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After previously dealing with JIM 639, Alternate Cover press on into JIM 640, where they unpick things like…
Because you can, if you want to, take “Master Wilson” entirely at face value. It probably helps if you understand the elements of Marxist philosophy that go into him, but aside from that, there’s no harm to the story if you understand him as an entirely new creation, a “contemporary druid” who represents the spirit of the Industrial Revolution and progressive, urban modernity.
But there also just happens to be the fact that he looks like, sounds like, and shares a name with, Anthony H. “Tony” Wilson.
Impresario, TV presenter, journalist, record label boss, club night promoter, band manager… Wilson did all of this, and more. He fell into music by presenting Granada’s showcase series “So It Goes” (yes, it’s a Vonnegut reference), gave the Sex Pistols their first TV appearance, and was hugely responsible for thrusting Joy Division (and, consequently, New Order) into the world. Inconsistency was his very essence: from a working-class background, he took a Cambridge education back to Manchester and stayed there while the rest of the media was looking squarely at London. He was egotistical and self-deprecating in equal measure. At the same time as running the Haçienda by night, he was presenting local news in the North West by day. And his personality and demeanour were far-removed from just about everybody else around him in the music industry – which is why most of them thought of him as, in his own words, “a prat”.
Yet his fervent love for his home town of Manchester was unparalleled (he was nicknamed “Mr Manchester by some, and the flag on Manchester Town Hall was lowered to half mast on the day of his death), and as the two major political beliefs he held were regionalism and socialism, this makes him the perfect figure on which to base a so-called “High Priest of Manchester” and druid of Marxism.
And much more.
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This is pleasing. The oft great Alternate Cover are annotating Manchester Gods. Glad to see someone do this, becuse all the gods know how much is crammed inside this particular arc. The first part is up now. Example quote…
Page 10, Panel 2: “He is a genius of little brain.” – Leah references A.A. Milne’s popular ursoid pictograph, Winnie-the-Pooh, famously “a bear of very little brain”. Pooh Bear was said to reside in Hundred Acre Wood, a fictional location based on Ashdown Forest in the southern English county of East Sussex. This continues the theme of forest folklore established for this arc. Also, he’s currently licensed to Disney, who own Marvel. Coincidence? Or the first signs of Disney’s creeping editorial intervention? You be the judge.Read the rest here.
