Weepers into the Whimpering

Let's talk about some more odd 90s comics.

Seekers Into the Mystery was a short-lived Celestine Prophecy-esque item from Vertigo Comics, an imprint of DC that remains best known for the literary fantasy comic Sandman. Various other Vertigo comics followed Sandman's clever writer/rotating artists/contemporary fantasy recipe. Grant Morrison's The Invisibles was my favorite, but we're gonna look at Seekers.

I know what you're thinking-"That's the kind of pulse-pounding action I want from my comic books!" To be fair, this low-key literary approach was pretty common in Vertigo titles. The guy on the left is a guru known as The Magician who's presented as being more or less God in human form. I alway though he was modeled on Yanni, but apparently there's a real life guru, Meher Baba, who's the model, although Baba, to his credit, didn't go by The Magician. Writer J. M. DeMatteis probably meant no disrespect to the little person community by his use of the term "midget," and artist Jon J. Muth probably meant to offset any such offense by depicting the character as roughly 5-6 feet tall.

Anyway, the comic centers on a wayward writer's quest for the mystical insights The Magician seems to offer. Things come to a bad pass when he visits an ex-girlfriend who has the temerity to argue with his newfound beliefs:

Nothing says "disrespect" like dropping someone's photo in the wastebasket. Especially if you've snatched the photo out of an admirer's hands, then hoisted it like you're gonna toss it across the room... only to primly deposit it, with your EVIL CLAWS appearing in shadow. And then little devils come popping out of the wastebasket. Artist Jill Thompson (the comic had a rotating team of artists) is really quite good, (see her work on The Invisibles, which we'll talk about in a moment, or her own Scary Godmother series) but here her talents are perhaps strained from misuse. It wouldn't take a lot of revising to make this comic suitable for Jack Chick.

Let the record show that I basically agree with everything she's saying here.

Again, insensitivity aside, I think she's right. The writer presumably thinks her argument has some persuasive force, or he wouldn't have his protagonist swooning like an overwrought damsel (although to be fair I've wept at women's feet a couple of times. Builds character).


But fear not, folks, the Pantied Skeptic is about to get what she deserves. What's that, you ask? A robust rebuttal?

Nope.

More like a KNIFE IN THE FACE.

This comic's low-key naturalism had its limits.

 Dramaturgically speaking, I can understand why Dematteis doesn't want to turn his comic into Oxford-style debate, but anytime your counterargument is "You need a good knifing!"... well, I'm gonna say you lost the argument by default. This comic is a tacit admission that astral projection, recovered memory, and other mystical experiences are probably glitches in our neurological operating system rather than deeper truths. Now, I'm confident that there are strong rebuttals to this philosophically materialist line of thought, but Dematteis can't or won't mount them. He is, perhaps, a philosophical materialist in spite of himself.

Grant Morrison's Vertigo comic The Invisibles, which was in some ways a model for Seekers, also pushed a mystical worldview, but was captious (and postmodern) enough to incorporate counterarguments as threads in a shimmeringly ambiguous dialogic tapestry, rather than mere problems to polish off (with a knife). Invisibles remains in print. I've probably reprinted more of the late run of Seekers in this post than DC ever will (all takedown requests will of course be cheerfully complied with).

Now let's look at an independently published (ergo black and white) comic called Starchild by James A. Owen. I dipped into Issue #12 without reading any prior issues. What's that like? It's like this:

I enjoy this inscrutable, decontextualized worldbuilding, probably for the same reasons I enjoy John Ashbury.

Full size for detail enjoyment.

True aficionados of peculiar 90s comics will detect the influence of Cerebus, which was one of the most remarkable and influential independent comics, right up until auteur Dave Sim decided to use his comic as a bully pulpit for all his deep insights, like that women are terrible. Other cartoonists stopped imitating Cerebus's lush backgrounds, vertiginous panels,  and wide-margined word balloons once they realized Sim wasn't kidding.

