I'd often thought the recorded lyrics sounded like Plastic Man. But I also thought that, as someone who'd read and enjoyed the Cole Plastic Man comics, maybe this is what I just wanted to hear.
I agree with the idea that the song takes from Jack Cole's personal and professional history. Though obviously Mark E Smith put this to his own use. He was using a desperate, cranky and fantasised comic writer character as a kind of mouthpiece to satirise interpretation of any popular culture including, by inference, music by The Fall.
What's interesting from a comics angle is that the comics that would have been around during the time Smith was growing up wouldn't have included Cole's Plastic Man. Mystery in Space was still going then but Cole was never a major contributor. So Mark E Smith would have come across Plastic Man through the agency of the fans and collectors, who as stereotypes are bugging and pestering the first person character of the song's lyric.
On why, if Smith is singing Plastic Man throughout, the song is titled Elastic Man, I suppose this is to give it some critical distance. And make it less likely for comic fans to track Smith down in the shoppes and ask him why he wrote. It would also have the side effect of keeping DC off his back if the single ever came to the attention of people in rights there (who were grotesquely intractable then and for years afterwards). That would have been about the time that The Fall were the 'gods of the East Village' as Brix Smith later put it.
I'd often thought the recorded lyrics sounded like Plastic Man. But I also thought that, as someone who'd read and enjoyed the Cole Plastic Man comics, maybe this is what I just wanted to hear.
I agree with the idea that the song takes from Jack Cole's personal and professional history. Though obviously Mark E Smith put this to his own use. He was using a desperate, cranky and fantasised comic writer character as a kind of mouthpiece to satirise interpretation of any popular culture including, by inference, music by The Fall.
What's interesting from a comics angle is that the comics that would have been around during the time Smith was growing up wouldn't have included Cole's Plastic Man. Mystery in Space was still going then but Cole was never a major contributor. So Mark E Smith would have come across Plastic Man through the agency of the fans and collectors, who as stereotypes are bugging and pestering the first person character of the song's lyric.
On why, if Smith is singing Plastic Man throughout, the song is titled Elastic Man, I suppose this is to give it some critical distance. And make it less likely for comic fans to track Smith down in the shoppes and ask him why he wrote. It would also have the side effect of keeping DC off his back if the single ever came to the attention of people in rights there (who were grotesquely intractable then and for years afterwards). That would have been about the time that The Fall were the 'gods of the East Village' as Brix Smith later put it.