A Robot For Our Wedding

Hello You.

Its a weird sensation when things that happened in the recent past actually happened 20 years ago. But it keeps happening. This last month say the 20th anniversary represses of the albums Mm..Food by MF Doom, and Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes by TV On The Radio. Growing up in a place as white as the Idaho Pan Handle Mm..Food wouldn’t cross my path until I got into a year after its release when MF Doom would do a verse on the Gorillaz track November Has Come for their second album Demon Days. TV On The Radio however were on some big tracks of 2004 compilation album I got from W H Smiths/Free With a Sunday supplement. Staring at the Sun was the big single from the album, and one that I regularly wake up with in my head at random intervals.

But nothing should have been 20 years ago. Its a long distance of time to have memorable, meaningful things have occurred before. I’m content with the idea that 20 years ago I was in school, or that 20 years ago I had a giant pencil case that looked like a coke can, but it feels odd that its been 20 years since I first saw Geof Darrow’s art in Hard Boiled or read my first volume of Sandman, or bought Silent Alarm from the HMV in Wakefield. I then hastily asked my mother if I could listen to the album in the car on the drive home, and then had that horribly adolescent panic of revealing your true music tastes to your parents.

Though to be fair Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm only came out 19 years ago, so next year is the anniversary of my becoming an insufferable hipster.

You may have noticed that there was no new newsletter last month. Essentially I was too busy doing things which I will then talk about in future news letters. In the months leading up to Stapled I was too busy preparing to make art to actually make art. The admin and the organisation meant that whenever I sat down at my studio I had to look at an email or a spreadsheet rather than spend my time painting or drawing. October was spent making stuff, but also teaching, and preparing, and also organising so something had to give, and that thing was the newsletter. So expect a big news section.

Topics wise we are looking at:

1) What am I doing right now?

2) Copying stuff for fun and profit.

3) Nick’s Music Corner.

So as always if any of those particular topics pickle your herring please skip a head, if not, lets hit this thing.

So first things first, last newsletter I announced that I would be opening a Zineophilia Zine Shop in Headingley. I am pleased to announce that we had our launch and have been open for almost a month. I went today to refresh the stock, arrange the shelves, and generally check in. Its such a joy to see the mount of empty spaces on the zine rack where people have been buying the cool stuff we have on offer. I had every intention of doing a social media post about one of my favourite things we have on offer, only to find out all ten copies had gone in a month. Exciting.

If you are in the Headingley area please do come on by and see what we have on offer. The shop is located at 5 Otley Road, Leeds. LS6 3AA within another shop called Beam Works.

I also started with my Masters group at Leeds Beckett University. I have been trying emphasise to them the importance of an art piece’s end presentation through it development. Of course being me I used Zines as the example of how this can manifest itself. A lot of my teaching comes from things that I wish people had told me throughout my time in arts education, and lessons that I have picked up along the way that had a strong impact on me. For example during my first year of my masters I was preparing for an exhibition as part of the Yorkshire Sculpture International (the only one that would take place as I believe the project was felled by COVID forever correction during writing this I did a cursory google and found that the next one is tentatively on the books for 2026 so I look forward to seeing how I can inveigle my way into that) for which I was going to present a series of short films I had made. My plan: Put a screen on the wall and have a bench in front of it.

This was not to cut the mustard, and the curators questioned me about whether this was the right way to go about things. So I talked it over with them and we came up with a new way or presentation, which was to have the films playing on a TV on the ground in the gallery with a bed made up in front of it. The films audio came out of a speaker in the beds pillow, so the only way to watch the film was to get into the bed and lay down and watch it.

In the end it was a great participatory work and lead to me experimenting more with performance and participation and how I can develop my work. Push its limits. But my only regret regarding the work is that if I had thought of this mode of presentation first, I could have made the film with the end goal in mind and joined it all together thematically. Its a tiny regret, more like a lesson to be learned, but its something that I like to evangelise to students whenever I can.