I love the atmospheric top panel on this page; the sense of depth and shadow, and hair. I suppose the hairy guy was trying to say "Greetings, Starchild" when he got punched, but I like the idea of a fantasy comic with a hero named Starchi. That punch is the only rough-and-tumble in the comic; mostly it's very quiet and genteel, like this:

Much of the comic consists of bushy male faces pressed close together, whispering cryptically. Like Wind in the Willows, it's a fantasy that pushes the homosocial towards the homoerotic. The only female character appears in a prose-with-illustrations section safely cordoned off from the delicately masculine main narrative. All she does is

• Not wear any clothing
• Step out of the wood like a newborn faun
• Let raindrops trickle through her fingers into a brook.

Starchi & Hairhead Double Digest. Ask for it by name!

 The above page is from Eddie Campbell's autobiographical Alec stories, serialized in Eddie Campbell's Bacchus comics, and it gives  a nice sense of the comics-as-jazz-poetry vibe that is Campbell's signature. I was perplexed by his work in the actual 90s, yet felt compelled to keep buying it, saving his work up for a day when I would be grown enough to understand. Today, it's probably the indy comic of the period that affords me the most pleasure.

Manga became a thing in the US in the 90s. One of the most important publishers of domesticated manga was Tokyopop, which went out of business as suddenly as it appeared. I'm not sure why...

But I'm pretty sure that hiring bored English majors to write plot synopses, and hiring non-graphic designers to do the typeface, didn't help.

Casual Maxx Squad: Some leftovers from a misspent decade.

 
That's from a comic book titled The Maxx, issue #10. It's the first issue I bought; the first comic I bought in my college career. That image tells you why. Lushly pretty, dense, narrative art with a cartoony base. It suggested ways of blending traditional comics and fine art in ways I'd never seen before. Further, the story, despite walk-on appearances by a boo-hiss supervillian and a superhero (drawn in a hybrid of 90s superhero muscle-mass and early-comics bigfoot comedy), focused on a normal girl's childhood trauma, and the way it shaped her as a grownup. This blend of nerd-friendly tropes and Bergmanesque thematic concerns instantly turned me into a Maxx fan. I returned to the comics shop to buy issues # 1-9. Had I been better educated in recent comics nerd material I would have known that the lovely page there was not exactly unprecedented; a fellow named Bill Sienkiewicz had set the example for this kind of cartooning with his Klimt-goes-Pomo art for comics miniseries such as Electra:Assassin and Stray Toasters.  But knowing that wouldn't have blunted my appetite for more Maxx.

So what does that pretty page and that nice daddy have to do with the story?  Not much.  Daddy's of dubious dramaturgical importance to the story:  It's a pretty basic childhood trauma narrative.  Girl rescues crippled bunny, tries to nurse it but it's too far gone, Mommy kills the bunny, and the girl's traumatized for life.

So here's a page from the first issue.  That ridiculously dressed woman is Julie, the adult version of the traumatized little girl in issue #10.  Now, this comic was written by two men: Sam Keith (the artist) and William Messner-Loebs (who's credited with the dialogue).  I don't know what their collaborative process was, but I'm guessing it was "Marvel-style," meaning they talked the story over, the artist drew some pictures, and the writer tried to come up with dialogue that matched/made sense of/made up for the art.  On this page we're confronted with a social worker who, unlike actual social workers I've known, doesn't believe in minimizing sexual cues.  This leaves Messner-Loebs with an interesting challenge; this character clearly dresses the way she does because the artist likes drawing women like this, but if you're trying to create something like a characterization, how do you make sense of this?  By making her nasty, apparently, and not in a Janet Jackson sense.  That blanket crack at the end suggests, if her wardrobe doesn't, that social work may not be the career path for her.  Issue #10, then, is what comics calls an "Origin story," the explanation of how she got this way.  She's afraid of the painful consequences of caring, so covers it up with a bitter attitude. I only have a few issues of The Maxx left in my collection.  I gave most of them away.  Notice that I haven't shown you The Maxx himself yet.  The Maxx is a pseudo-superhero who ocillates between being Julie's Spirit Animal (turns out he's a bunny beneath his mask) or the deluded homeless guy she can't help nurturing (in which case he's a human beneath the mask).  This slippage accompanies Maxx and Julie's vacillation between two worlds: the real one, and the Outback, Julie's fantasy world.  I'll not delve much deeper into that, partly because I don't remember it all, but mostly because Keith and Messner-Leobs were clearly making it up as they went and it ended up a tangle.

