Dreaming with Little Nemo

One of the things I hoped to do from the beginning with this blog is to offer the occasional interview with writers, artists, creators, editors and publishers of interest. I’m happy to kick off this occasional feature (which will be archived on the website, once that’s up and running) with publisher Peter Maresca, who brought to market one of the greatest surprises of 2005.

Peter Maresca has published one of the most exquisite books I’ve ever laid eyes or hands upon. Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays! is a wellspring of wonder, a roadmap of revelations, and as generous and eye/mind/heart-expanding a collection of McCay art as can be imagined. In an era in which comics and graphic novels have expanded the parameters of this remarkable (and still relatively fresh) artform, it’s even more astounding to steep oneself in all that Winsor McCay accomplished in the medium a full century ago. McCay was a prolific prodigy, a visionary worthy of the term -- and Peter Maresca has resurrected McCay’s most celebrated creation in a format worthy of its imaginative scope and expansive canvas.

I’ve praised the book here before, but it seemed timely to offer an interview with Peter, if only to prompt a few more of you to seek out a copy for yourselves (or for those deserving of such a glorious Christmas gift). There aren’t many books worth a $100+ price tag, but rest assured that Peter’s collected Little Nemo tome is one of that select number. Peter is humble as ever about his part in this production, but he is deserving of all due attention.

Without further ado, here’s Peter:
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The Little Nemo book is a revelation, on many levels. Let’s talk about it a bit -- what led to your bringing this full-sized collection to print?

It was something I had thought about for years (others had as well, I am sure), but the 100th anniversary felt like a time to make it happen. Given the fragility of aging newsprint, it will soon be impossible to see these masterpieces in their original form, so it's important to have a reasonable facsimile. I had the collection, and some time, so I started shopping the idea around to publishers. When they were too cautious to take it on, I found some money to invest and, thanks to support and assistance from others, I took on the task of self-publishing.

I doubt if anyone has spent the time with, or given the attention to, McCay’s art on the level you must have. What did you discover about the work itself in the process -- and I must ask, did it impact upon your dreams?

I've always had pretty wild dreams, a condition that gave me a connection with Nemo from the first time I saw the strip. Once diving into the project, the reality was far more insane (and frightening) than my dreams. I would urge anyone who is planning their first book to do something small.

You mentioned to me the fragility of the collection -- you wrote it “was dissolving almost before my eyes” -- and I can’t imagine how you would handle such material for the production process. What kind of precautions did you take, and was sort of restoration process was necessary?

I had to construct a scanning station that made for a gentle transition from storage to scans and back again. Many pages received fresh tears as part of the process and minor repairs to the pages themselves were a part of the reproduction. Once I had the digital images, tears and holes could be cleaned up in Photoshop. In a few cases, pieces of the art or text were missing or stained so badly that I had to "play McCay" and redraw parts of backgrounds or words.

The reproductions are state-of-the-art and staggering; the books themselves are hand-bound; what is the physical printing and binding process this Little Nemo collection requires?

Although I was at the plant for the press check -- to adjust and approve the colors of the book pages, I didn't get a chance to witness the binding process. Part of the punching and stitching can be done by machines, but there were no machines to complete the binding, and this had to be done by hand. With careful comparison, you can see that each book is just a bit different in how the pages fit together, but it's remarkable that in the 5,000 copies, I have only come across a handful with any obvious binding
flaws.

What has the reaction been to the Little Nemo book -- response from buyers and readers, and sales-wise?

The response has been overwhelming one of gratitude, often before ever seeing the book. Apparently there has been an ongoing desire on the part of the thousands of Nemo fans to be able to see these pages full size. Even with the steady stream of superlatives about the appearance artwork, for which I am given more credit than I deserve relative to the work itself, the overwhelming response has been: Thank you. Thank you for doing this. The sales have been a surprise, to say the least. Not that we were able to sell all the books, but that it would happen so quickly.

Is there a second Little Nemo collection in the offing, or another comparable future project you care to mention?

I'm not sure about a second Nemo book. Most of the best ones have already been printed here. Of course, with McCay, you're talking about the fantastic, superb artwork vs. the merely terrific and great, so there may be another book's worth to be printed. My immediate project involves reprinting other great comics from the first two decades of the art form.

You mentioned to me your work with Dan Nadel on his upcoming book, The Underground That Wasn't: An Anthology of Unknown Comic Visionaries, 1900-1970 (due from Harry N. Abrams in 2006). You said you helped Dan “tracking down examples of some of the lost comic strips.” Did this include excavating material on unknown cartoonists like Frank Johnson, or was your focus elsewhere?

Dan's book features both comic strips and comic books, and it's not so much the "lost" material, but the unsung heroes, those who had a style and innovation that's been under-appreciated over the years. Artists like Verbeek (Upside Downs), Forbell (Naughty Pete), Garret Price (White Boy) and others.

Your article on the early “lost” strips of 1900-1915 in Comic Art Magazine was fascinating. How expansive is your strip collection, and what are among the greatest unsung treasures of the medium, in your mind?

I find the pre-Krazy Kat work of [George] Herriman fascinating, you can see bits of his genius even as he was mimicking other strip artists, his own style evolving in the first decade of the last century. It's also interesting to see the comics work of those who went on to other careers as animators or illustrators, like Dan Smith, or T.E. Powers or F.M. Follett. Some of the real treasures are the full-page, custom-drawn promotional pieces announcing the coming of new comic strips. It was a much bigger deal back then, but of course, it was a major form of mass culture.
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You can reach Peter Maresca directly at:

SUNDAY PRESS BOOKS
450 Monroe Drive
Palo Alto, CA 94306
fax: (650) 941-7988

You can buy the astounding Little Nemo book direct from Peter at

Sunday Press Books

Peter says, “The simplest way to order is through the website with a credit card... a check can be mailed with a form on the Web site. Those who feel better about using Amazon.com can buy it there,” but note amazon’s stock of the first edition is limited; Peter has ensured Sunday Press Books should have sufficient stock to service Christmas season orders. But don’t be dragging your feet! Peter adds the second printing is already in production, but the “second printing won't be here until March, so get them now while you can. First printings will likely be more valuable (for those who care about such things).”

If you can afford to add the Nemo book to your private collection or as a gift for a loved one this season, I urge you to do so now. This is among the top books of the year, and a real treasure for anyone who loves comics, fantasy -- or simply losing oneself in one of the most eye-popping book treats of this or any lifetime.
____

(As in the case of all interviews posted here, there's nothing in this for me -- I don't get any direct benefits, there's no kickback for me, not even a free book. I bought my copy. This is an honest-to-goodness from-the-heart recommendation, no strings attached! This interview, as with all material on this blog, is copyright 2005 Stephen R. Bissette; feel free to link to it, but please do not copy it and post it as your own.)

Over the past few weeks, it's been a hoot to see the results of a number of projects I've worked either reach completion or a critical stage of completion. This is always a pleasure: to at last see the results only imagined before, and one's work shine in the greater context of that work by other hands/minds.
However, I find myself in the rather odd position of doing work, and seeing the results of work I completed earlier this year, that I can't write about here -- not yet, anyway.

In all but one case, I've got to give time for the parties involved to "roll out" the completed work (of which my efforts are only one component) in their own good time. They also have to launch their own promotional plans first; tempting as it may be to spill the beans/break the news here, that wouldn't serve their interests, so I will lay low for the time being.

The sole exception is a huge body of work not intended for publication of any kind, on behalf of a venture that may never enter the public radar -- someday, I'll tell the tale, but the project must play itself out in an arena most likely invisible forever to all but those directly involved.

Weird, huh? Such is the life of a freelancer. Having survived various promotional debacles of the past (announced projects that never reached fruition: the planned graphic novel adaptations of Rawhead Rex and Night of the Living Dead, for instance), I've learned to just do my work and button my lip unless there's a reason to do otherwise.

Still, it's been a hoot for me to see 2005 has indeed been a productive year in a number of ways.

Come 2006, these surprises will bring pleasure to many of you -- and I will be able to write about the behind-the-scenes fun and work here, when the time is right.

Taking Stock

Morning, all, and good gravy, it's the weekend.

I've been up since about 5:30 AM taking stock -- literally -- and moving portions of it from the garage storage areas into the new studio/office/library space. While constructing the heavy-duty shelving units for the new work area, Olivier designed them with an uppermost shelf flat intended for the rarest backstock in the SpiderBaby archives, including the remaining backstock of Taboo. I won't have a final tally until next week sometime, but I'm far enough along to see 2006 will at last drain much of my backstock to nothing.

For instance, my stash of the 1963 comicbook series is down to almost zip, save for those issues (1963 #2 featuring The Fury, for instance) I stocked heavily on twelve years ago. After the next couple of orders, I will no longer be offering full sets of 1963 for sale -- it will be completely out-of-stock.

About two years ago, Rick Veitch and I got together and shrink-wrapped the final stock we collectively had on hand into the Shameless 1963 Six-Pack, and via King Hell Press we sold those out through Diamond. That process cleaned Rick out of his entire stock and left me with what little there was, beyond the overstock on #2 I'd socked away. The shrink-wrapped sets are long gone, though I've still been able to fill individual orders until today.

So, Alan Moore and retro-superhero fans take note: I'll no longer be able to fill complete set orders on that historic series. With no reprint edition planned (despite our best efforts in 2002-2003), this will be it on 1963 unless fortunes change.

Heads up to Taboo fans or potential buyers: Taboo backstock is low, and as of the next two orders for full sets, I won't be able to fill orders for full sets of Taboo any longer. Looks like Taboo 6 is the first to go, with Taboo 7 not far behind.

There's still plenty of backstock on select individual issues of Taboo, and I have abundant backstock on Tyrant and SpiderBaby Comix for the time being.

As work continues on the new website, a current catalogue of SpiderBaby Grafix material will be posted with PayPal payment option in place -- but just seemed fair to give any last-minute shoppers this info now.

For years now, I've been the only one-stop reliable source for Taboo, and have had to turn away many disappointed buyers seeking copies of items once available online from yours truly (primary among those the From Hell: The Compleat Scripts Vol. 1 signed & limited hardcover and paperback editions -- long gone, sold out in 1999). I've always given fair warning online prior to sellouts; here's the latest.

For easy peeks or info for the curious, the current links (and, for this week only, the still-valid prices) for Taboo and the 1963 series are still posted on the otherwise now-defunct

comicon.com SpiderBaby Comix site

-- just scroll down and click on the vertical menu bar on the left, under The Goods, for Taboo and/or N-Man, The Fury, and The Hypernaut.

I'll post a final end-of-2005 inventory warning by next weekend, once it's all tallied up and in place.

For those of you who could care less about all this, ah, well, sorry to bore you today. I'll have something of greater general interest here in the coming days, promise.

See ya on Sunday (probably posting late in the day), and until then have a great Saturday and fantastic weekend...

Morning, all,

Well, we got our first real snow cover yesterday, and all our Thanksgiving guests still made it here, had a great time, ate tons of food, and then got home safe and sound, though we're told it was "a white-knuckle ride" by one of 'em.

Hey, Mark Martin isn't awake yet. He has a new blog. Run over to

his new blog

and post a comment there before he reads this.

C'mon, it'll be really funny. Let's see how many we can rack up before Mark "stupid ol' blog" Martin next posts anything there.

Quote for the day, from Charles Krauthammer at The Washington Post (compliments of Daniel Barlow):

""What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant,
more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too."

It's all here.

OK, that's it. I'm off to watch the new King Kong DVD -- what a way to start the day.

More later --

HAPPY TURKEY DAY: The Woodchuck Turkey Fest

My serious Thanksgiving Day morning posts are below (check 'em out), but here's my Turkey Day gift to you:

Excerpted from the ms. for the upcoming Black Coat Press book S.R. Bissette's Blur, my Thanksgiving of 1999 weekly newspaper video review column (November 23, 1999), which might give a few of you viewing ideas to counter the sports and TV parades. Per usual, please remember this was written for a family newspaper readership, not for die-hard movie buffs like most of you, so I couldn't assume the readership had ever heard of Ed Wood or any of the films following. Specifically, this was scribed for a Vermont newspaper audience, hence the "woodchuck" (local slang for, uh, locals) moniker and orientation.

So, dis-orient yourself accordingly, and read on.

Eat Hearty, me maties!:
__

Gobble! Gobble! Gobble! The Woodchuck Video Turkey Feast

You know, I reckon I like turkey as much as all the rest of you do, but come Thanksgiving weekend, I like other kinds of turkeys, too.

I’m talking turkey movies, and I don’t mean movies about turkeys. I mean turkeys, gobblers, braindead movies like Robot Monster that you might have caught on the late show when you were a kid, and they were so awful you thought you might have dreamt them, only you knew you hadn’t. Movies our parents used to dump us off at the matinee to see, back when theaters had matinees like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Little Red Riding Hood Versus the Monsters (being a woodchuck, I saw ‘em at the Strong and the Flynn up in Burlington), or once we had our licenses we drove ourselves to by the carload back when drive-ins were real drive-ins (ah, the Twin City drive-in on the Barre-Montpelier road!), showing double features like I Drink Your Blood and I Eat Your Skin (which reminds me about Marj’s favorite part of the table turkey, but never mind). I’m even talking about movies like Ishtar, Showgirls, and Hudson Hawk that cost more than every one of our whole lifetime’s incomes combined would equal, and still gobbled. Movies where you wonder if anyone on the set was awake enough to say, “Hey, this is really bad! Why are we making it?”

I’m talking Turkeys with a capital ‘T’. Movies so stupid, they’d stand there in the rain with their heads tipped up and fool mouths open till they drowned, if they actually were turkeys.

Here’s my list for this year’s Woodchuck Turkey Feast, specially cooked up for this weekend. Mind you, these are just my favorites -- no doubt, you’ve got a couple of gobblers near and dear to your own heart you can substitute as you wish. I reckon you could cobble together your own gobbler-fest in no time. Well, clear the table. Here’s they are, in no particular order:

* Fave-o-rite Woodchuck Butterball Turkey Classic: Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (1958) is the King Turkey, so bad it’s almost a religious experience. Plan 9 lives down to its reputation, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. If you’re wondering about ol’ Ed, check out Tim Burton’s bio-pic Ed Wood for the behind-the-scenes poop on this cheapjack wonder.

* Fave-o-rite Woodchuck Fast-Food Family Turkey: My neighbors used to go to McDonald’s for Thanksgiving, and this movie was made for them. Ronald McDonald liked Steven Spielberg’s E.T. so much, he ran out and made his own version, Mac and Me (1988). Only instead of one E.T., or just one product placement for Reesee’s Pieces, McDonald’s added a whole ding-dang family of cute li’l E.T. knock-offs, named the main one after a burger, and sent the li’l yippers zipping around about 90 minutes worth of product placements, including (of course) McDonald’s. It’s the definitive family product-placement movie, and it even leaves you choking on that little clump of snot you get in the back of your throat every time you eat a real Big Mac.

* Fave-o-rite Woodchuck Turkey All-Animal Epic: There’s only one true contender for this category, America’s first all-avian feature-length film, Bill and Coo (1947). The entire movie starred only birds -- parakeets, parrots, lovebirds, canaries, and their feathered friends, hopping and chirping around a whole teeny-tiny little bird town. Striking a blow for racial harmony everywhere, the villains were crows, which they refered to as “the Black Menace” throughout. This little slice of heaven won a special Academy Award for, um, being special, and it was written and directed by Dean Riesner, who went on to script Dirty Harry for Clint Eastwood, which proves, uh, I dunno, it’s a good thing they didn’t carry Magnums in the 1940s. The second all-avian feature-length film was, of course, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973), which you might think a possible contender to this perch, but truth be told, it’s nary a pinfeather compared to Bill and Coo.

* Fave-o-rite Woodchuck Western Turkey: An all-bird cast is something to see, you betcha, but you haven’t lived until you’ve experienced the world’s one and only all-midget western, The Terror of Tiny Town (1938). It’s pretty standard oater fare, ‘cept all the cowboys and cowgirls and saddle-bums are midgets and dwarves who strut under saloon doors and ride the range on Shetland ponies, and they all sing songs, kinda like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers used to. Except, you know, with higher voices. And not as good. Gosh, I get misty-eyed just thinkin’ about it, and wish I could go to Texas -- until I think of the next film on the list:

* Fave-o-rite Woodchuck Vacation Turkey: Seeing as “manos” is Spanish for “hands,” Manos, the Hands of Fate (1966) actually means Hands, the Hands of Fate, which kinda makes you think, don’t it? A Texan manure-mogul made this movie about a couple and their daughter waylaid by a satanic backyard barbeque cult and Torgo, a stuttering idiot with big floppy knees. It’s just like a real vacation. First, they drive around for a long, long time, and then they drive around some more, and then they drive more, and they drive around again for a while, and not a damned thing happens. Then they find a claptrap fleapit in the middle of nowhere, and a weird little guy (Torgo) checks ‘em in. Then they lose their daughter while standing around in their hotel room arguing and she just up and steps out the door and damn, what d’ya know, she’s gone, they can’t find her. It’s real scarey, like Torgo’s knees or a bad plate of pulled pork.

* Fave-o-rite Woodchuck Flatlander Vacation Turkey: Alan Alda starred in, wrote, and directed The Four Seasons (1981), which everybody chuckled over back when it came out, though I didn’t care for it then, and like a crappy bottle of Boone’s Farm wine left in the cupboard, my attitude toward it has just turned to vinegar over the years. I hate it when Alan and his muckamuck friends from New Yawk show up in Stowe and proceed to do all kinds of bone-headed flatlander things, like wear embarrassing winter clothing and offend the waiters at restaurants and drive their four-wheeler out onto the ice, which of course breaks through and sucks the fool vehicle down. I was going to Johnson State College at the time, and the best jazz musicians in the school scored a cameo as bad jazz musicians playing at a Stowe club, which I thought demonstrated Alda’s contempt for all things Vermontian, save our skiing and scenery. Like I said, flatlander. Almost as bad as the time the makers of that Chevy Chase movie Funny Farm up and killed all the trees in the Townshend Green when they painted the summer leaves fall foliage colors.