All of this feeds into my research and the PhD and this month was a bit of a breakthrough in terms of realising the shape of my PhD and how its going to be documented. Its a zine research project, so it makes an incredible amount of sense for me to document it in zine form. As such I present to you Zine Land; an ongoing series of zines about my PhD and what I am doing in it that serves as documentation, time line, and evidence of my ongoing works. The first edition covers Zineophilia, the Stapled event, and the Zineophilia Shop launch. I am not sure if I am going to distribute it or how, or when, or whatever. I do know that I am going to keep a copy on me at all times to hand to people to better explain what I do, but if you have an interest in this please email me at [email protected] and I can send you one out gratis.

I’ve been watching the Doom Patrol TV series again recently. I watched the first series just before lockdown and loved every second of it. It filled a hole that the FX original series Legion left in my life, which is interesting because the Doom Patrol and Legion have a shared relative in the form of the Xmen.

“What is the Doom Patrol?” I hear some of you ask. Well The Doom Patrol is a comic series from DC comics based around a team of super heroes who’s powers have lead to them living lives of alienation and suffering. Its an ensemble cast that has varied a lot over the years, but its probably most famous for its two revivals, once under the helm of Grant Morrison, Scotland’s premiere comics wizard, and the other under the gaze of Gerard Way the lead singer of My Chemical Romance. Its a book that has allowed creatives to get a bit strange over the years due to the fact that, for all intense and purposes, no one gives a shit about it. Its harder to get strange with Batman because people will care, a lot, violently care, passionately care. Relatively few people care about the Doom Patrol.

But the origins of Doom Patrol lie in a weird bit of behaviour the that DC and Marvel engage in all the time which is the blatant and shameless copying of one another. Green Arrow and Hawkeye. Batman and Moon Knight. Dr Fate and Dr Strange. Aquaman and Namor. Swamp Man and Man-Thing. In the early days one published made a thing and then the other copied it, so when Marvel announced that they were going to release a series called the X-men about a group of super heroes who have sworn to protect those that fear them, rumour has it DC rushed to launch their own series. But the best thing was that this time they wanted to get the series out of the gate before Marvel launched theirs, so without any knowledge of what an X-man might even be they created the Doom Patrol.

Of course I have heard this told to me the other way around, and that Marvel copied the Doom Patrol without any knowledge of what a Doom Patrol is, but I prefer the idea that someone would push out a comic first than someone would rush to copy someone after the fact, but either story is complete rumour and heresay so believe what you want. But the fact is that they’re teams of strange heroes lead by a man in a wheelchair who regularly fight an evil brotherhood and are often pelted by rocks and trash by the people they have sworn to protect.

The Doom Patrol TV series takes its lead from the Grant Morrison era where it leant away from the X-men tropes and came into its own as a series exploring the absurdity of superheroes and the surreal nature of DC’s own universe. The TV show is nicely weird, has a good plot line, rich characters, and is appropriately goofy. But it reminded me of the existence of a character from Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol run called Willoughby Kipling.

Kipling, played in the show by Mark Sheppard who is one of my favourite genre TV actors having been on Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and Supernatural, is clearly just a massive rip off of everyone’s favourite DC universe magician John Constantine. In fact I forgot that Willoughby Kipling was a real comic character and thought that they were an invention of the TV show to avoid putting Constantine in the TV show considering that DC TV is almost as convoluted and strange as the DC film universe. But no, he’s real, and appeared in a bunch of DC comics.

Now here is where it becomes strangely relevant that Willoughby Kipling is a Doom Patrol character because in the same way that the series is forever linked to the X-men as either progenitor or spawn, Willoughby Chase is actually a carbon copy of John Constantine invented to avoid DC’s own strict editorial controls. When writing Doom Patrol Grant Morrison wanted to use Constantine as a character, but they wouldn’t let him as they thought Constantine’s involvement in the series would drag him away from his serious and gritty origins. (Its worth pointing out that Constantine started out life as a Swamp Thing character and in an early issue got trapped in the internet whilst Swamp Thing used his vacated body to have sex with his wife). But because of this editorial decision there suddenly became a real Constantine and a fake Constantine running around the DC universe. DC copied itself.

