I don't have very much to add to the many tributes available to Will Elder, one of the country's great humor cartoonists, who died yesterday, so I thought I'd share some links with you. And this may well mess up the formatting of your LiveJournal friends' page, but I can't help that; it looks fine on my page. Now I'm kind of thinking I should have done an entry like this for one or two beloved names from the world of comics who've left us this year. I hope I won't have to do it again soon.





In PDF format, "Goodman Goes Playboy," an episode of Goodman Beaver (originally from the Feb. 1962 issue of Help!) that aggravated Archie Comics so much that they obtained the copyright to the strip... then forgot it over time and it entered the public domain a few years back. My copy's from the "Super Comics" pirate of the original Potrzebie Illustrated zine that exploited the copyright lapse.

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Six episodes of Kurtzman & Elder's Little Annie Fanny over at ASIFA-Hollywood's site (and here's part two). Playboy apparently headhunted Kurtzman and Elder for this strip on the strength of Goodman Beaver.

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Kitchen Sink Press's reprint of Goodman Beaver is sadly not currently available, but you can apparently get all 107 episodes of Little Annie Fanny in a pair of collections from Dark Horse.

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There's more classic humor from the duo coming soon. In August, Fantagraphics is releasing a complete set of the obscure Humbug!, which originally appeared in the late 50s and featured all kinds of work by some of MAD's original crew, including Elder, Al Jaffee and Jack Davis. And of course, you can score all sorts of work by The Usual Gang of Idiots in a number of MAD collections available at Amazon, or at any bookstore that's worth a darn.

Goodbye, Will.
Thanks.

gothamajp has some early design mock-ups for his forthcoming book James Bond: The Illustrated 007 at his LJ today. I want this book and I want it tonight. Unfortunately we'll have to wait a few months. *pout*

It being a particularly dull Friday and all, now'd be a good time to play, once again, ASK ME ANYTHING. This is that rousing game where anonymous comments are allowed, points are awarded arbitrarily, all questions will remain screened, and you can take the opportunity to satisfy your curiosity about something you've been wondering, and the first to reach Mornington Crescent by official rules is declared the winner.

Now you can be nosy about my past, get my advice, invoke old drama, or do what most people who play seem to like, which is ask me a question so bizarre that when you read my answer not knowing what the question was, it sounds like one side of a Marx Brothers routine, like "Well, that depends whether Morrissey was wearing his yellow raincoat." So don't delay, ask now! Your day may depend on it!

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. Today: reviews of The Best Cartoons from Punch (Simon & Schuster, 1952) and xxxHolic vol. 1 (Del Rey, 2004).



One of the neatest finds I ever came across was a stash of boxes full of Punch, the long-running British humor/cultural/political magazine, dumped behind a door in UGA's Park Hall in 1990. I helped myself to one a day until I decided at the end of the year that nobody cared and helped myself to most of the rest of them. Much of it was over my head - oh, you Tories in 1965 and your plans for the Tarminster by-election! - but there was some damn fine cartooning on display throughout the magazines, which covered chunks of a twenty year span from about 1962-82.

A few months ago, I found a rather beaten copy of this book, assembled more than fifty years ago for American readers, in a wonderful secondhand store in Columbus. The humor is sometimes polite and obscure; this is comedy that predates almost all of our modern templates for British humor. So before Galton & Simpson, before Sellers, Seacombe & Milligan, it looked like... well, not entirely unlike The New Yorker, honestly. Some of this is very funny, and I was torn as to which cartoon to use to accompany this. (My copy lacks the dust jacket and the plain red-brown cover is dull enough to make an illustration a little pointless.) Some of it is really more notable in a historical context, however.

The link in the cartoon above takes you to a listing at an antiquarian site I found, where you may purchase what sounds to be a considerably better copy than mine for under $10. I'd certainly recommend you do so! You can also see a few dozen other specially selected Punch cartoons at the company's website.



Sometimes it takes me a while to try something. I spotted some merchandising from this comic, or its accompanying TV adaptation, when I was in Toronto a year ago. dwinghy told me it was from xxxHolic and I told myself I'd have to look into that sometime.

