This adult animated film (from 1997, re-released by Deaf Crocodile) left me with a question: where has Bill Plympton been all my life?

Well, drawing, obviously (his illustrations were once in every men’s magazine). A better question: where have *I* been all of *his* life? This rocked from beginning to end, and was the most fun I’ve had with a movie in a long time.

I call it an *animated film* with some reservations—Plympton’s drawings are thrillingly dirty and itch like a hair stuck to the inside of your mouth, but they remain *drawings*. There’s little attention spared for the temporal language of animation (timing and anticipation and so on), and it’s largely filmed on threes and fours—characters don’t flow, they jerk and stutter. These cost-saving measures soon become part of the film’s scrappy, relentless charm. It’s a descendant of those extremely early 1910s cartoons (think *Mutt and Jeff* and *Krazy Kat*) that were basically flipbooks of moving images. Plympton’s art has a visibly constructed quality that I quite like. As noted in the accompanying audio commentary, Bill Plympton would often erase a drawing and then redraw on the same sheet, meaning you sometimes see ghosts and afterimages of erased work in the final shot.*

^[1]*I was reminded of Will Vinton claymation—the way he doesn’t seem to care that his clay models have fingerprints and bulges and so on. A lot of labor went into it, and that labor is allowed … Continue reading

But animation is great because of one thing, and it’s a thing the film grasps hard enough to draw blood: *you can create anything*. The film is tailor-made to exploit this idea: a newlywed man named Grant is zapped by a radio signal and gains the power to control reality, which has terrible consequences for those around him—particularly his new wife, Keri. Grant’s new “superpower” (I guess) is that all his intrusive thoughts manifest as literal reality. The human brain is an association machine, a demon monkey flinging shit at the wall, and we’ve all had our moments of “thank *fuck* nobody can see the thought I just had.”

Grant has no fucks to thank. Whenever he imagines something—no matter how obscene or bizarre—it just *exists* out in the open. His wife comments that he has “bedroom eyes”, and his face literally transforms into a bedroom (it makes sense in context…kinda). Her breasts remind him of balloons, so he literally can twist them into balloon animals. Throw in some cute songs c/o longtime collaborator Maureen McElheron, and a recurrent steel guitar jag, and that’s the movie. Grant’s innermost fantasies just burst out of him all the time like animals escaping a zoo, leading to all sorts of perversely amusing gags and adventures. There’s a stock B-movie plot about a totalitarian corporation seeking to control Grant’s powers (this is pretty ordinary stuff, and not the movie’s strongest point), but the movie really is just joke after joke after joke.

It gallops at breakneck pace, six laps ahead of the viewer. I kept having to pause because it was overstimulating the living crap out of me. The film is a triumph of quantity as well as quality: so relentless in its attack that it wears you down and then wins you over. Every scene is stuffed with throwaway gags, jags, riffs, and surrealist fancies, all working by the principle Tex Avery perfected in the fifties: just machinegun the audience to death with *every joke idea you’ve got*—even if only 50% of your material lands, you’ve turned the viewer into Swiss cheese. And Plympton can afford to be far more transgressive and foul than Termite Terrace was ever allowed to be. Things that are (mostly) implied in Avery’s work just get drawn outright here.

It’s not just a lunchroom food fight. The film *does* have stuff to say, if you’re in the mood to trowel through penises, feces, and viscera. Like Grant himself, it has hidden depths.

Grant is depicted as a boring square. (Almost literally, his silhouette is a rectangle with a head sticking out.) He is an accountant, vilified since the days of Monty Python and Arthur Pewtie as the most criminally boring profession to exist. He delays his uxorious duties because of work. Is the most boring person you know just a lunatic who’s good at hiding?

This seems like commentary on the animation trade itself, and the odd way it juxtaposes dreams with drudgery. Bill Plympton’s mind is buzzing with some of the wildest and weirdest thoughts ever thunk…but his body is sitting at a desk, pushing a pencil. He’d look like the world’s most boring man if you couldn’t see what he was drawing. The dichotomy of “boring life, wild art” is on full display here, both textually and subtextually. Grant prefers stability and order, but probably for the same reason a lunatic asylum does: because its fundamental nature is chaos. It’s disturbing to Grant (and even to us—*I Married A Strange Person!* could have easily been a horror film) that his life and marriage are being wrecked, not by the dreams of a mad god bent on tormenting him, but by himself. The call is coming from inside the house!