Eventually they ended (not resolved) the story, and the comic continued as a succession of minimally connected tales, now written in full by the artist, Sam Keith.  Let's see what he came up with!

Well alrighty.   15 years later it looks less transgressive, since every free weekly in America features Dan Savage helping people figure out diaper fetishes and related kinks, but imagery like this is still a bit much to take on an empty stomach.  Like the undigested erotic/psychological elements in the first issue, this makes me wonder what the thought process was that produced this, although in this case there's only Sam Keith to credit or blame, since Messner-Leobs had left the title by now.  Sam's put a lot of work into things like page layout; I like the way bodies are juxtaposed and intermingled in threatening/sexual tableaus, but it's unclear how positive or negative we're supposed to be about weird fetishes.  Horror, kink, and bootleg psychiatry in the EST/Dianetics mold come together in a story with none of the comic's original characters at all.  I don't have the next issue, in which this story presumably ends with an induced epiphany on the part of the kidnapped characters, or just an escape from bondage, but either way I doubt it's able to top (or bottom) that page for sheer queasy sleaze that plays on the ambiguous pleasure and terror of BDSM.  So let's skip to the last issue I have, which is The Last Issue.

Got all that?  Sheesh, look at that type.  Compare and contrast to the hand-lettering in the first couple pages I posted.  Although I wasn't aware of it at the time, I think the main reason I lost my enthusiasm for The Maxx wasn't because the lumbering improvisation of the narrative kept stumbling (Keith wound up explaining a lot of plot points in the letters pages instead of in the comic proper) or because Keith decided to take over the textual end of writing, or because the main characters disappeared for months at a time.  It was because the letterer quit and got replaced by a font, along with too much text, resulting in big indigestible chunks of wordwordswords.  Kind of like this blog...  That purple guy's The Maxx, btw.  Sometimes Keith drew him big and imposing, sometimes Keith drew him like this.  Maxx is tonally flexible in a way most costumed heroes aren't.

Anyway, the schmaltz of panel 3 is probably indicative of Keith's shortcomings as a crafter of Deep Human Narratives.  Portraying creepy horror/erotica?  He brings it.  Portraying simple happiness?  He falls back on greeting-card hand-me-downs.  This reminds me of the show Lost, which tried to turn its tricksy elements into the backdrop for O. Henry tales of human folly and growth, but lacked enough human insight to pull it off.  Lost's attempts at character-centered drama often left me wondering if the writers had ever actually met a human.

But in a panel here, a page there, Keith's outpouring of lush doodles helped me enjoy the 90s a bit more than I might have otherwise, and Messner-Loebs wrote one passage of dialogue (no longer in my collection, I'm afraid) that still matters, even if paraphrased from memory.  Maxx comforts a teenager (Sara, the brunette in the page above) with the insight that growing up is, in large measure, a matter of learning to manage pain.  That idea helped me through a lot of sorrows and frustrations.

Let's switch to a different oddball 90s comic now:

Oz Squad!  Two guys who aspire to pick up where John. R. Neill and Ruth Plumly Thompson left off, (or perhaps March Laumer was more the idea) draw upon X-Men/Teen Titans methodology to plug the gaps in their own youthful artistic problem solving toolkits, and behold the zap-kblam results.  Don't worry, Toto there's a repairable robot dog.  And all ends well, as the following panels make clear:

Hanging out at the mall, with big-headed Mulder and Scully (so 90s!) and... some other characters.  What happier ending could there be?

