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New DVDs I Love: The Euro-SF Revelation
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First, a reminder — I’ll be on the comics panel at 3 PM at the Burlington Literary Festival at the Fletcher Free Library tomorrow — for info, see my post for Sept. 16 (skip to the bottom for directions, links) and Sept. 10. That would be

and

Hope to see you there!

BTW, VT filmmaker extraordinaire Bill Simmons (the man behind The Perfect Goodnight Kiss, etc.) will be at the event; he writes, “I will be broadcasting your panel discussion at the Fletcher Free Library Saturday live on tv on Cable channel 15 in the greater Burlington area.” Since it’s a live broadcast, times will correspond with the panel times given in my previous posts. Bill is also Technical Coordinator for the upcoming October annual Vermont International Film Festival; more info later.

OK, on to today’s scheduled DVD recommendation…
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Among the DVDs I’ve savored of late is one you probably haven’t heard or read anything about, so consider this a heads up. The only print alert I saw was in The NY Times, which is a hoot in and of itself.

I have a real affection for European and Russian sf from the 1960s and ’70s; it’s was pretty hard to come by back then, but my appetite was instilled by early-to-mid-1960s childhood theatrical viewing of two that slipped through the distribution system relatively intact, First Spaceship on Venus and Voyage to the End of the Universe.

Why these films should have appealed so to me, I couldn’t articulate: I mean, they were both rather downbeat affairs, dramatically turgid for one raised on 1950s US sf, more than a little dogmatic, completely monster-less and skirting any exploitative elements whatsoever. But they felt more adult than any sf I’d seen, and they offered an alternative take on the genre I found enticing for its odd, non-American (as opposed to un-American, mind you) flavor. Later ’60s international sf was more immediately appealing: citing just two MGM pickups that swept through northern VT in their day, I loved both the Italian Wild, Wild Planet, with its mutants, tick-tack futuristic cars and costumes, and oceans of blood, and the Japanese The Green Slime for its hilarious theme song and monsters, bogus miniature & model work, and shameless potboiler energy. As my tastes matured (?), I later gravitated to Tarkovsky’s Solaris and more serious European, Russian, and Asian sf fare, but the first taste test was passed and provided by First Spaceship on Venus and Voyage to the End of the Universe.

These weren’t like the US, Italian, or Japanese sf films I loved; these were something else entirely. First Spaceship was a colorful, widescreen epic of sorts, a multi-national production (German/Polish, based on a Russian novel) which was reflected in its pre-Star Trek casting of multi-gender and racial cosmonauts (white males — German, Polish, and American — a scientist from India, an Asian male & female, and a black male) that made quite an impression on little ol’ me, if only because it seemed such a novelty at age seven or eight. This was the first truly multinational, multi-racial crew I’d seen in any film, truth to tell, and this at a time when a Vermonter like me had never seen anything but white folks in real life! Better yet, its alien landscapes (with multi-color veined skies, odd geometric metallic ‘flora,’ weird flitting metallic lifeforms puppeted from invisible but nonetheless obvious strings, and a sentient black magma that figured in the climax) were eye-popping and different, anticipating the pre-psychedelic landscapes I later savored in Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World and Planet of the Vampires. Its modest but cool tank-like robot seemed (despite its ‘humanized’ face) pragmatic and functional in a Popular Mechanics way that American humanoid robots never were; and its room-sized computers (operated by the eldest member of the expedition, endlessly pushing buttons without looking at them as if they were a piano keyboard) seemed state-of-the-art in the early ‘60s. Its scenario, though almost indecipherably stodgy to me as a youth, was anchored by a seriousness of tenor and intent that was unlike anything I’d seen — I’d read sf like this already, but sf movies were never this serious. A mysterious object is found on Earth, its alien message partially decoded, directing the world attention to Venus, so an international space expedition is mounted — blah, blah, blah, but something here was compelling, and the whole was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

Voyage to the End of the Universe was an AIP release of a somber black-and-white Czech space-travel gem originally titled Ikarie XB-1. Like First Spaceship, it proposed a multi-gender crew in space sans the romantic overtures American ’50s sf required, with long stretches in which crew members debated, danced, relaxed, and argued: adults acting like adults, however arch the dubbing or dramaturgy. The core of the film for me, though, was a long, partially silent, almost slow-motion (due to the convincing illusion of weightlessness and movement without gravity created) and utterly haunting sequence in the middle of the film in which the crew responds to a distress signal. They come across an apparently abandoned derelict spaceship, and cautiously enter the vessel: here was the seed for subsequent faves like Queen of Blood, Planet of the Vampires, and Alien, played straight — no monsters waited on board, only stillness, death, and an unsolved mystery that ends in disaster. One image, of a dead, decay-ravaged crew member aboard the derelict being found, the gray crust of dried facial skin drifting away like a mask from the bare bone of the skull at the slightest touch, malingers in my memory to this day. It was as breathtaking a moment of quiet horror as the unmasking of Barbara Steele’s pallid corpse in Bava’s Black Sunday, even more startling for its appearance in the relatively sterile confines of a dubbed black-and-white sf import.

