Geek

Dream Come True

Comics, Geek

For years I had this recurring dream where I would be walking down the street and come across a huge stash of comics sitting in boxes on the sidewalk. In my dream, I never got to open the boxes and see what was inside, but I envisioned them filled with great old books to complete my collection or at least sell for a tidy sum.

So imagine my disbelief when Victor, my building superintendent, pulled me aside the other day. He took me into his storage space in the basement and showed me box after box overflowing with comics! Turns out they had been left to him by a couple of vacating tenants over the years, and he had just gotten the bright idea of trying to sell them. Even though I’ve lived in the building for over seven years, he never knew I was a cartoonist until fairly recently, so when he found out, he figured I was the guy to show them to. Now I love Victor; he’s a great super and he always goes out of his way to help out Sari and I. So I agreed to go through the boxes and see what was what.

It took me a week or so of hour-long visits, but eventually I went through the thousands of books, culling what I thought had some re-sale value. (I’m sort of touch with that market from selling books from my collection over the years.) Sadly, the vast majority of the comics were crappy ’90s Marvel and Image books, published during the speculator rage when supply way outpaced demand. But I did find a mother lode of vintage 1970s Marvels, going back to the era of 25-cent books. Most of the comics were in awful condition, having been read multiple times and never bagged or boarded. Even so, there were a couple of gems, including the first appearance of The Punisher in Amazing Spider-Man #129, the first appearance of Gambit in X-Men #266, and a nearly complete run of Claremont/Byrne/Austin X-Men.

I took the books with “potential” up to my apartment, and spent some hours here or there over the last few weeks putting them up on eBay. I also invested in some comics boxes and bags and boards. When all was said and done, I netted Victor over $300 (the Punisher Spider-Man alone sold for over $100!). Victor was thrilled when I brought him the cash the other day, and I’ve been getting to enjoy reading old comics, and filling some gaps in my old collection (mostly Byrne and George Pérez books). And I still have a bunch of books left to sell, when I get around to it. Who says dreams don’t come true?

comics!

Showcase Presents THE ATOM

Comics, Geek, Review

I just finished Showcase Presents: The Atom #1, one of those 500-page black-and-white reprint tomes put out by DC. (Don’t ask me why; I got it free last time I was at DC’s offices.) The book includes three issues of Showcase and 17 issues of The Atom‘s own title. All the stories are by Gardner Fox, with art by Gil Kane and inks by Murphy Anderson and Sid Greene.

Although it was a bit of a slog, there was something satisfying in really immersing myslf in DC’s Silver Age. I was never actually emotionally engaged with any of the tales, but they were fun in a goofy, kidlike way. One thing that really impressed me was the pure craftsmanship of the form back then. There was definitely a different standard for artwork back in the early-to-mid-60s, and you could see that professional pride in Fox, Kane, and Anderson’s work. And Fox was a true polymath: in the course of a couple years (1963–1965) of The Atom, he tackled the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the space race, 18th-century English history, miniature card painting, Norse mythology, and numismatics, just to name a few. You could enjoy these stories and actually learn something about the real world in the process. How quaint.

Continue reading →

A Boob Tube Boob

Geek

I grew up (I thought) in a non-TV household. My mom was against television—especially for kids— and as far as I knew, we didn’t own a set. (I found out years later my mom secretly kept a small black-and-white TV in the closet for emergencies and special circumstances, like news coverage of the Vietnam war, or Nixon’s resignation.) Anyway, despite having no TV of my own, I watched enough at friends’ houses, or during the one month every summer I got to visit my dad, that it wasn’t completely foreign to me. Even back then, I had some favorite shows, most of which were already in reruns. After all, my semi-forbidden TV viewing was very much catch-as-catch-can; I had no way to watch primetime shows on a regular basis.