But this isn’t the end of this weird story, because in 1993 when Phil Foglio was writing his comic series Stanley and his Monster he wanted to write John Constantine or Willoughby Kipling into his comic and he was denied. In response he invented a character called Ambrose Bierce who is a trench coat wearing smoking magician with blonde hair. he’s basically a direct copy of John Constantine. We are now at a stage in DC’s history where there are three versions of the same person running around due to internal editorial decisions. John Constantine could start his own team book with himself and himself, and its a crying shame that he doesn’t.

Why am I telling you this?

Well it goes back to something I touched upon back in May when I was talking about the meaning of characters and the archetypal forces at work in comics. A main goal for a lot of people writing comics seems to be to write Batman. Or Superman. Or the Xmen. Or {insert name of big book here}. The bitter truth is that very few of us will ever actually write that book. Now this isn’t an exercise in telling you why writing your own story is inherently better than wanting to write the big ticket comic book. In the same way that I long to have my own characters show up in a D&D adventure module, there is nothing wrong with longing to contribute towards the cannon that you love.

No, the message I want to impart is; If you want to write Batman why don’t you just do it now.

If there are three copies of John Constantine running around the DC universe and no one bats a eyelid, then why can’t you change it ever so slightly to avoid being litigated off the face of the earth by the Warner Brothers Legal Satellite and Orbital Laser Platform (aka WB-LSOLP) and then make it happen? I mean, Moon Knight? Come on. There’s no shame in just making a copy of a thing and telling your own story in that world because comics is made up of archetypes and icons and copies and parodies, and your creation has a right to exist within that sphere. Don’t believe me? Want an example? Look at Copra;

Copra is a comic book series put together by Michael Fiffe in 2012 and its basically the Suicide Squad. A team of heroes for hire are thrown onto the worlds most wanted list after a brush with death and are hunted as they try and clear their names. Its a wonderful comic, a love letter to action comics and filled with characters that are instantly recognisable but legally distinct from that person who you are kind of remined of. The main character is not Bloodshot. There is a Not Doctor Strange on the team, alongside a Not Ironman and a Not Thor. But the strength of the series is the writing, and rather than spending time introducing us to characters that even if presented differently are ones we are already familiar with, if launches us into a superb and surreal adventure with its own personality written into the fabric of the narrative.

I would love to see more Copras out there. I would love to see more people pouring themselves into the story line of their super heroes. I am a big advocate for picking one of the millions of heroes that already exist, changing the colour, giving them a new name, and then telling your story.

Welcome to music corner where I give you some of my musical recommendations though-out the year.

-Stealing Sheep are a three piece from Sheffield that I have followed for quite a few years and have loved their ever changing approach to music. This last month I found out that with the Radiophonic Workshop they put together a soundtrack for the french animated film La Planete Sauvage. The film is about a gigantic race of beings called the Draags who keep humans as pets called Oms, and see them as an inferior race of animals. Its a colourful and psychedelic movie and Stealing Sheep have put together a similar soundtrack that is a lot of fun to listen to even without the movie playing.

-I was introduced to The Liminanas by my manager at work and I have really enjoyed their 2010 debut album of the same name. Its a psychedelic tinged album of quality garage rock that wears its influences on its sleeve with pride. It feels cinematic and exciting, which is probably why their music has been used in a few TV series in recent years.

-I mentioned The Halluci Nation in my review of the Venice Biennale earlier this year. Some of their music was used in the American Pavilion as part of a very powerful video art piece that brought tears to my eyes. Well this last month I have been playing their 2013 album Nation II Nation quite a few times. The Canadian band is a two piece of Aboriginal DJs who make music to see themselves represented in dance culture. Its a great blend of electronic music and native American tradition and I’ve found it very energetic to run to.

That’s that then for another month. December is the month for reviews and top ten lists and best ofs. I might provide you with one of my own, I also might not. I haven’t decided. But I will provide you with something in December worth reading. Until then…

I hope this signal finds you Earthling.

As always, yours faithfully.

Nick Gonzo.

[email protected]