* Fave-o-rite Woodchuck Turkey Musical Mashed-Potato Extravaganza: There’s lots of contenders for the top spud (Lost Horizon? Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? The Apple?? Xanadu???), but I save my sour cream and butter for that disco-era ‘tater tot Can’t Stop the Music (1980). I was always afraid of New York City until I saw this movie, and realized that, well, people are people everywhere, even if they sing and dance like spring peepers frying on an electric fence. The Village People were the big musical act here, Olympic Decathalon champ Bruce Jenner was the big star, and it was directed by visionary feminist filmmaker Nancy Walker -- y’know, Rosie, the lady who used to hustle Bounty paper towels on TV (“it’s the quicker picker-upper”). She musta been on some of them thar “picker-uppers” when she made this, and I ain’t talkin’ paper towels. NASA should fire this into space for other intelligent beings to observe and pass judgement on all mankind.

* Fave-o-rite Woodchuck 200-Ton Turkey Monster Movie: Speaking of firing things into space and intelligent beings, the Japanese bred a few contenders for this category, like the two-legged TV-antennaed semi-poultry monster The X from Outer Space, but I’ll forever keep a little light on in my soul for The Giant Claw (1957). This big turkey buzzard from outer space gobbles up trains, airplanes, and, in one unforgettable shot, little fellers wearing parachutes. Come Thanksgiving, I like a big bird, but this one makes you think twice. It’s supposed to be scary, but it looks like a refugee from a Dr. Seuss book and it’s a puppet -- you can see the strings and everything! In one stirring flash of political insight, the turkey monster pecks away a hunk of the United Nations building, which, come to think of it, may be why our country still hasn’t paid its U.N. dues. The movie itself is vintage Grade-A USA turkey, but the giant muppet turkey was actually made in Mexico, anticipating the great benefits the NAFTA treaty brought our way and the blessedly cheap slave labor corporate America has come to depend on.

* Fave-o-rite Woodchuck 200-Pound Turkey Monster Movie: None of you have ever heard of it, I’m sure, which proves that God does exist, but Blood Freak (1972) was filmed in Florida, which is the strongest argument I can possibly offer for my decision to never, ever move to Florida, even though my parents and sister did. I’ll take the snow, thank ye. Anyhoot, Blood Freak really is a turkey monster movie, in that the monster is a turkey, or a turkey-man. You see, he’s a screwed-up biker who wants to do right and quit dope and he falls for a born-again Jesus-preachin’ woman, but a Food-and-Drug researcher slips him a dose of something that, well, turns him into a big turkey, or rather a guy with a big fake turkey head over his own, which makes him kill, though I don’t know why. My friend Muskie raises turkeys up around Chester, and his turkeys never do anything but eat and crap and gobble and peck at each other, but this turkey is just plain mean. He needs junkie’s blood, which they just don’t sell at the feed store. The film’s narrator chain-smokes throughout and coughs his fool brains out. This is an important film, really, being the only anti-FDA-anti-drug-anti-smoking-pro-Christian-biker-splatter-turkey-monster movie ever made. Ever. And that surely counts for something.

* Woodchuck-Pick-of-the-Litter Holiday-Musical Turkey: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964). The title really says it all -- I mean, Santa really does conquer the Martians, who, being Grinch-colored, try to steal Xmas -- though I should also warn you that li’l Pia Zadora made her debut in green-face as one of the martian rugrats here, and the lame-o song “Hooray for Santa Claus!” will forever blight your Xmas memories. Why do we know or care about Pia, anyway? She never could act or sing -- I mean, how did she ever become a pseudo-celebrity?

Pardon me, I gotta go take a Pia.
See ya around Christmas time.

Oh, and I'll add this to my Thanksgiving greeting to you all this morning (below) -- this is a Thanksgiving Day Message from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, compliments of my amigo in Jamiaca, VT, HomeyM:

We are all here on this planet, as it were, as tourists. None of us can live here forever. The longest we might live is a hundred years. So whiile we are here we should try to have a good heart and to make something positive and useful of our lives.

   Whether we live just a few years or a whole century, it would be truly regrettable and sad if were were to spend that time aggravating the problems that afflict other people, animals, and the environment. The most important thing is to be a good human being.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, one and all ...

I may or may not be posting in the next few hours, so here's my best wishes to all of you today.

Much to be thankful for -- personally, the fact that both my now-adult children, Maia and Daniel, will be joining Marj and I and our friends and family this afternoon for the holiday meal is a blessing I could not have imagined possible last year at this time. This makes it a particularly special Thanksgiving for me, and a blessing for which I am deeply thankful.

May you all have the best possible Thanksgiving, and may you have many of your own blessings for which to celebrate the day.

Drive carefully, eat hearty, enjoy the gathering (however mighty or meager), and sleep well.

The Birds Is Coming...

The trip to CCS yesterday was more eventful than the ride home -- despite the harsh weather warnings, heading south from White River Junction at about 7:30 PM amid a light icy rain and some sketchy snow proved to be a sweet drive after I was south of the Claremont NH exit on 91. The skies cleared, the road cleared, and the road was open and dry all the way to Brattleboro.

I left, however, amid what indeed was a winter storm. Hitting the road at 1:30 or so, it was snowing heavily here in Marlboro: that heavy, wet snow we usually get first couple of storms. Since the drive twixt my home and Interstate 91 in Brattleboro is a winding road hustling with trucks, I decided to stick to the back roads, taking the dirt Ames Hill Road from Marlboro into West Brattleboro. It's always a fairly solo ride, as there's usually little or no traffic. The first stretch was slippery and treacherous, requiring easy going (even with my snow tires), but once the road dipped below the higher elevation it gave way to slush, to ice, then to a wet road. By the time I was dipping into the flats, it was genuinely pleasurable driving.

As I drove by one of the open pasture areas before the final extension into Brat, I glanced to my left and put on the brakes.

There, peppering the field from one tree-lined edge to the upper end of the facing hill's treeline, was the largest gathering of wild turkeys I have ever seen in my life.

I love seeing turkeys in the wild: it's the closest I'll ever come to seeing live dinosaurs, y'see. Their manner and movements, their ungainly heads and long necks leading their barrel bodies, their strut deliberate and calm until they're rattled (easily done) -- but this group was enormous!

Counting 37 in all, I idled by the side of Ames Hill Road as long as I could, just drinking in the spectacle. Amazing. As I drove off, I glanced back: they were still foraging, not at all concerned about either my coming or going.

And that, my friends, certainly prompts a final well wish to one and all for a Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow. We're having our annual gathering of friends and some family, and looking forward to it greatly.

Have a great Turkey Day -- in a way, I had mine yesterday!

If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Snowing...

Off to CCS later today for this week's lecture (more on the early graphic novel, 1950-1970, and coverage of the early underground comix years). It'll be rain, slush, snow and ice up and back, according to this morning's weather. Oh BOY!

Drive careful, y'all, and I'll do the same...

Monday Reading Assignment: Richard Clarke's "Ten Years Later..."

Hey, I may be out of circulation today as far as aggressively blogging is concerned, but I can passively blog. My dear friend Jean-Marc Lofficier sent me the link to this fascinating piece of speculative political sf by none other than Richard A. Clarke, former national coordinator for security and counterterrorism for Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

It was published January of this year in The Atlantic Monthly, and is even more timely today -- give "Ten Years Later" a read, unless you have an aversion to heavily footnoted science fiction.

Hmmm, I hereby nominate John Milius to script and direct the movie. Do I hear a second?

Here ya go:

"Ten Years After" by Richard A. Clarke

Of Cannibals and Cartoon Studies: Monday on a Sunday Night

Looks like I'm going to be swamped with work twixt now and Wednesday morning, soooooo -- just in case, here's some meat & potatoes I intended to get to in the next two days.

* Holy smokes, we're hammering out my spring schedule with James Sturm at the Center for Cartoon Studies. I reckon December is just around the corner, and the wrap-up of this first-ever semester is nigh, so James is hardly jumping the gun. Though I was originally scheduled to be teaching only this first semester's "Survey of the Drawn Story" class, I reckon I've pleased the powers that be (I'm as high-performance, low-maintenance as I can be: I arrive prepared, deliver the most ass-kicking two-and-a-half hour session I can to the students, and turn in my mileage form -- then I'm out of their hair, except for the Tuesday night movie I provide free-of-charge for the students who have the time and inclination to soak that up). Yep, I'll be back in January, teaching drawing this time around. James, Michelle Ollie, and I are still dancing around which day of the week will be my time to tango with this amazing group of students (and I do mean amazing), but it's all coming together. More news once it's fit to print!

* The big news that is fit to print is: my long-awaited book project We Are Going to Eat You!: The Definitive Edition at last has a publisher -- and what a publisher!

This past week, Harvey Fenton of FAB Press and I signed and sealed the contract for a revised, expanded, abundantly illustrated and absolutely definitive edition of my exhaustive overview of Third World cannibal movies from the 1890s to present. We've scheduled our efforts for a Summer 2007 release of finished product, and we've some real surprises in store (that I'll keep as surprises until we're further along).

The UK-based FAB Press is one of the best genre film publishers in the world, and I'm honored to be under their umbrella. Harvey has already published (and, in some cases, edited and/or co-authored) some of the most handsome, lavishly-produced, and beautifully packaged books of substance on all things cinematic, horrific and unusual. Among the many feathers in Harvey's cap -- from many authors, mind you -- are mind-and-table bending books like the brand-new Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, which joins the ranks of Ten Years of Terror: British Horror Films of the 1970s, Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe, Shock! Horror! Astounding Artwork from the Video Nasty Era, Profondo Argento, Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike, Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto, Art of Darkness: The Cinema of Dario Argento, Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, Abel Ferrera: The Moral Vision, Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser, Making Mischief: The Cult Films of Pete Walker, Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and Its Critics, Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic (two editions), Making Friday the 13th: The Legend of Camp Blood, DVD Delirium volumes 1 and 2, Eyeball Compendium, Flesh & Blood Compendium, and -- appropriately enough, providing a rich precursor for my own book in the FAB lineage -- Cannibal Holocaust and the Savage Cinema of Ruggero Deodato, among others!

Oddly enough, though I wasn't aware of it until Harvey presented me with a copy, my art previously appeared in one of FAB Press's oddest tomes, AntiCristo: The Bible of Nasty Nun Sinema & Culture -- turns out I did a sketch of a nasty nun for author Steve Fentone at the London comics convention UKAK back in 1991, and there she is, spitting up all over herself at the bottom of page 239.

Anyhoot, all these marvelous books and more (including Motion Picture Purgatory, a collection of Montreal cartoonist extraordinaire Rick Trembles amazing comics movie reviews, which I most highly recommend) are waiting for you over at

FAB Press.

Come 2007, my gruesome cannibal movie tome will be among their number, and I can't dream of a happier home for my mutant offspring.

Perhaps a short history of my humble project is in order: the original We Are Going to Eat You!: The Third World Cannibal Movies and the Inside Story of the Goona-Goona Films was completed in 1990, but I could not find a publisher at that time. It was a heady bit of research, completed looong before the era of in-depth books on such bizarre genres, loooooong before DVD (laserdisc was still in its early years), and looooooooooooong before any books at all existed on the subject (there have since been a couple worthy books on cannibal films, including Mikita Brottman's Meat is Murder! from Creation Books, 1997, though none are definitive). I was breaking new ground at the time, laboring to excavate all I could on this curious subject, with essential research input from folks like Craig Ledbetter, Tim Lucas, Michael H. Price, Chas Balun, Tim Caldwell, Douglas Winter, the late Bill Kelley and others.

A considerably truncated version of this original text was published in Chas Balun's historic The Deep Red Horror Handbook (FantaCo Enterprises, 1989), though I must add Chas did an extraordinary job paring my massive scribblings down to a comprehensive read. A few photocopies of my complete ms. were circulating in the ensuing decade. The complete, unexpurgated version wasn't published until February of 2003, when I self-published an "Archival SpiderBaby Edition" of the complete 1990 manuscript.

That curio clocked in at 336 pages, sporting a cover by yours truly for the squarebound photocopied tome (black and white; glue binding; protective plastic covers). Every copy was signed and personalized, available exclusively from SpiderBaby Grafix (and the couple of book dealers who picked it up for retail in the US and UK). The unadorned ms. was over 250 pages in length; the archival bound edition was a rough and ready affair, spiced with almost 100 pages of illustrations, including some of my own cannibal film and zombie artwork amid an eye-popping array (culled from the SpiderBaby archives) of super-rare movie pressbooks, clippings, ad mats, etc. from around the world, dating back to the 1890s. As I wrote in the publication announcement, "This is an archival reproduction of the original 1990 manuscript -- not typeset, but photocopied from the old Atari printer ms. -- which was completed before the release of key mainstream cannibal epics like Alive!, Silence of the Lambs and Fried Green Tomotoes, the influx of Asian horrors, before the true-life horrors of Jeffrey Dahmer."

Continuing the ballyhoo for the now out-of-print archival edition:
___

"What's important is what it DOES have:

*Analysis, insights, and behind-the-scenes stories of those bloody Italian cannibal gems like MAN FROM DEEP RIVER, THE LAST SURVIVOR/JUNGLE HOLOCAUST, TRAP THEM AND KILL THEM, MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD, CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE/INVASION OF THE FLESH HUNTERS, EATEN ALIVE/THE EMERALD JUNGLE, DR. BUTCHER M.D./ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST, and CANNIBAL FEROX/MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY.

* Cannibal cinema rarities like CANNIBALS OF THE SOUTH SEAS, A SCREAM IN THE NIGHT, WHAT'S BUZZING BUZZARD (Tex Avery's cannibal classic cartoon!), GOONA GOONA, FIVE CAME BACK, BACK TO ETERNITY, CANNIBAL ISLAND, SPIDER BABY, TERROR IN THE JUNGLE, AFRICA ADDIO/AFRICA BLOOD AND GUTS, the Mondo movies, THE WILD EYE, THE VALLEY (OBSCURED BY CLOUDS), HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMAN, MACUNAIMA, SURVIVE!, MONDO CANNIBALE, THE MAN HUNTER, CANNIBAL TERROR, CUT AND RUN, WHITE SLAVE, CANNIBAL TOURS, and more!

* Genre masterpieces including NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, SOYLENT GREEN, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, and others!

* Mainstream off-genre essentials like SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER!, THE SKY ABOVE THE MUD BELOW, THE NAKED PREY, WEEKEND, A MAN CALLED HORSE, WALKABOUT, AGUIRRE THE WRATH OF GOD, THE LAST MOVIE, QUEST FOR FIRE, THE EMERALD FOREST, THE MISSION, and other surprisingly key titles you wouldn't associate with the cannibal films you know and love.

Though much has happened to the cannibal genre in the decade+ since this was written, WE ARE GOING TO EAT YOU! remains a comprehensive overview of the cannibal film genre to that point in time, including coverage of many key films that remain ignored in the lavish full-color books that have been published since. This was a major undertaking, completed (but sadly unpublished) long before the contemporary explosion of cannibal coffee-table tomes.

From Martin and Osa Johnson's silent cannibal travelogues to GOONA GOONA and the Mondo films, from DR. X to CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and beyond, it's all here, researched and dissected with the usual Bissettian obsessive intensity."
___

Harvey and I are already prepping the thousands of illustrations for the book -- it will be an eye-popping feast, in more ways than one. I'll be painting the cover art and providing numerous interior illustrations to accompany the array of archival illustrative materials. I've got months of work ahead of me revising the already expansive text, with much from the past 15 years to cover (and much from the previous century at last in reach and in need of coverage), and literally two file cabinets filled with notes and clippings to sort through and weave into the book.

So keep your eyes in their sockets for now and your cranium capped and we'll keep you posted on the coming developments as they congeal.
___

* BTW, the electricity is now on in the new studio/library/workspace, thanks to my stepson Mike and his fiance Mary, who completely juiced and lit the room before heading home around 6 PM tonight. Bless 'em! I've started schlepping the books onto the shelves, though the heavy engagement with the process will have to wait until after my CCS Tuesday -- and, sigh, the carpeting. One more major hurdle to go, then I'll be writing and drawing in the new digs.
___

Well, that's my Sunday evening Monday & Tuesday morning entry. If you're checking this blog after 9:55 PM on Sunday night, be sure to scroll down to this morning's post, too -- this is my second of the day, anticipating a couple of days of no posts ahead.

See you all on Wednesday, unless I'm able to steal some time to get back to the keyboard between then and now...

Off the Newsstand --

A couple of recent newsstand purchases worth seeking out:

* The annual Bongo Comics' Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror special is thankfully still malingering on some newsstands, though Halloween has come and gone. Rush out and snag a copy, quick! My friend Dan Barlow luckily pushed me just in time, and I found it last night on one of the few comic spinner racks still left in Brattleboro, VT (thanks, Dan!), though it had just been pulled from some locations, like, yesterday. Per usual, the parodies of known genre chestnuts are knowing and amusing, with an equal quotient of inspired concepts and dialogue and groaners. This year's bumper crop promises more than it delivers, though, by lining up a stellar lineup of guest vet horror/sf cartoonists -- Berni(e) Wrightson, Gene Colan, Mark Schultz, Al Williamson, John Severin, Angelo Torres -- whose work (with the very notable exception of Colan's inspired pencils) is barely recognizable as their work! Pros all, and the stories themselves are perfectly told, but the Groening/Morrison covers (particularly the EC riff) are truer mergers of the Simpsons universe with traditional horror comics stylings.