For completeness’ sake (what other reason do I ever need?), I will document here the shows I watched regularly over the years. “Regularly” is the key word. I definitely had the TV on at  other times, just not so religiously that I became as intimately familiar with the shows as the ones listed here. So without further ado—and broken down by half-decades—is my TV history:

1976-1980
As I said, most of the shows here I caught at friends’ houses or the one month every summer I spent with my dad. My first love was Saturday morning cartoon shows like The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour and the Tom & Jerry Show, and the semi-animated Shazam TV series. From there, I moved on to The Jetsons and The Flintstones. Sundays were not as fun for kids’ TV back then, but I always seemed to be up early enough to watch the wonky Christian stop-motion show Davey and Goliath.
During this summers with my dad, I was also a regular daytime watcher of The Munsters, The Addams Family, Get Smart, The Brady Bunch, Happy Days, Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeannie, and even the game show The Price is Right (which I believe bridged the gap between the morning and early-afternoon reruns). I caught enough episodes of F Troop, Hogan’s Heroes, The Andy Griffith Show, and the Carol Burnett Show to be a fan of those shows too. Evening reruns I always caught were All In The Family, Adam-12, and Star Trek, ; and thanks to my dad, I got into baseball during this period, and started watching Yankees & Mets games with him many evenings as well. That means during the summer I was watching five or six hours of TV a day! The only primetime shows I developed any familiarity with were The Dukes of Hazzard, CHiPs, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Charlie’s Angels. And the late 70s was when I first started watching M*A*S*H, which is still my all-time favorite TV show.

1981-1985
My mom and I moved back East to New York in 1980, and by late 1981 I had moved in with my dad—partly because he allowed me to watch TV. With a set in my own room, this was my “golden age.” I still don’t know how I managed to read as many comics and science fiction novels as I did, let alone draw comics—and do my schoolwork! Not having a video game system helped, I guess.

Rerun staples of this period were M*A*S*H, Starsky & Hutch, Three’s Company, Taxi, Diff’rent Strokes, and The Honeymooners; while my primetime addictions included The A-Team, The Dukes of Hazzard, Enos (!), The Incredible Hulk, CHiPs, Magnum P.I., T.J. Hooker, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, The Greatest American Hero, Cheers, Family Ties; and reruns of Three’s Company, Taxi, Diff’rent Strokes, Mork & Mindy, and of course M*A*S*H, which I was becoming obsessed with. Saturday Night Live was great during this period, and having a limited social life, I was usually home to watch it. I also had intense but ultimately unfulfilled dalliances with such short-lived series as Tales of the Gold Monkey (a blatant rip-off of the Indiana Jones films), Strike Force, V: The Series, and — I’m ashamed to admit it — AfterMASH. Oy.

During this time, Hill Street Blues was the first “grownup” show I got into. Every Thursday during the show, man_size  and I would breathlessly call each other up during commercial breaks to glory in the latest segment’s “fresh illyness” (a tradition we continued through subsequent shows like NYPD Blue and Lost!).

I became an avid baseball and football fan during this era, so I rarely missed Jets games on Sunday afternoons in the fall & winter, baseball games on Saturdays in the summer, or the seasonal shows Monday Night Baseball and Monday Night Football.

1986-1990
These were my college years and (thank god!) I had usually had better things to do than watch television. I had a tiny portable black-and-white set in my room which I usually watched M*A*S*H reruns on. Otherwise, shows I managed to watch on a semi-regular basis were Moonlighting, Miami Vice, SNL, Thirtysomething and, until it really fell off in its last couple of seasons, Hill Street.

1991-1995
Having moved back to New York after college, I tried to get out more, and “real life” mostly kept me away from the TV. I also didn’t have enough money to afford cable. All the same, I managed to catch repeats of M*A*S*H (of course), Cheers, and Hill Street; and I watched Twin Peaks, Monday Night Football, and The Simpsons in primetime. Then, after an eighteen-month hiatus traveling around the world with Sari (no TV!), I got into NYPD Blue, ER, Friends (I admit it), Mad About You (I know), and Seinfeld once we settled in Chicago. I also saw a lot of free Bulls and Cubs games on WGN.

1996-2000
Transitioning during this period from Chicago to San Francisco to Provincetown, Mass, the only reruns I regularly watched were The Simpsons, but I became a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I also started watching Law & Order and kept my allegiance to NYPD Blue, ER, Friends, and Seinfeld. The Buffy spinoff series Angel debuted during this period, and I was a regular viewer of that show for two or three seasons.