I dug the film — so much so that I later arranged to rent it in 16mm for a public sf double-feature (as student council film dude at Harwood Union High School) and again for a sf literature class at Johnson State College. Post-2001: A Space Odyssey, of course, it seemed like mild tea indeed, but oh, that derelict sequence…

Over the years, I’ve gravitated to such films like a moth to a flame. Among my first 8mm film purchases (remember 8mm film ‘cutdowns’ of features, anyone?) was a Ken Films 50-foot release of First Spaceship on Venus, which was sharp but in black-and-white, it’s barely-five-minute running time condensing the black-magma climax into a weird little Blob knockoff with cosmonauts. Still, it was a souvenir of that childhood theater experience, and as such treasured. As I teenager, I caught a late-night TV broadcast of First Spaceship on Venus, and I couldn’t believe how wretched it was, an impression intensified by the fact that the colors were so faded the film seemed to be in black-and-white, and the widescreen images I so vividly recalled were pan-and-scanned into almost incomprehensible nonsense. Could I have really so mis-remembered the film?

When the vhs era hit, I snagged a $5 copy of Star Classic’s threadbare 1986 video release of First Spaceship on Venus, and it was agonizing, but an accurate record of the crap pan-and-scanned prints TV used to broadcast. Perversely, I held onto it — which panned out, when Englewood’s sterling color, letterboxed restoration of First Spaceship surfaced on the market in 1998. I incorporated duplicate clips from both video versions in my film classes, relating the story of my fond childhood memories of the film, my dismal teenage and adult experiences with the pan-and-scan ‘decolorized’ prints, and the wonders of letterboxed restorations (which led into a broader section on the joys of letterboxed video and DVD, and its importance to storytelling, using companion clips — p&s vs. letterboxed — from Dressed to Kill and Pulp Fiction, among others).

Which brings me at long-last to the DVD set I am bringing to your attention:

The DEFA Sci-Fi Collection is a singularly unappealing title, but I suggest you pick it up if you love sf cinema. Its a boxed set sporting three individually-cased feature films: DEFA’s first sf opus, The Silent Star, along with In the Dust of the Stars and Eolomea, and though I’ve just begun to view the set, imagine my surprise when The Silent Star (original East German title: Der Schweigend Stern)turns out to be — at long last! — the complete, original-language, restored Polish/East German production I first saw, cut and dubbed on the big screen, as First Spaceship on Venus! First Run Features’ functional packaging makes no mention of this fact, making me doubly glad I dumb-lucked into this on a pre-order listing and ordered it, sight unseen.

I’ll post a full review of the entire set on my site once I get through all three films, but I must say The Silent Star is a revelation. Adapted from a Stanislaw Lem novel I’m unfamiliar with, The Astronauts, this 95-minute color, stereo, and letterboxed (16:9, showcasing DEFA’s ‘TotalScope’) subtitled Agfacolor print is crystal clear and intoxicatingly vivid. The extras are terrific, too: a short gallery of set design sketches (b&w pencil/charcoal roughs and color) for the film, bio and filmography of director Kurt Maetzig (who co-founded DEFA in the 1940s, and directed 20 features before retiring), set designer Alfred Hirschmeier and special effects creator Ernst Kunstmann (whose career stretches back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and Murnau’s The Last Laugh, and many more!), and a text essay “Socialists in Outer Space” by the University of Toronto’s Stefan Soldovieri (which does acknowledge the US version First Spaceship and cites a few of the changes made for the US condensation). Best of all are the subtitled East German 1959 newsreel excerpts — a UK filmmaker’s visit to the DEFA Studio, including a behind-the-scenes Silent Star set visit, and the brief but cool A Rocket in the Soviet Zone, showing the film’s special effects and miniature work being shot — and the preview trailers for all three films in the set.

BTW, the other two films are enticing. In contrast to the 1960 Silent Star, the two companion films are 1970s efforts, with Eolomea, 1972, looking like the most unusual of the trio. The preview is a sui generis tease — “Is this film a love story?… Is this a nature film?… Or perhaps a thriller?” — as it eases into increasingly obvious sf imagery and trappings, arriving at “It’s the new utopian film by DEFA!” Metal Hurlant-like imagery is wed to absurdist dialogue shorn of any context (“You don’t know me at all. You’re not getting the container from me.” “We’re entering your shadow. Over and out!”)… hmmm, just like vintage Heavy Metal translations. This I gotta see! In the Dust of the Stars looks like the most traditional sf of the three, with more mysterious messages drawing expeditions to distant worlds inhabited by lounge-lizard humans with big hair and colorful spandex outfits, silly dancing girls, cosmonaut interrogation and torture, ragged slaves laboring away in subterranean chambers, helmeted laser-toting soldiers, disembodied sentient heads, et al., along with a Diabolik like shower scene. You’ll never see a preview for an American sf film end with bracing ballyhoo like, “Will they stay and assume responsibility? Or will they return to their cozy lives?” Incredible! Bring it on, DEFA…