No insult intended to the artists -- but it's a puzzlement: did editor Bill Morrison and/or Bongo Comics insist upon the artists submerging their styles so completely in the Simpsons template as to smother their distinctive styles? Did the artists assume they were to subsume their work to fit the template?

Whatever the case, it's a disappointment to find Len Wein and Wrightson's satire of their own classic House of Secrets origin of Swamp Thing so neatly revamp that 1970 gem to the world of Homer (transmuted into Squish Thing by failed attempts to create a new flavor mixing Squishies and beer and the fateful intrusion of a time bomb set by Moe, who covets Marge), only to find Wrightson's pastiche of his own past persona reduced to vague stylistic variations (primarily, use of side-lighting to render forms) sans flavor, authenticity or finesse. A few panels are lovely -- page 19's fourth panel (I know it looks inconsequential, but that panel works: there's flow, grace, and weight to the figures, Bart's legs look both "right" and "Wrightson") and final 'collision' panel (ditto); page 20's first two panels (particularly Homer strangling Bart), and best of all the fateful explosion and hilarious "Ow ow ow ow ow [etc.]" immediately following, etc. -- but weakest of all are the "money shots," if you will, Squish Thing's appearances primary amongst those. It looks like a lesser artist's attempt to cop the basics of Wrightson's 1970s work, sans the richness and supple brushwork Berni brought to his stylish "big foot" work on Captain Sternn, the Howard the Duck Presidential campaign poster, or his occasional National Lampoon efforts. In fact, prior year's Treehouse of Horrors stories sported more distinctive Wrightsonesque stylings -- particularly from Hilary Barta, one of this generation's great humorists and all-around cartoonists -- and that leaves me simply befuddled. Still, it's a hoot to find Len and Bernie goofing on their own historic moment in comics history (just one of many, I hasten to add), and we'll take what we can get of such rare rematches when and as they emerge.

The same is true of the Severin, Torres and Mark Schultz/Al Williamson stories: if you held a revolver to my temple, I wouldn't have guessed they had personally executed these gigs (save for the tell-tale Severin portrait of some of his old EC compatriots in the "Shock! Suspense! Simpsons!" splash panel, the only component of the two Severin stories that unmistakably radiates Severin's distinctive style). The Schultz/Williamson story hinges on recreations of the famous EC sf "Squa Tront? Spa Fon!" panels and pages, featuring Al's thick-lipped lizard humanoid aliens rendered as they were in 1953. It looks like someone other than Mark Schultz and Al Williamson clumsily copping Williamson's EC classic: only a few of the backgrounds carry the illusion.

Again, I intend no slight to the artists, all of whom are not just incredible artists but great guys -- I'm just wondering what happened here. Maybe the deadlines were inordinately tight, but one would think that would bring instinctive stylistic approaches to the fore. The fact that all but one of the teamups seem to have been smothered by some sort of 'house template' leads me to think this was an imposition from Bongo, but one can never assume such things: it may actually be that the veterans assumed they were to work as closely as possible to the Simpsons style, and thus avoided their own instincts to meet that perceived job spec. Had I been in the editor's shoes, though, I'd have insisted otherwise: I mean, you don't hire this amazing cosmic aligning-of-the-stars and ask them to not work in their own styles -- or do you?

(One other caveat, and one I have to chalk up to editor Bill Morrison: the Schultz/Williamson EC sf parody "Blast from the Future Past!" at one point hinges on the conceit of Bart and Lisa reading the comic we're reading, culminating in what should have been a great "Turn the page!" gag -- but damn it, the real page layouts don't match those in the 'comic inside the comic,' the page doesn't turn over to the revelatory page, and this sadly blows the joke completely! "D'oh!")

To pull together no less than a half-dozen of horror and sf comics greatest stylists to draw satires of their iconic works -- in effect, "recreate" their own styles -- only to end up with this half-hearted showcase is a disappointment. As Harvey Kurtzman and his Mad stable of artists knew (particularly Wally Wood and Will Elder), and National Lampoon understood and proved time-and-time-again in their 1970s heyday, the best comic parodies sing when they are almost indistinguishable from their sources. In this case, it's hard to fathom how adopting not only the styles of the wellsprings, but hiring the original cartoonists themselves who drew the seminal EC and Swamp Thing stories being satirized, ended up looking like such pallid imitations of the real McCoys.

For that matter, only John Costanza's lettering (on the Tomb of Dracula and Swamp Thing parodies) "plays ball" here. Once more, no slight intended to letterer Karen Bates, but the faux-"Leroy lettering" for the entirity of "Two Tickets to Heck!" and its component quintet of EC pastiche stories doesn't sufficiently emulate the emblematic look and feel of the true EC house lettering style. Like the art, it's all a dim, shallow echo. One can see what was intended, but it rings hollow from stem to stern.

Only Gene Colan comes through in spades: his triumphant, distinctively Colanesque fusion of his eye-popping "straight-no-chaser" Tomb of Dracula visuals with the Simpsons universe is the one absolutely on-the-money wedding of concept and creators in the book, sweetened all the more by the reuniting of Colan with his ol' Tomb of Dracula writer/editor Marv Wolfman. Colan also stays true to his own remarkable sense of page design, panel flow, and action (note page 11's layout in particular), and this lends the story a kinetic charge nothing else in the comic has. It works as beautifully as The Simpsons TV Halloween episode in which Homer entered the three-dimensional world (via inspired CGI renditions of a three-dimensional Homer). The jolting incongruity of seeing the familiar Simpsons characters rendered in Colan's style (reproduced directly from his energetic, atmospheric pencils) is part and parcel of 'the joke,' lending invigorating energy and startling life to Wolfman's confectionary script. The fun both creators bring to the job is contagious, and as with the best of prior year's Treehouse of Horrors tricks-and-treats, the shoehorning of Simpsons stars into classic horror roles (e.g., Smithers as Renfield, Homer, Bart and Lisa as the Van Helsing clan of Tomb of Dracula, etc.) works like a charm. Kudos to Marv and Gene, and I hope there was some sweet retribution in "reclaiming" Blade via this parody!

If only the rest of this annual event had been as inspired.

For the third time, I stress that these are not personalized comments or meant as attacks on any of the creators involved or the Bongo staff -- I'm just flummoxed as a reader who loves the work of all involved, loves the concept of wedding these artists and writers with parodies of their own work, and then wonders upon eye contact with the published work, "Wha' happened?"
_____

* BTW, Berni(e) Wrightson fans take note: This is the weekend the Showtime Network's current Masters of Horror anthology series is broadcasting Dario Argento's adaptation of the classic Bruce Jones/Berni Wrightson Warren horror comics tale "Jenifer". The original comics story remains among Bernie's greatest comics accomplishments, and among Bruce Jones's finest hours as a writer, a high-water mark for horror comics as a genre, and a classic of the genre in any medium. Here's hoping Argento does it justice; it certainly seems like an ideal match of filmmaker and source material.

Note, too, this is arguably the second adaptation of one of Bruce Jones's marvelously heartfelt fusions of horror and romance that so elevated the Warren zines (Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella) they appeared in. Last year's celebrated "you are there" shark movie, Chris Kentis and Laura Lau's Open Water,
essentially lifted its premise and some particulars from Jones and Richard Corben's full-color (with black-and-white framing pages) "In Deep". In fact, harrowing as Open Water was, it emulated only the first half of Jones/Corben's truly horrific and heartbreaking story, which pushed the situation to nigh-on-unbearable extremes (I've written a full article comparing the comic tale to the unauthorized/unacknowledged film "adaptation," which will see print in 2006 in one of the Gooseflesh volumes.)

Jones went on write for television, including The Hitchhiker TV anthology series, but his best work to my mind remains his horror/love scripts for Warren -- prominent among those the shattering "Jenifer".

I don't get Showtime, so alas, it'll be a while until I see it, but my amigo and vet Video Watchdog writer/editor/co-publisher Tim Lucas has been highly complimentary of the series thus far. His Saturday, November 19th "Video Watchblog" posting on "Jenifer" is heartening, and with a click and a scroll-down to Tim's November 19th posting, you can find it

here.

____

* The latest issue of Filmfax Plus is on the stands -- #108 -- and it's as usual a grand jam-packed read.

Prominent among this issue's delights (from various retrospective War of the Worlds articles to the usual great mix of interviews and articles with/on everyone from Richard Dix to Tiny Tim) is Part Two of Dan Johnson's marvelous interview with William Stout, this time focusing on Stout's early years working in Hollywood. They cover a lot of ground, from his poster artist work (e.g., Wizards, etc.) to his production design work (on Conan the Barbarian, Return of the Living Dead, Invaders from Mars, etc.), which no doubt continues into the upcoming third installment. Dan and Bill carry the conversation into turf Stout has never before gotten into -- including how he stumbled on his first production design gig, a confessional moment Stout selflessly offers up as "a lesson for someone else out there" -- which shines light into previously unexposed connective corners between Stout's incredibly multi-faceted career. This is essential reading, and per usual Filmfax sweetens the interview with a stunning array of the interview subject's work -- in this case, everything from Stout's seminal bootleg record cover art to never-before-seen storyboard and production design work (including Conan boards that were, at director John Milius's insistence, drawn as full comic pages). Highly recommended!

By the way, I urge you to get your hands on some of Stout's self-published sketchbooks and collections, and pronto! The two comics collections, Mickey at 60: Volume Two and Motor Mania! -- the latter collecting, for the first time anywhere, Stout's comics for CARtoons magazine, which counts as some of his first comics work -- are particularly recommended. These are just $15 each (plus only $6 total shipping), as are all of Bill's sketchbooks -- with the single exception of his splendid Tribute to Ray Harryhausen, which is a fat 70 pages featuring every one of Ray's stop-motion creations rendered in Stout's distinctive style!

No, you can't order online -- you gotta write a letter, write a check, and mail it snail-mail to:

William Stout, Inc.
1466 Loma Vista Street
Pasadena, CA 91104-4709

As a matter of fact, I'm going to check the checklist out (on page 27 of Filmfax Plus #108) against my stash of Stout books, and rush a check out to Bill in the AM for the ones I'm missing. A Merry Christmas gift to myself -- why don't you do the same for yourself?

Besides, it'll sweeten Bill's Christmas, too!

Swimming in Oatmeal for Satan!

Though I can by no means afford 'em all, I've been a long-time fan of Mike Vraney and his bountiful Something Weird Video output. Mike was inevitably my favorite table at the Chillercon of yore (I haven't been for years), and most often reaped the bulk of my $$$ during those twice-a-year sojourns to the Meadowlands of New Jersey.

Since the arrival of DVD and Mike's innovative deal with Image to springboard Something Weird into the mass market, he's detoured even more of my $$$ into the SW stable. It's to the point where I'll purchase a SW DVD out of idle curiosity, since even the "least" of the catalogue on DVD offers a bounty of extras I've never heard of -- and believe you me, I've been scouring for these films since childhood, in whatever venue presented itself, from 8mm cutdowns from Castle and Ken Films to our contemporary DVD overload.

Among my recent SW late-night viewings was the Asylum of Satan package. This is one I picked up on impulse and a whim, having always been a fan of director William B. Girdler's films (e.g., Death Curse of Tartu, Sting of Death, Day of the Animals, Stanley, Grizzly, The Manitou, etc.) and curious about Asylum for its grotesque newspaper ads (featuring a Haxan-like demonic visage that seemed to be made of clay). The lead feature lived down to my utter lack of expectations -- it's among Girdler's least entertaining efforts, though still fun for a Girdlerphile like moi -- but its surprise made-in-Florida co-feature Satan's Children was the real delight. I was completely unprepared for the lunacy of this 1973 opus from "who's this?" director Joe Wiezycki -- this was apparenty his first and last film -- helming a generation-gap psychodrama shot in and about Tampa Bay by a local TV station crew expanding their horizons.

It's a genre mix of post-Manson JD/counterculture/biker/satanist fear-mongering, in which a callow teen youth who hates his spoiled older stepsister and his home life (they make him -- gasp! -- mow the lawn) bolts away to immediately fall into the clutches of a biker who offers him a place to crash. That night, said biker and his gang gang-sodomize the kid for laughs and dump him in a ditch. He's found and "rescued" by a nomadic pack of flower-children who turn out to be (cue music) Satan's Children! Typical of the post-Manson cinematic landscape, these hippie space-cadets are depicted as a free-wheeling, torture-lovin' pack of misfits, only our rescued protagonist becomes the favorite squeeze of the coven matriarch while its patriarch is away. Of course, when head honcho warlock returns, things go south: the protective coven matriarch is buried in sand up to her neck and left for the ants (after her head is covered in syrup to allure the insects) and our young hero flees with the coven in pursuit. Some drown in an oatmeal-like pit of "quicksand," others are fried on a fence, and junior jail-bait indeed makes his way back home -- and then the film really slides off the deep end. The finale is a corker, even if its most transgressive act (incestuous rape) is kept off-screen.

For its era, the paths this low-budget youth-gone-astray flick pursues are pretty out-to-lunch, from the homosexual gangbang to the patricide-fueled excess (including the revenge-rape and crucifixion of sis) of the final act. Sodomy was a big-screen no-no in the 1970s, though I suppose Straw Dogs and Deliverance broke that cinematic ass-cherry. Still, among rural drive-ins, biker pederasts ass-reaming a long-haired teen boy would have driven most redneck yokels into a homophobic rage and out of the drive-ins all together. The climactic melee might have prompted salutary honking-of-horns from those who stayed the course (though our androgynous hero's method of murder -- smashing bottles over Dad's head until he croaks -- is hilarious, and as badly staged as the rest of the homicidal "action"), but those would have been either the heartiest souls, those who were distracted from the first act, or those incapable of driving themselves home earlier.

The story is told with that seamy, impoverished flat-footedness of similar first-time-out 1970s drive-in era fare, defined by its maladroit acting, clumsy staging of mayhem, and lack of any real energy. For me, though, the clash between Wiezycki's flaccid direction, the cast's high-school-theater theatrics, and the lethal ire of the film's narrative content proved strangely intoxicating. If you view it in the context of That '70s Show, it's even more disorienting: view it as "Eric's Big Night Out," ending with Eric's murder of Red and rape & crucifixion of Laurie (hey, is that Tommy Chong as the coven leader?), and you'll see what I mean.

By any yardstick, this is a pretty weird flick, and it's all the more delightful for having been essentially a lost film until SW rescued it from oblivion.

Coincidentally, my friend Steve Twiss (who had no idea I had this DVD, and likewise had never heard of the film) sent me the link to a website for

Big 13 WTVT Channel 13

of Tampa Bay, that area's CBS affiliate from the year of my birth (1955) to 1994.

There's a multi-page overview of WTVT's "Shock Theater" horror host,

'Shock Armstrong,' The All-American Ghoul

Better yet, though -- lo and behold! -- the site also features a complete diary of the making of Satan's Children by assistant cinematographer Marc Wielage, dishing the dirt amid the behind-the-scenes story of the film's production! It's all waiting for you at

Satan's Children: The True Story!

There's a fully-illustrated synopsis of the film, in case you feel the need to know more before tracking this DVD down for yourself, but best of all are the details behind the film's inception and production. This gem was shot in part on short ends leftover from The Sting, which is as close as this curio ever got to an Academy Award.

And to think it all happened in Gibsontown and Lutz, Florida. Someone should write the definitive tome on Florida filmmaking, as it's peppered with masterpieces like this among the stratos-fear of Herschell Gordon Lewis's splatter classics, Girdler's pantheon, one-offs from The Mermaids of Tiburon to Zaat!... and countless others.

My favorite revelation: according to Marc Wielage -- who oughta know 'cuz he was there -- that was indeed oatmeal those satanist suckers are floundering in. "$178 worth of oatmeal," to be exact, and that's 1973 dollars-worth-of-Quaker-Oats.

See, it pays to study special effects from a tender age -- and eat Maypo.

Anyhoot, Marj and I are off to see Harry Potter tonight -- but I can't see where it'll hold a candle to Satan's Children.

Sometimes, less is more. Waaaaaaaaaaay more.

Ah, at last --

At about 4 PM, our favorite carpenter/contractor Olivier Flagollet of Rise Up Builders wrapped up work on the office/studio/library.

The shelves are all in, and they are mighty and plentiful; the new wall-mounted computer work station/desk is in, and it's a beaut and large enough for my needs; the drawing table will tuck neatly by the doorway, with room for a pegboard above (and a two-shelf unit just above that is already in place).

I'll be preoccupied for the next couple of days -- I have wall touch up and painting to do, and some other odds and ends. The carpet measurements are being taken tomorrow, and Sunday my stepson Mike Bleier (without whom this project would never have approached completion as yet) will be in to install the lights and electrical fixtures.

The space is about the size of my old 1940s trailor studio, wherein I worked in the late '80s to 1993. That's where Taboo, Aliens: Tribes, We Are Going to Eat You, the 24 Hour Comic, and portions of 1963 (primarily the Hypernaut) and the initial pages of Tyrant (some of which saw print in Tyrant #3) were created.

This new space feels marvelous: it smells of wood, which I love.

The sole window in the room faces out onto our side lawn, right where a black bear occasionally passes. I've found deer tracks out there, too, though I've never seen the deer themselves; they no doubt pass in the night.

Here, much new work will take shape.

Here, many long-in-the-works projects will be completed.

Here, things I can't as yet imagine will emerge.

Wish me luck!

"Because It's Moooooooooving Day, Mooooooooving Day --"

"-- rip up the carpets off the floor/get on your overcoat/you're out the door/because it's mooooooooving day--"

The process that began in March 2004 and should have been done November of 2004 is finally wrapping up this weekend, with crucial but relatively quick labor (final installation of carpet, heating baseboard, electric and lighting fixtures) to soon follow. The completion of the studio/office/library is in reach at last, and I couldn't be readier for the move. Despite the work left to be done, once the shelving is in place and my cleanup/touchup/painting touchup chores are done before I fall down this evening, I'm beginning the momentous task of organizing and moving a vast portion of my library and collection into place, while setting up the computer and writing work area and a long-needed corner for drawing and art production.