The film’s core is the relationship between Grant and Keri, which is both a self-aware sitcom cliche (complete with meddling in-laws) and unlike any marriage I have seen in any film. Throughout, Keri ponders what to make of her husband. While he’s in the hell of being unable to hide himself, Keri is in hell of not knowing who he is. She has married a ghost. A mirage. A shape. Who is this man—simultanouely deathly-dull and a wrecker of worlds?

*I Married A Strange Etc* can be clunky when it attempts political satire, but its commentary on married life feels dead on. We’re all strange people. How do we deal with it? By becoming hidden people. We pretend the suit’s our skin and the mask’s our face. But we can’t hide forever. At a certain point, we have to let the disguise drop, and reveal who we truly are. Or be revealed. That’s the thing: eventually your secrets always come tumbling out.

Put more grotesquely, if you’re a guy who’s into feet, your wife is gonna figure that out real soon. There’s an awkward conversation to have or not have, but either way, she will eventually know. You cannot spend ten-plus hours a day around a person without having some cracks appear in whatever social facade exists around you.

The movie’s gross-out gags provoke comparisons with another (more troubling) titan of 90s animation. I grew up on Ren and Stimpy. It briefly dominated my inner sky like Sirius. After the corporate toy-commercial deadness of 80s cartoons, it seemed real and electric and alive. Inside the show was the spirit of Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, and Frank Tashlin, still alive and (if anything) twisted to be *even more* freakish. I was in love. John Kricfalusi seemed like animation’s own Martin Luther King; his show a burning fire to consume the papist heresies of the 80s.

But when I watched Kricfalusi’s ill-fated 2004 reboot of the show (*Ren & Stimpy “Adult Party Cartoon”* or whatever), I was struck by how *miserable* it felt. Had Kricfalusi artistically fallen apart? Had this nihilism always been there, and was I just now watching with eyes open wide? I don’t know, but it was like I was seeing right through the show and into the bleak, cragged mind of its creator: a man who hates women, hates his parents, hates 95% of classic animation (and all of modern animation), hates his audiences, and fundamentally does not have much to say, except to stew and sulk on his resentments endlessly. His animation was still technically brilliant, but what was he *doing* with his talent? Did I really want to watch old wounds getting picked open forever in a technically magisterial fashion? A massive bomb, *Adult Party Cartoon* was cancelled after six episodes. Even if it hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have bothered watching the seventh. I was done. Before the “Cans Without Labels” Kickstarter debacle, before unfortunate discoveries re: his personal life, my verdict on John Kricfalusi’s deal was a big fat “thanks, I got it.”

By contrast, there’s a joyous, generous warmth to I Married A Strange Person that I found appealing and even emotionally moving. It welcomes the viewer in, instead of freezing them out. It doesn’t sneer; it smiles. It’s not cynical or mean. It’s anything but nihilistic. I guess there’s *some* piss and spite (we get the Tex Avery end of Warner Bros more than, say, Chuck Jones). The riffs about an unfunny and sexually inadequate comedian feel aimed at someone Plympton knows. The nefarious Smile Corporation can only be Disney. Walt would have loved to have an armored tank division, even if they did occasionally hump each other like heat-ridden dogs.

It might also be a story about masculinity. What is a man? What is the role of a man? An oft-mocked . These are your two choices, you’re a Man Who’s Bad to Women, or a Man Who’s Not Bad to Women. But “not a jerk to women” isn’t an identity any more than “not mushrooms” is a pizza topping. What actually are you?

I think the default male experience is one of *freakiness*. The sort of freakiness that leaves you isolated and lonely: you have things that are integral to your psyche yet cannot ever be seen by those around you.

It’s generally true that men are a sex of outliers and extremes. Scholastically, boys seem more variable than women, producing more high and low achievers, and this tendency toward extremity seems to carry itself into art as well. *I Married A Strange Person* was made by a man, not a woman. (There are stories we might tell to explain male misfits: from evolution’s perspective, it’s simply not as large a crisis for a man to die or fail to reproduce. Male gametes are small, numerous, and disposable.)

Yes, women can be strange and perverse. But I still remember the Reddit post titled “How can I get my boyfriend to stop digging his tunnel?” To be clear, this was not a metaphorical tunnel. A woman was idly wondering why her boyfriend was suddenly spending all his time digging an enormous hole. Even if all gendered identifiers had been stripped from the post, you still would confidently predict that the hole digger would be a man. “Digging a hole in your yard for no reason” is just a particular kind of madness that only men seem to have. And I wonder if her boyfriend, when he speaks to others, mentions that he’s digging a hole? He’d probably love to talk about it. But he’s also aware—afraid—that whoever he tells about it wouldn’t share his love.

