Before I bring the whole Ultimate Edit Trilogy to rest, I just needed to write up the page-by-page details that explain all the endless references and dropped gags. Enjoy.

WEEK ONE

Cover

– References are made to Josie and the Pussycats, Squadron Supreme/Squadron Sinister where the original Nighthawk is from and, naturally, Heroes for Hire.

Page 1

– The line about Spider-Man looking like a toddler is commentary on David Lafuente’s weird proportions in his Ultimate Spider-Man work.

Page 2

– Spiders-Man is a character from Earth X who was given Inhuman powers and it turned him into a scaly-looking Spider-Man with the ability to create illusions. With Mark Millar’s return to writing Ultimate comics, he introduced a new Spider-Man to Ultimate Avengers. He’s a clone of Peter Parker, kept in a cell with a Hannibal Lecter personality and some kind of mind power. While I’m sure he isn’t based on Spiders-Man specifically, I’ve always just referred to him as Ultimate Spiders-Man. It fits.

Page 3

– During the production of Ultimates 3, there was a nixed cover by Frank Cho that showed Wolverine having sex with Magda, mother of Scarlet Witch. The final version would have had a blanket added on to cover her up, but the released sketch showed a giant bare ass.

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catherinethegame.com
07.26.11

(Gavok note: Since I’m still working on the annotations for New Ultimate Edit, I thought I’d have Nick “ManiacClown” Zachariasen write down his own thoughts on the experience. The guy never really gets to speak his mind outside of a couple comments here and there, so I thought he should get in his final word.)

I’d like to say that’s it’s been a pleasure to collaborate with Gavok on this project of ours. First we started with Ultimates 3. Then, when we thought the morning sun of the volume’s end had vanquished the horrible night that was Loeb’s first stab into the heart of the Ultimate Universe, Ultimatum came along and we knew that we were needed once again. Before Beast/Nightcrawler/Daredevil/Cyclops/Xavier/Cannonball/MultipleMan/Hank Pym/Doctor Strange/Wasp/Wolverine/[O.K., that’s enough, I think they get it by now]’s body was cold, we learned of New Ultimates and what was sure to be yet more crap. Now, I have to admit that with New Ultimates, Loeb’s dreck wasn’t quite so bad and was in a couple places kind of neat, as with the parachuting machine gun scene. Of course, to counterbalance that, there were also bits like the fact that on top of not having read the Ultimate Universe before writing it, he’d also not read Norse myth. Valhalla and Hel are two different places, Jeph. Granted, I may be seeing New Ultimates a bit differently because of the fact that I had perhaps a greater-than-normal amount of creative input given the heavy use of the Asgardian cast, which brought to bear my skill in writing in godspeak. I guess that year of Master’s studies in English was good for something after all!

One thing that the Ultimate Edit saga has — along with my tendency to heckle bad movies — helped show me is that even badly-executed entertainment has its value in some form. For instance, take Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. No, not the album. That wasn’t bad. I’m talking about the movie. It was kind of a cinematic equivalent of Jeph Loeb’s work in the UU in that it was a horribly jumbled mess that really didn’t make a whole Hell of a lot of sense. However, the music in it was, for the most part, actually enjoyable on some level and I — perhaps somewhat blasphemously — actually prefer Billy Preston’s rendition of Get Back at the end of the movie to the original. Similarly, in addition to knowing how to write a shut-your-mind-off action sequence, Loeb actually had an awesome idea in using Multiple Man as a reusable suicide bomber, which by definition is typically impossible. Overall, though, Loeb did help jar the UU out of what Marvel had seemingly been beginning to fall into, where they’d typically introduce a 616 character with a slightly redesigned costume and a modernized background and BOOM! they had their newest Ultimatized character. No longer can they rely on just rehashing 616 now that numerous key characters are dead, even if they have a replacement Wolverine who can make his sharp bits shiny or not shiny as the situation warrants.