2001-2005
Finally resettled back in New York, I severely curtailed my TV viewing. Now able to afford cable, ironically we decided we didn’t want it, and the network shows seemed to lose their allure. Due to lack of interest, I stopped watching NYPD Blue, ER, and Friends; though I happily discovered The West Wing, and stuck with Law & Order. I watched 24 for its first two seasons, before I got repelled by its gruesomeness and questionable politics. (And I admit to being the one person who actually saw the short-lived Friends spin-off show, Joey. For that, I sincerely apologize.) And I have been watching Lost from the first episode. I also eventually found out about the amazing HBO series Deadwood; and managed to catch that show on DVD.

2006-present
Ironically still without cable, the shows I am most addicted to now are all non-network programs: Battlestar Galactica, Rome (now canceled), and The Sopranos, which I’m finally watching now that it’s over. To be fair, though, there are some good network shows: I still enjoy Lost, and I’ve been watching Friday Night Lights since day-one as well. (I also confess to watching the entire run of the thankfully canceled Aaron Sorkin show, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. Lord, was that show a disaster.) I seem to have lost my interest in sitcoms, so even though at various times I’ve sampled The Office and 30 Rock, they just don’t do it for me. Shows that are intriguing to me but I have yet to really study are The Wire and Dexter, so a DVD acquisition may be in order…

Whew! Quite a compilation of mostly dreck and occasional brilliance. It’s interesting to look back on those periods and see how the shows reflected—and informed—my stage of life at the time. Like most people, I guess, I continually veered between desiring mindless entertainment and/or escapism, and then wanting something more meaty or intellectually challenging.

Although I’ve never considered myself a couch potato, there were clearly periods where I was addicted to the tube. All the same, I think my hours of TV watching pales in comparison to most other American kids of my generation. Still, I’ve often wondered if the fact that TV was so verboten early in my life made me need it to the point of obsession later on?

This is a question I have to ponder as I raise a child of my own. Already, Phoebe is automatically drawn to the bright colors and flashing images of the TV screen. So far, we’ve minimized her exposure to the tube, but eventually we’re going to have to deal with her active desire to watch it as well. One thing we can do is limit the available temptations by staying cable-less. But that’s not the final answer to the dilemma…

Video viruses I recently caught

Geek

And have to pass on, BECAUSE THEY’RE SO DAMN FUNNY!!!

Yes, most of these have been floating ’round the interweb for years, and some aren’t video, but they’re new to me. And maybe you haven’t been inoculated yet either…

• The zombie kid with the turtle obsession. Listen to this and then cue up Johnny Cash doing “The Man Comes Around” from American IV. Brrrr. (P.S. The reporter’s stunned reaction is priceless.) Thanks to benchilada for giving me this one.
• Playmobil Security Check Point. Playmobil seems intent on representing all sides of our legal system in toy form, everything from airport security to police radar stations, from safecrackers to SWAT choppers.
• The Vader Sessions. Did you know Darth Vader appeared in a number of 70s blaxploitation flicks? Dig it.
• “Write this..or that..or maybe…” Brit comedians Mitchell & Webb do a hilarious spin on an editorial meeting.
• The Internet is for Porn. Before Phoebe (and A.D.), I played a lot of World of Warcraft. So much so that I thought this was brilliant. (Only later did I find out the song is actually from the Broadway puppet musical Avenue Q.)
• In the category of cute animal stories, I’m reduced to expressions of “awwwwww” by the tales of Owen and Mzee and the grateful lion.
• And, finally, this. I don’t care what the image’s provenance is, and whether it’s PhotoShopped or what. It just makes me giggle. Every time I see it. See? (Thanks to man_size for sending me this one.)

Super… Bowl, Tuesday, Sons

Comics, Geek, Review

Last night I capped off this “super” week by finishing the Saga of the Super Sons trade paperback, a guilty pleasure of mine which came in the form of an X-mas gift. (Thanks, Sari’s mom & dad!) I actually own most of the original World’s Finest comics in which the Super Sons appeared (starting in 1973 and running sporadically until ’76), but it’s great to have them all collected in one volume.

As a kid, I loved Superman Jr. and Batman Jr. (“sons” of Superman and Batman, duh!), the titular heroes of the stories. Written by Bob Haney (with the best stories drawn by Dick Dillin), the Super Sons were obviously a misguided attempt to bring “relevance” (a big 70s term) to the Superman/Batman universe — without getting as hard-core or political as the now-classic Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics. The Super Sons were a perfect fit for my tastes at the time, as they combined super-powered adventures with a “hip,” boho-lite milieu similar to my own pre-adolescent life.

