“The Ruined Cast” / Dash Shaw – demo teaser from Howard Gertler on Vimeo.
Hey everybody, Frank Santoro here to update you the “not comics” project I’m working on: Dash Shaw’s new animated feature, The Ruined Cast.
We’ve made a three minute teaser and are presenting it here for your viewing pleasure. Check it out! And yes, I hand painted those waves rolling in from the ocean!
Check out this Brian Chippendale interview from WRNI in Providence, RI.
Remember Chipper’s new book is due out in a few months, True Believers, so don’t despair. There’s a short video on the radio’s site that shows some new pages from his forthcoming book, If ‘n Oof.
I just think adding superheroes to something instantly makes it more interesting. I have a friend who says every movie should either be a Spider-Man movie, or at least have Spider-Man in it. [Laughs.] I thought it was such a brilliant quote. It kind of is true, in a weird way. Have you watched a low-budget British movie, you know, about a guy who’s unemployed trying to make ends meet, and how does he feed his family now that the coal mine’s closed? If you suddenly had Spider-Man in it, you’d be a little more interested. [Laughs.] If that guy had super powers or a costume or something. On some craft level, I think there’s an element of truth to that. I just find that superheroes instantly make a story more interesting.
-Mark Millar, to the AV Club
This happened once. From 1966, the year of Batmania and The Monkees, I give you:
That’s right, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo. It’s real, it’s here, you can Netflix it. One hour and twelve minutes. And if you don’t nod your head a little bit when the guitar line kicks in as he swings that cape around toward the camera then buddy, you know a different Silver Age than I.
And yes, according to legend, director Ray Dennis Steckler — best known for 1964’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, but prior to that a cinematographer on legendary writer/producer/director/star Timothy Carey’s brain-searing, Frank Zappa-scored The World’s Greatest Sinner — was supposed to be making a perfectly normal ultra-low budget suspense picture, except after a while he got bored/panicked with the project’s development and, as I’d hope we’d all do in that situation, put together a pair of superhero costumes from stuff off the rack at Sears and finished the shoot in style. Someone has a gorilla suit? BOOM – action scene. A parade scheduled that week? They crashed the parade in costume and stole the footage for a set piece. However, the corollary legend, that Steckler didn’t want to pay to fix a fairly evident grammatical error in the title, is apparently not true – it was a little chant one of his kids started saying, so damn it, that was title.
Rat Pfink a Boo Boo is a lot like Kick-Ass, in that they’re both about superheroes in a ‘real’ world that obviously a total fake. But Steckler’s picture accomplishes this by purely cinematic and almost certainly accidental means, in that it ‘answers’ the completed footage of the crime movie it was supposed to be with acutely improvised capes ‘n tights antics, sprinkled with barely-relevant home movie footage cut A Hard Day’s Night-style to songs by leading man Ron Haydock, a rockabilly crooner supporting himself by writing scores of disreputable adult novels (and a few comics scripts for Warren magazines on the side, under the pseudonym Arnold Hayes). All boundaries between reality and fiction and art and assemblage are obliterated by the movie’s frantic lunge toward saleability, and by its effort it exhausts itself into a shambling heap of genre suggestion – if the Batman show was a slickly professional, comparatively desexualized variant cover of, say, Mike & George Kuchar, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo doubles right back to source material, the old Batman serials, transmitted in the form of a child’s daydream, half-understood real world anxieties careening into romper room escapades set to whatever’s on the radio nearby, pretty much. Like, there’s no sync sound or anything.
Wasn’t that last shot the end of The Warriors? I don’t think this has quite the same appeal – actually I suspect most people will find it to be lethally inane if not completely unwatchable, but there’s something to be said for a hard-headed exploitation film that does literally everything wrong, to the point where its very commercial intent is called into question. Pair it up with straight-arrow bullshit like Jerry Warren’s The Wild World of Batwoman from the same year and the difference is plain – Steckler is coming from a deeply goofy, weirdly personal place, committing to film the most inexplicable longbox find of your entire convention season.
Anyway, I’m confident that any of the fine artists listed below would be proud to have their work deemed the Rat Pfink a Boo Boo of comics of 2010. Immortality isn’t pretty, but it lasts.
Tezuka’s Mushi Production produced a trilogy of adult animated features in the early seventies known as the “Animerama trilogy.” They’ve been floating around online for years untranslated until recently Cleopatra has been fansubbed and posted on YouTube. As the intro explains, it was based on a machine-made translation of the Chinese version and it didn’t make any sense and so they tried to subtitle it in a way that made sense even though they don’t know any Japanese. “Every attempt has been made to convey the original story as we assume it was intended. Though some artistic liberties have been taken to ensure the story makes some sort of fucking sense.” Pretty funny. It starts here.