Back to Silent Star/First Spaceship: The film is vastly improved sans dubbing, but the subtitled dialogue is nonetheless risible at times (“I appeal to the consortium to accept that nothing will deter me!”). The script is completely coherent in its complete form, and indeed brimming with imaginative touches and concepts lost in the clumsy First Spaceship condensation and dubbing. “The indespensible robot Omega” is still as clunky and pragmatic as ever; if anything, after the recent NASA Mars robots, Omega looks more realistic than ever. But the film has never looked lovelier, with one foot in Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M traditions (the inevitable meteor shower; ongoing “should we stay or should we go?” angst; etc.) and the other anticipating the trippy imagery and psychedelia of later ’60s sf and Gene Roddenberry’s ‘innovations’ for Star Trek (again, multi-racial and gender crews).

BTW, Silent Star in its uncut form makes a fascinating companion piece to the Russian Planeta Burg (Planet of Storms), which launched another group of Cosmonauts to Venus to find prehistoric reptiles (a pteranodon, ‘brontosaur,’ and outsized man-in-suit bipedal lizards) and… something else. Carlos Clarens first wrote about this gem in his seminal An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (1967, a book that changed my life), and thankfully video put it in reach at last; this has been available from Sinister Cinema and other ‘gray market’ sources for almost a decade, and is well worth scouting out. Corman drafted Curtis Harrington and Peter Bogdanovich to revamp this Russian gem into Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, respectively, for AIP-TV release in the mid-60s, which makes it all the more extraordinary that seven-or-eight-year-old Steve Bissette was actually able to see as much of First Spaceship as he did on the big screen, sans too much US distributor manhandling.

Counting one’s blessings, it’s even more astounding to see The Silent Star at last in its original form in such a glorious restoration. Man, I’m glad I lived long enough to enjoy the DVD revolution!

For more info ASAP, go to

First Run is offering the set at 25% off its list price of $59.95 — a bargain at $44.96, though there may be better pricing at other online venues.

FYI, DEFA was an acronym for Deutsche Filmaktiengesellschaft (German Film Shareholders Company), the state-run studios of the former German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany) that were headquartered in what was formerly the UFA Studios in Babelsberg (near Berlin).

Curiously enough, it turns out the US branch of the DEFA Film Library is based not far from my Green Mountain State home: The University of Masschusetts in Amherst, MA, in fact. For more info, go to

More DVD blather tomorrow!

On Theatrical Experiences of Late and Commercials…

I know I’m not alone in bemoaning the ever-expanding encroachment of commercials into theatrical movie viewings. It’s a trend that isn’t going away, and is, in fact, escalating at alarming rates.

This past week, I’ve been catching up on some theatrical films I hoped to see before they left the area’s big screens, starting with the genre fare that blasts through with the speed horror flicks used to move through nabes (“One Week Only!”). The rapid turnaround now is due to the diminishing returns on Hollywood genre offerings. Well, no wonder the boxoffice is dwindling on this current cycle: even the best of ‘em are 1970s retreads, and I do mean retreads (what’s the best of ‘em? Sigh, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which rates only because the first possession/hallucination indeed got a rise out of me; in the end, it’s like a low-budget ’70′s Exorcist rip crossed with Perry Mason and The Runner Stumbles, all to arrive at the message William Peter Blatty sought to ram down our throats if only Friedkin hadn’t mounted such an effective horrorshow). I mean, am I the only one who thought The Skeleton Key was just a revamp of the livelier, more inventive Brotherhood of Satan and the bungled Nothing But the Night — respectively, ’71 and ’72 — with a thick icing of Southern Gothic? That Cry_Wolf (which I caught last night) was just April Fool’s Day with a sting in the tale? All three of the 2005 releases I’ve just referred to are well-executed, make the most of their casts and respective budgets (Cry_Wolf was impoverished by comparison to the two studio flicks I’m placing it alongside here, but it was tightly scripted, effectively cast and played, and the direction was solid). All three maintain a rigorous focus on their respective goalposts, which is more than I can say for utter drivel like Alone in the Dark, the scattered-as-a-mad-woman’s-shit-video-game movie (which I had flashbacks of during last night’s Doom trailer), or “I can’t believe they’re foisting this claptrap on me” schizobabble squirmfests like Hide & Seek. But they’re just more of what we’re getting: 1970s remakes or Asian ghost tale reboots, which is most of what we’ve been doled for three or four years now (remakes of Texas Chainsaw, Dawn of the Dead, and Amityville Horror; The Ring, Dark Water, etc.).

