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Appearance Dates 2008 April 18-20, 2008: New York Comic-Con - New York City, NY June 7-8, 2008: MoCCA Art Festival - New York, NY October 4-5, 2008: SPX (Small Press Expo) - Bethesda, MD |
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Dateline: September 5, 2008, 12:11 EST AND MORE ON TINTIN...
If you were to pick apart and examine the pieces of Tintin, it’s a comic that probably shouldn’t work. For instance: mixing genres, no principle female characters, no love interest, a talking dog, a cardboard cut-out adventuring boy reporter (who does no reporting), ridiculous supporting characters, crude caricature depictions (i.e., the Africans in Tintin au Congo), unbelievable plots, the paternalistic attitude permeating the whole thing. But work it does. The summation, the complete stories, is actually quite charming.
TINTIN: THE COMPLETE COMPANION, MICHAEL FARR (2002) Michael Farr’s exhaustively researched Tintin: The Complete Companion confirms that Herge’s The Adventures of Tintin is an exhaustively researched comic strip. Massive amounts of detail, clear-lined, photo-referenced artwork. Herge’s lack of female characters is peculiar: only Bianca Castafiore and her maid are recurring, and both play minor roles. Meanwhile, Captain Haddock is an alcoholic, Professor Calculus is deaf, Thomson is Thompson’s doppelganger...and as for Tintin, boy wonder? Adolescent desire? Youthful indiscretions? Teenage prurience? Er, no. Dateline: September 3, 2008, 9:41 EST BANDOLERO! (1968) Between the years 1935 and 1970, Hollywood made the same Western at least 500 times. The apotheosis of this cinema-generica is Bandolero! Jimmy Stewart springs his brother (Dean Martin) from jail. There's a chase. There's arguing. Guns get fired. A woman enters the picture. A grizzled, pistol-packing Jimmy Stewart in a black cowboy hat on a horse? That stammering, East-coast drawl? Unconvincing. The Hays Code history of the West. The highlight of the flick is a budding Raquel Welch. When is the movie version of Blood Meridian due out? Dateline: September 2, 2008, 11:05 EST CRASH, J.G. BALLARD (1973)
J.G. Ballard’s Crash is sort of an amazing and atrociously weird book. Very little dialogue, no question marks, no exclamation points, a stripped-down, technical quality to the writing. The word “crash” is used around 200 times in the first 50 pages...to describe around 200 car crashes. Crash. Semen, vaginal fluid, orgasm. Crash. Machine, technology, blood, broken windshield. Crash. Violence, rescue. Crash. Sex, suicide, green light, go. Crash.
GASLIGHT (1944) Charles Boyer’s life had a Hollywood Babylon ending: he killed himself with sleeping pills in 1978 at the age of 78...and was buried next to his only son, who had also killed himself while playing Russian Roulette. Gaslight is basically Hitchock-lite, with Boyer playing a smarmy, fussy, possessive villain...which probably wasn’t much of a stretch. A romantic skunk. Cherchez la femme, Pepe le Pew. Dateline: August 26, 2008, 9:22 EST BLACK IS THE COLOR
Derek Raymond is a crime writer worth perusing. The four Factory novels are fantastic. Bleak and beautiful, dark as hell, drenched in Cockney slang. As opposed to the aristocracy worship of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Elizabeth George: dear old gals suppurating genre sewage.
OCEAN’S ELEVEN (1960)
A ho-hum heist flick made with a group of song-and-dance-men in between shows at the Sands. Somewhat dated, somewhat silly. Except for Dean Martin, who is still Mr. Entertainment. But c’mon, Peter Lawford...? He’s as cutting edge as a broken spatula. He’s as daring as a trip to Jiffy Lube. He’s as groovy as a pair of spats. He’s as funny as a bag of rock salt.
BRANDED TO KILL (1967)
Butterfly. Manhater. Flame. Number One Killer. Hardboiled rice. Branded to Kill. Surrealistic Japanese noir spoof. Hit man with a boiling rice fetish. Flat-out demented. Sheer senselessness with wicked visuals. Way, way out there...like intergalactic-mutant-life-form out there...
Dateline: August 21, 2008, 9:43 EST THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS (1946) Strange. Love. Barbara Stanwyck is pretty much the epitome of the tough talking, self-sufficient modern American gal. This tough mama character still graces the silver screen only now she is likely to be packing a M4 semi-automatic carbine. But Barbara didn’t need a machine gun, man...just give her a cigarette and a frying pan and she could kick your ass from here to Glendale.Dateline: August 19, 2008, 10:54 EST
BEAT THE DEVIL (1953)
Watched a bunch of old-timey movies lately, one of which was John Huston’s Beat the Devil. Truman Capote co-wrote the screenplay for it, a screwball comedy as noir thriller. What immediately jumped out was just how old the actors were. Old and cancerous. Both Peter Lorre and Humphrey Bogart look as if they’re about to croak. Hollywood doesn’t let you do that anymore: die on a movie screen. So...maybe all old movies are just spools of celluloid embalming fluid.
