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Like many people of my age, I recently started listening to the Beatles again, prompted by the massive CD re-mastering/re-releasing campaign launched on their on behalf. It's impressive I can say this, considering that I was born 11 years after the band broke up, but there you go - as Scott Plagenhoef remarked at Pitchfork, some of these songs are so universal "they are practically implanted in your brain from birth." Too true; I wasn't even exposed to most of this stuff until my younger brother started playing the old ‘80s masters at age 12, yet I still got a contact high like none I've since felt.
Plagenhoef was specifically reviewing the 1967 release
Magical Mystery Tour, which I trust most of my Beatles-addled readers know was published as an LP in the U.S., adding a stack of popular ‘67 singles onto the U.K.'s EP edition, itself a tie-in item to a famous disaster of a television movie of the same year. The longer U.S. edition has since been embraced as a canonical album -- the only time that's happened with the band's frequently sliced ‘n diced North American platters -- so that's the edition released in this new series. Some have wondered aloud if soon we won't be concerning ourselves with this structural trivia, if this is perhaps the final economic hurrah of the compact disc era, and some day soon the empowered parties will release all this stuff to iTunes and we'll all just construct our own custom Future Masters Vols. 1-whatever.
And speaking of terrified teetering on the edge of the future: there's a comic too! I've literally yet to find a review of the new
Magical Mystery Tour that mentions this, but the package's New and Exciting Rare Photos bonanza booklet includes a reprint of the album's official free bonus program book, including a contemporaneous comic strip adaptation of the movie by illustrator Bob Gibson (not the folk singer, I don't think), who'd done some Beatles-related official drawings in the past. The original comic originally varied in size, since it was always an album pack-in; the U.K. edition was thus roughly the size of an EP, with the U.S. version blown up to LP size, enough so that a kid could probably lay on it while listening to
Hello Goodbye (which was actually in the film, playing partially over the closing credits, though it wasn't included on the U.K. EP, instead released as a single backed by
I Am the Walrus, which
was included on the EP… alright, enough of this. Soon I'll be sputtering on about the mono in
I Am the Walrus, or possibly the fever).
A little U.S. kid of ‘67 wouldn't have seen the movie, of course - it was never broadcast on domestic television that decade, nor was its 55-minute length enough for a proper theatrical run. Moreover, I doubt they'd have been entirely familiar with the style of the comic, which was composed in the manner of features from classic British children's comic papers like the Beano and the Dandy, with numbered segments matching illustrations (with some word balloons) and text narration. The style was still in use in ‘67, visible enough for Alan Moore to remember to parody it in
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, just to name a current example.
It's funny, though: as vividly-colored and frantically-drawn as Gibson's art could be, the comic as a whole acts as a solidification of the movie, which is somewhat legendary for making very little sense. Supposedly inspired by Paul McCartney's propensity for home movies, the film was mostly shot with no prepared script and numerous scenes improvised from a cast half-composed of old pros and odd ringers -- Beatles chum Victor Spinetti delivers an amazing nattering parody of military decorum -- and random plain folks taken along for the ride. A few odd skits were put together elsewhere, including de facto music videos for various tunes, most of them oddly ineffective.
The Fool on the Hill and
Blue Jay Way are typical singer-as-star personality pieces for McCartney (mugging and romping) and George Harrison (sitting), respectively, and even the iconic images of
I Am the Walrus only provide momentary distraction for how lackadaisically shot the whole thing is compared to the professional work in
A Hard Day's Night and
Help!
But then, the
Magical Mystery Tour movie holds its ragged anything-goes nature as part of its concept; its defining moment is where Jolly Jimmy Johnson the Courier urges passengers to look out the window, only for them to behold several minutes of the instrumental piece
Flying set to color-soaked landscape outtakes from the climax of
2001: A Space Odyssey; pity the film was originally broadcast in b&w, presumably leaving these sequences incomprehensible(-in-a-bad-way). There's also a good stolen moment with John Lennon playing with a little girl, and Harrison sitting off-screen next to them, still somehow unable to hide his boredom. It's multi-layered, and accidentally complex in a way the ‘intentional' movie only sort of approaches in Lennon's grotesque spaghetti-shoveling sexualized dining dream sequence sketch, which I expect may have influenced the famed restaurant bit in Monty Python's
The Meaning of Life; the two films even share matching old-timey dance sequence finales, though
Your Mother Should Know, with all due respect, is no
Christmas in Heaven.
Still, the film carries some measure of the Beatles' desire to expose their extensive fan base to strange, cutting things, a give-and-take between populism and experimentation that led Lennon to toss extra nonsense into
I Am the Walrus to mess with the pseuds before heading the creation of
Revolution 9 the following year. The film might barely hang together, but its total absence of polish leaves it perhaps closer to the nervy personalities of the Beatles as people, far away from the image-making of their prior films. When Ringo Starr starts screaming out of nowhere at the actress playing his aunt, you get the feeling
that's the kind of humor he sincerely prefers, to say nothing of the film's late detour to a strip club(!) for a performance of a non-Beatles tune,
Death Cab for Cutie by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (featuring Neil Innes, later of the Beatles ur-parody outfit the Rutles).
The cinema, made for television or not, is more prone to such strange contortions, being forced into a given sequence of images over a fixed period of time. It seems real, so it can abuse and critique reality more efficiently. The Magical Mystery Tour comic, meanwhile, presents the story of the movie as a remarkably coherent rising-and-falling-action
story, no doubt aided by its particular British format, which allows illustrators to run free without worry for keeping much visual sequence; after all, there's numbers and text to sort that out. Many readers, I suspect, see this as an imposing, obvious format, imperious in style and inferior compared to intuitive page layouts that don't specifically tell you what's happening in each picture, or where exactly to go next, as if you can't "read" comics.
Yet these heavy narrations remind me oddly of the reportage of early autobiographical comics, or journalistic comics, in that they make images and text firm in comic panels. The arrangement is tight, there on the page, both showing and telling so as to divine some sense of objectivity from the gaps of pure text. A kid could lean on Gibson's comic in a way he or she might not grasp the confused/psychedelic nature of the film, where the trip's luncheon occurs ¾ of the way through and a girlie club unexpectedly erupts into a mighty dance hall, white tuxedos and military pomp.
The comic puts all of this into a different, more natural-seeming order, complete with odd little character arcs (totally absent from the film) and even a deleted scene involving a jolly old man chasing beauties around the seaside. There's also omissions, in that the comic can't respond to the oddball improvisations of the film, nor can it capture the unmistakable anxiety that drifts through the proceedings, both romantic and extra-narrative; in comics, there are many gutters in which those things may hide.
Of course, comics may not be able to stay the same forever. We've got three mediums here: a movie, an album and a comic. The movie appeared nearly ready for transformation, even in ‘67; it's low-production, unvarnished, and fit for the small screen of television (so long as it's color!), and thus doesn't seem so bad viewed on a laptop, where more and more small films are headed - I mean authentically zero-money films, with no popular band behind them, bound for digital processing in this era of few theatrical distributors and wider creative technologies.
The album might be here at the twilight of physical musical media for consumers. The comic is printed smaller than ever in 2009, because it's just a little CD, and it won't be printed at all after that. It's a thought for comics, and their powers of composure; will this aspect survive digitally? When the fortunes of print maybe take this print art down with it? When comics have to live with everything else, out in the internet ether? Will it look at all the same, or will its unique and part-time powers vanish, transmitted into something else entirely, something to fit on a small screen, a computer or cell phone? Of all of these media, comics values space the most, and all of it cannot shrink forever.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