Now, no worries — I mean, with gems like Romero’s inspired, prescient Land of the Dead sweetening the summer horror pot and engaging fare like The Constant Gardener and Broken Flowers gracing local screens, I’m thankful for what’s in reach.

But in any and all cases, all these theatrical experiences are diminished as soon as the fucking commercials immediately begin unspooling. The military recruitment spots have been imbedded into my retinal patterns (my personal fave is the one with the recruit rock-climbing one of those staggering US desert spires: I keep flashing on him reaching the top only to find a ragged insurgent there who grins, shrugs, and then self-detonates — not the message the US Marines want to send!), the smarmiest of all the one with the teen kid playing pool with his Dad amid a conversation to convince Pop the Army is A-OK to join. But we’ve also got multi-language scientists singing Carpenter songs (“Close to You”), the latest insipid Pepsi spots, a painful Sprite ad, etc. etc. etc. When I am immediately greeted now with ads and even lobby displays that are blatantly urging me to abandon the theatrical experience — Sony’s infuriating Fantastic Four spot (which says, basically, “wait for the DVD”) and the cardboard standee in the lobby of the local Kipling Cinema for Comedy Central’s new David Spade program — I have to wonder: are the theaters even aware of what they’re accepting ad dollars for any longer?

And this is just the beginning.

According to the March 2005 issue of Entrepreneur, cinema advertising is “the hot, new tool for advertisers nationwide.” Consider this:

“Although cinema advertising is still a relatively small share of total U.S. ad spending, it’s projected to double in size from about $470 million in 2004 to more than $1 billion in 2008, according to communications industry forecast estimates from media merchant bank Veronis Suhler Stevenson. And what do moviegoers think of this change? Consumer studies by Arbitron in 2002 and 2003 found that more than two-thirds of adults and about 7 out of 10 teens don’t mind ads played before a movie.”

Who did Arbitron poll? I resent paying an average of $7.50 to $8 per ticket now to then sit through advertising, all of which places the film I paid to see into a context I further resent, even if it’s utter shit I choose to see. Bad enough that I’m usually faced with all-teenage staffing, incompetent (and too-often out-of-focus) projection, failing equipment (this past year alone, my wife and I or friends and I missed four or five films we drove to see due to cancelled shows because of no heat in theaters, or faulty projection, etc.), and rude-as-hell audiences who think nothing of talking through entire movies.

But dig, what’s at work here is the difference between the receptive ‘dream state’ projected 35mm theatrical film experiences place us in by the nature of the medium and by habit, versus the far less receptive state video and television viewing plunges the video-age generation into now (as opposed to the three-network monopolistic thrall of the 1950s-late ’70s):

“Moviegoers remember advertising messages as much as five to six times better than TV viewers, according to studies conducted by RoperASW and Nielsen Media Research for Regal CineMedia and the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau.”

I’m not surprised this is true. The reason I still prefer theatrical viewing experiences above even the finest home theater experience is the nature of the media themselves functions differently on a primal biological and emotional level: projected cinema engages us more urgently than television (whether traditional or high-def, it makes no difference) ever can or will. Forgive the simplistic summary, but: Our eyes and brains, as organs, engage in a different mode altogether with the clarity of light/cinema projected onto a massive screen vs. dots/pixels-per-inch illuminating a monitor screen: one is a shared dream-state, the other a mesmerizing solo alpha-state. Cinema, by nature, engages the eye and brain to ‘complete’ the illusion of movement: we’re involved in ‘creating’ the movement by bridging the almost-imperceptible individual frames and ignoring the ‘flicker’ between, whereas television and digital media literally turns us into receptors: we accept, rather than invest in, the movement and imagery.

I think we also invest actively when we pay for that theatrical experience, and once in our seats, we aren’t free to channel surf, mute, or wander away from the screen during the increasingly interminable commercials.

When the hue and cry went out this summer that boxoffice was down, my first thought was, “Well, duh, going to the theaters is beginning to suck more and more.” True enough, and commercials have prompted me more than one night to ditch the half-hour drive to the closest theater in favor of a DVD at home. If the commercial stream gets much longer as ticket prices go up, I’ll be more and more partial to the latter, come what may… and of course, $3+ per gallon gas prices (presently $2.74 at the lowest priced station I could find in the area) makes that option all the more appealing.

Thankfully, new DVDs are offering terrific stuff — more on that tomorrow!

CCS Musings: Week Two

The sense of community is palpable; I felt it as soon as I walked into the CCS/Colodny building (an hour before my class begins — always a little early these days). James Sturm was sitting across from the entryway, visible through the main floor classroom, talking to the attentive gathering — “Hey, Steve!”, he called over, and I waved to him and all with a clear view of the doorway. James looked and sounded relaxed, clear, open; quite a contrast to our first week, when everything seemed claustrophobically overwhelming.