What this bring me to is that bad entertainment is like why I realized why pants are funny. See, Wakko and Dot Warner don’t have pants but Yakko does and this is funny. This made me realize that pants are funny. However, until several years later when I had a 103 degree; fever from a sinus infection, I realized that the image of a man whose pants are around his ankles — exposing his heart-strewn boxer shorts — is funny because it isn’t the normal state. If pants didn’t exist, it would be the normal state, and therefore not funny at all. However, because pants exist they create the possibility of a lack of pants, which is funny. Therefore, pants are funny because lack of pants is funny — inherent humor value by proxy, if you will. The point is that, much like Heaven and Hell, without the bad the good is meaningless because there’s nothing to compare it to. If you don’t have Ultimatum, you can’t appreciate Ultimate Thor as much. It’s kind of like that part in The Dark Knight Strikes Again when Luthor’s pounding Batman in the face repeatedly until Green Lantern pulls his planet-saving stunt. We just sat there and took it from Loeb because we know the payoffs are coming. We know Loeb’s not going to stick around forever. We just know we have to outlast him. It’s a sort of faith that has its reward in the here-and-now, even if you have to be patient for three years.

The other bright side of the last three years (which I still can’t believe has gone by this quickly) is that I’ve gotten to know Gavok. Before, I just knew him as the Ruin the Moment guy in Batman’s Shameful Secret on the Something Awful forums. However, after I said the magical words “I want in” I gained a friend and writing partner. I found someone to help me be creative in a way that I hadn’t experienced before. During this process Gavok’s essentially been the head writer of our team, ultimately deciding which jokes get included and which don’t while sometimes indulging my insistence on certain gags that I thought were too good to not do. One good example of this was continuing the Twinkies gag. While certainly not as prominent as Thor being Santa — which has unexpectedly had legs like mighty Sleipnir, the eight-hooved steed of Odin — that joke’s been a nice little undercurrent to the Editverse, popping up when both you and we least expect it. While it kind of sucked getting some of what I thought were good jokes left on the cutting room floor sometimes, most of the time I think what Gavok did in that respect was simply good editing, which had I been doing this alone may well have ended up leaving me as a sort of Jeph Loeb of funnybook mockery. We weren’t just one writer with seniority over another — we were and I dare say still are a team.

I think Gavok and I mesh very well together in our senses of humor. I think some of that is our mutual interests, which include comics (obviously) and professional wrestling. We did, though, also make a good team because of our differences. Sometimes Gavok would toss out a reference that I would have absolutely zero clue about or perhaps a choice in diction which was probably a regional difference. He lives in New Jersey and I live in South Dakota, so in one joke he suggested that Multiple Man “ask off for Saturday” when I’d never heard that particular arrangement before. Out here, we always say “ask for Saturday off.” That difference in perspectives is part of what made us write so well together in addition to simply coming up with things that would make people laugh.

Of all we accomplished in this collaboration, I’m personally proud of the fact that I either came up with some of the best joke ideas, or at least refined them like the sugar in a Twinkie from Gavok’s brainstorming or one-off gags. Santa Thor, of course, is the prime example of this, without which the entire Ultimate Edit trilogy would have been wildly different. It ended up being a unifying element, tying everything together and ultimately (no pun intended for once) came together in New Ultimates as Loeb had the volume centered on Thor and company. Little did we know when we whimsically tried to think of a reason for Valkyrie to be on the team that we’d sown the seeds for what New Ultimates has been. That’s some of the magic of working like this, where we’re not completely in control of what we’re doing. Even though somebody else is sort of controlling what we do, it just feels natural once we get going and — at least for me — there’s a certain magic to that.

Finally, I’d like to give my thanks. Thanks to all of you readers who’ve stuck with us for the last three years. Thanks to Jeph Loeb for giving us material to work with. Thanks especially to Frank Cho, who seems to have been — at least incidentally — one of our readers with the Waldo sight gag, which he seemed to have acknowledged by actually inserting Waldo into a published scene in the issue after we made the joke. Obviously, I should thank Marvel Comics for being good sports about this whole affair. I don’t think they can have not known about this because doubtlessly somebody there’s read our updates. I think the aforementioned Waldo incident shows that and while I seriously think that if legal push came to litigious shove we’d have plenty of support (as fair-use parody) under Campbell vs. Acuff-Rose and its progeny, that Marvel didn’t even try to stop 4thletter from letting us put these up this whole time. I’d like to thank David Brothers for facilitating our four-color frippery through his blog. Last — and of coursenot least — I want to thank my writing partner Gavok, without whose perhaps-passing musing on an edit of Ultimates 3 I’d not have had the opportunity to do all this. It’s been a great run and I’m immensely proud of having made so many people I can’t quantify laugh at a bunch of Twinkie jokes and Christmas puns. To quote the Animaniacs whenever they’d been written into a corner: Goodnight, folks.

