Comics and their pulpy, image focused mandate have been an influence on music for as long as the two have existed. Everything from Beatlemania to New York Hip-Hop has had comics touch on their output, and as this excellent feature from Comic Booked shows the influence often swings both ways.

Indeed Marvel even had a short-lived music focused subsidiary, releasing titles based on musicians as wide varied as Bob Marley, Alice Cooper (see above), The Rolling Stones and rapper KRS-One. Here we’ve selected three examples to touch on some of the influence the two have had on one another.

Kiss’ glam metal in the seventies was powered in part by their cartoonish antics and appearance. So it’s not entirely surprising to find out that their success has translated equally well beyond the musical realm and into comic books, where their comics were created by distributed by no less an authority than Marvel themselves.

The first Kiss related comic Marvel got behind was released in 1977, and even featured a rather unusual gimmick behind it, that of the band mixing their own blood with the red ink it was printed with. Since then they have been part of numerous recreations of their stage characters into print, with the same theatrical elements that dominated their stage presence (huge pyrotechnics and grandiose entrances among them) a recurring theme.

The success was so much that lead singer Gene Simmons eventually started up his own successful comic company the Simmons Comic Group. They were behind the title, which featured a cover illustration from comic book legend Todd McFarlane and fifteen short stories of gruesome outcomes, with Gene contributing the intro and outro to the project.

Superheroes and rappers share one trait – the need for dual identities. The Wu Tang clan are one of hip-hops strongest examples of performers with a litany of titles, with many of the other monikers taking inspiration from the world of comic books. These include Method Man’s affiliation with the moniker of the motorcycle riding Johnny Blaze aka Ghost Rider, and RZA’s blaxploitation themed Bobby Digital – a comic book development on his own name, Bobby Diggs.

The one most commonly associated with comics though is Ghostface Killah, who assumed the identity of Tony Starks aka Ironman. His 1996 debut album was named after the superhero and he modified the Wu Tang blueprint of segueing kung fu film soundclips to the music by instead using mocked up sound-bites based around the character, all of these in the 90s when Tony and Ironman were not a huge part of the cultural lexicon.

All that changed with the explosion of comic book titles a few years later, and in particular the Robert Downey Jr played version of Ironman. The mutual benefits saw Ghostface record a song for the soundtrack to the first film in 2008, as well as constant referencing to it in interviews and promotional duties (MTV recently asked for his thoughts on April’s Ironman 3).

Johnny Thunder wasn’t the most famous of the DC Comics starlets, but typically had a pretty outlandish skill-set. Due to being the seventh son of a seventh son, born at 7 a.m. on Saturday, July 7 in 1917, he was then given a thunderbolt in an infant ritual which led him to having special powers. Swept away to the United States where he was raised unaware of the gift, he inadvertently recalls it in later life for a serious of adventures, using the sheer power of the bolt for the greater good of society.

Which makes it at first, it would seem, an odd choice for The Kinks to pick upon for two records during their recording career. As the quintessential ‘English’ band of the swinging sixties, the usual source material mined by the group related to twee lyrical anecdotes of very uniquely British characteristics. Indeed the album that the group’s first reference to Johnny in ‘Johnny Thunder’ appeared on, The Village Green Preservation Society, was actually primarily themed around village and hamlet life. A direct reference to the idyllic surroundings of the Devon retreat the group had found themselves in, it’s hardly the most obvious bedfellow for the comic book capers.

Delving a little further into the subject realm does show that really it was a nickname for a similar character for which the Kinks were attacking, who finds himself socially marginalised on account of his preponderance to do everything by himself with gusto. Unlike Ghostface who would assume the identity of his comic book hero, this level of influence exists more on a metaphorical level and shows the reach of even the most obscure of comics and the characters.

The Kinks would later return to the character on ‘One of the Survivors’ on the Preservation Act 1 LP.

Well we now stock spare blades, so all is not lost!

Click HERE for details

We hope you had a great festive season and we wish you all the very best for 2013.

We are offering discouint of 30% on the following products

appControl

appWheel v2

appBlaster v2

Simply add them to your cart and add the discount code - JanuarySalesDiscount (as one word as shown here) and your discount will be added upon completion of the order.

This offer is open until February 21st at 23:59

The AppToyz Labz will be closed for our Festive break from Thursday 20th, so any orders for AppToyz products that are placed after 7.00am [GMT] will not be dispatched until the week beginning 2nd January 2013.

We all wish you a very happy Christmas and holiday season and best wishes for 2013

One of the most prescient developments of our world becoming more focused on technology is the way they’ve shaped our leisure time, and nowhere is this more relevant than with gaming. Games, whether via our computers, consoles, phones or any media device, have become much more than ways to pass the time, cultural events and signifiers of society that become obsessions for some. The influence of games on behaviour is constantly debated and there is also evidence of their use extending into the professional world, with the extensive database used to power players on Football Manager rumoured to be used by Premier League football clubs as a preliminary scouting exercise.

The recent announcement concerning the latest instalment in Rockstar’s GTA franchise goes to prove the huge lure games have in the twenty first century. The internet had been awash with rumours about GTA V for a prolonged period of time, with a short video of amazingly detailed CGI created screen shots of cars surfacing in May earlier this year among many fake attempts at hyping up the game from outside users. There was some truth finally forthcoming in an announcement in the autumn of the game’s likely release date of Spring 2013, and then the gaming community was sent into hyper-drive levels of excitement when two posters were released around the same time. That distills the eagerness that the game has created; even the briefest of glances into the world it sets out to inhabit can create a spellbinding level of anticipation.