(Man, does this bring back memories of my first month at the Kubert School… but I won’t bore you with that old-man-dribble today.)

As my amigos know, I have a tendency to over-prepare and become compulsively fascinated with the nuances and details. Of course, that’s where the stories are — “the devil’s in the details,” some say, but devil that I am, that’s also where the meat and potatoes reside. I’ve been working hard at narrowing the focus of the comics studies class since winter, first intent on the goalpost of turning in a comprehensive syllabus back in March, thereafter targeting what, exactly, I could convey to the students in a mere fourteen sessions of 2 1/2 hours each.

Inevitably, material worthy of attention has to succumb to the editing process. I have marvelous resources for presentations on and discussion of the Bayoux Tapestry, illuminated Medieval manuscripts, the 15th and 16th Century Dances of Death (primarily Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1538 edition and 1491/1500 The Danse Macabre of Women), etc., but something had to give.

Week One instead focused on the Japanese ghost scrolls (with a quick follow-through to manga and anime, showing a few examples of that culture’s 17th and 18th Century intermediary works — this improvised after Michelle Ollie mentioned to me that Christine hoped to show anime to her fellow students in later weeks), Mixtec codices (primarily the Cordex Nuttall, with a peek at the incomprehensible but exquisite Codex Borgia), Bosch triptyches, the European broadsheets (primarily the ‘crime and punishment’ broadsheets), Hogarth, Goya, and capping with a ‘preview’ of the comic strips to come via a presentation on Winsor McCay’s work in comics and animation.

Of course, one of the first questions I was hit with: Why had I passed over the Bayeux Tapestry?

Bingo!

You do what you can, and what there’s time for.

I’ve also tried to turn liabilities into strengths: for instance, I’m not yet versed in either scanning or powerpoint presentations (a learning curve I’m working on in hopes of debuting power-point next week), and my available stash of slides are genre-specific (selected and shot for my Journeys Into Fear horror comics history presentation). So this week’s session — covering relevent 19th Century landmarks, the origins of the American comic strip, transitional stages in bound comics (from Toppfer’s 1830s ‘picture-stories’ to the first bound comic strip collections), and the birth of the comic book format — became a hands-on, ‘show and tell’ session, with me placing as many hard copies of books and comics pages in their hands as the timeframe would accomodate. In a way, it’s too bad I will be versed in powerpoint for next year, but realistically these old books couldn’t handle annual handling… still, it was very cool to be able to place the books themselves in the students’ hands.

As any comic reader knows, reading is as much a tactile sensory experience as it is visual: the feel, weight, smell of the books and pages are essential to the experience, a reality increasing reliance on digital presentations eschews. Touch is as essential to the drawing/creative process as thought and visual engagement with the work at hand, and that can be fueled and enhanced by hands-on contact with the published work of their precursors and those-who-walked-these-paths-before. Though they would only be able to spend a few minutes at best scanning the books, it was still hands-on, and I think that’s vital.

Soooooo, I kept the slide show to a minimum (about ten slides) and instead platformed the class session around hands-on scrutiny of relevent books throughout the lecture. The new layout of the classroom — a U-shaped looping of desks, with the open area naturally facing the instructor’s lair (and slide/projection screen) — meant my determination to find two samples of each key publishing landmark was worthwhile: I could hand each row a copy of the relevent publication to look at and pass down, looping back up to my end of the room.

This required a quick trip south into Massachusetts to powwow for lunch with one of my best friends in the world, G. Michael Dobbs aka Mike Dobbs. Mike and I had hoped to get together in any case — Mike had his own agenda, wanting to bounce around ideas relevent to his current book project — and the timing was solid for either this week’s or next week’s class. Mike has been teaching at the college level for years (he has far, far more experience than I!), and he came to our lunch meeting armed for bear, much to the benefit of my CCS class.

Between Mike’s collection and my own, the students were able to check out a lot of goodies as we skipped like stones over water, touching on as many of the key 19th and early 20th Century comics landmarks as possible. My handouts put a quick overview of Rudolphe Toppfer’s works into their hands (with a more expansive handout accessible for them to copy if they wished, and James came in to offer access to Comic Art #3′s excellent illustrated article on Toppfer), along with two samples of Outcault’s seminal Yellow Kid (October 1897 single panel and multi-panel offerings) and a photo of the first comics-derived movie star: Opper’s Happy Hooligan as played by Vitagraph co-founder J. Stuart Blackton, circa 1897.

Better yet, I had two copies of contemporary reprints of Wilhelm Busch’s works (Max & Moritz, 1862-5, and a later lesser-known work The Adventures of a Bachelor from the 1870s); three dramatic examples of the Life-spawned books from 1905-1911 (two of Uncle Sam creator James Montgomery Flagg’s pint-sized satiric hardcovers and one of Charles-Dana Gibson’s gloriously oversized pen-and-ink collections); examples of the two dominant comic strip collection book formats from the early 1900s (Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, McManus’s Bringing Up Father); the Penguin reprint of Frans Masereel’s Passionate Journey; three of Milt Gross’s jazz-era gems (first editions and reprints); and much more.