The curse of being a woman is that you are constantly being perceived, constantly on display. The curse of being a man is that nobody wants to know who you actually are. The average woman, viewing her boyfriend’s internet search history, would react with disgust. *Ew. Ick.*

Being a man means hiding your true self from women, and wondering how much you can safely show her. It’s a troubling spot to be in. Maybe she fell in love with your mask, which is rotting to pieces on your face, an illusion more unsustainable by the day. Or maybe she *knows* you’re a freak. Maybe she knew all along, and is hoping you’ll whisk her off on all sorts of bizarre adventures. That’s what you hope for, anyway. My own mother and father had the same kind of relationship as Grant and Keri in the film, now that I think of it.

*I Married a Strange Person!* is an amazing achievement. A bath of idiocy and filth that leaves you feeling strangely wise and clean. I expect that no movie like it will be made again in my lifetime.

“My baby’s in there someplace,” – David Bowie, “TVC 15”

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I once ran a community site for the game Claw. Three months back, a journalist for a gaming website contacted me—they were looking for some quotes for an article they were putting together. I don’t believe they ever published the article. For anyone interested, my words are below.

Sorry about the wait. Coastal Australia got hit with a one-in-a-hundred-year storm, and my farm flooded. Pretty cool.

I could write a lot about Claw; certainly, more than anyone has the desire to read.

The short version: in 1997, my dad wrote a review column for an Australian tech magazine. He received samples such as cameras, DVD players, and promo copies of games. One of these games was a 2D platformer called Claw, which was about pirate cats. I liked pirates and cats, so Claw was strongly Relevant to My Interests(tm).

I don’t think I have ever “clicked” with something harder than I did with Claw at age seven. The game was spellbinding; for a long time, it was the only one I played, or wanted to play. It seemed to have real depth and beauty and style. Even today, I don’t mentally shelve it with Mario or Sonic, but with a hardcore “art” game like Eric Chahi’s Another World.

Sorry, but I’m simply not a person who can form objective opinions about Claw. Childhood nostalgia is a hell of a drug. If you held a gun to my head and told me to denounce Claw, you’d have to come up with a shovel and an alibi real fast.

Yes, viewed objectively, it’s flawed. The difficulty is tuned very high for a kids’ game. The gameplay loop is simple and arguably simplistic, built around fiendish jumping puzzles and not much else—the puzzles of level 14 require faster reflexes and timing than those of level 1, but they’re fundamentally the same puzzles. It can get monotonous. The cool-looking enemies are repetitive to fight. One move (jump, then slash downward) wrecks basically every baddie in the game, which is disappointing. (The peg-leg pirates of levels 9 and 10 are among the most memorable opponents you’ll face because they’re the one exception that the trick does not work on). There are bugs. Some levels cannot be perfected due to treasure placed outside Claw’s ability to reach.

None of these really register as problems for me, per se. I have a friend who trash-talks his home city with evident fondness. “You know you love something when you even love the bad parts of it.” That’s where I land with Claw.

Monolith swung way harder than they had to with a 2D platform title. It has traditionally animated cutscenes that possibly cost more to create than the game itself. The soundtrack whips. The art and design are lavish and thoughtful. The levels are always well-designed and frequently a masterclass in how to suck the player in. Level Four (The Dark Woods) perfectly captures how it feels to wander lost in a dense forest—that weirdly terrifying sense of there being both too much empty space around you, and not enough. Level 8 (The Shipyards) has the Captain exploring massive and utterly believable ships (which must be painstakingly assembled in the editor like jigsaw puzzles from seemingly hundreds of 64×64 tiles—it’s a pain in the ass. Building a real ship might be easier.) This is the part of Claw that has held up the best: the rivet-tight sense of immersion it builds around the player.

(I love old games, but find a lot of modernistic “retro” efforts kind of frustrating. Everything in them is a slavish recreation of some generic “classic gaming” touchstone. Pixel art. Chiptunes. Floating hearts as health items. Where’s the vision? Super Mario Bros and Sonic look the way they do because of technological limitations, not because they’d hit upon some objectively perfect Aesthetic of Gaming that must be copied and imitated until the end of time. A lot of “retro” games just feel like parasites upon the past, offering the player nothing except his or her own repackaged nostalgia. When I see people trying to Kickstart a “Doom-style FPS game” I always think “What else do you have to offer? I can fire up Dosbox and play the real Doom any time I want.” Claw strikes a good balance, I think.)

