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Fund It! – Now That’s A Concept (Part 3)

By | April 20th, 2011
Posted in Columns | % Comments


Alright you voracious viewers you, the third and final part of our latest Fund It triple-threat is here! I’m gonna keep up the trend of “extreme variety” that Walt and Matt put forth before me and tackle three wildly different releases from three distinct artists: Mastodon’s Crack the Skye, Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade and the brand spankin’ new release from Boston’s own Dropkick Murphys, Going Out in Style. Click on down for the haps!

Mastodon – Crack the Skye

Starting off with Crack the Skye, I’m going to just state now that his is the longest stretch of all of the stretches I take with assigning creative teams (at least in the case of the writer), though when we’re done breaking down the story here, I bet you’ll see why no other writer is really fit to bring this yarn to the page. Another fact that needs to be laid bare is the fact that, musically, this is my least favorite Mastodon record. By far. While it was critically lauded for the chances it took and the various progressions it made to the band’s sound, the Dream Theatre meets Black Sabbath crap? I’ll take the “chug chug chug” nature of their previous releases, thanks.

That said, I LOVE the story here. Which begins with a paraplegic boy who’s only means of exploring the world is astral projection. Pretty basic right? Yeah well, it is until the boy projects too close to the sun and loses his anchor to his body, gets sucked into a wormhole, ends up (via Russian Mysticism) inside the body of Rasputin until Rasputin is assassinated and then both of their souls must work together in order to return the boy’s astral projection to this body. Oh and also, they fight Satan somewhere in there too.

Now, given the outlandish yet still solid nature of this story, I don’t think that I’m overstepping boundaries when I say Alan Moore is probably the ONLY writer out there with the brain and experience to convey this story with even a modicum of respect, especially given his more…how should I put this…batshit insane tendencies as of late. Yeah yeah I know, he’s done (and disgusted) with comics, but this is as column centering on the hypotheticals right? Even when you take snake gods and giant blue penis out of the equation, you still have the likes of Watchmen and Swamp Thing and their insane attention to detail and adherence to the darkest intricacies of history and you have a slam dunk in terms of narrative.

On the art side of things, I’m tapping in Dustin Weaver on this one. Mostly since given the admittedly disjointed and somewhat hard to follow narrative of this one, the art has to ere closer to the crisp and clear side of things, and Weaver’s work on Jonathan Hickman’s SHIELD fit that description to a T. We know he can visualize the outlandish perfectly, but as SHIELD proves, he can also tackle historical sites, motifs and aesthetics like he lived there himself. Check and mate.

Hüsker Dü – Zen Arcade

The term “influential” is often thrown around fairly often when it comes to Hüsker Dü, but I’m not sure many would argue when I claim that Zen Arcade is their most ambitious release. Singer/Guitarist Bob Mould has long since claimed that in anticipation of this record, he took a good hard look at everything that was “punk rock” and found himself wanting. Like few before and countless after, he viewed the scene from which the band came as inherently limiting and longed for his band to do more with it. The result was Zen Arcade, a double LP that pushed the boundaries of the genre and created what many claimed would be “the closest thing punk rock would get to an opera” (mostly since it would be two decades before Toronto’s Fucked Up would start writing).

Continued below

The narrative is a relatively simple search for self circa the early 1980s as the protagonist of the record leaves his home only to get lost amidst the perils of drugs, the military industrial complex, organized religion, love and loss only to find that all of these experiences took place over the course of a particularly harrowing night of troubled sleep. Despite the deus ex machina taking away all consequences of our hero’s experience, the record manages to paint a vividly clear picture of life as American teenager in the 1980s and it does so through the thick, wall of sound style the Dü would become known for.

Given the intense teenage angst present in the story, and given his fantastic work adapting Neil Young’s Greendale into a magnificent graphic adaptation last year, I’m tapping Joshua Dysart to helm this one. He clearly knows how to balance intense life experience with vivid exploration and has shown mastery in portraying a wide variety of life experience. Plus, and this is particularly vital for a story like this, Dysart knows how to portray youth accurately. Not many artists can really grasp the particulars and nuance required to portray the somewhat erratic and naive stature of a youthful character, but Dysart seems to be master of that particular technique.

Backing him up on pencils is another creator that has a keep grasp of youthful character design and implimentation: Jamie McKelvie. With his uber-modern style combined with as keep understanding of young physical stature (as exemplified by his work on Phonogram and Suburban Glamour), I feel McKelvie can portray both the highs and lows, the lights and the darks and straightforward and complex inclinations of this story perfectly. Plus, the dude clearly knows his punk-esque visual aesthetics, which also doesn’t hurt this time around.

Dropkick Murphys – Going Out in Style

Boston’s own Dropkick Murphys have long since helped define the “celt-punk” sound thats developed a growing subculture within both the international punk scene as well as the Irish diaspora the world over. Their combination of traditional Irish instruments with a punk rock songwriting structure and mentality has provided them with worldwide notoriety and critical acclaim. Their latest effort, Going Out In Style may not deviate from their established musical formula, stylistically the band set out to tell a much more vivid story than they’d traditionally been known for.

To that end, the band enlisted the help of author Michael Patrick Macdonald to help them weave their own disparate family histories into the fictional character of Cornelius Larkin. With the record functioning as a eulogy for Larkin, each song hits at different parts of Larkin’s life and bounces around chronologically quite a bit. Shifting from Larkin’s time on the Korean war to his wake to his time as a labor unionist, the record manages to paint a relatively complete picture of the Irish American experience over the last few decades.

Given the heavily political nature of Larkin’s story and its tendencies to bounce between time periods, I’m pegging Ed Brubaker as the ideal fit for this one. His work on Captain America and, even more so, The Marvels Project, proves Brubaker’s ability to weave together stories that jump through time from one scene to the next and portray them all accurately and compellingly, particularly when it comes to war time scenes. However, Bru has also proven himself able to handle quieter character moments, which will also serve him well given the intensely personal nature of some of the tracks on the record.

On pencils for this one, Carmine Di Giandomenico fits in perfectly. On books like Magneto: Testament and Spider-Man Noir, he proves his ability to work within a mid-century American setting and his more recent work on Iron Man 2.0 shows he can transfer his style to a more modern setting as well. His unique proportions and character designs in addition to his particular use of perspective can give weight and meaning to the low key, family oriented scenes of this book as well as the more intense scenes of conflict.

That brings this triple-threat of a Fund It! to a close. Tune in next week as Fund It! major domo Walter brings you yet another wacky creative team that will more likely than not make you exclaim “huh…ya know, that just might work!”


//TAGS | Fund It

Joshua Mocle

Joshua Mocle is an educator, writer, audio spelunker and general enthusiast of things loud and fast. He is also a devout Canadian. He can often be found thinking about comics too much, pretending to know things about baseball and trying to convince the masses that pop-punk is still a legitimate genre. Stalk him out on twitter and thought grenade.

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