Even though the Super Sons exist completely outside normal continuity, DC refused to declare that their adventures were “imaginary stories”; a distinction I’ve always found hilarious — as opposed to the “real” adventures of the superhero in question?! In fact, Haney/Dillin always make a point of obscuring the sons’ mothers’ identities, which led to a number of stories where the kids get in arguments with their parents, with the moms’ faces always turned from the viewer or engulfed in shadow!

The stories usually involve the junior heroes riding around out West, Easy Rider-style, on a souped-up chopper or dune buggy, defying their parents’ wishes that they just settle down to “normal” lives. The tales tend to follow a predictable pattern: the boys get in a “generation-gap” argument with their dad and storm off together. They fall into some misadventure, jump to a number of conclusions, make some dumb mistakes, and are eventually bailed out of trouble by their stronger, wiser fathers. (In fact, they make a big point that Superman Jr.’s powers are only half those of his dad’s, seeing as how he has a mortal mother.) It’s abundantly clear what the editorial tone of these stories are: give kids room to rebel — a little — but make sure they know who’s boss in the end.

In my favorite story of the collection, “The Shocking Switch of the Super-Sons,” Bruce Jr. and Clark Jr. swap dads for a time, and then all four visit an encounter camp to “discover” themselves! The dialogue throughout all the stories is a hilarious pastiche of hipster/black dialect: Clark Jr. and Bruce Jr. never go more than a panel without proclaiming something “crazy” or “far out,” or calling each other “baby,” not to mention any nearby females “chicks” or “dolls.” It’s classic stuff.

The collection sort of comes out of left-field; I wonder what compelled DC to release it now? I can’t imagine that there’s a huge audience for the book, outside of folks like myself with an ironic sense of nostalgia. The book is nicely produced, with a beautiful Nick Cardy cover (was he one of the all-time great cover artists, or what?!), and the addition of a couple of oddball Super Sons stories from the 80s & 90s (including one written by Bob Haney shortly before his death), as well as a cover gallery. But the one thing the book really needs is a foreword or introduction. The stories are just too weird to escape comment!

Josh… the film critic?!

Geek, Review

I’ve been a movie fan for all my life, dating back to when my university professor-mom would screen films on a bedsheet in our living room. Years later, when I was a college student, I took a number of film criticism classes, most notably one focusing on movies about the Vietnam War (which was a special passion of mine). I wrote a number of papers about those flicks. Then, in the early 1990s, I actually published some movie reviews, in the progressive weekly In These Times.

Recently, I stumbled across some of those old reviews and papers, which I’ve added to the "And…" section of my website. It’s funny, even though only half the reviews I wrote back in ’91/’92 got published, I really got into the whole "film critic" thing, and spent just as much time on the pieces  I knew would never see print — just for the fun of it. That was a period in my life when I was searching for my true creative outlet, having temporarily given up comics in disgust (before I discovered the wonderful — and lucrative! ;-> — world of alternative comix). I distinctly recall the passion I felt about film criticism. I loved unpacking the films, trying to read their subtext, judging their socio-political relevance — essentially treating them as works of art and not just "entertainment." The whole enterprise seemed like a big puzzle, and if I could twist my brain into enough loops, I could figure it all out: the films, the world, my life. No "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" for me — I pretentiously thought of myself as a critic; not a reviewer.

Of course, looking back on these pieces now, I fear they suffer from an overdose of PC moralism (I did go to Oberlin in the late 1980s, after all!). Nevertheless, I still feel they contain some degree of insight, and thus seem worth sharing. (The pieces on Full Metal Jacket, Eating, and Star Trek VI are probably the most interesting of the lot.) 

So if you’ve got a hankering to read about a random selection of almost-20-year-old movies, take a look…

TOP TEN MOVIES of… 1991?