The game has a tangled heap of spaghetti instead of a plot, mainly due to contradictions between the animated cutscenes and the game itself. Captain Claw can apparently warp through time and space. In level 8, he captures a gem, and two levels later, receives that same gem as a gift from a crewmate. He kills off the main antagonist in level 2, and thus a NEW main antagonist is shoved into the story out of nowhere. Claw must assemble a lost map to find Tiger Island, yet somehow his arch-nemesis can find his way to Tiger Island without the map, and Claw’s crew are also there at the end, despite him previously ordering them to stay behind. And so on, ad infinitum. Most Marvel comics need twenty years and two retcon arcs to achieve Claw’s level of confusion. It’s sort of impressive.

The game clearly had a lot cut out of it. You can see fragments of a larger story sticking out like dinosaur bones. Who’s Katherine? What’s the relationship between Claw and Marrow? The game cried out for a sequel. Monolith apparently almost made one.

Observable evidence would suggest that Claw was not a commercial success. Growing up, nobody I knew had ever heard of it. Monolith never made another Claw, or even another game quite like it. Their subsequent titles were cheaply made arcade/action titles like Get Medieval and Gruntz (which reused Claw’s WAP engine, and even some of its art assets), or triple-A FPS titles like No One Lives Forever and FEAR.

I beat Claw in 1998, and then beat it a few more times. I wanted more. There wasn’t any more. I was not on the internet and had no way of meeting other Claw fans (if they even existed). Eventually, I moved on.

In 2005, I remembered the game and decided to play it again. My dad’s old CD-ROM didn’t work. I attempted to buy the game again and found that you couldn’t. Monolith had stopped selling it years ago (this was before Steam or digital distribution). I shrugged and acquired the game through other means.

I replayed through the whole game in a day, was hit by that same “Damn, I wish there was more.” Then I went online and found that people had made custom levels. I played a few hundred of them; then I started creating my own.

I felt like I was making them for ghosts. The English Claw community was basically dead in 2005. There was an official Claw website. Monolith paid the hosting bill on it but did nothing else. The official Claw forum required no account to join (you just typed your handle in the user box) and was obviously about 95% spam and trolls. The occasional newcomer would show up, ask for help finding the game, and get linked to goatse—it was that kind of place.

A few people had Geocities sites with Claw levels on them. One of them was DzjeeAr—a highly prolific and creative level designer whom I looked up to. I mailed him my levels, and he sent back honest but fairly blunt feedback: my levels were too difficult and not that fun. He was right. I started working on making them bigger and better. The Claw level editor had so many options. I kept trying random stuff, and interesting new tricks seemed to fall out of nowhere (like cannonballs that could fly diagonally). I needed somewhere to host them.

At the time, I had a subscription to a PC magazine. It had a brief (and error-filled) “create your own website” guide, showing you how to write basic HTML. I used it to create a Claw fansite, but with some help from my dad, I got a Claw fansite online. In early 2005, The Belated Claw Fansite went live.

I called it “Belated” because I felt like I was making something long after it had ceased to matter. Like erecting a monument to Rome in 477 AD. (Except Claw had never had an imperial phase, so maybe a monument to the Etruscans or whatever.) But in my eyes, Claw was a genuinely great game. It was too good to be forgotten. I didn’t care if I was the only fan the game still had: it still deserved fans.

I promoted my site on the Claw forum. Soon, I expanded and began hosting other people’s levels, along with downloads and guides and so on.

I was the greenest of webmasters and made every mistake imaginable. Once, I “installed” a stats tracker by putting the tracking pixel on a hidden page that nobody except me knew about—I couldn’t figure out why my hits wouldn’t rise above 1. For a while, I actually hosted the full game on my site. Lots of people appreciated the gesture—I found this out when my hosting company informed me that I had 1) blown my bandwidth quota by several times, and that 2) I would be paying them a hundred dollars for the pleasure. Oops!

Yet the Claw community seemed to surge back to life around the site. The game’s apparent deadness was an illusion; a ton of people were still hanging around: they just didn’t have anywhere to go.