Yeah, suck it, McDonalds!  We're not gonna tolerate some crass corporate entity moving in on our shopping mall.  Oz Mall!  I hate to admit it, but the idea of Oz as a mall probably would have gone down pretty smooth with L. Frank Baum if he'd still been around.

Look at that lion's eyes, particularly in the second-to-last panel.  If I were sitting by a lion, I'd want it to be sedated, but that lion is BAKED.  Just another stoner at the mall.

And in closing, a quick glimpse of Casual Heroes!  As far as I can tell, only one issue ever got published.  And while it's not likely to make any nostalgia-monger's top 100 list, it's one of my personal talismans of 90s-ness.

Kirby swipes.  Bold colors.  Ripped stockings and cutoffs.  This utterly derivative title tries to goose typical superhero schtick with slacker banter, and when I close my eyes and think "90s," this is how it looks, only less aggro and no sausage lips.  In the letters page (yes, first issues had letters pages, thanks to friends of the artists) the guy behind this comic talks about swipes (the fine art of copying other artists, like oh say Jack Kirby) the way DJs talk about sampling.  It's a kind of comics bricolage, or could be if it got past this Colorforms level.

I turn 40 in a few days, and this is still what I spend my mental energy on.  Bye now.

Maison I Cough oooh

It's 3:22 in the morning. I can't sleep, because that would involve relaxing, which I can't do because letting myself go slack makes my as-if-mosquitobit uvula bounce off my postnasal drip, jarring me into a manic coughing fit. So instead of trembling next to my Wife and keeping her awake the day before she has to teach class, I'm in the office thinking about Maison Ikkoku.

Maison Ikkoku is a manga by Rumiko Takahashi, the artist responsible for the comic fantasies Ranma 1/2 and Inu-Yasha. Ikkoku, by contrast, is a more or less reality-based romantic comedy. I was obsessed with it post-college. I identified with the clueless underambitious male lead, and I was enamored of a woman who strongly resembled the comic's female lead. Since my doltish efforts to woo the real woman were all abject flops, I turned to the comic for comfort. It seemed like a more hopeful retelling of my misadventures. Every month I bought the new issue and depended on it for pretty much all the pleasure I ever got out of this thwarted-love dynamic.

Obviously I got over this unrequited relationship, but the other day I reread the last issue of Maison Ikkoku, totally out of context. It's (spoiler warning, I guess) the big wedding between the protagonists. As with most real weddings, one's emotional response is likely to be tied to one's emotional attachment to the people involved. Reading it now was like attending the marriage of someone I vaguely remembered from school.

Life and like that

Gabrielle Bell has a blog and I've added it to my links.

I'm trying to learn Marat/Sade in suffecient depth to keep the director from holding me up for ridicule. I'm trying to relearn and improve a scene from last year's production of Turn of the Screw since I'm being forced to perform it for a local theatre awards show. And I'm trying to learn sides for two original plays for which a local theatre is holding auditions. And I'm trying to learn two different new monologues for various other auditions. And I'm polishing an older monologue. So I'm not posting here much. One hopes I'll get back into maintaining this record of my life soon. My life itself will have to ease back a bit first.

Right around

Having tweaked the author of Hollywood Animation Archive blog in my last post, I now praise him for posting this.

What a wonderful approach to capturing the all-at-once nature of social events! Gasoline Alley did this kind of thing, probably before this artist, but if I were a 'toonist I'd consider using this approach rather often. Neither prose, nor theatre, nor film can get this simultaneous yet leisurely effect. And while these toons have some social attitudes that are past their shelf life, there's a warmth to the characters, without ridding them of their rough edges.

SHUT UP NERD

Elizabeth Taylor won an Oscar for her performance in Butterfield 8. Most folks agreed it wasn't her best work or a very good movie, but she had a life-threatening disease and got the sympathy vote. What does this have to do with this year's Best Supporting Actor award? Oh, nothing.