Shambling about through 30 years of accumulated material -- art, books, files, papers, etc. -- has been one of the great obstacles week-to-week, though I've managed to do so with enough effectiveness to complete a multitude of projects. Pitiful attempts to lend some order to all this since Marj and I moved into our present abode (the first I've owned rather than rented) in March of 2002 have been sporadic at best: whenever the next feat of construction or renovation was necessary, I'd have to shuffle it all about anew, and it's pretty hopeless at this point. Some of these projects have been research-intensive, leaving heaps of discards and relevent materials in various corners once a given project is done and on its way. It's a process any writer or artist dependent on access to research fully understands, and laypersons can only shake their heads at.

I've managed to wade through some staggering tasks amid all this chaos, and have had pretty solid luck finding all I've needed when I've needed it. Still, much of what I sometimes need is still boxed and sealed and stored in the second floor of our garage (like my entire paleontology book collection), and I've turned down some attractive work offers for lack of anywhere to execute such gigs. For those I have taken on and completed, the void of a dedicated organized workspace has been crippling at times, and the chore of shifting and sifting through the increasingly discumbobulated collection to complete research has become since September a weekly ordeal as I prep my CCS sessions (the average lecture incorporates over 200 images, scanned from various comics, books, and documents scattered -- and I do mean scattered -- over three floors of our home).

Soon, that will all be behind me, and I'm eager to claim the new space and use its abundance of storage, shelving, and work space to reorient literally two floors of my debris and spread-like-a-madwoman's-shit chaos.

That all this is coming together in our little corner of Vermont within a week or two of displaced Hurricane Katrina receiving their December 1st eviction notices from various FEMA-financed shelters (hotel rooms, etc.) leaves me mortified at how much fucking space I fill with my accumulated career/collection shit. I'm feeling criminal, claiming all this turf -- but still, Marj and I worked hard for it, we've ended up paying through the nose for it (no thanks to the original contractor who effectively stiffed us when he abandoned the job), and I'll nevertheless savor the process of moving at last.

We've Got Mail!

Write again with confidence, we'll reply with the same!

Thanks to the great grand & glorious Mark Martin, our Yahoo email account is up and working perfectly now. Thanks to all who wrote with advice (and even invites to open new email -- thanks, Mitch, Andrew), but Mark was first to provide the needed technical recommendation -- which should have been waiting in my mailbox from Yahoo the morning of their system revamp. As Mark said to me, "They added that 'feature' to 'enhance' your experience. It's just like you suspected - something you did not ask for, don't want, etc - but god dammit you are gonna get it!!!" Ya, just like Alan Goldstein used to "enhance" the only computer at First Run Video I depended upon -- "enhancing" later-necessary files out of existence. Anyhoot, thank you, Mark -- it was an elegantly simple operation, but one I neither Marj or I would have thought of or inadvertantly stumbled upon in weeks of Sundays.
___

Awoke this morning (via Marj's radio alarm) to the dulcimer tones of our lying sack-of-shit Vice President Dick Cheney honking off at those pesky Democrats who apparently found the roadmap to one of their testicles this past week or two and are finally aggressively criticizing this Administration's rush to war in 2003.

Lying sack of shit, I say. This isn't a matter of opinion about Cheney: it's a fact. Lest you've forgotten, Cheney proved himself a complete sociopath before the nation in the very first words out of his piehole during the Vice-Presidential debates when he claimed to have never met Senator Edwards before, much less ever seen him on the Senate floor. This first-volley dirt-cheap shot at his debate opponent was countered within hours with news footage of Cheney himself magnanimously introducing Edwards and his wife before some event on the Senate floor. Cheney neither apologized nor was shamed. He is clearly incapable of the latter, and has steadfastly refused to do the former however callous his behavior or blatant his deceptions.

Cheney was the most visible Administration official to maintain the deceitful, non-existent link between the 9/11 attacks on the US and Saddam Hussein, hours after President Bush had admitted publicly none existed. Cheney, our first cyborg Vice, will demonstratably say or do anything with arrogant bravado and unshakable confidence to support whatever lie he chooses to tell or debunk whatever lie he pretends he didn't tell, and his bold bullying of the past days does nothing to counter the rational and long-overdue debate over the deceptive manner in which Bush, Cheney, and their cronies "sold the war" (their own term, mind you) to a gullible American public.

That they -- Bush and Cheney -- are so publicly tag-teaming in the current campaign to (a) legalize their torture state while (b) lying before the entire world (from foreign soil no less, moving from Bush's stand-by "America does not believe in torture" to the emphatic "America does not torture") is the latest one-two punch from men so intoxicated with power that they can't see or don't care about the basic incompatibility of these two synonymous positions. They apparently believe, given how "we" as a country continue to apparently support their rogue corrupt state, that "we" stupidly won't notice. This lethal pathology is growing more blatant and transparent, and one no longer knows how to react when (for instance) Bush lectures China on the principles of democracy (from a podium in Japan, mind you: given the centuries of animosity between China and Japan, Bush just topped his President Pop's faux pas of vomiting into a Japanese diplomat's lap: with a single speech, he humiliated both Japan and China, his host and the very country he is visiting next -- and remains oblivious to having humiliated both parties).

Just last week in England, Tony Blair couldn't get a bill passed extending detention of terrorist suspects from 14 to 90 days; in the US, "detainees" are still being imprisoned without charges for years on end. As of November 17th, AP reports we now have "detained more than 83,000 foreigners in the four years of the war on terror, enough to nearly fill the NFL's largest stadium" ("83,000 Foreigners Have Been Detained in War on Terror: Prisoners in Custody in Iraq Hit a High of Nearly 13,900 on November 1" by Katherine Shrader and Robert Burns, 11/17/05). These are our contemporary concentration camps, which "we" emphatically maintain "we" have a right to maintain indefinitely as our President and Vice-President campaign to extend such abuses of power into the realm of legalized torture even as "we" are and continue to torture without such "legal" sanctions (from the same AP story, just to summarize the situation: "...On Capitol Hill, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is leading a campaign to ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. The administration says the legislation could tie the president's hands. Vice President Dick Cheney has pressed lawmakers to exempt the CIA..."). If you personally don't believe we're torturing detainees, take a moment to read Amy Goodman's sobering interview with American soldier (former U.S. Army interrogator Specialist) Tony Lagouranis

here.

We clearly are out of control. We are behaving like a rogue state, a rogue superpower, led by an American rogue's gallery like none in living memory.

Of course, this is only further eroding whatever shred of credibility or illusion of decency left to our nation.

This morning's radio-broadcast spectacle of mock indignation and no-doubt genuine outrage from the man who told Senator Leahy on the Senate floor to "go fuck yourself" and thereafter expressed his glee with having said it is just further evidence of the shameless guile, bile, and deceit this motherfucker revels in. It isn't swagger, it's his fundamental behavior pattern.

I can't recall any Vice President since Spiro Agnew who has been so destructive to our country or the basic principles of democracy. Agnew was a piker next to Cheney, who 20 years ago would have seemed too incredible a character in the context of the most asinine of Charles Bronson or Chuck Norris thrillers -- and yet here we are, in the 21st Century, with this mind-boggling villain speaking (literally out of the side of his mouth) on behalf of our country time and time again, pretending to speak for our shared values, demonstrating the utter bankruptcy of our sham pretense to civility, decency, and democracy.

He clearly has no shame.

Have we no shame?

Yes, We Have No Email Today...

Notice to friends and associates:

With some sorely-needed sleep, the cool light of reason and a new morning, it's now evident that the overnight change in systems at Yahoo's email functions is indeed non-functional at the Bissette household, on any and all of our three computers. Switching, per Yahoo's suggestion, to Safari or Mozilla's "lastest" (typo on Yahoo's instructional banner) system only immediately shuts down our internet connection. We can now only read, but not reply to, all incoming email.

So, if you're reading this blog, and have emailed me in the past two days, you now know why there's been no reply.

There may not be, either. We're unsure what we're going to do, but either a change in email service/address or a decision to simply abandon all email until this can be resolved may be forthcoming in the very near future.

This is rather symptomatic of my ongoing interaction with computers: as soon as I gain a level of interactive competence with current systems, some dramatic overnight overhaul of systems renders my ability to interact with systems moot and obsolete. This then requires further expenditures of time, money, and effort into forced reeducation, all of which seems to me an increasingly fruitless waste of said time, money, and effort. Still, I soldier on, though I do resent at times the capitalizing on my time this vicious cycle requires. (Wouldn't you all rather I be writing or drawing in any case?)

In this matter -- and I do hope I'm wrong about this -- it may be the internet/email systems are simply no longer serving those of us still limited exclusively by geographic issues beyond our control to 'dial' phoneline access. Marj and I live in a region of Vermont where no rapid-alternatives are available (no cable, no satellite access). Hopefully, I am dead wrong -- but if so, this may prove to be one of those turning points where we say "ah, fuck it."

(The impending, long-promised Federally imposed High Definition television changeover promises to be another such turning point -- we're not going to blow $1000+ for HD monitors and the technology upgrade necessary to access television we no longer watch in any case. TV is no longer part of our active lives, and hasn't been for some time, so it'll be easy to bail out when the TV simply no longer functions with broadcast signals of any kind.)

Mind you, this is not a willful abandonment of computers and the internet -- that's become a staple of our day-to-day lives -- but if communication in one-way as our email now is, it serves little useful purpose.

So, email -- we'll see.

But at present, if you're writing me, I can read your email -- I can't respond.

Sorry. Will keep you posted here, one way or the other.

___

(BTW -- apologies to the rest of you -- quick replies to pending emails to folks I know read this blog: Thanks, Heath, but that's not a Hamilton's Invader insect, whatever the auction site says; many thanks for the effort, though -- Salvo, got your email, all is well; don't despair, snail-mail is slow twixt the US and Italy -- Oh, no, Implosia, be careful, and pleasepleaseplease, don't fucking do that! You'll never be able to replace/supplant that organ!
__

And speaking of regionalized constrictions on access to interaction with the rest of the world:

Re: "Intelligent Design"

As the current regional democracy of school boards shapes our national dialogue on this topic (note the tight swing vote in the current Kansas school situation, and that last week's election locally ousted the Pennsylvania school board members who had voted for "Intelligent Design" being taught in their school), keep in mind that choosing to pay attention to science may be determined by such democratic process, but the scientific principles at stake will not be deterred. Ignorance may impose local-government-sanctioned ignorance on the next generation, but the rest of the world marches on. The consequences will eventually become so real that ignoring them becomes impossible.

In the 21st Century, an American determinative refusal to engage with science as the rest of the world does will simply place the burden upon our country, culture and children of a self-imposed exile from reality. We pursue this path to the detriment of our own assumed future role in the global community. If faith-based redefinitions of the sciences continue to gain momentum, we'll drift back to the illusory succor of a new Dark Age while Europe and Asia usurp our positions in evolving (yes, evolving) technologies and sciences. Willful stupidity is no excuse.

With the summer boost President Bush's input fully acknowledged herein (further evidence of his disdain and fundamental refusal to engage with science on any level beyond that which sanctions his dangerously narrow "What, Me Worry?" worldview), I humbly add the following to my earlier posts on the topic:

First off, author John Rennie provides some insightful retorts to fifteen key points in the current ID dogma in

Scientific American responds to ID

Give it a read. There will be a test in 2007.

Bringing to the table his mastery of the language (he is, after all, linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as an activist writer), Noam Chomsky reorients the discussion. He suggests we adopt new terminology, proposing the moniker "Malignant Design". Hmmmm, it does explain a good deal, doesn't it? The November 14th Toronto Star article includes the following bon mots:

President George W. Bush favors teaching both evolution and "intelligent design" in schools, "so people can know what the debate is about." To proponents, intelligent design is the notion that the universe is too complex to have developed without a nudge from a higher power than evolution or natural selection. To detractors, intelligent design is creationism -- the literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis -- in a thin guise, or simply vacuous, about as interesting as "I don't understand"...

So far, however, the curriculum has not encompassed one obvious point of view: malignant design. Unlike intelligent design, for which the evidence is zero, malignant design has tons of empirical evidence, much more than Darwinian evolution, by some criteria: the world's cruelty.

Intelligent design raises the question of whether it is intelligent to disregard scientific evidence about matters of supreme importance to the nation and the world -- like global warming. An old-fashioned conservative would believe in the value of Enlightenment ideals -- rationality, critical analysis, freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry -- and would try to adapt them to a modern society.

America's Founding Fathers, children of the Enlightenment, championed those ideals and took pains to create a constitution that espoused religious freedom yet separated church and state.

The United States, despite the occasional messianism of its leaders, isn't a theocracy. In our time, Bush administration hostility to scientific inquiry puts the world at risk. Environmental catastrophe, whether you think the world has been developing only since Genesis or for eons, is far too serious to ignore.

Perhaps only the word "malignant" could describe a failure to acknowledge, much less address, the all-too-scientific issue of climate change. Thus, the "moral clarity" of the Bush administration extends to its cavalier attitude toward the fate of our grandchildren."

(Special thanks to 'Artemis' aka Ashley and to HomeyM for their always generous input.)

Taking my own advice to heart, you'll of course excuse me now while I try to reorient myself to the rather sudden and completely unexpected evolution in my email system.

Are those feathers sprouting on my keyboard, or am I evolving a third eye?

Woe to Those Behind the Eight-Ball of Technology...

Brief post today, cuz I'm fried. I was up until about an hour or so before dawn working -- I used to be able to pull the occasional all-nighter, but that's a thing of the past.

As a youth in my twenties, it was hey -- no sweat! I caught up on sleep later. After hitting 35 or so, the toll was harsher on the ol' bod: still, I miss the magic hours twixt dusk and dawn for creative work, especially after midnight when the phone won't ring and the night stretches in directions one forgot was possible.

Point being, I'm toast this morn.

Sleeping four fitful daylight hours doesn't suffice, and with a long drive to and from the Center for Cartoon Studies ahead of me before and after teaching, I'm dreading the drive home tonight (one word: "cof-fee," which will keep me up upon my return home and further disorient). I'll make it, but I'm prepping for a fall-down all day tomorrow as I pay the piper for working into the wee hours this morn.

Anyhoot, the point is, I opened the Yahoo email this morning on my old steam-powered iMac and -- I can't reply to any email! The beast has altered itself in fundamental and no-longer-functional ways. What the -- ??

Overnight, Yahoo has magically "upgraded" the email reply function in such a manner that all sorts of ginchy bells and whistles now appear in a colorful bar atop the reply window -- two of which the little 'warning' boxes on my screen alert me to this iMac's inability to load -- and I can't write a reply to anyone! Nada! Nothing is working as it had for years until 9 AM this morning! YYYYYYyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaggghhhhhhhh!

A "heads up" notice or instructional email or just a fucking option to engage or disengage would be nice, but nooooooooo, computer geeks never ever think that way. A choice would have been nice.

I loathe "upgrades," particularly unannounced ones on my low-tech, functional old 'puter. They always require hours and sometimes days of additional labor and time I haven't got to pour into this box, all to arrive at roughly the place I was comfortably at before.

Too exhausted to fuck with such frivolities this morn, my apologies to all I would normally have communicated with by this hour, and ta-ta for now.

The Luddite is leaving the room.

Monday Morning, No Blues...

Ya, I know -- "Speak for yourself, Bissette!" Well, this Monday morn finds me applying the final coats of poly to the massive new computer desktop that'll be installed into my studio this week (with just enough poly left to slap one coat on the wall-mounted floor-to-ceiling shelving unit), and it's warm outside and I'm prepping for tomorrow's CCS class all day, so it's all good from here.

Some links, updates, and news:

Meet David Paleo: If Taboo still existed, he'd be there!

Thanks to an October email out of the blue from Argentina, and a followup from Mark Martin, whose email to me prompted contact with one David Paleo and a little connect-the-dots to the earlier October email I referred to, it's my great pleasure to introduce you to a cartoonist you've likely not heard of -- or much of, unless you're familiar with his appearances in The Comics Journal oversize specials, or saw his work in Satan's Three-Ring Circus. Meet David Paleo, whose art would be a fixture of Taboo were I still editing/co-publishing that verboten anthology. He's the first cartoonist I've seen whose work echoes and expands upon that of my old amigo Rick Grimes, though I've no idea if David has ever seen Grimes's work. David's work has its own distinctive intensity, and an eye for detail closer to the more Basil Wolverton-inspired underground comix maestros of yore, but don't take my word for it. You'll see what I mean if you check out these single-page illustrations:

Niamis

Suaz

Vvovil

Mark also sent me a link to one of David's stories, and it's mesmerizing, hilarious, perverse, and downright anus-puckering in the extreme. WARNING! Be sure you've finished breakfast/lunch/dinner before clicking to this one! You have been cautioned! If you've the belly for it, check out the scatalogical three-page story

"Mengeloid!"

__

Where Oh Where is Horrible Hamilton?

ALERT! ALERT! Aging cartoonist seeking alien artifact from his youth! Does anyone out there know where I can get my hands on a Horrible Hamilton? I would so love to see my old buddy again.

Last night I caught the first fifteen minutes of the new WB show Supernatural, which left me cold and indifferent, despite the bug attacks peppering every closing for a commercial break. Yawn.

Now, I remember when bugs were big, I mean, BIG. And I remember when they invaded the pages of the beloved Sears Christmas Catalog back in '62 or '63, via the unexpected appearance of outsized, green, bug-eyed, blood-veined sac bristling, jaws-agape invertebrate extraterrestrials who presented themselves as -- Hamilton's Invaders!