I wrote about Warren Ellis and Kaare Andrews’s Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis for ComicsAlliance, and how much I liked Andrews’s art. I think this is probably the best looking X-book in a good while, even above Ron Garney’s work with Jason Aaron on Wolverine: Weapon X: The Adamantium Men. Just ugly and grimey and awesome. Also notable: someone gets stabbed through the chest with no sound effect covering the exit wound (which is something Marvel has done something like 99% of the time since Elektra died) and Wolverine holds his own guts in his hands.

So this, then, is a sidebar to the CA post. This right here? Best Wolverine sequence in years. For real. Neat use of his powers, good way to sell the threat of the Furies, and good way to show that Wolverine is down, down… but not out, no… not out.

(colors by Frank D’Armata)

Pick that series up if you find the trade or back issues or whatever. It’s got Furies in it, and as a lapsed Ellis fan… best thing he’s done in years. Probably since Ultimate Fantastic Four.

It started over three years ago. Venom attacked the Ultimates for a reason that’s still ill-explained and it led to a story about Ultron murdering the Scarlet Witch and Tarzan knockoffs being taken apart by Magneto. Then, many delays later, we got a story about Magneto killing billions, including a bunch of mainstream characters. As bad as Ultimates 3 was, Ultimatum brought crap to a whole new level. But with every Empire Strikes Back, there needs to be a Return of the Jedi, for better or worse. New Ultimates has come and gone and now it’s time to lay it all to rest.

Yesterday showed the fates of Loki, the return of Captain America’s shield and Arcana’s posterior. Let’s finish it.

And there it is. Thank you so much for those of you who read this regularly enough and even stuck around for the end. Thank you for every, “This makes more sense than the actual story,” comment. Thanks to my partner in crime ManiacClown, who will no doubt go through the worst episode of withdrawal since the baby nightmare scene from Trainspotting. Thanks to Frank Cho, whose art has made this a more pleasurable experience. Hell, thanks to Jeph Loeb for keeping me off the streets.

New Ultimate Edit Annotations

brothers and sisters
created: Couple gooduns this past week. Did some more writing about art, something I don’t do often enough.

–Cameron Stewart and Karl Kerschl formed like Voltron (they were both the head)

–Dwayne McDuffie memorial

–Kaare Andrews flips the script on Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis

–Part two of my Marvel Black History joints. These were fun.

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rebuild your lives
consumed: I’m growing increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of stuff I read online. I need to read less, and in doing so, read better works. Gotta stop clicking every link where somebody’s hopping mad or talking about some comic I never read.

-Right now, as far as I’m concerned, Black History Month is done. Four years and out, wham, bam, and Billie Jean is not my lover, no matter what she says. Thanks for reading, but I quit.

–Tim O’Neil wrote a stellar McDuffie tribute, and his piece on the time Punisher went black is pretty good.

-Sean Witzke goes in on Seth Fisher with Jared and takes George Lucas apart in one neat post. I don’t mean that in a stupid “Oh I hate those prequels so much!” crybaby way, either.

-Sean linked this a long while back, and I finally finished reading it. The forgotten story of Marcia Lucas, George’s ex-wife and collaborator. Great read.

-Courtesy of Ron Wimberly comes these:

Audience Calibration Procedure from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery on Vimeo.

-Michelle & Melinda talk about the visuals of One Piece and NANA.

–Frank Miller interviews Goseki Kojima and Kazuo Koike, of Lone Wolf & Cub fame.

–Lupe Fiasco is an idiot, and you shouldn’t buy his album.

–Four free issues of David Lapham’s Stray Bullets. You should definitely read these.

–Jack Kirby does Frank Miller

–Stop talking to me about Charlie Sheen

–Sloane drew a comic. I liked it–there’s a bit with a tongue and a pill that’s super Akira.

-Vote in the Gylphs Fan Award for Best Comic. The correct choice is Captain America/Black Panther: Flags of our Fathers.

-I tired to work my way through Radiohead’s discography… it didn’t take.

-Amazon has some pretty ill five dollar albums up: Brown Sugar, Baduizm, Vol.2 … Hard Knock Life, Things Fall Apart, What’s Going On, Licensed To Ill, The Score, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star

-I always want to change after I wrap up February. BHM is always stressful–both the schedule (I think only three posts didn’t publish at a minute past midnight) and the subject matter. Working through my own issues via comics is stressful enough, but having to pay attention to what other (frankly lesser) writers are saying is a pain in my neck. I just want a break, really, a chance to re-center.