There was a guy from Poland called Zuczek who had his own Polish-language Claw page. We discussed combining efforts. I’d run the English site; he’d do the Polish one. We relaunched in late 2005 as The Claw Recluse. The site still remains online, 20 years later, in 9 languages, still with my original design.

It served as a lightning rod to gather old Claw fans. I’d say it sparked a revival of the game, but I’m not sure the game had ever reached this level of popularity to begin with. You see this by downloading the full list of custom levels on The Claw Recluse and sorting by date. In the couple of years before 2005, only a few custom levels were made. Dozens upon dozens poured out afterward. It was incredible. The game was coming back to life.

Soon, Zuczek had Teophil working alongside him—he was a longtime Claw fan who’d been active in the community longer than anyone (except possibly a guy called Randy, who came and went). Eventually, Zuczek handed over the site to him. Gradually, I stepped away too.

I have not been involved in running The Claw Recluse since 2007. I moved on to other things. I still play Claw from time to time and was involved in speedrunning a number of years ago. It’s intermittent. Claw will always be something of a North Star for me. I don’t think I have to be crazily obsessed with the game anymore for that to be true.

Claw is actually more active and alive in 2025 than it was in, say, 1999. That defies every intuition I have about how gaming works. They’re supposed to be released, get played by however many people play them, and then die. But somehow, people are keeping this one damned game alive.

The lesson I learned is that a fan can easily care more than the actual creators of the thing they’re a fan of. The Beatles found this out in the 1960s (Lennon famously wrote “I Am the Walrus” to mock/troll superfans who attached profound meaning to lyrics he’d dashed off in a few minutes). Claw was abandoned by its developers and kept alive by its fan community. I am honored to be a part of that, if only for what seems like a brief moment.

Anyway, that’s it. Hopefully some of this was useful.

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You’d better like 1977’s rock opus Bat Out of Hell. You were conceived to it. I am not speaking hypothetically. You were actually conceived while it was playing. I know this as a fact. I was there. I was watching.

“Are we doing an ‘I fucked your mom thing’ here?” Sadly, no. I did not participate in your conception. I was wearing my Roscoe the Rat costume at the time, and Mr Jenkins (my shift manager) would yell at me if I even unbuttoned the bum flap without notarized consent, so I was forced to remain an observer. I remember finding it odd that two people were screwing in the drive-thru of Roscoe the Rat’s Squeak-tastic Burger Barn, but was glad to finally see the miracle of life occur. Anyway.

This album had a lot working against it. An album of eight minute Wagnerian piano ballads, starring a chubby farmboy from Texas, released in the face of two adversarial headwinds—disco in the US, punk in the UK—yeah, good luck with that. To a risk-averse music industry, this album must have seemed like a scientific experiment in how to sell zero copies. It eventually sold forty-four million. Which is nearly the same as zero, when you think about it (I didn’t).

But songwriter Jim Steinman believed in being out of step with the times, believed in being unfashionable on purpose. It usually doesn’t work, but sometimes it’s the only thing that can. It’s never easy, though. Meat Loaf and Steinman had to tour the record relentlessly, finally breaking the beast in Canada (where it’s currently 2x Platinum). Canadians are right to love Meat Loaf, just as they’re right to love Fleetwood Mac (Rumors is also 2x Platinum). Let’s do Canadians a favor and stop examining their cultural tastes while they’re ahead.

But success came at a price. Meat Loaf’s brutal road schedule did not allow off-days so his voice could recover, which meant it it didn’t. Meat Loaf tore his amazing voice to shreds performing these songs live, five days a week. His next album (1981’s Dead Ringer) finds him a haggard shell of his former self. It’s a dispiriting listen. He died so that Bat Out of Hell could live. There are several Michael Lee Aday albums. But in a sense, this is the one and only record ever made by Meat Loaf. Bat Out of Hell is glorious: a work I truly love. But it’s tragic, as well as magic.

(The above is Steinman’s own account of what went wrong with Meat Loaf’s voice. A perusal of Setlist.fm suggests a far more relaxed schedule than he lets on, with countless multi-day breaks between shows. But maybe there are dates missing, so take that for what it’s worth. Which is also how you should take Meat Loaf’s own claim that his voice loss was mainly “psychosomatic”.)

And the album’s very magic. Enchantment leaps off the speakers, out of the cover, and out of nearly every other element of its conception. Few albums are so uniformly great in every aspect. It has wonderful singing, great production and engineering, and beyond superlative songwriting.