That Christmas, these objects of compulsive fascination indeed invaded our Christmas, and they were great monster toys. There was no explanation for who or what Hamilton might be, so I assumed he was the main bug, the BIG bug -- Horrible Hamilton -- and here he is, in all his glory:

Horrible Hamilton and his Beetle Battle-buster!

Both insects moved -- Horrible Hamilton by a rotation of that quartet of legs, activated by pulling a string out of his ass, the beetle by a little motor and wheels in his carapace underbelly -- and if you pried their jaws open, they would automatically close upon contact with, say, a plastic soldier, or one of the futuristic army grunts featured with the following:

Weapons of Mass Destruction to Halt Horrible Hamilton's Invaders!

Hamilton's Invaders Helmet!

I had them all -- and as a matter of fact, that final item -- the helmet, still in its (beat up) box -- is in the Henderson State University/HUIE Library collection of my weird shit, in case any of you doubt my wistful memories here. Lea Ann, quick, display the helmet! Better yet, wear it! It may be all that saves you from... Hamilton's Invaders!

I gave up my helmet to the greater good of the Stephen R. Bissette collection at HUIE, but I'd sure love to find a real, semi-live Horrible Hamilton. If anyone has any leads, let me know, please!

These colorful online pix come to you and me courtesy of the marvelous

Gallery of Monster Toys.

It's a site my amigo Michael Ryan steered me to, and here's what its sponsors have to say about Hamilton's Invaders:

"A set of imaginative "giant bug" toys. Though manufactured in the 60's, their B-movie style owed more to the 50's. Three large boxed playsets included one giant bug, a military vehicle and a squad of brave plastic soldiers. Several smaller bugs were sold seperately, as were additional vehicles, soldiers and a helmet that kids could wear. The "leader" bug was named Horrible Hamilton, the biggest of the invading insects."

Explore the site, and have some fun.
___

And if this wasn't a toxic enough dose of my obsessions on a Monday morning, or enough of little ol' me to slake your thirst for Bissettiana, I've just completed on online interview for the regional website iBrattleboro site. It's the website for the closest thing to a real town, Brattleboro, VT, where my daughter Maia and son Dan live and work, so it's home sweet home for some of the Bissette clan.

Anyhoot, iBrattleboro Grand Omnipotent Stomper and contributor Christopher Grotke asked me some pungent questions (including some I've never been asked before -- read all about my high school animation experiments!), so my futher blatherings await you

here.

That's that for this morning... Have a great Monday, if the Mengeloid didn't put you off your granola!

On Neil Gaiman, Odds and Ends, and Somesuch: Being An Account, Of a Rather Dithering "Is He Really OK?" Sort, of My Recent Reveries on My Friend Neil, Prompted by a Recent Visit to a Bookshoppe; This to be Followed by a Rather Random But Hopefully Bemusing Potpourri of Virtual-Space Connections, Unexpected Delights & Dust-Bunnies, Gatherums, Brick-Bats, Curios, Oddities, and Things That Make My Bump Go Grind in the Night, and Yet Leaves No Wet Spots

While perusing the book store shelves this week, I came across no less than three new books by (in various capacities) my dear but distant friend Neil Gaiman, who by his own admission I have known since he was a mere teenage lad. Frustratingly, the three tomes all were tied into Neil and Dave McKean's new (first) feature film MirrorMask, which has neither screened nor seems to be coming soon to a theater-near-me. Also frustratingly, the total sum due, had I been so bold as to purchase all three lovely books, would have exceeded the right-now-rather-princely sum of $100 or more, which I neither had in hand nor could afford to drop, what with daily expenditures for the ongoing construction of my studio/library/office, which my beloved wife Marj summarily dubbed "the money pit" yesterday at about 12:35 PM.

In any case, the three books were and are quite lovely, and I spent a bit of my available down time happily perusing all three before resigning myself to placing them back upon their display shelves. (Lest you think I am, at this juncture, being either stingy, puckish, or perverse, allow me to hasten to include herein the titles of all three books, should you care to ferret them out for your own amusement and edification: they are, in no particular order, MirrorMask Script Book (Harper Collins), a handsome hardcover which is what it says, and which I perused rather cautiously, not wanting to betray any of the film’s narrative secrets prior to viewing the film itself; The Alchemy of MirrorMask (Collins Design/Harper Collins), another expansive hardcover, this one concerning the production of the film itself, plentifully illustrated; and MirrorMask, an illustrated novella based upon the film and aimed at juvenile readers and any progessive ages up from that target audience.) I also understand there is a fourth tome, MirrorMask: A Really Useful Book, upon whose relative usefulness or uselessness I cannot comment, save to note it is apparently scribed in invisible ink, which is a ploy only a writer of Neil’s stature can get away with in the current constricted book market. Do not take my word for it that these books are worthy of attention; I urge you to forthwith search them out for yourself, and in a manner permitting physical interaction rather than the sort of “online shopping” experience that passes for interaction these days. If you are indeed unfortunately addicted only to the latter, or have no bookstore worthy of the drive anywhere within reasonable motoring distance, or no vehicle to facilitate such travel, please allow me to steer your attention to the bookseller who seems to be Neil’s preference, in that this bookseller often offers (at no additional cost, in most cases) the opportunity for you to purchase copies of Neil’s books which have been graced with a signature from the very hand of Neil, thus affording those of you unable to personally interact with Neil in any reasonable venue the opportunity to purchase and possess a signed Neil Gaiman tome. The bookseller I speak of is

DreamHaven Books.

Forgive my leisurely prattling on, and allow me to arrive at the purpose of the above introductory statement. I indeed enjoyed my time with said tomes, all of which led me thereafter to muse a bit wistfully about my dear friend Neil, who I have not laid eyes on for quite some time. As happens when one works in the professions and the arts, one finds oneself feeling very close to fellow travellers at times in ways that would rationally seem quite incompatible with the rather fleeting time one gets to spend with these fellow travellers. Further compromising those brief times in which one indeed shares a bit of time, space, perhaps food and drink, with a heartfelt fellow traveller is the fact that such meetings of the minds and crossings of paths usually occur amid the din and clamor of massive gatherings none-too-condusive to any intimacy of expression or true fellowship, particularly when one or the other or both are therein the focus of much attention -- as Neil most often is. When once Neil expressed his discomfort with the adulation and lack of personal space thus available at such cacophanous gatherings, I humbly pointed out that if Neil were merely to shed his black clothing and doff the sunglasses to dress in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and a John Deere cap, he might freely move about and go anywhere without interruption or the imposition of others upon him, Neil cocked his head and looked at me in a most curious manner, as if I had (for instance) just nibbled on the thorax of some unusual form of invertebrate, most likely an insect.

Thus, we rarely actually see one another. That said, we have stolen some time in the past: a trip I made to his and Mary’s home in Nutley, England, prior to their move to America; a most pleasant sojourn to Neil and Mary’s new home in America, whereupon I met The Fabulous Lorraine and family and others in their circle, though that trip was blighted somewhat by an intractable pain in Neil’s neck which contorted his features and rather skewed his head akimbo for the entirity of my visit, thus demonstratably proving I am indeed comparable to a pain in Neil’s neck (though he politely, as is his wont, later ascribed said neck-agony to an allergy to coffee, which at the time he knew not of, but which his own father soon informed him of); a trip Neil made to Vermont to visit myself and my first wife Marlene and our children Maia and Daniel at tender ages; and most recently, a planned shared meeting, for two full days, at the summer horror writers’ convention Necon, wherein Neil and I roomed together, and spent one night laying in the dark talking about our lives and our children and life in general, just as one does as a lad camping out in a tent or under the stars, until we fell soundly asleep, despite the relative discomfort of the Necon beds, which is condusive to late night chats due to the difficulty one finds falling asleep therein. Neil has been at times among the most charitable of friends, once arranging for my daughter Maia to attend a Tori Amos concert; alas, that’s another story, which I shan’t go into here, but mention it only to affirm the generosity of spirit and care Neil has indeed extended in the direction of myself and my family, which endears him forever to us all.

It is indeed true that I first met Neil when he was but a teenager, standing as an acolyte alongside none other than Clive Barker when Clive visited Alan Moore, John Totleben and myself at the annual UKAK in the mid-1980s. Neil was at that time laboring to establish his writing credentials, expressing himself via fiction and non-fiction in any and all available publishing venues, as we are all wont to do at that stage in our respective careers. I thereafter kept an eye out for his writings, including Don’t Panic and an incredibly entertaining book of dialogue quotes taken from countless cinematic endeavors of dubious merit, a tome co-scribed by Kim Newman, who is also a hale and hearty fellow. During these early years, I also secured (thanks to a fellow fan in the Boston area) a copy of Neil’s first solo book effort, being a pop-music biographical treatise on none other than Duran Duran, for which I had been “hungry like the wolf” since first hearing of its existence, and which now sits proudly upon my shelves alongside Sandman collections and the copies of Violent Cases and Mr. Punch both Neil and Dave McKean so lovingly scribed to me long ago.

It’s been some time since Neil and I either met or chatted, but I must say part of the pleasure of having savored such relations means that one enjoys seeing the fruits of the other’s labors: it’s indeed a part of them, now here, in one’s hands, visible on bookstore shelves. It’s no balm for the distance in miles and time, but it’s something to be savored nonetheless. I greatly look forward to MirrorMask, if only to share 90 minutes or so in the creative company of Neil and Dave -- of whom I’ve not spoken much of this morning, but one day shall -- and bask in whatever that experience may hold.

I shall further express and detail my musings on my friend Neil in a future post, this I promise. But for now, this is all that time permits. I shall therein mention more of our true experiences, and reflect upon what marvelous shared moments and gracious expressions of his caring he has shared with me over the years. Among our true experiences I may expound upon at some future time is our visit to what was, by all appearances, a "magic bookshoppe," and I do mean magic, and one we both were convinced we would never be able to retrace our steps to again, should we ever try, for there we both found books we never thought existed, and many we each had individually sought without success and/or knew of and coveted but never beheld ourselves, and yet there they were. I may even humble myself so as to illuminate for you why it is that Neil refers to myself upon occasion as "Hamster Balls," knowing, of course, that Neil may have already done so in a public venue, or may do so pre-emptively in his own blog. That is, always, his perogative -- but I do still have that Duran Duran book in easy reach, and may be forced to retaliate, though I am loathe to do so, or even ponder such an action on such a fine Sunday morning as this.
___

Amid other diversionary delights, might I recommend this fine Sunday morning (and it is a fine one, here in Vermont, and much more hospitably warm than it has been the past two days) that you enliven and invigorate this blessed Day of Rest with a non-labor-intensive, rather simple exertion of your finger to explore

this.

As the visual and text awaiting you there may prove beneficial to your spiritual well-being, and by happenstance might tickle the fancy or funny-bone of one or more of you, I offer it in good accord with this Holiest of Weekdays, and remind you that this diversion was not of my making nor of my discovery. It comes to you compliments of Joe Dante, Jr. by way of our mutual friend and constant compatriot Tim Lucas, and thus they are the gentlemen you should applaud should this diversion indeed prove of interest or slight value to you.

I, for one, can only wonder what the artisans whose work brightens the other end of that link might do or have already done with more appropro vehicles for their mode of exploration, such as Red Planet Mars, in which G-d Himself speaks to we puny Earth inhabitants from yon Red Planet's surface, or mayhaps When Worlds Collide, which given a moment to ponder, I might humbly suggest would make an ideal title for a revisionist cinematic science-fiction epic concerning the current culture-clash so prevalent in our news of late concerning the legal battles for the very souls of our youth over the teaching of (shudder) "evolution" in our schools. Alas, I shall table that controversial subject for another day, not wishing to disturb or in any way unsettle your own Day of Rest this fine Sunday morning.
___

In another notable and altogether honorable focus of creative powers and interdisciplinary effort, I would like to further direct your attention this fine and fit morning to a new PaleoBlog posting by my fine Canadian friend, wee-fellow-compatriot in comics, and paleontologist-by-profession Dr. Michael Ryan, who has often illuminated my life and creative efforts (such as they are) with his considerable insights, knowledge, and passions (of the non-transgressive variety, I hasten to add). Of late, said Dr. Ryan, who I shall hereafter refer to as Michael, due to our long-standing friendship (hence, I am not being overly familiar, lest you fear I am being too forward), has taken it upon himself to articulate his current fascination and the considerable pleasures a book has recently instilled within him, being the latest handsome tome dedicated to the life and work of that most esteemed of illustrative geniuses, none other than

Roy Krenkel.

A mere click on his hallowed name will instantly transport you to Michael's reverent musings, which I believe and most dearly hope will further grace your Sunday with mirth and not a bit of melancholy.

If I may be so bold, I would care to add my personal recall of having met the late great Mr. Roy Krenkel during my own wayward youth, as an aspiring cartoonist suitably humbled and in awe of the mere presence of Mr. Krenkel when we crossed paths at two consecutives comics gatherings in the New York City area. Mr. Krenkel was always remarkably gracious to others, particularly artists, and at one such occasion in fact invited my fellow cartoonist and Joe Kubert School classmate Tom Yeates to come, sit beside him, and peddle our own wares alongside the master. Mr. Krenkel thereafter produced a series of nondescript, unadorned boxboard boxes -- such as those typing paper might be purchased or stored within -- and removing the lids, exposed to all those passing an extraordinary array of his own sketches, in both pencil and pen, primarily etched upon tracing paper and a thin vellum. These were all miraculous renditions of those subjects nearest and dearest to Mr. Krenkel's heart, being exquisite miniature renditions of all manner of prehistoric peoples and creatures, armored and weapon-wielding warriors, ancient architectures and structures, fantastic beings of the imagination, and living animals, all delineated with a precision of line and effect that was truly breathtaking. Some were mere fragments, smaller than one-inch-by-one-inch, while others were folded vellum masterpieces, which at their full length would fill a frame of 11 inches by 17 inches or more. All were offered up by Mr. Krenkel for either the pleasure of perusement, or for purchase, should one be able to afford either as little as $2 or up to $50 (for a couple that were further embellished with either watercolor tints or colored pencil strokes, if not both). Being an impoverished student and merely an aspiring artist at that juncture of my own career arc, I availed myself of the pittance in my pocket (thus condemning myself to missing lunch, though the sacrifice was then and today well worth it) to purchase as many of Mr. Krenkel's tiny tracing paper sketches of antediluvian animals (as that is my own passion) as I could possibly afford. Later in the day, Mr. Krenkel seemed highly amused and even a little touched when Tom and I diverted our humble earnings from our own table sales and sketch income to the purchase of more of his marvelous art, ensuring one last exploration of all that remained in Mr. Krenkel's boxes at the end of that day of conventioneering.

Those precious, exquisite miniatures reside still in my collection, lovingly cradled in one of my favorite tomes collecting Mr. Krenkel's work. I will leave it to you to avail yourself of the link to Michael's PaleoBlog, which I have provided so thoughtfully above, to cast a light upon the life and labors of the late Mr. Krenkel, a beacon further illuminated by the insightful writings of none other than Mr. William Stout, who has himself followed in Mr. Krenkel's footsteps as both a fantasy artist extraordinaire and paleontological reconstructionist, wielding pencil, pen, brush, ink, and all manner of colors and pigments to recreate in two-dimensions that which once walked, crawled, slithered, swam, and flew upon this planet.

I will also add, though it is of a rather intimate and provocative nature, and perhaps too ribald for a fine Sunday morning such as this (for which I beg your indulgence and forgiveness, lest I have transgressed in a manner I earlier promised I would not), that Mr. Krenkel was not shy about his delight in the female of the species, particularly those who would be considered by others rotund or "big-boned," as some choose to politely put it. I have it from knowledgable sources that Mr. Krenkel was known, for instance, to have once rhapsodized over a femme who'd caught his fancy as being "a veritable sphere of a woman," and hence abundantly desirable. Within my own collection resides a published portfolio of Mr. Krenkel art of a most peculiar nature, being delicately-rendered portraits of rather obese Amazionian warrior-women astride various species of Dinosauria, some of Mr. Krenkel's invention. These curious portraits are quite lovely and uttery beguiling, further reinforcing the truth of those tales of yore I've heard over the years concerning Mr. Krenkel's affection for the fairer sex writ large in the flesh, and thus making sense of a couple of comments Mr. Krenkel himself shared, in a hearty "good fellow" manner, with Tom and I that convention day, as a variety of women of all ages and dimensions passed by our tables. It is with some devotion that I add, by way of providing a final morsel of curious lore, that Tom later told me he keeps a sword he was given by Mr. Krenkel, or a sword that once belonged to Mr. Krenkel that Tom somehow acquired in his travels, beneath his bed. That sword has served Tom admirably, and no doubt has offered some measure of protection at times.

There is much similar and curious cartoonist lore that we of the inky trade share among us, some which is best left unexposed to the light of virtual space. My knowing these things is just a fact of my chosen profession, and one we cartoonists often muse over, for private and occasional public amusement. They are in and of themselves of no consequence and yet sources of great delight at times, particularly when shared, though one must at all times remain discreet and practice discretion in such airings. For instance, while there is certainly no harm in Mark Martin having revealed to the masses that Kevin Eastman rubs his bare feet with his socks after having removed them, or that I choose to seperately consume my breakfast cereal and glass of skim milk each morning for breakfast, or my mentioning here that Eddie Campbell has been observed in my own home reclining with the perfect rigidity of an unwarped board upon the bare floor with not so much as a pillow beneath his head, and thereby napping soundly, despite the giggles of my own children in their youth, astounded at the spectacle of this Scot-from-Australia sleeping thus, it would be untoward of me to say anything more about the late Mr. Krenkel, lest I inadvertantly imply or infer a level of intimate knowledge I neither have, had, nor wish to mislead any reader I might have had, concerning any details of Mr. Krenkel's time on this earthly plane.

