised itself with the question, "Can you keep a secret?," warning readers that their "unspoken truths" would "become dread realities in a court of supernatural horror." The image that accompanies this text shows a teenage girl with a sharp knife in her hand and grungy clothes on her back. Standing at the top of a crooked staircase with a scowl on her face, her and her background are drawn in the jagged, sketchy style Teddy Kristiansen would use to keep readers uneasy with an advertisement that is as unsettling as it is compelling. The ad also hints at the story of a female protagonist. Since comics were mostly advertised to a male audience, it was a gamble to make your lead character a teenage girl. But this was Vertigo and the aesthetic of the ad would capture a tone that worked perfectly for a horror comic. With the new faces Vertigo was giving to comics, and the success of The Sandman, the number of female readers was increasing. With Sandman's little sister Death personified in a female form, The Sandman was not only attracting new readers, many female, because Tori Amos mentioned the book and its writer in her songs. New readers were coming because comics were showing different worlds than the familiar ones where women mostly wore bikini-like costumes. Instead, comics started showing people fictions based in the world they lived in, setting that reminded them of their own.

House of Secrets wasn't the only title that sought to update characters from the past. Twenty years after Prez Rikardson became the first teenage president, Ed Brubaker wrote Prez: Smells Like Teen President. Taking from the title of a Nirvana song that was one of the most well recognized on the time, Prez is shown on his cover standing on a car filled with bumperstickers. If generation X wasn't excited to read a story about politics, they might be interested in a character that likes the same bands, as made clear with stickers that say Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Nirvana, the bands that were royalty of the alternative airwaves. With its cover alone, the new Prez could have excited kids to go out and rock the vote, just as MTV told them to.

While changing up the past to suit the present is a creative approach that was successful for the books mentioned above, as well as Peter Milligan's  Shade, The Changing Man (which lasted for 70 issues), nothing would speak to a generation that tried so badly to separate itself from the previous generations like a brand new cast of characters that would speak their language while trying to create a new one.

With an advertisement for the first Invisible collection, a series of silhouettes build a layer of mystery around the characters with text that promises "the ultimate conspiracy," in a time where The X-Files used the same topic to much fanfare. With a neon hand grenade acting as a period on the corner of the ad, it's hard to know exactly what The Invisibles will be about. Even after reading and rereading it, it could be hard to figure out exactly what The Invisible is about. Still, it's the mod style of the characters, the idea of what exists in the shadows and the grenade painted in explosive colors that suggest this is a different kind of story about a new type of team.


Part Three: Tunnel Vision

The new wave of commercial comic books on shelves in the 1990's brought superheroes that were younger and acted like it (Starman, Hitman). Spider-Man may never hit his 30's, but he'll also never hit a rebellious chord, and Vertigo titles aimed to change the atmosphere of comics altogether. But the aesthetic and tone that vertigo used was so well defined that the Vertigo feel would become easily identifiable and imitated like any other successful brand. More than something that would be found and discussed between the walls of comic shops, titles like The Invisibles and Sandman would get written about and reviewed in popular youth culture magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone.

Even something as mainstream as the Washington Inquirer couldn't help but get on the bandwagon to discuss Vertigo when it said "Vertigo Comics is by far the HBO of the comic-book world." While fans and comics journals had been talking about the dream project of turning Sandman into an HBO series ever since HBO adapted Spawn for tv in 1997, making it even more gritty, violent and dark than the original comic was, it's no less true when the Washington Inquirer says it and Vertigo uses it in an ad printed in a 2007 issue of Hellblazer.

Like HBO, Vertigo created a style that was identifiable and imitated. It's hard to imagine cable tv putting out shows like Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy if not for The Sopranos. And, when Vertigo became popular, other publishers were paying attention. The variant cover for the first issue of Gen 13 (right), is as much an homage to  Dave Mckean, and the style he used on all of the covers of Sandman and The Dreaming as it is a way to get readers to give the book a second look and wonder what story rests behind the cover. Mixing photographs with painted and drawn images, cover artist Joe Dunn imitates Mckean's style with precision while also making it eerily reminiscent of Twin Peaks. This cover may have been a way to attract the same audience as Vertigo readers, but Gen 13 was trying to cast a wide net when advertising its superhero team of generation X characters. With 13 variant covers, the artwork parodied images of the 90's, including a famous cover of a recent issue of Spider-Man, a poster of the movie Pulp Fiction and the Janet Jackson cover of Rolling Stone. If nothing else, when Gen 13 ripped off of Vertigo, it was obvious that the imprint had made something recognizable, big and popular enough to steal. Reinventing comics for an American audience, it was clear Vertigo wasn't just publishing comics, it had officially turned into its own brand.

Vertigo's resident journalist Spider Jerusalem