Long ago, in a land far far from here, I lived in a punk rock group house with a lot of fans of Steve Purcells’ Sam and Max characters and their unsavory pals. Sam and Max was a hilariously antisocial comic strip. Assuming one thinks punk humor is hilarious and freelance talking animal police are a good source of humor.
Some time later, LucasArts decided to make a game based on the Sam and Max comics. The internet tells me that LucasArts was Steve Purcells’ day job and Sam and Max were a long-running LucasArts in-joke, which is the sort of little fun fact to know and share that tended to be unknown pre-internet. I could comment on this more, assuming I read all of the background info (which I haven’t yet), but suffice it to say that LucasArts actually made a pretty pleasingly unsavory game based on Sam and Max. The internet also tells me that the characters were eventually made into a television show which aired on a secondary FOX channel called FOX Kids. Which is weird both because it is simply weird and because I’ve never watched it, despite my affection for Sesame Street and Back at the Barnyard.
I’m excited to report that the awesome old Sam and Max comics are all back in print now. Full disclosure: the source of the new mega-packs of Sam and Max comics, DVDs, XBox, swag, etc. is an advertiser on Blue Blood. I haven’t checked out the new game yet, but the printed stuff is definitely worth picking up. Watch out for the bunny.
So the nice girl next door at Evergreen Terrace is going to be sort of taking it off for Playboy. A Playboy spokeswoman seems to indicate that Marge Simpson will only be showing implied nudity in her three page pictorial, despite having landed the cover of Playboy for all newsstand copies. (Subscribers will get a non-cartoon celebrity on the cover. No word on whether it is a naked celeb.) The old saying goes, implied nudity is a lot like implied food. I don’t a hundred percent agree, but it seems like doing Playboy should equal conservative nudes because that is their format. Unless Marge were just doing an interview, in which case I’m not sure about her being the sexy covergirl, much as I love The Simpsons.
I think a number of people keep saying Lois Griffin from Family Guy should do Playboy next, because they know Lois Griffin would actually show the goods. Let’s be realistic here and see that Lois Griffin would be a great fit for Hustler. Regardless, Marge Simpson doing Playboy is a very cute way to celebrate The Simpsons 20th anniversary. Yup, The Simpsons have been on the air for twenty years.
Playboy CEO Scott Flanders, who replace Hugh Hefner offspring Christie Hefner this summer, states that he is really excited about having a cartoon on the cover for the first time because he really wants to bring in a younger audience. Yes, you read that correctly. I don’t know if he is any relation to Ned Flanders, but he does think that The Simpsons will really bring in the under-35 crowd. According to The Chicago Sun-Times, based in the city where Playboy is headquartered, CEO Scott Flanders thinks Playboy’s current audience is around thirty-five because of shows like The Girls Next Door. And putting a cartoon’s twenty year anniversary on the cover will bring in a younger audience. It’s not like he’s putting Abby the Cow from Nickelodeon’s Back at the Barnyard on the cover.
Given that The Simpsons came out of the underground and alternative comics world, it started off with an audience which would have been offended by the suggestion that cartoons are for kids. The Simpsons manages to be more subtle than others who have followed in its yellow animated footsteps, so kids can watch it, but the point was always that The Simpsons was also more sophisticated.
Raise your hand if you remember Life in Hell from before The Simpsons. Are you in your twenties? Yeah, didn’t think so.
Playboy is a brand which has always had such a genius for branding that it seems odd and unsettling to watch them flounder. Like when your first older relative or mentor starts to forget things or have random outbursts.
Putting Marge Simpson on the cover of Playboy is an awesome promo. Just not a promo which is actually designed to bring in readers born the same year as Bart Simpson. Bart read Playdude because he found Homer’s stash.
In case some of you are getting too much work done, there is a web comic I’ve mentioned in the forums before, that I’m going to remind you of again now. The xkcd comic strip is probably most accurately described as tech culture humor. At a time in history when so much of the population uses the internet so extensively, tech humor probably has a pretty broad audience though. The site could be more cohesively designed, but the strips are some of the most insightful and hilarious on the web. The “Someone is wrong on the internet” panel is pretty much my favorite thing I have ever seen in a comic strip and I think of it often. Normally, I’d talk a bit about genius strip creator Randall Munroe and how his strips started life as an archive of scans from his math notes and who he is and all, but his bio is just so awesome that I feel like paraphrasing its info would be leaving something out:
I’m just this guy, you know? I’m a CNU graduate with a degree in physics. Before starting xkcd, I worked on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. As of June 2007 I live in Massachusetts. In my spare time I climb things, open strange doors, and go to goth clubs dressed as a frat guy so I can stand around and look terribly uncomfortable. At frat parties I do the same thing, but the other way around.