The GTA series are all classic examples of the type of computer games which have become as huge and culturally resonant as the Movie industry, the computer age’s Hollywood blockbuster. Grand Theft Auto first premiered in the nineties as an evolution of the classic platform concept, but as the software developed it become a third person played masterpiece which veered between classic shoot-em-ups like Doom and Duke Nukem and fast paced car simulators such as Gran Turismo, creating extensive story-lines in the process which followed the plight of an anti-hero.

They would also go onto break new ground with the music as well. Although they were not the first to bring in radio stations as a means of imbuing personality, with Vice City, released in 2002, the ambition was stretched well beyond anything that had happened before with seven radio stations featuring individual DJs across differing genres, for which players could easily oscillate in real time when driving a vehicle. It shows that down to every last detail, the GTA series has always been about pushing the concept of what a computer game can represent. This time the radio concept will be combined with score, meaning music is once again used in more extended detail than Rockstar have managed before.

But GTA V is setting itself up to delve further into the recesses of how vast a computer game can be. The narrative this time isn’t singular; there are three protagonists at the heart of a story and when completing missions involving them all you can veer seamlessly between each one’s role. The depth of the terrain is huge as well; although based on the fictional city of Los Santos there is also a monolithic country expanse added entitled San Andreas. Their interpretation of Southern California, it includes mountains, desserts, countryside and villages, all with its own ecosystem. The space is equivalent to totalling up the entirety of the previous two GTA titles and Red Dead Redemption, another one of Rockstar’s vaunted games.

The result is that rather than being a blockbuster movie, what GTA V really represents is the game equivalent of something else. That being the sprawling and vividly wide-ranging TV programmes which have become another of our new cultural obsessions in the twenty first century, shows like the Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Wire. Certainly the parallels with the latter can’t be ignored, particularly on the sheer density of the characters involved within it as well as the constant crime focused sources that GTA mines for its plot.

It’s hard to think of another game in history having had quite as much hype and fervent interest, its release having been heavily reported in the UK’s and the US’ mainstream media, rather than just splashed across the gaming blogosphere. For many fans Spring 2013 is too lengthy a time period to wait, and already a glut of tribute sites have been set up poring over the rumours and snippets of information that have slipped into discussion already. It’s going to be very interesting to see if the final result really does deliver on all this anticipation.

Fans of the previous GTA games should explore the toys AppToyz have which relate certain characteristics of the game, notably the driving simulators AppDrive and AppWheel and the shoot-em-up AppBlaster.

Anyone seen anything else they are inspired by in terms of sound control?

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The Day The Earth Stood Still

So Apple have been busy over the last couple of months.  The launch of the iPhone 5, the Touch 5, a software upgrade to OS6 and now the new iPad mini has given us an opportunity to see the company in action after the Jobs era.  So what, if anything, has changed?

First the iPad Mini, again Apple has developed something that looks sleeker and sexier than the rest and they don’t seem to have compromised on functionality.  With the walled garden of available apps and greater portability the Mini is likely to be a massive hit in a niche that Apple now has to take seriously but what would Jobs have said.  He always maintained that a 7 inch screen was defunct and would never happen, although he was said to be coming round to the idea.  There is no doubt he would have been worried about it cannibalizing his beloved Touch sales.  The price point has meant that it is on a par with the Touch 5 but does not compete on price with the nexus or Amazon Fire.  Would Jobs have been prepared to risk his first baby the Touch for this launch?

Then there was the new OS debacle, specifically around maps.  While Jobs spent a lot of time and resource in taking out the competition as we saw with his crusade against Adobe.  There seems no doubt he would have supported Apples foray into Maps taking on Google.  However there is no way Apple Maps would have been released in such a state of unpreparedness.  Jobs attention to detail would certainly have made sure that the product was offering a superior look and feel and guaranteed like for like functionality.  He would have avoided the negative press on that one for sure.

Would he have agreed to the changing aspect ratio on the new Touch 5 and Phone 5?  My feeling is that he would have been convinced by the need to allow video viewing especially as this is a 4G product but he was always very careful to avoid fragmentation of the hardware for developers, who he understood to be the real power of the platform.  This would have been a tricky road that he would have had to negotiate.

Finally there are the leaks.  These days everyone knows what is coming up round the corner and the mystery of Apple’s new products is being eroded.  My feeling is that Jobs would have done everything in his power to maintain total secrecy.  The allure of not knowing was one of its greatest strengths and one of his core tenets.

Ultimately we will never know, but we can definitely see that Apple is morphing into a different beast.  With Apple reporting figures that disappointed analysts for the first time last quarter does this represent a turning point?  My feeling is that the Phone 5 and iPad Mini will provide a boost in the short term but the long-term outlook for Apple post jobs is more uncertain.  Certainly there is no doubt that there would have been some trademark lengthy shouting matches in the corridors of Apple had he been around.

***UPDATE***

As we saw heads began to roll at Apple given their “poor” performance last quarter……John Browett and Scott Forstall gone.  Looks like you’re only as good as your last billion dollar success.