-Usually that means deciding to take a week off from posting and then failing utterly, but this year… I think it means writing about music more. I just don’t have patience for a lot of the stuff that comes with talking or reading about comics online. Sometimes I read stuff and I just want to raze my RSS feeds to the ground. But music: music is new and interesting and I’m feeling my way around it. It’s like looking at someone with new eyes.

-C’est la guerre, right? Things change, people change, I change.

-Working with Graeme McMillan on that co-review of Blur’s 13 was a trip. I think it’s the first time we’ve collaborated on something. It’s crazy–six (or however many) years ago, I was just a fan who checked Fanboy Rampage regularly. Life is pretty okay sometimes. There’s more coming, too, with Graeme and others. I feel good about this.

-Video game update: The only thing I’m playing lately are the Netflix and Hulu apps on my PS3 and Killzone 3, whose online multiplayer is great fun. Me and a friend (Larry) get on just to fool around. We spent most of a game talking to each other about nothing while shooting dudes. At one point we were remarking how cool it is that when you’re squadded up, your teammates can’t hear you, when another player joined our server. This guy joined our conversation and we realized that, nope, turns out they can hear us fine, we were the only ones with mics, and that we’d subjected our team to about 15 minutes of chit-chat about kung fu movies and everything/nothing.

-Larry mutes people with a quickness. They get one chance and bam, gone. I’m lazier, and also, I didn’t bother to learn how to mute people in-game until recently, so I’d just talk through them. One guy kept complaining about how his missiles weren’t working, his gun was weaker than the enemy’s guns, blah blah blah my controller sucks, not me, I’m fine, they’re cheating. So I sorta started coaching him. “Shoot better.” “No, you can’t–that’s the wrong way, turn around.” “Shoot now! No, wait—awww, why’d you shoot?” “Wait, this isn’t Call of Duty? Are you SERIOUS? I thought I was playing on Shipment.” “Do you like turtles? Or pudding?” Eventually, the rest of the team joined in on heckling this chump.

-Larry got half the conversation and was therefore entertained. The chump… not so much. Can’t imagine why.

-Great game, though.

-I’ll be back to review the comics I bought in the morning. Feel free to review your books, too, or talk about them, whatever whatever.

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we’re all drug takers
David: Heroes For Hire 4, Joe the Barbarian #8, Thunderbolts 154
Esther: Superboy 4, Secret Six 30 Possibly: Batman Confidential 53, Weird Worlds 2
Gavin: Axe Cop Bad Guy Earth 1, Azrael 18, Green Lantern 63, Joe The Barbarian 8, Secret Six 31, Darkwing Duck Annual, Irredeemable 23, Avengers Academy 10, Daken Dark Wolverine 6, Deadpool 32.1, Heroes For Hire 4, Secret Warriors 25, Thunderbolts 154, Ultimate Comics Captain America 3

Here’s some panels I liked from Jack Kirby’s Captain America 200:

No deep thoughts, no examinations… I just liked the way they looked and wanted to share them.

Related: here are some people at HiLoBrow talking about several more Kirby panels. It’s a fun read.

The Damon Albarn Appreciation Society is an ongoing series of observations, conversations, and thoughts about music. Here’s the third, where Graeme McMillan (Techland, Spinoff Online) joins me to talk about Blur’s 13. These are raw track by track opinions, generally written over the course of the song we’re discussing. I’d have embedded music videos so you could listen while you read, but Parlophone doesn’t let you do that. Instead, open youtube in another tab and listen along.

1. “Tender”

David: My first thought was, “Wow, a seven minute introductory song?” For some reason that struck me as an awful idea, like maybe they should have eased into this one or used it as the last song simply due to the length. But no, actually, this is really good. The “oh my baby, oh my baby, oh why, oh my” bit is scary catchy, and the “Tender is the touch of someone that you love too much” is pretty great, emotionally. It’s interesting that the song is essentially two identical halves, and I’m not sure what that means just yet, but as far as a song about wanting to be in love goes, this is pretty great. It’s the kinda song you want to do in Rock Band (I really like going “Oh whyyy… oh myyyy…”)

Graeme: The first single from the album, and one of those songs that just hits you at the right time so that it sounds like a message from some higher power as much as it does just a song. The first time I heard this, I was maybe a week at most after being dumped by a girlfriend of a year or so, on-and-off, and it was as if Damon was singing to me. Because of that, maybe, this always sounds much bigger than it might do to other people, something I can’t just take as a song because it also feels like a hug, or a friend telling you that you’re going to be okay. Come on, come on, come on, get through it.