That is sufficiently awesome that the only thing I have to add at the moment is that I’m buying myself a “Stand back, I’m going to try science” T-shirt if I finish everything in my inbox tonight.
I’m going to admit that this year, like many Americans, I’ve been too caught up, either following election coverage or avoiding it, to properly celebrate Halloween. Sure, Blue Blood is sponsoring a few Halloween parties, most notably the Release the Bats decade anniversary. And I remembered to freshen up my hair color and play with squash a little. Some years, I get all freaked out about wanting to do too much for Halloween, but this year I haven’t even had my favorite holiday at the front of my brain most of the time. But I’ve been enjoying a bit of vicarious Halloween joy today, checking out the work of people like Dana Dark and Ray Villafane.
More on Dana Dark’s Halloween secrets later, but I want to tell you all about Ray Villafane now. He is an artist who primarily appears to work on sculpture for folks like Sideshow Collectibles and McFarlane Toys. In the unlikely event you are not familiar with those companies, they make collectibles for the horror, science fiction, fantasy, and general monsters and comic books realm.
But, wow, can Ray Villafane sculpt a pumpkin! Some people paint or draw on pumpkins. Most people just scoop out the guts and cut holes for features. I like to make jack o’lantern art at one step remove and have nude models scoop out the guts and cut holes for features. But Ray Villafane turns the pumpkin carving process into real sculptural works of art.
I’m feeling more buoyant about Halloween just thinking about it!
It has been a while since we had a contest, so here is a new one.
About our beloved sponsors:
Squishable
A couple years ago Zoe and Aaron were backpacking around Southeast Asia doing some volunteering and being bums. They ran into their first fat, fuzzy piggy in Hong Kong and bought it as a tribute to gothic comic book artist Jhonen Vasquez. When they got back to the United States, their huggable pig was immediately kidnapped by rabid fans. And so the Squishable company was born. Their stuffed octopus just wants to be friends, so we’ve got their extra-friendly alligator for one lucky winner.
Lost Boys 2 The Tribe
The movie Lost Boys 2: The Tribe is out on DVD this week. Somewhere between a sequel and an homage to the original 1987 Lost Boys movie where Kiefer Sutherland’s character led a band of vampires, his half brother Angus Sutherland takes up the vamp responsibilities this time around and the flick features references to and cameos from many of the characters from the original. The piping hot fresh DVD has one of those nifty multi-picture hologram covers, a featurette about the movie’s stunts, alternate endings, and music videos.
Blue Blood Boutique
The Blue Blood Boutique features a growing variety of Blue Blood branded swag, including plush hoodies, high quality pins, and large waterproof stickers. The primary hoodie designs were conceptualized by Blue Blood art director Forrest Black. Forrest tapped longtime Blue Blood contributor Ed Mironiuk for the store launch to do a redesign on the traditional Blue Blood royal skull. Previous Blue Blood swag has featured work by James O’Barr, Trevor Brown, Slash, Jeb Huffman, and of course yours truly and Forrest Black. Perfect attire for all your club-hopping, con touring, coffeehouse lounging, and before and after sex needs.
Laughing Squid reports that the Art 94124 gallery in San Francisco will be presenting the 6th Annual Altered Barbie Art Show this week. This gallery group exhibit showcases the works of a variety of artists with different takes on the Barbie concept and place in the cultural zeitgeist. The Altered Barbie site has more information and gives you the opportunity to buy the gift for that hard-to-shop-for friend who has everything i.e. an $8,000 Barbie. Bet most folks you know don’t have one of those yet. Actually, even as I type this, I feel the certainty coming on that I must know at least one person who does.
With The Sun reporting that the new Black Canary Barbie, based on the DC Comics superhero character, could be called S&M Barbie, edgy artists will need to pull out all the stops. I have faith that Art 94124’s artists will be up to the challenge. But, yes, Mattel is actually releasing a superheroine Barbie clad in motorcycle jacket-cut PVC, hotpants, fishnets, and fetish boots. I’d ask what the impact of such media on little girls is likely to be, but I saw Olivia Newton-John in Grease when I was the right age for Barbie. Grease clearly taught that the best thing was to be a nice girl like Sandra Dee, but to dress like a dangerous black-clad uber-slut. Taking my own experience as an example, obviously eleven-year-olds don’t take any weird lessons away from such media. I mean, look how I turned out.