Geek, Review

I just found this in some old computer files, so in homage to the de riguer tradition of year-end top ten lists, here are my…

TEN BEST FILMS OF 1991! (compiled in 1991, when I was 24 years old)

Barton Fink (dir. by Joel Coen)
Cape Fear (dir. by Martin Scorsese)
Cyrano de Bergerac (dir. by Jean-Paul Rappeneau)
Dead Again (dir. by Kenneth Branagh)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (dir. by Nicholas Meyer)
The Silence of the Lambs (dir. by Jonathan Demme)
The Double Life of Veronique (dir. by Krzysztof Kieslowski)
Thelma and Louise (dir. by Ridley Scott)
Truly, Madly, Deeply (dir. by Anthony Minghella)

I fancied myself a bit of a film critic back then, and even published a couple of reviews in the lefty weekly In These Times. All the same, my tastes were fairly unsophisticated  (as they still are now!), tending toward the mainstream.

Some of these films I hardly remember anymore, not having seen them in 16 years. But some – Silence of the Lambs and Thelma and Louise, for example — are considered modern classics. At least one film, Barton Fink, has not in my mind stood the test of time. I’m a big Coen Bros. fan, but that particular film doesn’t do for me what it did back then. (To give Sari her props, she hated it at the time!) And as a kid who grew up during the Cold War, I still love Star Trek VI, with its un-subtle allusion to Gorbachev and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

And, just to be fair, here are what I considered the…

TEN WORST FILMS OF 1991!
Blowback (dir. by Marc Levin)
Defending Your Life (dir. by Albert Brooks)
Delusion (dir. by Carl Colpaert)
The Doors (dir. by Oliver Stone)
Eating (dir. by Henry Jaglom)
The Fisher King (dir. by Terry Gilliam)
Green Card (dir. by Peter Weir)
Jungle Fever (dir. by Spike Lee)
The Last Boy Scout (dir. by Tony Scott)
Regarding Henry (dir. by Mike Nichols)

What’s notable about this list is how many bad films there are by good directors. Oliver Stone, Terry Gilliam, Peter Weir, Spike Lee, Mike Nichols — they’ve all directed many great films. But none of these are them! (And Tony Scott deserves mention just because his brother made the top ten list for that year, while he made the bottom ten.)

Star Wars Fan Casting Call

Geek

A chick I went to high school with is a casting director for commercials and the like, and she just posted an intriguing note on our alumni forum.

I know it’s a shot in the dark, but I thought there might be a slight chance that there is a some kind of crossover between comix readers and Star Wars fans, so I’m just putting this out there (for New York-area residents):

“Jenevieve over at About Face Models is looking for diehard fans of the Star Wars movies. She is looking for guys 18 and up, any ethnicity, but they MUST have a Star Wars costume! This is a commercial for Ebay and it is SAG so you should make pretty good money. (You don’t have to be in SAG to audition.) If interested, please email Jenevieve — aboutfacemodels@yahoo.com — ASAP and tell her Nef Jones sent you.”

Come say hello to my little friends!

Comics, Geek

Photobucket - Video and Image HostingAfter some mix-ups with shipping, I finally received my X-mas gift from Sari, a set of curio cabinets for the small collection of toys, models, and action figures that I’ve acquired over the years. (Yes, like every other cartoonist on earth, I am at least part geek.)

So with a small amount of fanfare, I mounted one of the cabinets on the wall, and finally was able to create a home for (from top left. reading like a comic) Klinger, Hot Lips, Hawkeye, and B.J., Will Clark and Willie Mays; Boba Fett; Willie McCovey; Jack Clark; some cool Tintin chocolates; super-deformed Wolverine and Superman; the Giants Pontiac Firebird; Tintin, Snowy, and Captain Haddock; and Tintin, Snowy, and the Thompson Twins.

They all seem to be adjusting well to their new home.

The Artists of American Splendor

Comics, Geek, Work

As Harvey Pekar’s unofficial, unauthorized archivist, and in honor of the publication of The Quitter, I’ve updated my list of Pekar’s artists! From R. Crumb to Joe Sacco, “Dino” man_size Haspiel to Gary Dumm, Joe Zabel to Frank Stack, Chester Brown to Jim Woodring — even Joyce Brabner to Alan Moore — this is where you can find which artist drew what story.

The list is organized by artist’s last name and features the title of the piece, where it appeared, and the date it was published. It’s fairly comphrehensive: I own pretty much everything Harvey’s ever published, with the exception of American Splendor #1 (but a lot of the material from that issue ended up in the first AS collection), but if you spot an error or have an addition, please let me know.

Enjoy the arcana: joshcomix.com/and/pekar_artists.