I can't seem to stop running in nerd circles so I've gotten an earful recently about how wonderful the latest Batman movie is and how it got robbed at the Oscars. I'm ambivalent about the flick: I saw it because Laurie wanted to (how's that for a role-reversal: my girlfriend drags me to superhero movies!) and was prepared to hate it, since the trailers made it look like a gloomy slog. It was smarter than the average shoot-em-up and deserves credit for that. On the other hand there's something rancid about making a Batman movie that you can't take children to. This film is like a fat grownup stealing a Batman toy from a child and shouting "Mine, not yours!" as millions cheer. And let's face it; just as we'd never have heard of Elvis if he'd been black, we'd never have heard all this gush about how wonderful that Joker performance was if the guy were still alive. Dadgummit.

And now the nerds are carrying on about the Watchmen movie. Snore. And I love the Watchmen comic, as much as any nerd out there, I do. But adaptation is only interesting if it creates its own identity, an identity that stands on its own, like Miles Davis' Porgy and Bess. Who needs a "faithful" adaptation? When was the last time you enjoyed something because it was "faithful" to something else? Movies should be faithful to themselves alone. The Watchmen movie looks like Beatlemania.

Obviously I wouldn't get so worked up about this stuff if I weren't a nerd myself. As Evan Dorkin points out, the me of a decade ago would be aghast that I wouldn't go see a Watchmen film.

Watch Out For Splendour

I met Allison Bechdel and Harvey Pekar on Friday! I'm a fan of them both, but even though they were both really down to earth and approachable I got all tongue-tied.

One cool thing about Pekar is that a couple years ago he got to publish some new work with DC comics, the Batman people. Given this opportunity to connect with a mass audience, he wrote a bunch of stories about unclogging toilets. That's what I call authenticity. I tried to compliment him on this, but it came out sounding more like a complaint. It's hard to compliment someone for writing toilet-unclogging stories.

Allison Bechdel's Fun Home is an extended consideration of Bechdel's father, and we got to talk a bit about the book's spiraling, ruminative structure, which I found spellbinding. She sketched herself thinking in spirals in my book. It's a treat! I felt bad cuz I didn't buy anything (hey, I'm unemployed until November!) but after we schleped the 20-odd unlit miles from the civilized world to Kannapolis, Laurie read my copies of Our Cancer Year and Fun Home, so they've picked up a new reader.

Months Late, Dollars Short

A bit behind the times, but here's a few pix from The Charlotte Heroescon.




It's Kevin Huizenga, of Or Else and Ganges comics! His blend of Cheeveresque suburban mythologising and Nintendorobic monster faceoffs has made him one of the rising stars of my generation... okay, my brother's generation of cartoonists. Here you can see him drawing me a sketch. Thanks, Kevin!



















Here I am with Tom Spurgeon, the Comics Reporter. Ever since he was editor of The Comics Journal he's been shaping my sense of how to grapple with art in a personal, even-keeled but incisive fashion.






Jaime Hernandez, one of the greatest living cartoonists, period! If you're not familiar with Jaime, go find the Love & Rockets comic book and get acquainted with his and his brothers' cast of characters. He was a joy to speak with; we discussed his roots in punk culture and how that shaped his DIY approach to comic storytelling. He answered my question about how he views Strangers in Paradise, a popular comic that I regard as little more that a tepid emo pastiche of Jaime's work (He sees the resemblance, acknowledges that SiP creator Terry Moore denies imitating Jaime, and shrugs). And...



he drew us a picture of Maggie, his main character!











And here's how I felt about that.

Photos courtesy of Laurie.