Mike had thoughtfully offered, and suggested I include, examples of the late 1960s underground newspaper comix and comix inserts, including an original Air Pirates, which was indeed invaluable and instantly caught everyone’s interest. These kinds of connect-the-dots-across-decades not only lend greater urgency to the earlier works that are the primary focus of a lecture like yesterday’s — it gives me an opportunity to touch upon how the pioneering work of prior generations may fuel the students’ own work, an assertion that carries a bit more weight when one can spotlight (however briefly) a phenomenal cartoonist like Bobby London adapting the styles, kinetics and aesthetics of Segar and Herriman for his own work, and his own generation (thanks again, Mike!). I also steered them all to the strongest comic strips collections in the CCS library, and urged them to make time to sit down with the books and read some of the strips. Losing yourself in these marvelous early works is essential, and that’s the best opportunity presently available here.

All in all, I think it was a good session. Now to get to work on next week’s session… covering the whole of post-1919 comic strip history in 2 1/2 hours.

Hey, James, want to crash the party long enough to sing the praises of Roy Crane?
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If you don’t check the comments posted on earlier blog posts, allow me to bring to your attention a significant followup to my Monday post on regional comics.

This from one of the participants in the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center 24-Hour Comics Marathon of August, a gent who also teaches comics in Keene: Marek Bennett, who is an active member in the (hyper-)active Keene Comics Group (who had already sponsored their own 24-Hour Comics session a couple months before the Brattleboro event — and most of ‘em came to that one, too!).

Steve –
Amazing synchronicity! On this very day (September 19th 2005), my new weekly comics series launched in the Keene (NH) Sentinel. It’s called Monadnock History Comics, and will be archived at my website,

I’m aiming it towards teachers, and developing some curriculum to guide students in creating their own local history comics; I’ll just post this announcement and let the project’s website explain itself.
– Marek

Thanks, Marek, and I for one will be visiting your site often!

Marek’s Monadnock History Comics are the relevent portion of the website, and I urge you to check ‘em out

History in the making, and a timely contemporary of the celebrated Texas History Movies I referred to on Monday.
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Yesterday afternoon, Robyn Chapman broke out fragile copies of an Alaskan newspaper her grandmother had edited throughout the 1960s and ’70s. The paper serviced a tiny community a-way up North, and Robyn’s grandmother had graced every issue with a regular page-two comic strip of her own creation. It was crude but effectively delineated, and judging from the look of it (the labored look of some panels, thickness of the line, and pasted-in typed word balloon text) guessed that Robyn’s grandmama had been working at times with those stubborn mimeo stencils of yore — a sort of carbon-like non-paper that had to be cut into with metal tools, which stymied any but the most simplified and labored illustration efforts. I used to work with those damned things in my elementary and junior-high school years (1960s), which jived with the dates on a couple of the newspapers Robyn was showing us… my heart goes out to her grandmother!

Anyhoot, another cool example of regionalized comic strips, and a subject ripe for further research. Certain film archive and academic circles have embraced the preservation and study of home movies (16mm, 8mm, and Super of prior generations, and this equitable turf in the comics medium is equally worthy of scrutiny and preservation.

CCS Musings: Week Two

The sense of community is palpable; I felt it as soon as I walked into the CCS/Colodny building (an hour before my class begins — always a little early these days). James Sturm was sitting across from the entryway, visible through the main floor classroom, talking to the attentive gathering — “Hey, Steve!”, he called over, and I waved to him and all with a clear view of the doorway. James looked and sounded relaxed, clear, open; quite a contrast to our first week, when everything seemed claustrophobically overwhelming.

(Man, does this bring back memories of my first month at the Kubert School… but I won’t bore you with that old-man-dribble today.)

As my amigos know, I have a tendency to over-prepare and become compulsively fascinated with the nuances and details. Of course, that’s where the stories are — “the devil’s in the details,” some say, but devil that I am, that’s also where the meat and potatoes reside. I’ve been working hard at narrowing the focus of the comics studies class since winter, first intent on the goalpost of turning in a comprehensive syllabus back in March, thereafter targeting what, exactly, I could convey to the students in a mere fourteen sessions of 2 1/2 hours each.

Inevitably, material worthy of attention has to succumb to the editing process. I have marvelous resources for presentations on and discussion of the Bayoux Tapestry, illuminated Medieval manuscripts, the 15th and 16th Century Dances of Death (primarily Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1538 edition and 1491/1500 The Danse Macabre of Women), etc., but something had to give.