Random fun fact: This has the worst edit in any modern pop song I can think of. Listen closely at 4:00 and you’ll hear Damon go “Tuh” because they didn’t properly cut out what was, presumably, him doing the final verse before they added in the solo and chorus.

2. “Bugman”

David: Puts me in mind of “White Light” from Demon Days and “Punk” from Gorillaz, but less successful than either. I like when the “na na na na” comes in about 60 seconds in and then the song goes crazy twenty seconds after that, but overall, this is like 75% noise to me. Is this about drug dealers? “I know the nodding dogs,” with doing heroin being “on the nod,” the city being portrayed as dangerous… This song is like two minutes too long, though. There’s this huge outro that I’m not into at all. Neat in theory, ehhh in execution. It’s very Gorillaz in sound, though.

Graeme: This is… fun enough, I guess, but pretty much a muddy mess overall. I think this is a really muddy album in general, in terms of production – It lacks the sharpness and clarity of the Britpoppy stuff, adding more reverb and distortion but forgetting to make anything really stand out. You’re right in saying that it’s two minutes too long – This was the album where, in interviews, they said things like “We’ve learned to keep all the noodling in, instead of just cutting it out,” but for all of that “Yeah, we’re being true to the way we are in the studio” posturing, it misses the point that the songs were better when there was more of an editing process. Maybe that should add to the wallowing aspect of the whole thing, that Damon post-break-up is lazy and messy musically where the rest of us are emotionally?

3. “Coffee & TV”

David: Reminds me of my limited exposure to REM’s catalog for some reason–the soft vocals and twangy guitar put me in mind of “Orange Crush” and “Losing My Religion,” though not for any specific reason or hard connection. Just a weird “Oh, is this like that?” I like it, though. This song feels very conversational, rather than being a tour de force of singing prowess. I really like the way the vocals feel soft, and the drumbeat is good, too. This one is about… being rescued via love? I don’t know. I don’t know about the squeaky guitar solo, either.

Graeme: “Do you feel like a chainstore/Practically floored” is one of my favorite opening lyrics to anything ever, it has to be said. This has very little Damon on it – He didn’t write it (It’s Graham Coxon, who also sings lead – He did “You’re So Great” on “Blur,” as well), and only does chorus lead vocals/background vocals and the keyboard at the end – but it’s one of the most pure moments on the album, for me (This, “Tender,” “Mellow Song” and “No Distance Left To Run” feel like they’ve come from a different album, in terms of sound). Maybe because of the way that Graham sings – quietly, mumbly – it feels really intimate, so I can totally see where you’re getting the conversational thing.

4. “Swamp Song”

David: I like the “I want to be with you” part of the chorus, but overall? Not really digging it.

Graeme: It’s got a great opening riff, and there’s something I kind of like in a “singing along when I hear it, but not listening to it intentionally” way, but yeah; this isn’t really the greatest song. Like “Bugman,” “BLUREMI,” and “Caramel,” it feels more like a half-finished song that should be a B-Side or something, if that makes sense. In particular, this song really, REALLY doesn’t have an ending.

If you’re following lyrical themes through the album, though: “Gimme space brain” harkens back to “Space is the place” at the end of “Bugman,” weirdly enough. Wonder if that means anything?

5. “1992”

David: This is about being dumped and hoping that the dumper feels bad, right? It took a while, but I came around to liking this one. I like the way the song builds and peaks toward the middle with loud noises and uneven volume around the third minute before just completely devolving into something else–a thunderstorm?–and then cutting out a few seconds before the track ends.

Graeme: My Britpop memory is off, but I’d be very surprised if 1992 isn’t the year that Damon met Justine, the girlfriend that most of this album is about. This really reminds me of the shoegazery music that Blur did for the first album, and again, it doesn’t have an ending, it just gets louder and stops, which… doesn’t count.

6. “B.L.U.R.E.M.I.”