I'm wildly excited about a forthcoming con. Specifically, this. Art-comics champs are going to be in attendance, and if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise, Laurie and I will get to meet folks we've admired for years! I'm so provincial that the idea of meeting Jaime Hernandez makes me swoon. Of course when it comes to meeting celebs I reckon it's important to act like someone they'd actually want to speak with, rather than like a gibbering fool. As a local actor I've actually met folks who were starstruck to speak with me, as strange as it seems (I'm only a local actor, for heaven's sake!) and I found it a distinctly worrying experience. I love to talk with folks who enjoy theatre, but watching grown people quaking with excitement over someone who was in a local play is disorienting. C'mon, folks! As John Waters said, you're not famous until you're in the Enquirer.

Added: Frank Santoro, artist on the oddball adventure comic Cold Heat, will be there too! I can't wait to ask him how he acheived some odd color effects. And Sammy Harkham, the editor of Kramer's Ergot will be there! Plus
Kevin Huizenga, one of the most thoughtful, nuanced, innovative cartoonists of the new breed! Apologies to my regular readers, none of whom care.

Waiting For Garfield

Garfield Minus Garfield takes a a well-known comic strip and takes it into Beckett territory. Oddly, I've never felt a comic came so close to capturing my home life.

Chris Cilla

My new link is to Chris Cilla's blog. He made a contribution to Kramer's Ergot 6, the infamous artcomix anthology, that I return to again and again.

Cleanup

I was telling one of my Shakespeare at Sloss co-performers about my filthy-apartment woes and said "I've got four big trouble spots. If I can clear those up I'll be out of the woods." She said "you can probably clear up each spot in about a week, right?" I dunno, but her saying it motivated me to tackle some of those trouble spots that I've done nothing more than furrow my brow at for a while.

I've got a pile of clothing that I haven't worn in years; for various reasons I decided these clothes didn't fit the bill, and I threw them in one of the semi-closets that pepper my apartment. Today I finally started sorting through them... they'll need serious cleaning, but most of them will be wearable with a bit of care, and some of them are startlingly nice clothes that my parents bought me, years ago. I'm dumbfounded that I didn't appreciate these things, and just left them in a lump.

* * *

Three comics from Picturebox (see link to left!) arrived yesterday: 1-800-MICE ishs 1 and 2, and Free Radicals. 1-800-MICE is by Matthew Thurber, whose contribution to acclaimed artcomix anthology Kramers Ergot 6 spellbound me. I'm savoring this new comic; it's like a mashup of the perfect long-form improv show, the perfect dream, and the perfect Saturday morning cartoon that never was (including the cereal ads).

Free Radicals is an anthology which blends new-school artcomix with prisoner art. New-school artcomix kids thought it would be interesting to solicit art from convicts, and they aren't wrong. So you get short narratives, some elegant and enigmatic images, and then, y'know, nekkid ladies with devil horns. The book is wildly uneven, but at ten bucks the best of it redeems the worst.

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I recently saw the movie Elephant by Gus Van Sant; it's based on the Columbine shootings. It takes Steadicam about as far as it can go, and builds up compassion for the victims without yanking at our heartstrings. One thing that struck me about it was that Van Sant presents the fictionalized shooters as affectless, bland, without overt passion. I had imagined the Columbine shooters acting out of an overflow of poorly-channelled passion.

I wonder what the Columbine shooters would think if they could see their fictionalized selves kissing in the shower.

Macbeth Funnies

This blogpost is from a teacher who asks students to draw comics illustrating Macbeth. It's a cool way to gauge the kids' comprehension, and I think the comics he posts are pretty amusing.

Bodega

New link: Bodega. They publish some tasty looking comics, and unlike most comics publishers I'm into nowadays the comics are available in small affordable formats, not enourmous expensive coffee-table formats. Although I like the coffee-table formats too.

Someday I will be able to afford a two-dollar comic book, and on that day I will place an order with Bodega.

My issues aren't collectors' items.

September is shaping up to be a complicated month. I've overextended myself in a lot of directions. I won't bore you with details, but I got some serious juggling to do. Lots of people want lots of things from me, and I want lots of things from lots of people. I might have to puzzle some things out, behave erratically, and holler.