Being a gentleman, I will leave it at that, and beg your indulgence one last time for perhaps transgressing, if indeed you feel I have.

And with that, I bid you, constant reader, a fond adieu, and ciao.

Enjoy the day, and ponder the blessings which are yours at this time, as I shall, without coveting your own.

"Bossth! The Room! The Room!"

I can almost taste it -- in fact, phwaaw -- cough, cough! -- I can. I just cleaned it!

The workspace/library room will be almost complete by this time next week. A lot of work was done this week, including the completion of all sheetrocking, I slapped up two coats of paint within a 15 hour period on Wednesday, and since then Olivier and his co-workers have completed 2/3 of the massive shelving units and yesterday he prepared, cut, and sanded the two-tier computer/writing desk. I'll be polyurethaning it this weekend so it can be installed on either Monday or Wednesday.

When I rechecked the measurements yesterday morning, my drawing board will indeed fit into the room as well (giving me two drawing studio spaces within the home, a major change from the past seven years of drawing on the kitchen table or counter).

Next weekend, we'll still have the final installation of the heating baseboards and electrical/lighting fixtures to see to, then I'm moving in. Oh, man, I can hardly wait... I've been wrestling with the lack of dedicated work space for so long, due in part to the life changes, shifting around in living space, and (most overwhelming of all) the sheer quantity of books/archival material/artwork/etc. I've accumulated in 30 years. This is the winter of final organization, accessing, and having a proper work area, and it's become exciting this past week as the light at the end of the tunnel grows closer --

More flicks and pix...

THE CONSTANT GARDENER -- John le Carre's novel marked a thematic shift in his work which this excellent adaptation adheres to, positing a post-Cold War villain (the pharmaceutical corporations) audiences can relate to while dramatizing the human toll exacted by the unholy wedding of governments and corporations. The complicity autopsied here is the government-sanctioned (on multiple levels) appropriation of beneath-the-radar Third World (African) populations for medical experimentation, and the fate of those principled 'rogue' individuals who seek to expose the powers-that-be. Rachel Weisz is the journalist, wife of timid Brit career diplomat Ralph Fiennes, determined to unveil the veiled 'health procedures' perpetrated against impoverished Kenyan citizens under the guise of 'care'; alas, Fiennes' diplomatic superior (perfectly played by Danny Huston) has interests in both getting into Weisz's panties and preserving the status quo complicity of the British government and drug companies, and it takes the disappearance of his wife to begin to tear the blinders from Fiennes's eyes. All this duplicity and espionage could have been dry as African sand, but director Fernando Meirelles -- whose City of God crackled with immediacy and terrifying energy -- forges from an excellent script a gripping drama that gets under the skin in all kinds of ways, aided considerably by its sterling cast (including Pete Postlewaite and Bill Nighy in key supporting roles). This isn't a dogmatic political tract: in keeping with the strengths of LeCarre's novels, it has the heat of the heart in every frame. What sets this film apart from others of its ilk is its emotional core: Meirelles opens us up to the true scope of the tragedy, from its most base humanity -- the warm intimacy between Fiennes and Weisz, the bonds of friendship and conviction between Weisz and her African compatriots, and Fiennes's awakening to the consistency of those bonds in the light of Huston's maladroit attempts to portray them as betrayals -- to the cruelity of those in power so callously indifferent to the human toll of their crimes. The massive tragedy is horrific, but it's the sorrowful arc of Fiennes's character, LeCarre's Constant Gardener, that grounds it in something one can almost touch and taste. Timely, agonizing, and potent, Meirelles exposes all levels of this contemporary corruptive network to the sun, from the highest levels of power to the sordid fly-blown remnants of the disposal operations that maintain the silence necessary to such criminal extremes of unchecked globalist policies. The film circles one such crimescene from its black heart -- in which we and Fiennes visit the sad scene of Weisz's final moments -- to its heartbreaking finale at the same remote beachhead. A remarkable film, highly recommended.

THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE -- One of the late summer's surprise hits, this rather curious fusion of 1970s bookends The Exorcist and Robert Wise and Frank DeFelitta's forgotten reincarnation opus Audrey Rose is arguably an extension of the current cycle of studio remakes of 1970s horror films, revamping The Exorcist into a more "life-affirming faith-based" crowd-pleaser. Actually, it's closer in tone to The Runner Stumbles (Stanley Kramer's sad final film) than Audrey Rose, but I'd be surprised if anyone had heard of, much less seen, that curio -- so, let's stick with The Exorcist and Audrey Rose analogy, shall we? The particulars, from its Catholic orientation and claim of basis in a true story to the gender and exorcism of its possession host (effectively portrayed by Jennifer Carpenter), are almost identical to The Exorcist, save for the courtroom framing device and resulting reorientation to the case history at hand. Supplanting Pazuzu with a more traditional demonic presence, skirting scatalogical extremes, and eschewing the sparks between secular amorality of Exorcist director Friedkin's pragmatic approach to Exorcist author Blatty's passionate faith-fueled Christian content and intent, Emily Rose director Scott Derrickson is clearly on the side of the angels from the get-go. Thus, its the dramatic tension between courtroom opponents Laura Linney and prosecutor Campbell Scott in the trial of Roman Catholic exorcist/priest Tom Wilkerson that is the arena of this spiritual battle, not the frigid bedroom-and-barn locales in which Wilkerson sought to exorcise Carpenter. In short, it's Perry Mason sugar-coating a pro-Christian horror flick, as such an extension of the ongoing fundamentalist Christian horror cycle (e.g., The Omega Code, the Left Behind series, etc.) and Hollywood satellite productions (from indies like The Rapture to studio efforts like The Seventh Sign, Stigmata, and others). That said, Derrickson spices the courtroom/prison cell/late-night-home-alone-in-the-apartment crisis of faith character arc Linney suffers in the thrall of Wilkerson's faith with some mighty effective chills. Primary among these are the flashbacks to Carpenter's gradual collapse and possible possession, including one startling classroom hallucination that had me jumping and involuntarily muttering, "Jesus Christ!" That wins my heart in the horror department, so I've got to recommend this despite the sanctimonious piety of the courtroom proceedings and reassuring agenda of the film as a whole.

GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK -- Highest recommendation! George Clooney's maturation as a filmmaker and actor continues with this crisp, unpretentious, straight-forward and remarkable "you-are-there" account of premiere TV journalist Edward R. Murrow's determinative decision to expose and derail the witch-hunt mounted by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Despite the caveats of some critics, Clooney's decision to work with extant archival footage of McCarthy, the Senator's investigations, and the televised hearings is a masterstroke: while the fidelity to its period (the early 1950s) and performances are sterling across-the-board, the galvanizing power of the McCarthy footage cannot be overstated, nor its relevence to the post-9/11 national environment we find ourselves steeped in today. David Strathairn has always been among my favorite character actors of this generation, and he inhabits Murrow with unwavering focus and gravitas (including the framing farewell speech to a broadcasters gathering, Murrow's sobering parting shot to the very medium and its corporate captors who were intent upon trivializing democracy in its race to pander to consumer culture). The supporting cast -- Clooney, Patricia Clarkson, Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Daniels) -- are just as good, but Frank Langella is arguably best of all as the CBS honcho who backed Murrow's stand against McCarthy while tending to the harsh mistress of business -- which, after the crisis, claims her pound of flesh. This is brilliant populist filmmaking, the courage of its convictions (and determination to "speak truth to power," as they say) anchored primarily in its determination to dramatize a key turning point in American history by simply telling the story, sans flash, flourishes, or embellishments. Note that Clooney is the second ‘liberal’ filmmaker to incorporate a telling archival clip of General & President Dwight Eisenhower at/as a critical point in its tapestry (the first, of course, was Oliver Stone with JFK). Clooney ends with a succinct Eisenhower clip that stands in harsh historic contrast to current President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney’s pro-incarceration-without-due-process (and torture) policies; indeed, decency and shame seem distant from our current government's members. Like so much else in this film, it’s impossible not to draw the unfortunate parallels -- how far astray we’ve wandered from our espoused ideals, as a country, as a people, and as a world power. But whatever your politics, see this film -- it's a solid piece of work, and a perfect companion feature to Michael Mann's excellent The Insider (1999). Together, they offer sobering accounts of the rise and fall of CBS News and American television journalism as a whole. Clooney lucidly locates the seeds of the destruction Mann potently dramatized, both evident in the closed-door office rooms meetings so central to both stories. Another link they share are those 'coffin nails' -- a lot of cigarettes are smoked in Good Night, and the only commercial Clooney includes in his tapestry of 1950s TV is a hilarious cigarette ad of the period; The Insider neatly caps and concludes that component of Good Luck in spades. Again, Good Luck and Good Night is not to be missed -- among the year's best.

More this weekend --

And Soon the Office...

Between the wind and lightning and rain storms yesterday, and the two coats of paint I splashed onto the walls & ceiling (and floor and me) of the new office/studio/library room, and the pleasure of hanging with my son Dan for the afternoon and early evening, I didn't even approach the computers yesterday except to unplug them completely when a bolt of lightning hit nearby. Sparks flew and there was a loud 'pop', sharp enough to prompt the mass unplugging of tech equipment in every corner of the house. That was the first bolt to hit -- before that all we'd had was rain and wind -- but it was enough. Luckily, everything seems to be working fine this morning.

Before the storm hit, though, Dan and I enjoyed the new Blue Underground DVD release of an old drive-in fave of mine, Tombs of the Blind Dead, which was big fun. More on that later, too. After Marj got home, we enjoyed our first sit-down dinner together at home since Dan moved out earlier this fall, and it was big fun, too. Drove Dan back to town in the hammering rain with a bag of video bootie (giving him some of my old big-box horror vids), then home again home again to jiggedy-jig the second coat of paint in the new room before collapsing around midnight.

So, catchup post later this morning. Until then, the eagerly-anticipated, sorely-needed room awaits the next stage, underway as I type this, of the massive shelving construction (being done by the good folks at Rise Up Builders, Olivier and Elliott, who have done top-notch work for us before). Soon, soon, I'll be in my new work space!

Time to Play the ILSA Game! C'mon, America, Join in the Fun!!

Sometimes the online headlines -- the title at the top of the window frame -- speak volumes.

Yesterday's first online news item on President Bush unapologetically supporting the current US torture state was a case in point: "Bush Declares 'We Do Not Torture' -- Yahoo News".

Ya, Yahoo News -- what a ya-hoo.

It's all

here.

This is a step forward from Bush's previous claims that "America does not believe in torture," which was at least not as blatant a lie. We may torture, but we don't "believe" in it, or that we are doing it.

Let's call a spade a spade, shall we? I assume enough of you are acquainted with Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, and Ilsa: Tigress of Siberia -- if only by reputation -- to understand the game following.

Hey, big-budget remakes of 1970s and '80s gorefests are all the rage right now, right? I mean, if they can remake Assault on Precinct 13, Dawn of the Dead and even Squirm (under the modified moniker Slither, which technically was a 1970s flick starring James Caan), why not bring back Ilsa?

Think about it. Uma Thurman would be a natural, unless Meryl Streep has dibs. Hell, we can even preserve the Middle East setting of Harem Keeper, and bring back Ilsa's statuesque ass-kicking, eye-gouging Amazonian bodyguards Velvet and Satin in the bargain. Whadya think, Lucy Lui and Keira Knightley in those roles?

Consider this the opening pre-title faux newsreel sequence of the upcoming Ilsa: Dominatrix of Abu Ghraib, though that title isn't final (producers are also considering Ilsa: Blood-Bitch of Guantanamo Bay). They weren't originally going to cast Ilsa as el Presidente, but recent developments have prompted the bolder narrative strokes (and I do mean strokes):
_____

"PANAMA CITY, Panama - President Ilsa on Monday defended U.S. interrogation practices and called the treatment of terrorism suspects lawful.

"We do not torture," Ilsa declared in response to reports of secret CIA prisons overseas.

Ilsa supported an effort spearheaded by cyborg Vice President Dick Kaiser to block or modify a proposed Senate-passed ban on torture.

"We're working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible, more possible, to do our job," Ilsa said. "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet we will aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law."

Licking her lips seductively, President Ilsa added, "My law."

Kaiser is seeking to persuade Congress to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from the proposed torture ban if one is passed by both chambers.

Accompanied by her aides Satin and Velvet, Ilsa spoke at a news conference with Panamanian President Martin Torrijos on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider a challenge to the administration's military tribunals for foreign terror suspects.

In a case entailing a major test of the government's wartime powers, justices will decide whether Osama bin Laden's former driver can be tried for war crimes before military officers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, U.S. military forces have held hundreds of suspects at known installations outside the United States, including at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.

Ilsa was asked about reports that the CIA was separately maintaining secret prisons in eastern Europe and Asia to interrogate al-Qaida suspects — and demands by the International Red Cross for access to them.

Without confirming or denying the existence of such prisons, Ilsa said, "Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people."

She pointedly noted that Congress shares that responsibility with the administration.

"We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do ... to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the
law. We do not torture," Ilsa said.

The European Union is investigating reports of the CIA prisons. The story was first reported by The Washington Post....

Sen. Max Thayer, D-Mass., said Ilsa's comments in Panama,
combined with Kaiser's efforts to exempt the CIA from the torture ban, "only demonstrate that the White House learned nothing from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."

"This administration has consistently sought legal justifications for harsh techniques," Kennedy said.

The United States drew worldwide condemnation after photographs circulated showing guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad mistreating and humiliating prisoners."
_______

Go ahead, play the Ilsa game in the coming days.

Really, it'll do you good.

It may not make this latest stance of our own country less vile, but it'll at least keep you focused on how badly our leaders are trying to place a gentle spin on their ReBiblican torture state. I don't recall Jesus condoning this kind of behavior, but what do I know, leftist heathen stooge that I am?

Having endured their own open torture states (many subsidized by the good ol' U. S. of A. and our C. I. and A.) in Panama City, Panama, where Fearful Leader was speaking, South and Central Americans were hardly sympathetic.

Maybe we should wake the fuck up north of the border, eh?

Weighing Options

My ongoing capsule reviews of recent theatrical film releases will continue, but here's a little detour I'll pursue only because it's clearly near and dear to at least some of you out there.

The TCJ thread I've been on (of late with Eddie Campbell and Mark Martin, both contemporary geniuses of comics I am fortunate to know) has taken an interesting turn.

Consider the following blog post from yours truly, then click on over to

Back to TYRANT?

Pick it up from the lower section of that page of the thread, and read on.

I've taken the opportunity there to address the following:

"Please don't misunderstand my post concerning TYRANT. I'm not seeking sympathy, as I'm happier now than I've been in years (though you wouldn't know it when the topic at hand comes up); indeed, life away from comics has been far kinder to me than life in comics ever was. So, my thanks, but don't fret for me.

If I may, I'd like to build on Eddie's post to move this thread in a far more constructive direction, and one I'd love to know more about myself in the new comics business environment.

That is -- relevent to FROM HELL, relevent to TYRANT, and relevent to all graphic novel projects -- how do creators subsidize their creative life?

It's tough enough in the freelance realm, whatever one's situation and venues. That's a life I know intimately, but the commitment to major graphic novel projects is an extraordinary one, and one I stepped into experentially from two sides of the fence: as a publisher (first, via TABOO and the three serialized graphic novels I provided a venue for: FROM HELL, LOST GIRLS, and -- the only one completed under TABOO's tenure -- THROUGH THE HABITRAILS), and abortively as a creator (TYRANT).

We are now arguably in the second generation of cartoonists/creators to wrestle with the form. What I'd like to discuss -- again, building directly on Eddie's candid post, above -- is what economic models truthfully exist.

For the purposes of discussion, seems to me there are five existing models.

The first three are dependent on serialization, as that model remains the most economically viable in terms of both time and income; the fourth and fifth are the exceptions, and I gather possible for those able or lucky enough to land a major publisher/patron:

1. Self publishing/self-supporting: whether funded by outside work (a dayjob) or incrementally via self-publishing, the graphic novel is completed via periodical publication in installments or serialized form. Whether that serialization venue is self-standing (CEREBUS, ELFQUEST, etc.) or via a more free-form title or anthology (the original incarnation of YUMMY FUR) is of no consequence here, though.

2. Financially self-supporting creator, working with a publisher-supported venue for serialization: this is relevent to published venues that do not pay advances, only royalties. In time, that income may help support the work, but the creative commitment is prepared to subsidize their own work as necessary. It is a step away from self-publishing, and necessarily dependent on legal contracts bonding the creator/property and publisher, which may have consequences. The graphic novel is completed via periodical publication in installments or serialized form. Again, whether that serialization venue is self-standing or via a more free-form title or anthology is of no concern.

3. Publisher-supported serialization: the creator of the serialized work is paid either a page rate or advance, plus royalties. The page rage/advance income subsidizes the work, necessitating legal contracts bonding the creator/property and publisher, preferably in a healthy long-term relationship (e.g., LOVE AND ROCKETS, SANDMAN, etc.). The graphic novel is completed via periodical publication in installments or serialized form. Again, whether that serialization venue is self-standing (SANDMAN, BLACK HOLE) or via a more free-form title or anthology (LOVE AND ROCKETS) is of no concern.

4. Publisher-supported graphic novel venue as a complete, self-contained graphic novel: the creator of the work is paid either a page rate as work is completed, or an advance/scheduled advances -- though book-industry standards of advances seems to be the norm, by all accounts -- plus royalties. The page rage/advance(s) subsidizes the work, necessitating legal contracts bonding the creator/property and publisher, preferably in a healthy long-term relationship (e.g., STUCK RUBBER BABY, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCES, etc.). The graphic novel is not published until it is completed as a whole.