A year later, and it could've waited. In its favor, xxxHolic features some absolutely gorgeous artwork by the Clamp studio. It's sort of an inversion of their usual style from Sakura and Tsubasa, which are bright, ribbony and sunny comics. This is instead dark, lacy and smoky, with long-limbed figures reclining decadently in expensive surroundings.

But the list of strikes against xxxHolic is as long as your arm. I was perversely intrigued by the protagonist Watanuki's non-sexual, but nevertheless kinky, submissive relationship to the witch Yuka, but Yuka herself is as dreary a character as they come, a smug, superior bore with the drama-killing power of knowing everything that's going to happen. There's no sense of urgency or danger; everything just sort of plays out following a cryptic warning from Yuka. I found myself spending more time studying the intricate chapter-opening title page illustrations than the actual chapters, because nothing happens that will have any impact on characters who'll be around for more than two or three episodes.

This was my first Del Rey book, and I was a little appalled by the high price tag of $10.95. If they charged the same retail eight bucks that Viz charges for, say, Death Note, I could possibly justify cashing in a Borders coupon to get more of this gorgeous artwork, but eleven? I won't be bothering again. Your prices stink, Del Rey, and so does this story. Not recommended.

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

In October 1997, two of the most unusual of all 2000 AD series debuted. They would both be finished before the end of the year, never to be reprinted and never to be seen again. They're called The Space Girls and A Life Less Ordinary, and they're both pretty darn lousy. This is a shame, because prog 1063 does contain some very good material. There's the first part of a fantastic Judge Dredd comedy called "Mrs. Gunderson's Little Adventure" by John Wagner and Henry Flint which is probably better than any comic you've read in the last week, a good Sinister Dexter one-off by Dan Abnett and Julian Gibson, and a really creepy little Vector 13 by Abnett and Alex Ronald. So 60% of the comic's pretty great.

The UK had some pretty big pop culture exports in 1996-97. The Spice Girls released a series of hit singles, and Trainspotting, a film by the team of Danny Boyle, John Hodge and Andrew Macdonald, became one of the biggest and most imitated British movies in recent memory. The trio's next project, an odd fantasy about an heiress and her kidnapper falling in love thanks to the machinations of a pair of angels, was predicted to become another big hit. So the marketing people at Fleetway were already talking with editor David Bishop about finding some ways for 2000 AD to get some more publicity from the mainstream media when Channel Four Films asked for a meeting about a comic adaptation of A Life Less Ordinary. It's a little unfortunate that the scheduling worked out the way it did, because it meant that the eight-part comic version, which preceded the film's release by about three weeks, would run at the same time as the similarly market-led Space Girls.

That Space Girls isn't any good is no surprise, but what is odd is how utterly empty the story is. The strip was only going to run for five weeks, but the closest thing to a parody in the strip comes in the characters' wacky nicknames (such as Hyper Space and Wide Open Space). Otherwise, it's a very dull and boring affair which focusses on the villains instead of the heroines, who have nothing whatsoever to do with the world of pop music or media manipulation, two subjects which might have made the strip at least briefly memorable. The artist, Jason Brashill, had been painting episodes of Judge Dredd and Outlaw over the last couple of years. Here, he uses traditional pen and ink and the result is nowhere near as vibrant as what he'd done before. Since I often feel the reverse is true with 2000 AD artists (I believe that Clint Langley and Simon Bisley, for instance, did much better work in the 1980s and 1990s with pen and ink than paint), this may be seen as evidence of just how utterly backwards everything in Space Girls is.



I'll continue on that note next week, because there's "backwards" and then there's "upside down in the wrong dimension," which is how the Space Girls story will conclude.

John Tomlinson is listed as the writer of the series, and on the official site, David Bishop is listed as the uncredited co-writer of the first episode of Space Girls. Bishop is also listed as the writer of the Life Less Ordinary adaptation, but is not credited in the comic with it, either. Now here's a thankless job. You can't completely hold this dull, drab comic against him. Bishop had to assemble a comic script from an early shooting treatment of the movie in virtually no time at all, and then Steve Yeowell had to put the artwork together with inadequate reference of actors, costumes, locations, you name it. Turning it into a 48-page story would have been difficult enough, but with a cliffhanger every six pages?