Week One instead focused on the Japanese ghost scrolls (with a quick follow-through to manga and anime, showing a few examples of that culture’s 17th and 18th Century intermediary works — this improvised after Michelle Ollie mentioned to me that Christine hoped to show anime to her fellow students in later weeks), Mixtec codices (primarily the Cordex Nuttall, with a peek at the incomprehensible but exquisite Codex Borgia), Bosch triptyches, the European broadsheets (primarily the ‘crime and punishment’ broadsheets), Hogarth, Goya, and capping with a ‘preview’ of the comic strips to come via a presentation on Winsor McCay’s work in comics and animation.

Of course, one of the first questions I was hit with: Why had I passed over the Bayeux Tapestry?

Bingo!

You do what you can, and what there’s time for.

I’ve also tried to turn liabilities into strengths: for instance, I’m not yet versed in either scanning or powerpoint presentations (a learning curve I’m working on in hopes of debuting power-point next week), and my available stash of slides are genre-specific (selected and shot for my Journeys Into Fear horror comics history presentation). So this week’s session — covering relevent 19th Century landmarks, the origins of the American comic strip, transitional stages in bound comics (from Toppfer’s 1830s ‘picture-stories’ to the first bound comic strip collections), and the birth of the comic book format — became a hands-on, ‘show and tell’ session, with me placing as many hard copies of books and comics pages in their hands as the timeframe would accomodate. In a way, it’s too bad I will be versed in powerpoint for next year, but realistically these old books couldn’t handle annual handling… still, it was very cool to be able to place the books themselves in the students’ hands.

As any comic reader knows, reading is as much a tactile sensory experience as it is visual: the feel, weight, smell of the books and pages are essential to the experience, a reality increasing reliance on digital presentations eschews. Touch is as essential to the drawing/creative process as thought and visual engagement with the work at hand, and that can be fueled and enhanced by hands-on contact with the published work of their precursors and those-who-walked-these-paths-before. Though they would only be able to spend a few minutes at best scanning the books, it was still hands-on, and I think that’s vital.

Soooooo, I kept the slide show to a minimum (about ten slides) and instead platformed the class session around hands-on scrutiny of relevent books throughout the lecture. The new layout of the classroom — a U-shaped looping of desks, with the open area naturally facing the instructor’s lair (and slide/projection screen) — meant my determination to find two samples of each key publishing landmark was worthwhile: I could hand each row a copy of the relevent publication to look at and pass down, looping back up to my end of the room.

This required a quick trip south into Massachusetts to powwow for lunch with one of my best friends in the world, G. Michael Dobbs aka Mike Dobbs. Mike and I had hoped to get together in any case — Mike had his own agenda, wanting to bounce around ideas relevent to his current book project — and the timing was solid for either this week’s or next week’s class. Mike has been teaching at the college level for years (he has far, far more experience than I!), and he came to our lunch meeting armed for bear, much to the benefit of my CCS class.

Between Mike’s collection and my own, the students were able to check out a lot of goodies as we skipped like stones over water, touching on as many of the key 19th and early 20th Century comics landmarks as possible. My handouts put a quick overview of Rudolphe Toppfer’s works into their hands (with a more expansive handout accessible for them to copy if they wished, and James came in to offer access to Comic Art #3′s excellent illustrated article on Toppfer), along with two samples of Outcault’s seminal Yellow Kid (October 1897 single panel and multi-panel offerings) and a photo of the first comics-derived movie star: Opper’s Happy Hooligan as played by Vitagraph co-founder J. Stuart Blackton, circa 1897.

Better yet, I had two copies of contemporary reprints of Wilhelm Busch’s works (Max & Moritz, 1862-5, and a later lesser-known work The Adventures of a Bachelor from the 1870s); three dramatic examples of the Life-spawned books from 1905-1911 (two of Uncle Sam creator James Montgomery Flagg’s pint-sized satiric hardcovers and one of Charles-Dana Gibson’s gloriously oversized pen-and-ink collections); examples of the two dominant comic strip collection book formats from the early 1900s (Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, McManus’s Bringing Up Father); the Penguin reprint of Frans Masereel’s Passionate Journey; three of Milt Gross’s jazz-era gems (first editions and reprints); and much more.

Mike had thoughtfully offered, and suggested I include, examples of the late 1960s underground newspaper comix and comix inserts, including an original Air Pirates, which was indeed invaluable and instantly caught everyone’s interest. These kinds of connect-the-dots-across-decades not only lend greater urgency to the earlier works that are the primary focus of a lecture like yesterday’s — it gives me an opportunity to touch upon how the pioneering work of prior generations may fuel the students’ own work, an assertion that carries a bit more weight when one can spotlight (however briefly) a phenomenal cartoonist like Bobby London adapting the styles, kinetics and aesthetics of Segar and Herriman for his own work, and his own generation (thanks again, Mike!). I also steered them all to the strongest comic strips collections in the CCS library, and urged them to make time to sit down with the books and read some of the strips. Losing yourself in these marvelous early works is essential, and that’s the best opportunity presently available here.