5. Creator self-supported graphic novel venue as a complete, self-contained graphic novel: the creator of the work completes work under their "own steam," sans publisher involvement. Using whatever means available, the creator self-subsidizes the work, retaining all rights. The graphic novel is not published until it is completed as a whole.

Note that the economic models #1-3 can also be boosted/amplified by the publication of collections: that is, compilations of the completed chapters, as either larger serializations (e.g., the reprint FROM HELL volumes, SWORDS OF CEREBUS) or compartmentalized, cohesive self-standing volumes (e.g., SANDMAN's individual volumes, the definitive CEREBUS collections).

I should also throw in variation #6 -- meaning, some combination of the above, determined by a project's lifespan and multiple publishing arrangements that usually outlive venues and/or publishers involved (e.g., MAUS, FROM HELL) -- and variation #7 -- graphic novels completed thanks to non-publisher outside support (e.g., the Xerix Foundation, MAUS's Guggenheim grant, the out-of-the-blue grant that allowed Howard Cruse to complete STUCK RUBBER BABY).

Seems to me Eddie's candor opens a great opportunity to discuss such matters, which (if anyone's interested) WOULD go a long way toward helping me sort out the viability or options for TYRANT.

Like other key graphic novel works (MAUS, STUCK RUBBER BABY, etc.), FROM HELL was completed only after an extensive commitment of time -- years! -- from its creators, Alan and Eddie. The publisher particulars, though relevent, aren't nearly as critical as the creator's situations. How did Eddie get through over a decade of ongoing labor, and deal with the vagaries of the market (including publisher musical-chairs) and legal nightmares associated with seeing it through?

He's already shared some critical issues and insights. Let's continue, please.

Though many forget the chronologies, FROM HELL is hardly alone in its case history. Dave McKean had to deal with the fallout from the whole Tundra/Kitchen Sink dissolutions for CAGES; more to the point, Spiegelman launched MAUS as a one-shot story in the underground one-shot FUNNY AMINALS; expanded and re-launched the graphic novel proper in serialized form as the insert mini-comics in the first oversized incarnation of RAW; made the leap to Penguin for MAUS Vol. 1; scored the Guggenheim Grant, which subsidized continuing labor on MAUS until the completion of Vol. 2 and thus the whole.
That's a long haul.

For my own circumstances, the attempt to launch a self-supporting TYRANT self-published serialization succumbed to the combo of slow (almost annual) release of installments (which isn't untenable: Charles Burns' managed the feat with BLACK HOLE), personal financial setbacks (including divorce), and the collapse of the direct sales market (which in less than a year neatly cut my initial sales reach to a dozen distributors down to one).

However, it would be concievable to resurrect the project in any one of the 7 variations I've outlined above. Each has their virtues and detriments -- and only two (#1 and #2) are viable, given my current situation, though neither is likely in the near future.

Well, if anyone's interested, let's dance this around."

If we can apply the yardstick to comics history of generations of creators solving problems, it seems to me the current generation of creators are engaged with solving the problem of graphic novels as a form demanding extraordinary commitment over time and extraordinary means to complete.

We can now chart many viable models, working to the present from the landmark of the late Will Eisner's coining the term graphic novel in 1977 with the publication of A Contract with God, while noting the precursors to that landmark (and the immediate contemporaries of Eisner's who also engaged the form, from those the market defeated -- Gil Kane's His Name is Savage and Blackmark, Wally Wood's attempts to mount his Wizard King -- and those who found or created market niches -- Jack Katz's The First Kingdom, Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy's Sabre, released simultaneously with Eisner's Contract).

The key for any involved in this creative process is how to make ends meet while sustaining/nurturing/completing massive self-contained works -- graphic novels -- over the years (sometimes a decade or more: Maus, From Hell, etc.) necessary to their completion.

My first attempt to mount and launch Tyrant as a self-published vehicle succumbed to personal and market forces. I am weighing my options anew, in hopes of finding a means to re-engage with the project.

As a generation, we're far enough along in the process to have multiple economic models to define, dissect, analyse and assess (and access!).

I hope some of you will sample the thread, and join the conversation.

See you there.

And in theaters...

The Bissettian computer work area/studio/library room is now completely sheetrocked and painting begins tomorrow; the outdoors work in and about the house was completed yesterday (including the creation of a rock-tiered area in Marj's garden and burial of Sugar with the ashes of her feline compadres PT and Shadow); and I'm back to work on two writing gigs I tabled for a time as weekly CCS prep and other commitments asserted themselves.

Still, I've stolen a couple hours here and there to see movies on the big screen, and here's the rundown, for what it's worth. As my stepson Mike's pal Chad puts it regarding food, "I'm an Opportunivore," and that goes triple for me and movies. Missed Serenity, though, which I did want to catch, and Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Mirrormask is nowhere in driving distance:

THE CORPSE BRIDE: It was intoxicating to see, in the same week, two stop-motion animation feature films on the big screen (the other was Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, natch). I wish I could have contrived to see them back-to-back, as a double-feature. This latest Tim Burton confection was a sweet slice of Gothic cake, effectively and efficiently telling the tale of a timid groom's (Johnny Depp) ordeal with a family-arranged marriage tipping inadvertantly into an impromptu wedding to a dead woman (Helena Bonham Carter), opening the door for him into the realm of the dearly-departed (a favorite theme of Burton's since Beetlejuice and arguably Vincent and Frankenweenie). The ensuing melodramatics are executed with high humor and marvelous visuals, graced with sterling vocal performances and some stunning atmospherics and set pieces, and in its way this was far more accessible on first viewing that Nightmare Before Christmas was. The faux-Peter Lorre voiced maggot provided the most vivid link to the old Rankin-Bass stop-motion chestnuts (recalling most of all Mad Monster Party, with its faux-Lorre character), but those creakers never had the vast resources of budget, time, or talents that Burton's stop-motion productions enjoy. This was quickly eclipsed at the box-office by the subsequent release of Aardman's more populist and popular canine & master duo, which is too bad: Corpse Bride didn't even limp into the Halloween season hereabouts, when it would have been a pleasure to revisit it.

DOMINO: Tony Scott's latest, based on Richard Kelly's adaptation of a 'true story' (the genuine Domino Harvey pops up before the final credits; alas, in real life, she was dead by the time the film was released) about a contemporary female bounty hunter (played with mucho attitude by Keira Knightley) and her meteoric rise and fall, brought to the screen with Scott's typical lavish overdrive. As many have noted, Scott completely adopts the textures, tone-shifts and kinetics of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers; what they don't say is this is also damned close in tenor, tone and nihilistic alchemy to Rob Zombie's uneasy summer opus The Devil's Rejects. However, Domino and her cronies shower a tad more often and have better teeth, but they're just as lethal, sociopathic, and ultimately remote emotionally, as is the film. Still, fun to see Knightley and Lucy Liu spar a bit, more fun to see Mickey Rourke again (though this isn't a star turn as in Sin City) and Christopher Walken lending his always bemusing reptilian opacity to a network exec, and one of the reasons I always try to catch Tony Scott's work in theaters is win, lose, or draw, damn it, you always come out knowing you saw a fucking movie. It's always a cinematic experience, however shallow the well. While Domino's celebrity mum has a fleeting onscreen life here as a character (played by Jacqueline Bisset), the canny use of images/sequences from her dad Laurence Harvey in the original The Manchurian Candidate is compelling -- alas, it would have been far more appropo to the emotional landscape to include clips of Harvey's desperate, impoverished final role and directorial debut, Welcome to Arrow Beach aka Tender Flesh, which anticipates the despairing narrative, landscapes, and threnody Domino really is.

DOOM: I went with zero expectations (which is how I try to approach every film I see), and was rewarded with something more entertaining than I had any reason to hope for. It's light years away from the nadir of both House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark, the turds of the video-game movie sweepstakes, and for 90 minutes, that was a blessing. Still, it's a video-game movie stripped to the bone: its virtue and vacuum. The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) is, well, the Rock, embodiment of the steadfast lethal efficiency of this particular vehicle, though the supporting cast (led by Karl Urban and Raz Adoti) is better than he is throughout. Rosamund Pike is distinctively out of place (as female characters almost always are in these machofests) but holds her own despite her thankless role. 'BFG' does not mean 'Big Friendly Giant' in this universe, which is one we've all grown up with. Ever since Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby invented the claustrophobic sf/military horror/sf subgenre with The Thing (from Another World) (1951), it's been a distinctively American breed. James Cameron amped the archetype into overdrive and its definitive contemporary mode with Aliens, the very permutation the video game Doom adopted into its distinct medium; Doom the movie brings that all full-circle, jettisoning some key aspects of the game's narrative (such as it is) but lapsing in its final setpiece into an obligatory literalist cinematic adoption of the game's first-person shooting-gallery POV -- yawn. Until then, director Andrzej Bartkowiak pulled it off as well as anyone would or could.

THE FOG: I'm no fan of director Rupert Wainwright's inverted Exorcist opus Stigmata, and once again the studio remake cycle lavishing $ and gloss on revamps of 1970s and '80s low-budget gems adds up to "more is less," emphasizing how back in 1980 top-of-his-game John Carpenter was hands-down the better filmmaker (working with a fraction of the means lavished on this remake). This shambling, staccato remake of Carpenter's modest gem of a ghost movie doesn't cut it, hampered by a rather misbegotten Cooper Layne script that tosses the rotting little baby out with the fetid bathwater once too often. Alas, this lurches to-and-from revisionist versions of a few of the original's key setpieces without ever finding its own sealegs or satisfactorily emulating or resurrecting the first film's narrative logic, arriving at a clever final twist that falls flat because (a) there isn't the narrative thrust to lend it gravity and (b) star Maggie Grace (of Lost) is such a cipher in her role. She barely changes expression, whether she's looking into Tom Welling's frat-boy eyes or staring death in the face. But it's the failures of Layne's adaptation that did this in for me. For instance: we once again have the lighthouse radio station and female DJ protagonist deftly established in the opening moments, but the events never arrive at or envelope either. The lighthouse setting is essentially shrugged off, the DJ discarded as a key character with maladroit recklessness, and nothing supplants either, thus derailing the adaptation in ways that undermine the entire venture. The fog itself is never the malignant presence it was in the original, nor are its ectoplasmic occupants, and nothing flows -- there's no cohesive sense of place or geography, and hence no suspense. Like the fog herein (how did they shortchange the fog as an effect, having CGI at their fingertips?), the film moves in fits and spasms, spinning wheels sans momentum. While individual characters and sequences occasionally work, the whole never coheres into its own identity, much less a dim shadow of the original. Too bad. Did I mention Maggie Grace delivers the lamest performance in recent memory in any film? Oh, I did? Sorry. The only welcome ghost here is the screencredit for the late Debra Hill.

More tomorrow!

International Journal of Comic Art Fall/Winter issue is in hand...

The latest issue of John Lent's most excellent ongoing (seven years!) International Journal of Comic Art just arrived, and has brightened the past day or so. John is among our premiere comics scholars, and his publication remains one of the finest in the field, always chock-full of fascinating reading.

This latest volume (and they are hefty paperbacks, clocking in over 400 pages per issue) has a number of highlights, including R.C. Harvey's autobiographical overview, the latest installment in the publication's ongoing Pioneers of Comic Art Scholarship series, detailing the lives and labors of the first generation of comics historians, archivists, and academics. This has been an endeavor of international scope, so what editor Lent has incrementally constructed is an autobiography of the entire study of comics as an artform, person by person.

But the focus, as always, is the medium itself, its creators, case histories and/or studies defined by thematic links, historical periods, or the parameters of individual artists, communities, or even stories (as in this issue's analysis of the EC Haunt of Fear story "The Prude"). My personal favorites thus far this issue are Louise C. Larsen's chronicle of Dutch cartoonist Hans Bendix and his editorial cartoons savaging the growth of Hitler and the Third Reich, concluding with Bendix's destruction of his own originals to prepare for the Gestapo's investigation of his home after the occupation of Denmark (the Nazi Nordische Gesellschaft subsequently requested he work for their propoganda division, "promising him syndication everywhere within the Third Reich"! Bendix asked for some time to think about it, and fled to the US). The other fave is Chris Murray's ode to the indy comics efforts of Scotland's Douglas Noble: the complete repro of Noble's chilling little gem "Gash Meat" (pp. 297-310) is worth the price of admission this go around.

Thomas Alan Holmes further sweetens the pot with a sterling article on Warren Ellis's unpublished Hellblazer Columbine-inspired script "Shoot" (which would have appeared in #161 of Hellblazer, had DC not decided to literally "skirt the issue"). Holmes provides a detailed synopsis and analysis before rightfully placing this online artifact in the context of DC's other recent acts of self-censorship (unless it's been shut down in the interim, Ellis's "Shoot" can be read

here).

[Note: sadly, the link isn't working -- see comments, below.]

This practice has been institutionalized at DC since the debacle over Swamp Thing #88, and Holmes concludes that "DC's editorial policy has led to the pulping of seemingly controversial comics and the inordinate delay of others... These editorial policies have also contributed to underground circulation of the material... Ironically, through these editorial decisions, a small part of the world's largest media conglomerate in the world has invited more analysis of its workings. This independent study helps us avoid the dampers of passive media consumption."

You'd think they'd see a marketing opportunity when it so blatantly presents itself (and expands with such regularity). C'mon, DC, swallow some of that corporate pride -- there's a buck to be made here. A DC/Vertigo unexpurgated collection of the complete censored works would be one hell of a book (and/or series), presentable in whatever state they were censored in (whether completed, a'la Jean 'Moebius' Giraud's hilarious Batman, or the Ellis/Phil Jimmenez (art) Hellblazer #161, or in fragmentary form, a'la the Rick Veitch script/Michael Zulli pencils/partial Tom Sutton inks of Swamp Thing #88). It would be a certain best-seller!

In any case, John Lent's fine International Journal of Comic Art is deserving of your attention. I subscribe for $30 US per year (two issues, and well worth it), institutional rate is $40 per year; send check or international money order to John Lent payable to John Lent/IJOCA to:

John A. Lent
669 Ferne Blvd.
Drexel Hill, PA 19026
USA

If you're too lazy to do that, click

here.

I'm going for a walk...

Man, I was up at 5:30 AM, read the paper, had a good breakfast, and planned my writing morning -- including this morning's blog posting -- when my computer warm-up visit of a few boards landed me

here.

So, instead, the morning writing warm-up exercises that comprise this blog went there instead, hoping to curb such gross distortions of history I was involved in.

Some days, you just get derailed a bit. This is one of 'em. You do the best you can for people, with people, and still find a nice serving of shit waiting when you least expect it.

The sun is out, the sky is blue, and it's Indian Summer in Vermont.

Fuck Taboo, fuck From Hell, fuck comics; I'm going for a walk.

See you all later, here.

Very Odds and One Sad End

First off, a belated farewell to a fine artist. The last week in October, my amigo Tim Truman noted the passing of his good friend Keith Parkinson, D&D artist extraordinaire. I met Keith a couple of times in the 1980s during my comic conventions daze, and his work was key to the gaming and D&D realm for at least two decades. Alex Ness posted a succinct eulogy to Kevin at PopThought.com,

here.

But for an abundant tour of Keith's work, check out his own gallery at

Keith Parkinson's website.

Keith succumbed to leukemia at the age of 47, a sobering reality for those of us his age. Keith, like Tim, was among the many artists whose work elevated TSR's D&D line in the 1980s, and Keith expanded his horizons throughout the 1990s to lend his distinctive vision and leave a major mark on the entirity of fantasy and imaginative art. Here's to Keith, his family, and his friends.
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It's been some time since I posted much about my ongoing work at and relations with the Center for Cartoon Studies, which is going great guns (that is, the CCS as well as my work). Last night Marj and I attended the CCS celebration of New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren, which was well attended (more asses than seats, as they say, with no slight intended) and a successful fund-raiser for the school. Ed was a charmer, as were his cartoons. A trio of Ed's single-panel cartoons that were offered up, sans captions, for an on-the-spot captioning contest yielded some laughs from the captions suggested by those in attendance (including yours truly, who won a prize for one of my multiple entries for one Koren cartoon). Big fun, all and all, and a lively testimonial to the ongoing and growing health and vitality of the CCS. Kudos to co-founders James Sturm and Michelle Ollie, whose labors reward us all.

BTW, Alan David Doane's engaging Kochalkaholic site offers a fresh take on the Center for Cartoon Studies via an interview with CCS student and cartoonist Josie Whitmore, which awaits you where

Josie tells all!

For my own humble part in all this, I can say that my ongoing comics history class "Survey of the Drawn Story" is making headway; we've just wrapped up the 1950s Kefauver hearings and comics code coverage (a staple of my old Journeys Into Fear slideshow/lecture) and an extensive overview of Harvey Kurtzman's seminal body of work, particular attention being given to his pre-Mad evolution to prep this week's reading of the Mad archives in the library (you have nooooo idea what a kick it is to assign the reading of Mad after years of having copies of the zine ripped from my hands in school!). As we move into the Silver Age, European comics (which we have been tracing all along, including Herge's 1929 creation of TinTin and tracing of that series to WW2), formative precursors of the graphic novel form (again, an evolution we've been tracing since our first session in September), and the early rumblings of the underground, I'll be able to bring in guest speakers as time and scheduling permit.
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Relevent to the above, tonight I'll be introducing and moderating an opening-night animation panel at the White River Independent Film Fest at the CCS. Details on this evening, and the entire weekend of cinema feasting, are available

here.

Hope to see some of you there!

The evening kicks off with a screening of The Man Who Planted Trees (1987), an exquisite and moving half-hour Academy Award winning short helmed by Quebec-based animator extraordinaire Frederic Back. It's a lovely work, as are Back's previous animated jewels All Nothing(1981) and the celebratory Crac! (1982) (which is among my favorite animated shorts of all time).

