Read Comment (1)

I thought of this when I heard Irvin Kershner had died, which goes to show you the psychological damage a lifetime of comic book reading can do. Kershner, of course, inevitably prompts some funnybook consideration; as director of The Empire Strikes Back, he picks up the considerable baggage of the asserted comics influence on Star Wars, while his direction of Robocop 2 — the first R-rated movie I ever saw in R-rated form — implicates more contemporary notions of translating a cartoonist’s style (i.e. errant screenwriter Frank Miller’s) to a big-money action movie.

Then again, these days the most direct Kershner/comics connection is in fact specifically wedded to psychological damage, in that he served as director for the notorious 1955 horror comic books episode of the television program Confidential Report, currently on a dvd included with the Abrams ComicArts release of The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read! While mostly comprised of awkward interview footage of, say, children recounting various horror comic plots or a reformed cartoonist indicating where touch-up artists made the breasts on his romance comic heroine larger, the meat of the program is surely its energetically cut (and rather patently staged) footage of kids romping out to the woods to take in some fine graphic literature, after which they engage in the unsubtly sexualized (if okay-for-’50s-television) assault of a hapless local boy.

It’s weirdly harrowing stuff — flaunting its journalistic license to loll in content abjectly harsher than usual for its era and style — boasting a centerpiece of delirious kitsch wherein narrator/creative force Paul Coates, like a proud graphic novelist perched at the podium of his spotlight panel at a art comics convention, recites the narrative captions of a jokey, she’ll-rip-yer-heart-out horror poem one-pager with all the cold gravity of Signal 30, after which one of the featured boys rises immediately to his feet and begins driving a pocket knife over and over into a nearby tree. I read comics that make me feel like that too.

(more…)

Read Comments (10)

Contrary to what you’re thinking, this is not from the new Palookaville, it’s an entirely random fumetti I happened to come across this week. Or, really it’s what North American publishers were calling ‘cinemanga’ until recently, in that it appears to have assembled from screengrabs of a 2006 action movie vehicle for Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, Don: The Chase Begins Again. Publisher Bollywood Comics appears to prefer the term ‘movic’; I guess the producers of Don enjoyed the results regardless of what they’re called, since the comic was included as a pack-in with the dvd release of the film. I bought it just for the comic.

(more…)

Read Comments (5)

I find it extremely difficult to avoid coming off like Harry Naybors whenever I try to discuss things like comics terminology, but fortunately not everything about jargon is necessarily so deadly. It’s likely common knowledge to everyone else, but the origin of the term “fumetti” was new to me when I recently read it in a footnote from Tim Lucas‘s excellent-so-far biography of Mario Bava:

The word fumetti means “smokes” and it was coined for this medium of storytelling [comics told through photographs] because the Italians likened the word balloons used to convey dialogue to puffs of smoke.

Maybe I’m a sucker, but to me, that’s just a beautiful metaphor. In fact, it’s beautiful enough to make me want to become a fan of fumetti (as irrational as that chain of logic may be). Does anyone know of any photo-funnies that really work? I mean, that are worth reading more than once? In the meantime, I’ve got some old issues of National Lampoon and Weirdo to look through.