I loved the Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller film adaptation of Sin City. It was an aesthetic triumph. I recently re-watched it when Forrest Black and I went clubbing in Portland with DJ Mohawk Adam and Sin City is still fun when re-watching it on a large screen in a goth-industrial nightclub.
Truthfully, the actual comic book Sin City turned me off though. Frank Miller was instrumental in getting me into comics with his Dark Knight re-envisioning of Batman in a much grittier world. But, when I got to the part of Sin City where the chick is all freaking out about how the bad guy made her watch while he ate her hand, I just rolled my eyes and pretty much gave up on reading comics. I didn’t mind giving Sin City a chance to entertain me as a movie because there was no fond memory of a book it could destroy.
The other major factor in me becoming less satisfied with the comic book medium was that I read Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Watchmen is the most perfect comic anyone anywhere has ever done. It is hauntingly emotionally beautiful, vividly memorable, philosophically and politically insightful, and still a great action tale. Once I had read Watchmen, nothing else in the field could really compare.
Because Watchmen was an important work, I feel like it is news that the trailer for the long-rumored Watchmen movie has been released. I post it here, if you’d like to view it.
It has been widely reported that author Alan Moore is not happy with the film adaptation of his seminal graphic novel. If it turns out that Alan Moore in fact does not like it, then I will personally almost certainly avoid seeing the movie.
Yes, I know Alan Moore should not have taken the movie industry’s money in a deal which allowed them to pervert his vision. I give Frank Miller huge kudos for making a deal on Sin City where he could be happy with the outcome. I give Robert Rodriguez huge kudos for giving up his Directors Guild membership in order to be able to give Frank Miller proper credit on Sin City. Robert Rodriguez lost some big deal work for going against the DGA, but he produced something damn excellent in Sin City by doing so.
V is for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell were also made from Alan Moore comic books. IMDB has the following quotes from Alan Moore on his feelings about movie adaptations of his work:
“The answer I always fall back on is to quote Raymond Chandler. People said: ‘Raymond, don’t you feel devastated by how Hollywood has destroyed your books?’ And he would take them into his study, point to the bookshelf and say, ‘There they are. Look, they’re fine.’ The film has got nothing to do with my work. It has a coincidental title to a book I’ve done and they’ve given me a huge wedge of money. No problem with that . . . the comics medium as it stands seems to me to have been allowed to become a cucumber patch for producing new movie franchise . . . League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was the reason why I decided to take my name off all subsequent films . . . I want them to say, ‘We’re not going to give you any money for your work, you’re not going to get any credit for it and we’re not going to put your name on it.’ To see a line of dialogue or a character that I have poured that much emotional involvement into, to see them casually travestied and watered down and distorted… it’s kind of painful. It’s much better just to avoid them altogether.”
Given all that, it seems messed up that so many of Alan Moore’s works have been optioned for film. I’m assuming he had to have signed off on this at some point in time, but I think the problem is that it is very difficult to have one’s work widely seen in comics without being published by Marvel or DC Comics and they both tend to retain things like movie rights. My understanding is that, when development started on Constantine, Alan Moore rejected both payment and credit for having created the Hellblazer character, giving his share to the comic book artist who first drew the Constantine character for the Alan Moore Swamp Thing scripts for DC Comics. That shows at least belated integrity, even though perhaps the best thing would be for Alan Moore to have never cashed corporate checks, if he wanted to be free of corporate masters.
Carny: Here ya go! One blue Elmo for the young lady!
Jeff Schuetze: Blue Elmo? Did you hear that? Cookie Monster is not a blue Elmo!!!
Sean: We are totally old.
Jeff Schuetze: And he eats COOKIES!!!
