For any fans of old horror monsters and/or the stylings of Roy Thomas, here’s a three pager I originally wrote for the horror issue of Solar Wind, that finally found a home in Duke Etrange’s World Of Weird. Art by Brian Coyle.
Full images under the cut…
There is a sequence in Werner Herzog’s Encounters At The End Of The World, where we see the Camp McMurdo safety training procedure. There is a large proportion of it that involves people wearing buckets (which the recruits have painted happy smiling faces on) on their heads to simulate the complete lack of visibility caused by a whiteout, a storm where literally all you can see is snow. Its a well shot sequence, funny without ever losing the edge of danger.
There is a similar sequence in Whiteout, the South pole crime thriller whose trailers pretended it was potentially a horror film. In the Whiteout sequence the camp Doctor gets some newbies to take their jackets off outside, to explain to them how quickly the cold will effect them. There are no happy smiling faces on buckets, just a man vaguely injuring people to tell them how much they would be killed if they were to do something as stupid as what HE TOLD THEM TO DO. It is symptomatic of Whiteout’s stupidity more »
Pete Baran in FT • 1 Comment
Superhero Perfume Ad
Saw this in a comic last week. Had to be scanned it is so preposterous.
I cannot for the life of me imagine who this is aimed at. Except children. And children
a) don’t buy comics anymore
b) don’t buy eau de toilette
But putting aside the pointlessness of the product, lets consider what each of these fragrances should smell like if the attached hero is involved.
Eau De Spider-Man : Considering he wears an all-in-one body stocking made of what seems to be some form of rubber, and is very athletic it is no surprise Peter Parker developed a fragrance. Notoriously unlucky in love, Peter possibly realised this is because he smelled like a five day old jockstrap whenever he had been web slinging. One assumes this has a strongly antiseptic smell. more »
Pete Baran in FT • 3 Comments
In “Comics as Culture”, M. Thomas Inge posited that comics and jazz were the two art forms that “perhaps represent America’s major indigenous contribution to world culture.” A throwaway line; as you can tell by the title he didn’t write much more about Jazz, but one picked up by this article by Brad Mackey Batman As Jazz. In it the writer takes the metaphor that one stage further and considers the act of creating certain kinds of licensed comics as Jazz itself (namely the reinventing and riffing on a familiar motif to create something new). Its an argument that works best with Batman and less well with most other monolithic US comic characters, and allows the following excellent quote: Batman has been riffed on so many times that he’s become the “‘Round Midnight” of the superhero set.
This idea of the malleability of Batman is one that DC Comics had thrust upon them about the time of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and was a well they drained next to dry in the nineties with endless “Elseworld” tales of a slightly different Batmen. more »
Pete Baran in FT • 3 Comments
Comics Should Be Good links to my old Pitchfork essay on THRILL-POWER, a term I use a lot without ever having managed to give a good summary of what I mean by it. (“Earthlet, if you have to ask, you’ll never know”)
This awesome comment however perfectly indicates why there’s still some way to go before the Dictators of Zrag are fully purged from the US market: “Call me crazy but I’ll take a “story” over a “thrill” any day.”
In terms of current comics discourse, here’s where I think thrill-power fits in: more »
Tom in FT • 6 Comments
Obviously I have an attraction to crazy quixotic blogging projects*, but I have to take my hat off to Laura Hudson and Leigh Walton, who are planning to blog EVERY ISSUE OF CEREBUS. On the one hand, there are ‘only’ 300 of ‘em. On the other…. well, NO SPOILAZ, but there are sections of the story I’ll be interested to see how they handle. Currently, of course, they’re still on the early funny stuff (except before it was funny).
*By the way, I recently found a blog taking up where Mike Daddino’s US-equivalent-of-Popular project left off, but I’ve completely lost the URL. It was called “No Tape Errors” or something similar. If this is your thing (or if you know whose it is!) get in touch so I can link it!
Tom in FT / The Brown Wedge • 9 Comments
I’ve not even opened it yet (it’s a collection of 1950s DC SF comics) – I just wanted to show everyone the cover.
Almost all the talk these days in comics is of graphic novels, mostly meaning collections of the continuing traditional 24-page monthly comic. Writers create story ‘arcs’, i.e. they write for later collecting, most often in six-issue chunks. I have nothing against this, but I want to celebrate the monthly comic, too, and the writers who make really good ones, who, without sacrificing the longer story, write great single issues that make you desperate for the next one.
Mark Millar’s previous run on Wolverine, collected as ‘Enemy of the State’, was fantastic, but this current run may be even better, and the latest issue was one of the best I’ve read in years. The setup: it’s set in a future 50 years after just about every Marvel villain somehow got it together to team up and massacre all the superheroes and take over the world. Wolverine hasn’t fought anyone or popped his claws since then. more »
Frank Miller’s film of the Spirit has been beaten to death by the press, which befits a film where ultra-violent beatings are the order of the day. Watching it out of curiosity it is interesting to see how much of this beating is due to
a) Frank Miller
b) Superhero fatigue
c) Violence fatigue
d) Blue-screen movie boredom
There is no doubt that all of the above contribute to the Spirits’ awfulness, but at the same time the film has a gusto and energy missing from many movies, something which could be down to the writer directors singular vision of the titular character. Which unfortunately boils down to “What if Miller’s Batman moved into Sin City?”. So we get endless voice-overs of how “The city” is The Spirit’s wife and life – which is somewhat ironic as the choice of filming technique leaves us with little image of the city itself except as a black silhouette and a few bricks. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • 6 Comments
The story in today’s Independent on manga is pretty telling about what the author thinks of “comics for girls”. Quote: “The [typical] manga reader was a man, and he probably liked SF and he could be a student. But then they decided, let’s sell these as books. And so girls could walk into a book-shop and pick up their angst-ridden pretty-boy vampire comics and not feel intimidated by the smell or the staff”. Followed by in brackets, the shocking fact that 7%-85% percent of readers of ‘yaoi’ or Boys Love comix are in fact GURLIES. Anyway yesh but now onto the “real” manga. Patronising much, o fuckwit? There’s a picture of a manga written by a female author but you immediately realise it can’t go anywhere because half of the font is COMIC SANS.
Anyway, this article reminded me that recently I picked up my first SHOUJO MANGA (manga for gurlies, typically published by Shoujo Beat over here)! My decision to Try It (given that I hates all comics) was provoked by intense lolz from recent jdrama Yasuko to Kenji, which featured boyband drummer Masahiro Matsuoka as an ex-biker gang leader turned awesome shoujo manga artiste (each episode would feature him dressing up his two goons as eg swooning schoolgirls, cheerleaders, puppy-walkers etc).
I picked up “Absolute Boyfriend”, as I have familiarity with the jdrama (‘Zettai Kareshi’) based on the manga, which turns out to come with two further ‘stand-alone’ comics, “I Won’t Let You Become A Star” and “Aromatics”. I’m not sure if each ‘book’ has one ‘serial’ in each instalment, followed by two standalones or whether this is a one off as it was the last episode of ‘Absolute Boyfriend’, mind. As AB is the finale of a long-running story, it’s actually quite hard to say anything about it without talking about the drama which is a different kettle of cream-puffs. So I shan’t bother! more »
Sarah in FT / The Brown Wedge • 5 Comments