LOOK INTO MY EYES There’s a novel called Trilby written by George du Maurier (published in 1894) which would make an entertaining comic book. It’s not a great book, per say. It’s very staged, almost like a play, and reads as if it was written by an artist (which du Maurier was) with excessive detailed descriptions at the expense of plot, character development. And it’s superficial and sentimental and contrived and the main character (Trilby) is less than original. However...Svengali is ridiculously cheesy. Svengali, the sinister, mysterious, unwholesome, thought-controlling mind-freak. So why do Dracula and Sherlock Holmes still have juice today while Svengali is largely forgotten? All three were created around the same time. All three are suitably preposterous.Dateline: August 14, 2008, 9:21 EST FROM THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE, BY DAVID HAJDU (PAGE 69)
“To Biro, realism and violence were inextricable. In addition to demonstrating this through the relentless savagery in the stories he produced, he articulated the idea explicitly to his readers in an odd meta-vignette in the November 1943 issue of Crime Does Not Pay. Biro and Bob Wood appear as themselves...Wood asks, “Do you think this crime story is too bloody and gory, Charlie?” Biro responds, “It’s bloody all right, but it’s true! That’s the important thing. We want our readers to see all the horror of the crooked path to crime.”
HOW TO WRITE A GRAPHIC NOVEL #106
Don’t be get hung up on originality. The argument of innovative vs. derivative is essentially limiting and somewhat irrelevant. Art is about art. Writing is about writing. In the end, there is only one poem...written over thousands of years...by thousands of different poets...
THE SADDEST THING Want to know just how much film/tv actors dominate culture? The answer is another question: how many pre-motion picture actors can you name? Three, maybe: David Garrick, John Wilkes Booth, Eugene O’Neill’s dad. As opposed to today, Aug 2008, when one of the national conversations is which actor was the best “Joker”? Depressing.Dateline: August 10, 2008, 4:21 EST
PHILIP K. DICK ON WRITING (1974) “It is cruel and inhumane what they pay writers. It’s a disgrace”.
Dateline: August 6, 2008, 8:58 EST
A WHOLE ENTIRE SELF-CANNIBALIZING LIFE HISTORY DELIVERED IN SERIAL FORMAT FROM THIS MOMENT UNTIL THE DAY I DIE And the point to blogging is...? Here is a mathematically sound formula to answer this burning question: take the number of words written, subtract the number of hits, multiply by the number of individual entries, add the amount of money you’re getting paid to do it, let simmer on low-heat for thirty minutes. Complimentary digital candy baked in an electronic thinking parlor.Dateline: August 5, 2008, 12:21 EST ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE ON WRITING (1914) "Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance. Surely our profession would be a drab and sordid one if we did not sometimes set the scene so as to glorify our results." Dateline: August 1, 2008, 3:05 EST “YOU WANT EXCITEMENT, MAYBE? DIVERSION AND THRILLS. YOU’RE WAITING FOR SOMETHING...YOU SAID SO YOURSELF...”
The new graphic novel Obsession is listed in August 08 Diamond Previews (p.297), order code AUG08 4101. Ships in October. “Tell me...what are you waiting for?”
RICHARDSON, CORBEN, EARLY ‘70’S Picked up a slightly mangled copy of Fever Dreams (1972) for fifteen clams at the Strand last weekend. Richard Corben did the trippy cover art and drew a story called To Meet the Faces You Meet...a freaky fantasy thing that looks great on sallow, decomposing, dust-moted paper. The second story in the mag is The Unicorn Quest illustrated by a gent named John Adkins Richardson. John Adkins Richardson...? Superb stuff. The cover screams insect spaceships buzzing through a time-shredded reality. Forget attracting the widest possible audience; go with weirdest possible audience...
“HE WASN’T KILLED FOR NOTHING. I’LL BET THIS MUCH, WHATEVER IT WAS, WAS BIG.” Mickey Spillane’s 1947 pulp novel I, The Jury was written in nine days. It takes about two hours to read. The plot concerns a sexist, sadistic, homophobic, crusading, Red commie killing, uber-patriotic, racist private dick named Hammer. The writing is derivative and dated, bordering on parody (unintentionally one would assume). Spillane started out writing comics: if he were alive and working today...Dateline: July 30, 2008, 10:34 EST
RAYMOND CHANDLER ON WRITING (1958)
From Playback: "I picked a paperback off the table and made a pretence of reading it. It was about some private eye whose idea of a hot scene was a dead, naked woman hanging from the shower rail with the marks of torture on her...I threw the paperback into the wastebasket, not having a garbage can handy at the moment."
HOW TO WRITE A GRAPHIC NOVEL #105 When writing characters: don’t be afraid to get beneath the skin of people who you would normally despise. You don't have to be the same person all the time. Play the role. Imagine your characters. Make them speak. If you are writing an autobiographical comic, no problem: no acting required. If, on the other hand, you are writing a character who is a prehistoric, pillaging sentient plant... |