All in all, I think it was a good session. Now to get to work on next week’s session… covering the whole of post-1919 comic strip history in 2 1/2 hours.

Hey, James, want to crash the party long enough to sing the praises of Roy Crane?
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If you don’t check the comments posted on earlier blog posts, allow me to bring to your attention a significant followup to my Monday post on regional comics.

This from one of the participants in the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center 24-Hour Comics Marathon of August, a gent who also teaches comics in Keene: Marek Bennett, who is an active member in the (hyper-)active Keene Comics Group (who had already sponsored their own 24-Hour Comics session a couple months before the Brattleboro event — and most of ‘em came to that one, too!).

Steve –
Amazing synchronicity! On this very day (September 19th 2005), my new weekly comics series launched in the Keene (NH) Sentinel. It’s called Monadnock History Comics, and will be archived at my website,

I’m aiming it towards teachers, and developing some curriculum to guide students in creating their own local history comics; I’ll just post this announcement and let the project’s website explain itself.
– Marek

Thanks, Marek, and I for one will be visiting your site often!

Marek’s Monadnock History Comics are the relevent portion of the website, and I urge you to check ‘em out

History in the making, and a timely contemporary of the celebrated Texas History Movies I referred to on Monday.
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Yesterday afternoon, Robyn Chapman broke out fragile copies of an Alaskan newspaper her grandmother had edited throughout the 1960s and ’70s. The paper serviced a tiny community a-way up North, and Robyn’s grandmother had graced every issue with a regular page-two comic strip of her own creation. It was crude but effectively delineated, and judging from the look of it (the labored look of some panels, thickness of the line, and pasted-in typed word balloon text) guessed that Robyn’s grandmama had been working at times with those stubborn mimeo stencils of yore — a sort of carbon-like non-paper that had to be cut into with metal tools, which stymied any but the most simplified and labored illustration efforts. I used to work with those damned things in my elementary and junior-high school years (1960s), which jived with the dates on a couple of the newspapers Robyn was showing us… my heart goes out to her grandmother!

Anyhoot, another cool example of regionalized comic strips, and a subject ripe for further research. Certain film archive and academic circles have embraced the preservation and study of home movies (16mm, 8mm, and Super of prior generations, and this equitable turf in the comics medium is equally worthy of scrutiny and preservation.

Odds But No Ends: Shameless Hucksterism, Part One

I’m scrambling this morning to pull together a wide variety of crumbling archival comics and comics material for today’s CCS class, so today will be a quickie. But I do want to alert those of you interested in corraling some vintage Bissette and Gaiman collectibles that my amigo James Rochefort is placing on the auction block; check ‘em out, please.

The Bissette items are direct from the SpiderBaby archives, and these are fully authorized auctions of these signed items. While I will be setting up my own site to handle some sales (specifically the rarest Taboo back issues and other rarities), for the time being James is my online dealer of choice, so if it’s Bissette items you’re looking for, read on. (In the coming weeks, I will also be making special arrangements with my friend and veteran Comics Route proprietor John Rovnak to offer other Bissette and SpiderBaby comics and comix items online; more info on that once all our ducks are in a row. I am not, however, selling original art as yet.)

Note, however, that the Neil Gaiman collectibles are being handled by James to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. When the CBLDF made the momentous move this summer from their long-standing Northampton, MA base of operations to their new digs in Manhattan, CBLDF director Charles Brownstein contacted me, asking if I knew anyone interested in handling some of the CBLDF stock, if only to minimize the scope and cost of their move. Charles and James worked out the necessary details; 50% of every Gaiman/CBLDF related sale from James will be going to the CBLDF, so don’t be shy about your support.

James is currently active and listing items on Ioffer.com, Amazon.com, Bookavenue.com and Ebay.com — check ‘em out, and often!

On all these sites, you can access James’s auction items by checking his user id, which is gimlisloot. The rotation of stock and rarities will be frequent, so you might want to reference James’s efforts on a regular basis.

James is up and running, and there’s some primo packages and items already within your reach. Here’s some of the Ebay listings:

S.R. Bissette’s TYRANT: THE PRIMO PALEO PACK

THE BISSETTE-SET, one-of-a-kind collection (Signed)

XL vintage SR Bissette Chiller Theatre Expo T-shirt, Spring ’95

ALAN MOORE ‘1963’ T-SHIRT

S.R. Bissette and G. Michael Dobbs’ THE YEAR IN FEAR CALENDER (1992) Signed

Neil Gaiman Comic & More Collection

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OK, off to finish prep for today’s CCS session.

Hmmm, all these historic discrepancies about when exactly The Yellow Kid first saw print… I have to sort this out. Anyhow, I’ve some real treats in store for the CCS folks. It should be a real hoot; will tell you more tomorrow!