This is a tough act to follow, but two Vermont animators rise to the occasion with their most recent efforts. Robert John Wurzburg and Meredith Holch are the creative souls whose work will be screened afterword, and discussed thereafter in a lively Q&A session. Wurzburg's Dogsharks offers a preview of a planned series adapting stories from the popular Dogsharks book series for young readers, while Holch's No Place Like Home uses animated figures and landscapes rendered on translucent tissue paper to illustrate (as the program states) "voices of refugees from Somalia, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Bosnia, and Tibet as they describe the realities of resettling in Vermont. Their experiences are then contrasted with eye-opening facts about the U.S. policy toward asylum seekers who arrive on their own rather than through official refugee resettlement programs." I'm screening the latter this morning after signing off on this post -- soooo, hope to see some of you tonight, and off to work I go!
__

That said, I must add one thing:

My three-part October blog on Religion and Paleontological comics has spawned a lively thread some of you might find interesting over on The Comics Journal discussion board (link below). Among the participants are Clan Apis creator Jay Hosler, who is most visible countering articulate (which doesn't per se mean I find them persuasive) pro-Intelligent Design posts from Jesse-Hamm, who is presenting the arguments of prominent ID authors like Phillip Johnson and molecular biologist and biochemist Michael Behe (writer of Darwin's Black Box, which I read portions of after Peter Laird asked me what I thought about ID, and did not find particularly engaging, in part for reasons Jay verbalizes). Both Jesse and Jay have elevated this thread considerably with their back-and-forth exchanges; like Jay, I'd also recommend anyone interested track down and read Robert Pennock's book Tower of Babel. Pennock was recently a guest on Fresh Air, which made for a lively 40 minutes of listening. His book offers the most expansive, yet concise, overview of the Creationist and ID background, histories, and issues.

For what it's worth, among the threads many posts, Allen Rubinstein's sums up my own concerns when he writes, "The whole impetus for the political fight against evolution in classrooms... is that some people are offended that kids are being told something different in schools than they hear in church. There wouldn't be an "Intelligent Design" movement without a group of people being attached to the scientific theory that one guy named Adam was formed out of clay and a lady named Eve was created out of a rib in Adam's side (Test that one, egghead!). They wouldn't give a crap what science had to say otherwise. If evolution has its flaws (or more accurately, aspects it hasn't worked out yet), it's still the best working set of ideas we've got at this point. Its existence is hardly a reason to simply "disprove" it out of hand unless there's an agenda behind the effort. I see a lot of fear in this." Agreed.

My own comment (posted this morn) summarizes my current response to the exchange I've had with Jim Pinkoski on the likely-unread-by-most comments exchange on this very blog, following my comments on one of Jim's many comics, all of which is archived

here.

Responding to Jesse's TCJ thread post, "...ID doesn't invoke a creator God. ID infers a designer, who may or may not have belonged to the natural order. Many ID theorists believe in God, as do many evolutionary theorists, but theism is not a point either group relies on science to establish...", I reply:

No, but I doubt ID intends to evoke an image of a designer closer to Cthulhu than the anthropomorphised patriarchal humanoid Judeo-Christian archetype.

Still, as an lifelong amateur nature-lover, it's tough to equate the latter with the myriad parasitic lifeforms that we unknowingly interact with daily. Once one is acquainted with the fascinating life cycles of, say, fungal forms that infect invertebrates and complete their life cycle by mysteriously driving their host to assume the mating position in death atop the highest possible vegetation (a reed, a stalk, etc.) to ensure the fungus perpetuating its own as soon as an unwary fellow invertebrate obeys its instinct to couple and copulate, that cozy image of a divine, all-loving patriarch with a big white beard who sits in heaven and loves us all becomes a might -- uh, less benign.

If you insist upon not only ID's focal goal -- acknowledgement of a designer -- to follow that with the insistence that we all agree upon the nature (or, as some do, even the gender) of that designer most certainly enters the realm of theology, not science.

Evolutionary theory seeks to explore and articulate a mechanism of observable change in nature and lifeforms, ancient (e.g., the fossil record) and contemporary -- not its source.

Furthermore, the undermining of geology in some Creationist and ID texts (a reading of which I never represented as definitive) further corrodes either having any coherent value as a science. If you drive a car or use plastics in your home, you're utterly dependent on a science that is inherently incompatible with a literalist interpretation of Genesis or its absurd intepretation of geological time.

I'm all for those who derive comfort and guidance from faith in their lives. But your form of faith may not, and most likely never will, be my own.

ID most certainly "invokes" a specific form and faith associated with its belief in a designer. ID implicitly and explicitly adheres to the belief that said designer "made us" in "His" image, thus affixing an article of faith to its mysterious core: the designer.

To imply or state otherwise is at best sleight of hand that won't stand up to even the most rudimentary associative scrutiny, and at worst deceptive and deceitful, which is contrary to one of the commandments, is it not?

If you're so inclined, catch up on the conversation over

here.

Transparent Corruption: How Deep Can This Guano Get?

Let's see: From multiple news sources, we now have Karl Rove hoping he's dodged the bullet I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby took last Friday, and that Rove "may offer a formal apology" (apology not accepted, if it's offered -- how do we usurp this unelected all-too-powerful figure?); Wilkerson continuing to detail the extreme power wielded by Vice (indeed) President Dick Cheney and the methodology of that "cabal" with Rumsfeld to shape government policy (and intelligence) to their whim, foreign and domestic; all while Cheney aggressively refuses sanction of, and fights, a bill (prepared in part by former Vietnam POW and torture survivor Senator John McCain, who Rove and Bush handily slandered in the initial Bush Presidential campaign) which will force his torture state to cease ongoing torture and abuse of prisoners and detainees (what possible spin can be placed on this by any but the most rabid pro-torture advocates, however much they claim otherwise?); and Tom DeLay's attornies have managed the dismissal of the Texan judge previously assigned to his case due to political affiliations displeasing to DeLay (hmmm, does that mean he gets to choose a judge to his liking -- meaning a ReBiblican? This just gets richer every step of the way). They are, of course, also campaigning for a change of venue, while publicly attacking the prosecutor (with foaming attack dog TV commercials). All while Bush's recent choice of right-wing Third Circuit Court of Appeals judge Samuel Alito to replace critical swing-voter Judge Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court stirs the pot, and not coincidentally tipping the Supreme Court further still to the right if Alito is indeed seated. Meanwhile (can you stand it?), corporations continue to cancel (thus fleece) retirement and health-care policies for their workers with the sanction of our government (even as the corporate CEOs behind this latest abuse pocket spiralling, mind-bending bonuses and pay). Relevent to which, in a clear vote along partisan lines, the first proposed minimum raise hike in almost a decade (the last was in '97) is defeated by a corrupt Senate who have hiked their own pay almost annually since '97. Quote:

"U.S. senators -- who draw salaries of $162,100 a year and enjoy a raft of perks -- have rejected a minimum wage hike from $5.15 an hour to $6.25 for blue-collar workers. The proposed increase was sponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and turned down in the Senate by a vote of 51 against the boost and 49 in favor. . . All the Democrats voted for the wage boost. All the negative votes were cast by Republicans. Four Republicans voted for it..." (quoted from Helen Thomas's article, Hearst News)

You got that? Four Republicans voted for it. 51 against, after having voted in their own pay raises a short while ago. Don't take my word for it -- go to:

Minimum Pay Raise Crushed

Having worked at minimum wage myself (most recently just after that '97 wage "hike"), and with many friends (and two young adult offspring) who eke out paltry livings working at or just above minimum wage, sans any benefits, I can tell you it's impossible to make ends meet in any way working for minimum wage (though many of you know that from hard experience).

This isn't a joke. If the goal is spreading poverty, they're succeeding admirably.

In conjunction with that decision, hunger in the US has now officially increased 43% since Bush assumed the throne. "The House Agriculture Committee approved budget cuts Friday that would take food stamps away from an estimated 300,000 people and could cut off school lunches and breakfasts for 40,000 children. The action came as the government reported that the number of people who are hungry because they can't afford to buy enough food rose to 38.2 million in 2004, an increase of 7 million in five years. The number represents nearly 12 percent of U.S. households." That from Libby Quaid at the Associated Press -- go to:

GOP Slashes Food Stamps, Lunch Programs

That as we move into winter with the highest heating oil (and thus all heat source) prices in our lifetimes. Stave off the cold or starve? That's the choice many face starting as soon as the cold hits.

That's just the tip of the garbage in sight this morning.

As I've said, it's almost impossible to rationally take all this in and articulate it on even the most superficial level without sounding like a raving lunatic. But it's all happening, right now. It's all our collective national reality.

The latest -- which HomeyM emailed me last week, but which I sat on until finding multiple corroborating sources, including an on-air interview with a UK editor of Fortune magazine on last night's CBC news program As It Happens -- is this gem. Following the ongoing and transparent links between the Bush family (including ex-President Poppa Bush) and various Republican officials and The Carlysle Group and other war-profiteering firms, and the widely-known-and-acknowledged history between Cheney and Halliburton et al, we now have a direct correlation between Donald Rumsfeld and the pharmaceutical firm with controlling proprietary interests in Tamiflu.

This shines another disturbing light on Monday's sleight-of-hand, "don't-look-there-look-HERE" fear-mongering speech from President Bush, outlined in this excerpt from an October news item (predating Monday's relevent President Bush speech) by Dr. Mercola. Read on, read closely:

"Rumsfeld To Profit From Bird Flu Hoax

...Not long ago, President Bush sought to instill panic in this country by telling us a minimum of 200,000 people will die from the avian flu pandemic, but it could be as bad as 2 million deaths in this country alone. This hoax is then used to justify the immediate purchase of 80 million doses of Tamiflu, a worthless drug that in no way shape or form treats the avian flu, but only decreases the amount of days one is sick and can actually contribute to the virus having more lethal mutations. ...the U.S. placed an order for 20 million doses of this worthless drug at a price of $100 per dose. That comes to a staggering $2 billion.
...Roche manufactures Tamiflu and, in a recent New York Times article, they were battling whether or not they would allow generic drug companies to help increase their production.
...that a drug was actually developed by a company called Gilead that 10 years ago gave Roche the exclusive rights to market and sell Tamiflu.

...Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was made the chairman of Gilead in 1997. Since Rumsfeld holds major portions of stock in Gilead, he will handsomely profit from the scare tactics of the government that is being used to justify the purchase of $2 billion of Tamiflu."

As I say, I held off posting this until it could be verified by multiple sources. The foreign press has done so, and last night's As It Happens jaw-dropping interview with the UK Fortune editor was the final confirmation I sought. Dr. Mercola continues:

"If you have been viewing the media you must have seen the scare the media and the president are seeking to orchestrate on you and the public. According to a draft of the government's plan to fight a potentially cataclysmic pandemic, this new bird super-flu could kill nearly 2 MILLION Americans. But I nearly fell out of my seat in the airplane as I was flying back from a conference in Ft. Lauderdale when I read that in the BEST-case scenario, only 200,000 people might die. Then they post the frightening picture from the 1918 flu epidemic to heighten the fear. It just amazes me how they can get away with this type of reporting that is so obviously manipulated by the government and drug companies to scare you into taking the flu vaccine. The popular media continues to reinforce this unbased fear. In the editorial section of the October 17, 2005 issue of the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Henry Miller, former director of the Office of Biotechnology at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), seeks to frighten the U.S. public by telling us that the bird flu virus can jump from birds to humans and produce, and is a fatal illness in 50 percent of those infected.

A 50 percent fatality rate sounds pretty scary to me. What Dr. Miller and the other experts fail to explain is how these numbers were derived. Did they examine everyone who contracted the bird flu and use those numbers, or did they examine the sickest of the sick who had come down with the bird flu and determine the mortality rate from there? Of course, it was the latter, and from the 60 people who have died from this in THIRD-world countries we are being told that anywhere from 200,000, AT BEST, to 2 million people at worst will die from the bird flu. This is shoddy science at best and beyond belief that any reputable scientist could get away with such nonsense.

...The bird flu epidemic hoax reminds me just how uncommon "common sense" is. Folks, where is the sound basic science here? How do they make the giant leap of faith that 60 deaths will translate to 2 million or even 200,00 deaths in the United States from a virus that does NOT readily spread from birds to humans, or humans to humans?
Most of the people who acquired this infection were bird handlers who were in continuous contact with these sick birds. Does anyone in their right mind envision similar circumstances in the United States?

...What might the purpose of these scare tactics be you ask?
Well how about the United States purchasing huge quantities of antiviral drugs and an increase in flu vaccine production, along with purchasing 20 million doses of the highly questionably effective Tamiflu. Guess how much one treatment of Tamiflu costs?  Give yourself a slap on the back if you guessed $100. So those 20 million doses the government has authorized will cost U.S. taxpayers $2 BILLION."

Which, natch, profits Donald Rumsfeld and his cronies handsomely.

Continuing:
"...Now I think very few of us would mind if this drug actually worked and prevented even a few people from dying. But does it do that? Not really. About all anyone can expect from this drug is that it might make the symptoms a bit less severe."

BTW, this has now been confirmed by multiple sources; see the link, provided below, if you seek more information.

Continuing:
"On the downside, (aside from setting you back $100) Dr. Tenpenny explained in her Flu TeleClinic last week that Tamiflu can actually cause the virus to mutate into a more dangerous and potent viral strain. Recently, U.S. Congress asked Roche, the maker of Tamiflu, to suspend its patent and have others make it because they could not likely keep up with the demand, but of course Roche refused saying Tamiflu is hard to make and it would take another company three years to "get up to speed." What they were really saying is they could care less about the public. What their primary focus was on was to not share their windfall profits mandated by the U.S. Congress."

The good doctor goes on to note, "...let us not forget the flu shots that many will get when they confuse bird flu with the regular flu. Please understand, even if you believe the flu shots work, the flu shot you can now purchase is in no way, shape or form designed to protect you against the bird flu. They are completely different strains. (Bird flu is H5N1 strain). But rest assured the makers of flu vaccines will not lose this unusal opportunity to rape the American public for even more profits. Recently we learned that those getting the flu shots may see a 25 percent increase in prices at clinics, doctors' offices and medical centers because of increases in the wholesale cost of the vaccines.

...Meanwhile, the "Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005" (S. 1873), recently passed out of the U.S. Senate HELP Committee one day after it was introduced. The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) is calling the bill "a drug company stockholder's dream and a consumer's worst nightmare." This bill, spurred by bird flu fears, will broadly eliminate corporate liability for vaccines and drugs. This bill will soon go to the full Senate for a vote.... The proposed legislation, nicknamed "Bioshield Two," is being pushed rapidly through Congress without time for voters to make their voices heard by their elected representatives. It will strip Americans of the right to a trial by jury if they are harmed by a drug or vaccine that they are forced by government to take, whenever federal health officials declare a public health emergency. The bill establishes the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA), as the single point of authority within the government for research and development of drugs and vaccines in response to bioterrorism and natural disease outbreaks. BARDA will operate in secret, exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act, insuring that no evidence of injuries or deaths caused by drugs and vaccines labeled as "countermeasures" will become public. This proposed legislation is an unconstitutional attempt by some in Congress to give a taxpayer-funded handout to pharmaceutical companies for drugs and vaccines the government can force all citizens to use, while absolving everyone connected from any responsibility for injuries and deaths which occur."

We've all seen how this current Administration has stood up against (cough, cough) the power pharmaceutical lobbies.

So, as the grip "The War on Terror" held over our collective populace for the past five years wanes daily, we now have this new batch of blatant fear-mongering, all calculated to profit Bush's key cronies once again while further empowering corporations orchestrated and fanning the flames.

Lest you think sanctioning blanket indemnity for vaccine and pharmaceutical firms is a great idea, remember the 5 million swine-flu vaccine program of three decades ago. "The hastily contrived program for swine flu resulted in hundreds of Guillain Barre Syndrome paralysis victims as well as countless deaths for a flu pandemic that never materialized." At the time, investigative journalist Ida Honorof (then recipient of a first prize award from Associated Press for investigative journalism) called that swine-flu pandemic fear-mongering and the resulting vaccination program "The most brazen, obscene electioneering ploy" profered by that standing President "and his coterie of scientific hacks, fabricated to cause pure unadulterated panic and guarantee political capital, rammed through without consideration of people's health and lives and approved by a band-wagon Congress..."

So give this some thought and do some homework before you embrace the panic.

The Martians have not landed in New Jersey, nor has the avian flu erupted.

The reality is, and remains, that 60 people have died out of less than 200 infected to date, worldwide, period. Is there cause for concern? Yes, but as all responsible medical authorities have stated and restated since Monday's speech, no flu vaccination effective against such a possible pandemic yet exists, nor can it exist until that strain of flu manifests itself.

This is more fear-mongering from a President and Administration desperate to divert the attention of the American people from the consequences of their own blatant abuses of power and increasingly evident corruption.

It is transparent and the same mechanism, in a new guise, that they have relied upon from the beginning of their initial Presidential campaign.

It is also, sadly typical of this Administration, orchestrated to profit their own.

They are frightening you as they fleece you, and all of us.

For more information on the medical view of this situation, go to:

Rumsfeld Makes Out

November Haiku

Cold nights bring in mice
I bait and set trap trap trap
Dreams break snap snap snap

"Here come de judge! Here come de judge! Order in the courtroom, here come de judge!"

Clearly, Karl Rove is back at the helm in the White House. It's astounding to me that a Friday 2 PM press conference concerning "Scooter" Libby's indictment and the ongoing investigation of the Valerie Plame CIA leak is already openly referred to as "last week's news" thanks to the Monday AM announcement of the new pick of the litter for the Supreme Court. It's like the old Pigmeat Markham routine (mass-marketed to country bumpkins like me in the mid-60s on Rowen & Martin's Laugh-In quoted above. Are we really as a country such a bleating pack of sheep??