Two of the three greatest compositions Jim Steinman ever wrote in his life are on here (the third being “Faster than the Speed of Night” by Bonnie Tyler).

The first highlight is “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, a great and hammy piece of Springsteen-style storytelling, packed with cool moments and inspired ideas. And it’s funny, too—overflowing with tonal influences from Steinman and Ellen Foley’s work with National Lampoon. My only complaint is that the “will you love me?” part goes for a long time, and finally exhausts the listener the way it exhausts the protagonist. (Apparently Steinman’s original version was twenty minutes long, and had him doing the Phil Rizzuto baseball bit himself.)

But the masterpiece—of the album, and of several of the creators’ careers—is closing opus “For Crying Out Loud”. A lesson in how to take an unsuspecting piano and pound it until the stars fall. The middle section breaks, strings crash, and then total cataclysm occurs. Atoms split, everything’s louder than everything else. It’s an astonishing album closer. An off-ramp that sends you flying into space.

Everything else here is great too. The opening track is a powerful scorching barn-burner, grasping and ambitious and realizing those ambitions. “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” finds Steinman in standard power balladeer mode—a cloak he obviously wears quite well. Even the shorter album tracks rule all over the place. “All Revved Up And No Place To Go” is more great Springsteen-type stuff. I love the double-time groove at the end. It sounds so fiery and kickass and cool.

Most of the album is very dramatic. Perhaps excessively so, to some tastes. I guess maybe it verges slightly on the wrong side of theater-kid precious, but I don’t really mind it. And there are plenty of moments where it’s absolutely not taking itself seriously, to offset the sturm-und-drang. Todd Rundgren offers quite a lot of ironic detachment—the opening riff in “Paradise” sounds like a mega-cliche’d blues riff that you’d play when you’re taking the piss. There’s an element of persiflage to what Bat Out of Hell is doing. Of trying to make the audience smile while not totally undermining the project. It does the hardest thing: satirizes itself while also taking itself seriously. No matter what level you approach this CD on, it meets you there.

None of the other Meat Loaf albums equal this.

His big comeback, Bat out of Hell 2 does offer strangely exact parallels in a lot of ways. (And not just because it had a song that, like “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”, your buddy from school would swear up and down was secretly about anal sex, harr harr.) Again, Meat Loaf released it in the worst of possible years—by 1993, grunge rock had just broken in the states, and R’n’B had a commercial stranglehold that I viscerally remember. And suddenly, you had this disc of massive operatic cheeseburgers that sold a million million copies. Another inspiring win for the little guy. Or the big guy, I guess.

But sometimes the parallels go awry. The singing is not as strong. And where Todd Rundgren’s production of Bat out of Hell is timeless, Bat Out of Hell 2‘s production now feels (while not bad) fairly typical of its era. It’s essentially 1993, The Album, with that “early-gen CD sound”—a bit harsh, a bit too informed by the ultra-processed sound of glam metal. There are some modernistic touches that don’t quite gel with the Broadway-meets-Peter Pan grandeur being attempted.

Bat Out of Hell 3 is not something I care to discuss at length. I mean, Wikipedia says that “[Desmond] Child [who produced] began recording sessions by playing Slipknot CDs to get the assembled musicians in the mood.” That’s a better summation of the album’s issues than I could ever write.

It contains a grab bag of mostly old (and mostly second-tier) Jim Steinman compositions (who was sadly in fading health at the time), fluffed out with whatever Songwriters’R’Us guys Meat Loaf could find (Rob Zombie’s John 5, Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx). It’s long, exhausting, tonally confused, and unnecessary. It does not earn its name. To its credit, few albums do. The first Bat out of Hell extends out of rock entirely, and is arguably bigger than music itself.

Like all of Jim Steinman’s work, Bat Out of Hell owes no allegiance to any form of media. It’s a rock album, but even that ultimately seems almost accidental. It could have just as easily been a play (it started out that way), or a film, or a book, or a tube of wart-removal cream. The fact that Bat out of Hell is the particular thing it is seems like a twist of fate. Steinman’s patented technique of making things bigger than big and more colorful than color works on any canvas. Maybe not the wart-removal cream canvas. He’s compared to Springsteen more than enough (in this review, too), but there’s a bit of Bowie in him. Bowie was essentially a light entertainer who used rock—like a latter day French chanson singer. I like that. Use art in whatever way you can. Don’t be its slave.

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