So it's the perfect time for Not Blog X, my new link. It's a guy reviewing his childhood favorite X-Men comics. I never got the X-Men bug, but I enjoy it when people thoughtfully reexamine the stuff they dug as kids, and I feel a bit like a '90s era X-character: consider me a poorly-drawn lumpy hollerin' guy who's suffering from unclear problems but bearing up by striking poses and acting sullen.

Past, Present and Future

I've been thinking about manga a lot lately. It became an important part of my life in my last year of college, and remained important to me for years. Rumiko Takahashi's romantic comedy Maison Ikkoku and zany comedy Ranma 1/2 were must-reads for me; I felt like I could see truths about my life projected onto the white spaces between her clean lines. For my nonproductive post-college years manga were my main source of escapism. Quiet enough to not wake my parents, portable enough to sneak into any location. Nowadays I only want such entertainment comfort food on an occasional basis; I don't need it to compensate for a lack of real life. Yet manga and anime imagery plugs into my Nerd Mind the way Klingons or Light Sabers do for other nerds. I'll see an image of Any Old Manga Character and get excited on some primal level, but when I start reading the stuff I get bored fast.

The loss of novelty value is part of it. Manga was once scarce, a niche market, and if you liked the stuff you pretty much bought what was offered. Why else would I have three digests of Fist Of The North Star, which is basically postapocalyptic Wrestlemania?

* * *

This production of Fuddy Meers is coming together; we just got off-book for Act 1, and the Off-Book day is always a troubling one. It feels like suddenly the production is awful. To make matters worse, two of our key tech people saw us work with it for the first time last night, and what they saw was people not knowing their lines, bollixing the rhythms of the scenes. Someone, possibly me, told three fellow actors to bite his behind because they knew their lines better than he did. But getting the script out of my hand is like getting the needle out of a junkie's arm. It's painful, but it's for the best. As soon as we have line mastery we can really start to have fun with the readings. I'm going to try bringing a little Elliott Gould to my performance tonight; my character goes from nice guy to heavy and back again, and I don't think I'm making the nice parts light enough. I'm anticipating the heavy passages, and it's weighing down the nice guy passages. Gould circa The Long Goodbye may be the poultice I need.

Does that make a lick of sense? Pay no attention to anything actors say about their process.

* * *

I dunno what I'll audition for after this. BFT will be doing Moonlight and Magnolias, about the making of Gone With The Wind. I love the premise, but I've never read the script. I've gotten some nonspecific enthusiasm from various impresarios around town. I need to do theatre, but what theatre needs me?

Goony

Sunday I went to see a theatre matinee. I got there just in time, then found I'd left my wallet at home. That's the kind of goofup I used to make all the time when I was younger, but I thought I'd finally tightened up on stuff like that. The ticket-taker and usher offered to let me in for free, but I didn't feel right about that and I slank home to do laundry instead. I didn't want to get something for nothing, especially since I was in a self-punishing mood over forgetting my wallet, but now I wonder if I didn't commit the greater sin against the performers by turning my back on their show, and against the ticket-taker by turning down her offer.
* * *
This blogpost talks about manga titles the author's stopped reading. It's a meme that's making the rounds on manga-happy nerdblogs, but I realized recently that I've more or less stopped buying manga. The last manga I bought was a volume of Osamu Tezuka's Buddha. Tezuka created manga, but not only did he pioneer it, he continued to find new uses for the form. "Buddha" retells the story of Buddha, obviously, and while I'm not familiar with the full story I find Tezuka's retelling to be gripping. Tezuka knows how to spin a yarn, and the moral seriousness of his tale gives it flavor without being overpowering. The story never slides into boring or banal piety; religious storytellers take note! Once I would have been nonplussed by Tezuka's use of goony-looking cartoony characters in excruciatingly serious tales of spiritual trials, but nowadays it seems perfect to me. Aren't we all kind of goony, and aren't we all involved in serious spiritual trials?