Actor/comic strip guy Jeff Schuetze (pronounced “shoot-zee like a gun”) writes a web comic called JEFBOT. His strips are mostly about pop culture and his trials and tribulations as a SAG actor. Although he generally brings readers a new comic twice a week, he does something unusual but clever in the world of comics and lists his acting resume on there. I always wanted to see what Dogbert’s Scott Adams’ resume looked like alongside the Dilbert comics, moreso when he still had a day job. At any rate, Jeff Schuetze’s acting curriculum vitae includes a special skills and abilities list. Having looked over mountains of headshot submissions myself, I can confirm that it is fairly common for someone to list unusual talents on the back of a photo or on an attached piece of paper, the sorts of oddities which might make them a better candidate for a booking. Jeff Schuetze’s list includes biking, bowling, hydroslide, ju-jitsu (brown belt), ostrich jockey, programmer, soccer, surfing, tennis, ultimate frisbee, and videogames. While including the list is common, I’d have to say that is a unique and interesting list. I googled hydroslide and I can’t figure out how it differs from regular water-skiing. I’m dying to know what exactly that is and how the artist became an ostrich jockey and what that entails.
JEFBOT is fun in general, but it probably comes as no surprise that I especially loved the cookie monster webcomic. It is actually currently my desktop on one of my laptops. All the recent legal coverage we’ve been doing, followed by getting the court documents from Verne Troyer’s manager had me thinking about my old crush Cookie Monster. So it was very nice to see someone else who remembers Cookie Monster from his glory days as a cookie-gobbling star, before he was forced to sell out and hawk health food.
In case you all were wondering, yes, I did hear from the Children’s Workshop in-house legal department when I wrote Cookie Monster was the first bad boy I ever loved. Given that I was one of many people who covered Mr. Monster’s surprising conversion to “Cookies Are a Sometimes Food”, I was surprised to get lawyer mail on that one. Then again, I did serious journalistic research for that article and I unearthed and exposed the business partnership that Sesame Street was involved in with Earth’s Best health foods. More and more, I realize that I get the most brutal pushback whenever I actually do serious well-researched hard journalism. And people wonder why it is getting more difficult to find proper even-handed journalistic coverage of anything anywhere.
Anyhoo, JEFBOT is a humorous entertaining read and I recommend webcomics fans check it out.
The talented Calan Ree, whose Gingerdead & Friends comic strip I have mentioned here before, wrote about gathering paper frogs this week. According to Calan Ree, paper frogs are these partially translucent, pale, flat, dehydrated amphibians. The frogs apparently get flat from the absence of moisture and not being run over, so recent rains may have washed away the paper frogs which could normally be found in Calan Ree’s neck of the woods this year.
According to Calan Ree, paper frogs are seasonal and normally could be found this time of year. Her searches for them, perhaps due to the weather, proved fruitless. While hunting, she was, however, approached by, not one, but two creepy guys. The first one rolled up on her in a van and asked her if she wanted a ride. The second guy asked for directions to the nearest schoolyard, despite the fact that it was eight o’clock at night. After her van suitor left, she lamented that she had
“missed a golden opportunity. I should have answered, “Oh no thank you, I’m gathering frog carcasses!” It’s so rewarding to creep out the creepy. Sigh.”
Oh, in case the part where Calan Ree does a cutesie gothic horror comic was not a tip off, she, of course, wanted the paper frogs for an art project. I will admit that my research efforts to learn more about paper frogs just lead me back to GingerDead.com, but the artist’s mother used to have paper frogs in her walls too, so they must be real.
The vibrant Michelle Aston, as photographed by Blue Blood photog Justice Howard, adorned a giant sign in the front of Meltdown Comics as part of the Dangerous Toys art show. There was appropriately a tattoo shop next door, which you can see in my snapshots of the event. Dangerous Toys was a joint art show collaboration between photographer Justice Howard and toymaker and painter of toys Jim Koch.
I really liked Jim’s toys which seemed perfectly suitable for dressing up one’s cube at work. There were complex original pieces on display at the Dangerous Toys art show and Meltdown Comics also featured some semi-mass-produced versions of his design.
Jim and Justice worked on a few joint pieces, such as a skateboard with Justice’s photos worked into the textured design. I’d never want to skate on it, though, because they are so beautiful.
Justice decided to forgo framing her individual pieces for this particular show in order to be able to display more work. Although this creative decision, in some respects, made individual pieces come across as less important, I personally enjoyed it because I love Justice’s work, but I am very familiar with it. So getting to see so many different pieces was a pleasure. (more…)
Long ago, in a land far far from here, I lived in a punk rock group house with a lot of fans of Steve Purcells’ Sam and Max characters and their unsavory pals. Sam and Max was a hilariously antisocial comic strip. Assuming one thinks punk humor is hilarious and freelance talking animal police are a good source of humor.