David: This sounds almost like it should be the theme song to a sitcom, but I like it a lot. Is this a punk influenced song or is there some history to this sound? I really dig the vocoded/sped up B-L-U-R-E-M-I laid over Albarn’s normal vocals. Wait–is this about history? “Group using a loop of another pop group, completing the cycle, until the teenage maniacs, they bring it all back?” Music moves in cycles, what’s old becomes new, and Blur is on a 70 year old record label… The piano outro is interesting, but I’m not sure what it represents.

Graeme: It’s “Bugman” part two, but with an annoying ducklike vocoder moment! THIS is the one that really sounds like “Punk” to me, if only the annoying “BLUREMI” duck voice wasn’t there. One of the things that this song really underscores for me is how much I like lyrics in this album when I dislike the songs – I really, really like the “group using the loop/of another pop group/completing the cycle” take on pop music that Albarn is showing off here (Also, maybe it’s him getting his head around non-Britpoppy music, in a way, preparing for Gorillaz?), but musically…? This just doesn’t work for me.

7. “Battle”

David: I like it. It sounds like outer space. I didn’t get the lyrics at first because of how he’s pronouncing battle–I hear “Batou,” like the guy from Ghost in the Shell. (I noticed that on “Song 2,” as well. I’ve never heard anyone say “jum-bo jet” like that before.) This one feels really noodley, like they were fooling around in the studio and improving or something. I like when the heavy guitar comes in at around 2:30 and then transforms into another sound in time for the next verse. I like this one a lot, and his singing feels… not quite melancholy, but maybe so. It’s a song for a rainy day, when things aren’t bad, but you just kinda want to relax and re-center. Maybe a little Pink Floyd-y.

Graeme: A song that really, really grew on me, back when I was first listening to the album – I didn’t like it at first, but the more I heard it, the more things jumped out at me… The way the drums just push the whole thing forward (Dave doesn’t get enough credit for his drums in Blur, I don’t think; something like “Song 2” or this is just awesome work), and you’re right, yeah, it sounds very spacey – There’s a great UNKLE remix of this that came out as a B-Side that turns it into a something much sleeker and dancefloory, but there’s really something about the… unpredictability of this version, and the way that it holds together nonetheless, that I have ended up loving a lot. It sounds fucking GREAT on headphones, as well, with all the panning between left and right.

8. “Mellow Song”

David: I like this one a whole lot. Maybe I just like the sad stuff more. It’s clearly about a breakup, and “giving away time to Casio” is brilliant. I’m not sure if it’s my favorite on the album, but I definitely like it a whole lot.

Graeme: God, I love this song so much. I love almost everything about it, especially the lazy, quiet way it starts – the ghostlike keyboards that come in on the second verse, the murmured vocals, the “Is this where I’m going to…? We’ll see… We’ll see. We’ll see” in the chorus. I’m with you on liking the sad songs more – I think almost all of my favorite Albarn songs are the sad ones, he does melancholy really well, I think.

9. “Trailerpark”

David: I don’t much like the “Freestyle! Forty five!” part, but the “I’m a Country boy, I got no Soul” verse (bridge?) is pretty great. This one kind of overstays its welcome, though. There’s this weird piano loop in the background that sounds like Final Fantasy VII music, too, or at least reminds me of it. This, in fact, but less… jubilant. But that rising and falling action–that’s it. That’s what I hear.

Graeme: I’ll give you the “Freestyle – 45!” thing, which just feels like a pose, this inauthentic thing in the middle of a great song that I otherwise love. In a weird way, this song feels like the heart of the album to me, the one place where the honesty and hurt of “Tender” and “No Distance” and “Mellow Song” meets the over-produced weirdness of everything else, and again, it’s all in the vocal and the lyrics – The underperformed way Albarn offers up “I’m a country boy, I got no soul, I don’t sleep at night, the world’s growing old” and the repeated “I lost my girl to the Rolling Stones.” I said in an earlier email my theory that losing his girl to the Rolling Stones is an allusion to Justine (allegedly, seeing as I don’t want to get sued) falling into the rock and roll lifestyle of heroin following the first Elastica album, right? I’ve always thought that since the first time I heard this song, and it makes it so much sadder, somehow, as if Albarn is actually just repeating his flaws and the cliche that he’s lost his girlfriend to without being able to do anything about it.

10. “Caramel”

David: I like this one a lot. Melancholy, quiet, great vocals, great lyrics. I like how it spins up into something almost jazzy and frenetic, too. I think he’s chanting “Love, love… love” about 5:30 in? I’m digging it. Another good Rock Band song. I like that the outro sounds like an old record, but I still don’t get it.