Scattershot

Per this morning's NPR News, Kellogg's is planning to stop advertising their more egregiously unhealthy cereal to kids, at least until they can rework the recipes to be less awful for you. I'm the kind of person who is filled with despair whenever someone wants to waste precious time talking about a funny commercial, but I confess to a deep-rooted nostalgia for the cereal ads that kept my Saturday morning toons in the air. I'd as soon eat something I found in a parking lot as put froot loops in my mouth, but you show me a picture of Toucan freakin' Sam and I'm a happy camper. It's totally Pavlovian. And those weird New Wave ads for Bubbilicious bubble gum stir fond memories of cute people turning into flying, dancing neon signs. I'm sure these ads would look way less cool to me today; I resist going onto Youtube to check this stuff out. I wonder how today's slicker ads are shaping and warping today's kids?

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When I was in second grade I had a crush on a pretty girl in my class; let's call her Debbie. I didn't know a thing about her except she fit a conventional prettiness template that I hadn't yet thought my way past. A year later she moved away. And although I'd never spoken to her or gotten to know her, I prayed "Dear God, please let me meet Debbie again and have one more chance with her."

A year or two later my family and I went to Pops in the Park, an orchestral Pops music concert they held every year at the foot of an pseudo-medieval tower on a battlefield (why a medieval-style tower on a Civil War Battlefield? Ya got me). So we spread out our picnic blanket, and there on the blanket in front of me was... Debbie. I sat there and quietly stared at the back of her head for the whole evening. She never seemed to notice me, and I never uttered a word to her. I think God just gave up on granting my requests after that. Maybe that's why He didn't burn that comic book I mentioned a while back.

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Speaking of comics, I got a thing called Elvis Road recently. It's in book binding, but open it up and it's a 24-foot long sheet of paper with a big doodled mural on it. It's pricey at twenty-five bucks, but it's richly rewarding. It's basically a picture of a fantastical street with lots of cheerless strip malls and such. Weird cartoon characters run and drive around, getting into wrecks, getting attacked by monsters; it may sound trivial, but the density and variety of it makes it hypnotic. It's a small triumph of world-building; every page is crammed with detail. It's like Richard Scary on an ether binge.

Smootches

No real post today: after a big comment about L'Eclisse on Diane's blog Your-Russia, I'm done.

Go check Buenaventura Press's catalogue and see if you like anything. They sell art comics and such. I've already got Kramer's Ergot 6, Hunter and Painter, and Spaniel Rage. All are splendid. I covet Elvis Road, everything by Marc Bell, and the other Kramer's Ergots.

Last night I had The Actor's Nightmare. I was in a convoluted but generic musical, didn't know my part, and screwed up the luminous Carl Dean by not being onstage to feed him his cue to start singing his big song. He came backstage and thumped me on the head, which he would never do in real life. I woke up and thought "I guess this means I need to go see Carl Dean with Kristi Tingle-Higginbotham in the Magic City Actor's Theatre production of Evita." And so should you.

Star Lord Vs. God

Today I got nothing, so I'll cross-post something I wrote on a nerdy message board.

When I was in junior high I bought some old Marvel black and white SF magazine. I think it was titled Star Lord or something equally dopey; it included a Harlan Ellison rant about the evils of calling science fiction "sci-fi." Anyway, it had a few panels of a topless woman. I'd never owned such hot stuff! Then I went to a church camp; I don't remember what they actually told us that inspired this action, but I came back from camp, picked up the magazine, put it in my wastebasket, and intoned, "In the name of Jesus, I command you to BURN."

I honestly thought it would work. I'd planned this midway through the weeklong camp; I was so upset about my sin (owning and enjoying a mildly smutty comic) and so pumped up about God's power to work in our lives that I honestly believed God would make this comic burst into flames, proving His power over evil.

But whaddayaknow, folks; Star Lord wouldn't burn, so I just threw it out. I learned that God's miracles aren't available on demand.