Finally, the Year We Make Contact. What better way to celebrate than with an all-CC links roundup?
1. Dan takes to the internet to discuss Ron Regé and Joan Reidy’s Boys with Tom Spurgeon.
2nd: The Daily Cross Hatch begins a multi-part interview with the always voluble Frank Santoro.
3. Speaking of Frank, Cold Heat has been appearing on a lot of best of the year lists, including here and here. And Dan’s Art Out of Time made a most important of the decade list.
4. Also, Jeet’s been doing some great posts on gay representation in old newspaper comics on his other blog, which you have probably already read, but if not: here and here.
5. I think Dash might have a book out this week or something?
6. And finally, this isn’t the most interesting video in the world, but it seemed important to post, if only for the light it sheds on the now apparently settled-for-good Mort Drucker controversy. I still don’t understand that quote from the book I mentioned, though…
[via]
I’m busy, people, what can I say? Luckily, Frank and Dash and Jeet are doing an awesome job and my presence is entirely superfluous. Anyway, this time I couldn’t even come up with three things to link to. All the same:
1. You all know the great blog Same Hat, right? If for some reason you don’t, go there now to see a massive post with lots of photos and video from Yuichi Yokoyama’s recent live painting demonstration in San Francisco. Then “bookmark” it. (Or whatever you’re supposed to say these days.)
2. Matthew Thurber made the drawings you see above and the right sidebar. He is a very funny and talented guy. He recently sat down for a panel discussion as part of the CBLDF’s Conversational Comics series at Brooklyn’s Union Pool (with Jessica Abel and Jason Little). You can listen to the audio from that panel here.
(The audio for Dash’s panel from last weekend will probably be up shortly, so stay tuned.)
As Tim noted below, I seem to only post PictureBox-related crap. And true to form, here’s another one. But never fear! I am working on a long review of The Hunter. That will happen soon and my good name will be cleared. Anyhow, many moons ago, while in Switzerland for Fumetto, I shot this footage of Yuichi Yokoyama doing a live drawing demonstration. The camera’s a little shaky but it’s still a lot of fun to watch him conjure these faces onto paper. San Francisco denizens take note: Yokoyama will be making his first U.S. appearance on August 15th at the new Viz Pictures store, New People. The store in general looks extremely exciting and Yuichi designed fixtures and other interior details of the store. More details to come. Sadly he’s not able to continue on to NYC or anywhere else this time, but has promised me that he’ll do a proper U.S. tour in the year ahead. So, look out for that! In the meantime, enjoy the picture.
A few odds and ends here. I’m sure I’m the last person to know this, but wow, Dark Horse is releasing the first volume of the Jesse Marsh Tarzan series now! His work has an incredible arc to it, from early drawings that look carved from stone to mid-period, more fluid pen lines, to his last scratchy, near-abstract images that Russ Manning claimed was due to his declining eyesight. He was a great artist, and the Tarzan work is among my favorite work of his. There’s a great Jesse Marsh web site here from which I stole the gorgeous image above. Marsh will be in the second Art Out of Time, which I should be working on instead of doing this.
Also, been thinking about Victor Moscoso lately for another project, and friend Norman pointed out an amazing series of animated shorts Moscoso made sometime in the late 60s or early 70s. What I love about these is how it takes him out of psychedelia and suddenly he seems wonderfully in line with drawers like Milton Glaser and Heinz Edelmann. He had the same transformative impulses and shared with Edelmann a pen line of such urgency and clarity that it’s impossible to look away. It’s a sharpness — a tiny bit of grumpiness. Moscoso was certainly the best colorist and overall designer of his S.F. (and perhaps North America in general) contemporaries, but people sometime forget about that wicked penline. The thing that stood out for me the most in the recent Crumb show in Philadelphia was, in fact, the original jam pages Moscoso worked on. Where everyone else looks like they’re carefully cartooning a gag, Moscoso’s marks come on like brush-fire — just decimating the very formidable competition. Just brutal and immediate and delineating modern-psych design forms. Anyhow, enjoy these little films. I don’t know much about them but maybe someone can fill us in in the comments.
EDIT: Someone just did.
How did I never think to check Paper Rad‘s YouTube favorites before now? I should’ve done that a million years ago. Thanks, Bounty Farmer. (The video embedded there is even better, really.)
