Posted in: Comics | Tagged: dimmu borgir, Matthew Rosenberg, mewithoutyou

In Darkness A Light Shines On Matthew Rosenberg

Published Fri, 05 Apr 2019 18:30:34 -0500

Two more neat references from Matt Rosenberg's (The Punisher, Uncanny X-Men) Marvel bibliography.

In The Punisher #5 (2018), Frank Castle finds at least one Hydra thug working at a fast food restaurant called Dimmu Burger. That one's a pretty clear nod to Dimmu Borgir, the Scandinavian symphonic black metal band. For a couple years they were heretics within the black metal world for including melody and symphonic instruments. Given the generosity of time, most of their critics moved on too.

In Darkness A Light Shines On Matthew Rosenberg — From The Punisher #5, by Matt Rosenberg and Szymon Kudranski

The meat of the piece though are his titles from his Tales of Suspense run. Zach from the Xavier Files pointed this one out to me: Matt titled four of the five issues after mewithoutYou songs.
Tales of Suspense 101: Disaster Tourism from Catch Us For The Foxes
Tales of Suspense 102: Every Thought A Thought Of You from It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright
Tales of Suspense 103: Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt from [A–>B] Life (the title a Kurt Vonnegut nod)
Tales of Suspense 104: The Cure For Pain from [A–>B] Life

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MewithoutYou's an actual oddity of a punk band. They started out an angular post-Fugazi, please don't call it screamo band made up of nominal Christians. The singer might identify Christian, though he'd include an idiosyncratic leaning towards Sufi mysticism. (Tellingly, mewithoutYou included a packet of carrot seeds with an advance of their record Brother, Sister.) The band currently sounds somewhere between REM and post-Revolution Summer DC with an impossibly tight groove. Surprisingly, their 2018 record [untitled] is the most aggressive and chaotic they've sounded in years.

Matt plumbs mewithoutYou's early work for his comic about Bucky Barnes and Clint Barton processing their lover Natalia Romanova's death. (Nat debuted, incidentally, in that same series, Tales Of Suspense, issue #52. Nice touch.) I can almost hear Clint think Disaster Tourism's hypnotic chorus "call me outside, i'll come running back" in his narration. The final issue titled The Cure For Pain, I'll argue, manages a neat thematic resonance, where for Nat to feel a sense finality from the Red Room, she must go further and deeper than the events of Tales Of Suspense to root it out. The song The Cure For Pain's first lyric? "The cure for pain is in the pain."

Of the songs Matt pulls from, try Disaster Tourism. If you'll let me recommend you a song, try Cardiff Giant from Ten Stories. Or, perhaps, Fox's Dream Of The Log Flume, a song a couple degrees removed from comics. Fox's Dream features Haley Williams, who also featured on Chvrches' song Bury It. Jamie McKelvie (Phonogram, The Wicked + The Divine) drew the video.

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