Graeme: The sound of a man trying to pull himself of… what? A bad relationship? MOURNING a bad relationship? “I’ll love you forever…” but who is he saying that to? Another song that’s less a song than an incantation, repetition and rhythmic without falling into the verse-chorus-verse structure, and underscoring the feeling that this album is full of expression, even if it’s this weird stream-of-consciousness expression that could’ve done with some editing.

11. “Trimm Trabb”

David: I’m not sure what “Trimm Trabb” is, but I like how this one sounds. The layered vocals on the chorus are pretty cool, too. Just slightly different enough from each other to sound like a handful of vocalists. There’s a lot of vocals that I can’t quite pick up–the counting in the background, the robot voice–but I still dig this one. Not top 5 on the album, I’d say, but very listenable, even when it breaks down into yelling.

Graeme: Trimm Trabbs are – were? – sneakers. So “I got Trimm Trabb, like the flash boys have” is meant literally as “I have the cool shoes.” (Weird coincidence: “Killing of A Flash Boy” is a popular song by Suede, Blur rivals and the band Justine belonged to when Damon met her). Again, this starts nice and lazily, and builds up – that feels like the structure of a lot of these songs, sonically, or is it just me? – and has a very passive Damon working through his demons: Not only does he say “That’s just the way it is,” but also “I’ll sleep alone” is repeated over and over again.

12. “No Distance Left to Run”

David: The opening guitar makes it feel like a song that wouldn’t be out of place in a Western, though the vocals obviously don’t match. This is a monster break up song, too. It’s fantastic. Probably tops on the album?

Graeme: I’m convinced this album plays in reverse. This is clearly “set” before “Tender” – This is the actual break-up of the relationship that Damon’s recovering from in that song, right? It is completely and utterly heartbreaking, so open and honest and fearless in its emotion – Again, when I first heard this album, I was in the middle of this horrible breakup (that ended up lasting months as we’d continue to hook up and self-destruct and bring out really bad things from each other without meaning to), and so, a lot of what Damon says here was exactly how I was feeling, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. There’s something so amazingly heartbreaking about the “I hope you’re with someone who makes you feel that this life is the life/Who settles down, stays around, spends more time with you” part, especially… The idea of just surrendering to the idea that you are at fault, that the pain is on your shoulders, that you weren’t good enough. It’s a beautiful, beautiful song, and never fails to make me want to cry.

13. “Optigan 1”

David: Weird thought–this feels like an intro, doesn’t it? Like the prelude to the album? I wonder if it and “Tender” were switched in the sequence? Maybe I’m reading too deep/being too picky. This one sounds old, like hand cranked record player old. I like it. Weird placement on the album, I feel, but it also feels very final at the same time.

Graeme: Yeah, it does feel like an intro – and if this album is played in reverse, it WOULD BE (Dun dun dun). But it also feels like a farewell, like something that would be playing in a theater as you’re leaving following a show. It doesn’t feel quite there, either; too quiet, too old, too… not present. The sound of the past, fading out.

It’s funny – Listening to this again to write this, I realized that there’s more to this album that I liked than I’d remembered. I’m still not sure that it comes together or works as an album – It really doesn’t feel like a BLUR album to me, if feels too overproduced, if that makes sense? – but as some kind of side Albarn project, it’s more interesting than I’d thought.

Yesterday gave us the brief reunion of Thor and his undead squeeze Valkyrie, whose wings will make putting on shirts a total chore. With everything taken care of, threat-wise, we still have the epilogue to work through. Shanna, Ka-Zar and Black Panther have moved on to greener pastures. They aren’t the only ones leaving.

ManiacClown insisted I namedrop “Twinkies” somewhere in there. The dude just can’t let it go, but whatever. I like the challenge. As for what Zarda’s talking about, the Supreme Power: Hyperion miniseries from a few years ago showed a dark future where Hyperion, Zarda and a lot of superheroes rule over the world with Nighthawk being the only remaining opposition. Like with the end of Howard Chaykin’s Squadron Supreme series, Loeb’s exit from Ultimate stuff calls for a moment of, “Crap, we have to force things back to the status quo so that future stuff can happen.”

Tomorrow is about putting an end to this for good and also tying up that one loose end that really should have had a bigger impact on the story.

Day Seven!