For fans of the Blank Check Podcast, with Griffin Newman, David Sims, and Ben Hosley. Is Ben "Professor Crispy"? Will Griffin and David ever get the premise of the show down to 30 seconds or under? Let's listen together and find out! #thetwofriends
New to the podcast, I started listening during the McTiernan series. Newer still to this sub, don't know if this kind of discussion fits here.
I really loved all the talk during the Godfathers episode about mediums and the types of stories those mediums are "allowed" to tell. I was trying to think of things I've come across that had similar goals.
I'm a big fan of Harvey Pekar's comics. American Splendor was a comic book Pekar started writing in the 80s. His stories are great, some of them are about geopolitical issues but most of them are kind of mundane, daily life stuff. I am sure there are others like Harvey but he was doing his own thing when superhero comics were the only type available to Western readers.
Kool Keith's Dr. Octagonecologyst is another great example. There's a lot of great rap music but this album was one of the first to show that you could rap about literally anything, up to and including first person accounts by a murderous alien doctor from the future. Kool Keith was already a legend from his time with Ultramagnetic, but Dr. Octagonecologyst gave weird rappers license to be different.
Any other favourites? Would love to hear about others.
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Recently(ish) the video game Disco Elysium really pushed at the edges of what video games can achieve as a medium. It was one of the best stories I’d experienced in years across any medium. Especially because the story was actually enhanced by being a video game compared to some other games that have good stories that just happen to be wrapped in a game.
That's something I left out of my original post. These rethinkers are adding depth to their mediums by going against the grain. Great suggestion.
Totally agree. Probably the most genuinely moving game I have ever played. And as you point out it works so well in large part because it is a game and uses the format to give you an agency which makes the story beats so much more meaningful.
As opposed to many other narrative-focused games, which often have a rigidity that leaves me feeling like I am an actor in a play who hasn't learned his lines.
Welcome to the sub! This sort of discussion is totally welcome here.
Because of Pekar and the people who came after him (Hernandez Bros, Terry Moore) I've never thought that comics were just superheroes for kids.
You named two of the best. Love Harvey Pekar but his comics were still primarily written for and on behalf of nerdy white guys. SIP and Love and Rockets were some of the folks who showed there was more than one perspective in comics.
If I get what you're saying, I could think of a few.
(God this first one will sound pretentious) But I love J.M.W. Turner. But his work, particularly later, was so smeary and seemingly indistinct (it's gorgeous) that the art community couldn't reckon with it as serious work. Of course you could mention any nonconventional artist in the same manner.
I think Sunbather by Deafheaven had a lot of people saying "Oh! Metal can be this?"
I think that one reason The Sixth Sense was such a phenomenon was that it behaved in a way people didn't associate with 'horror'.
Not sure if this is what you're getting at, but hey. And welcome!
Digging into these Turner paintings, and that's exactly what I had in mind. He was criticized for painting differently than he was supposed to. I don't know enough about art at that time to understand completely. Seeing how the establishment reacted to him seems to be a good way to gain a lot of insight.
Right. While there were people making all kinds of art, if you wanted to make a living of it in Europe, certainly England, there were fairly strict ideas of what the medium is for. Religious imagery. Natural imagery.
Even later, post Turner, when France bloomed the Impressionism movement: that word was initially an insult from a critic, as in "they can't draw acvirate representations so let's call this impressionism" (to paraphrase). And Turner was well before that.
...and if you did movies and are thinking this kind of stuff over - Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner is just gorgeous!
It's been several years since college but I remember "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" by Lawrence Sterne being along these lines. The central joke of it being that Tristram Shandy is trying to describe his life but he cannot talk about something straight through instead getting caught feeling he needs to digress into another point or narrative to explain the context of something in the original narrative, but that new narrative will equally diverge into something else.
Alan Moore feels like he has spent his career trying to explore what Comics can do that other mediums cannot and telling stories with that medium that go out of the conventional superhero genre.
"Citizen Kane" gets talked a lot about the technical innovations but I also think narratively it is interesting in the way it is built around trying to find the meaning of one word to a person as way to unlock their life. I have difficulty thinking of many films that take on that structure.
"Pale Fire" by Nabokov is a novel written as a poem and annotations.
Forgot to mention in my original post that the movie about American Splendor is great! Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis star. Tells the whole story.
(just noting: American Splendor started in the 1970s, with Pekar also doing some anthology stories before launching his own title, and was available to the same Western audiences as the entire underground comix scene, most of which was kept in print at the time. [Arcade died the same year as American Splendor started, so AS kinda falls between two stools of post-underground and the "ground-level" labelling of Elfquest, Cerebus and Star*Reach - it definitely fits better stylistically with the 1980s independent DM scene.] Mystery, horror, humor, adventure, war and teen comics were also very widely available in mainstream newsstand/newsagent distribution in 1976, with even Marvel running an entire line of B&W magazines in the US to bank off of Warren's success.) (Plus, readership of newspaper strips, in a range of genres, was vastly huger than standalone comics - and alt-weekly strips like Feiffer's Sick, Sick, Sick and Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies are notable 'real-life-stories' predecessors geographically close to Pekar.)