In fact, it's been so long since I saw the film that I've forgotten practically all of its details. Without them, reading the first episode was a real chore, wading through choppy events with poor transition and even worse storytelling. It's a really bizarre experience, because neither Bishop nor Yeowell were novices when they put this strip together, and yet it feels like the disjointed work of people who'd never worked in comics and were still learning the rules. A little clue: the introductory text page with the photo of Cameron Diaz should not have been required reading to follow the comic. On that note, Steve Yeowell is a wonderful artist, and responsible for many classic thrills, but the photos that appear with each episode actually serve as a painful reminder of how much the characters do not resemble the actors who played them* and should not have been included.



Did this "marketing approach," as Bishop has sinced coined it, work? Probably not, as the "media-friendly" events in 2000 AD will end before 1998 and not be tried again. I can sort of see A Life Less Ordinary drawing in some curious readers but losing them within a week or two. However, if the Space Girls earned any readers, I'll be amazed. Hands up if you saw the name "Space Girls" and didn't think "oh, how stupid."

Next week, the wincing continues as the Space Girls meet an ignominous end.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: In prog 1062, Sinister takes his third bullet of the series, wounded in the back by a target called Lance Boyle.

*note: David Bishop, who was both editor and scriptwriter for the serial, clarified that 2000 AD didn't have the rights to the actual likenesses of the actors in question. So it was not that Yeowell "botched" the characters, as the original version of this entry stated, but that they weren't allowed to. This entry was modified on May 15 '08 to reflect the updated information.

I saw something odd tonight out of the corner of my eye. The kids and I were playing Buzztime Trivia at Buffalo Wild Wings, and the Braves-Phillies game was on. As best I can figure, one of the Braves smacked a ball into deep left field, where it became wedged underneath the wall at the back of the field. The outfielder who was chasing it immediately stopped and threw his hands in the air, as if to indicate he didn't touch it. I was kind of in the middle of my game and couldn't see what was going on, and there weren't any closed captions anyway. Is there a rule about that? Ball trapped by wall?

I realize my friends list is hardly built of baseball experts, but I figured it possible one of you knows, or knows someone who knows.

While we're talkin' baseball, the Mighty Mud Hens sit atop their division, one game ahead of the stinkin' Bats, who come to Toledo for four games starting next Thursday. Win these ones, boys, not just to keep atop the division, but because they're the stinkin' Bats, for cryin' out loud!

The third Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Unnatural Death, was published in 1927 and is set in the spring and early summer of that year. For me, it has long been the novel about which I recall the fewest details. Ian Carmichael starred in a radio adaptation of the story, but the BBC never made it for television. Since two of my three Sayers rereads were done in conjunction with a now-defunct web page about the TV adaptions, I believe I've only read this book twice before. I'd forgotten how much of the story revolves around gossip and how poisonous talk can undermine reputations.

In fact, the story begins with a sequence which has stood stronger than the rest of the book in my memory. It is such an unusual sequence, and so unlike contemporary social etiquette, that it has always felt very strange to me. The story opens as LPW and Insp. Parker are enjoying a late dinner and discussing crime. Their story is overheard by a fellow who apologizes for his rudeness but can't help but agree with them. He tells the lengthy story of how his small medical practice in a village in Hampshire was forced to close because of nasty rumors along the "devil's radio" about his poor treatment of the elderly Miss Dawson, who suddenly passed away under his care. While she was a cancer patient, and her end was inevitable, she died several months before she was expected to. Post mortems showed nothing untoward, and the death was chalked up to heart failure.

The eavesdropping doctor only relates about half of his story before LPW suggests that, as the restaurant is closing, they return to his flat for a glass of port to hear the end of it. Here's what surprised me: they don't introduce themselves or share their names. The doctor deduces that his host must be the famous Lord Peter Wimsey, but he declines to give his own name or details out of fears he his violating the confidentiality of his patients, and just wants to thank LPW for his hospitality and port, and chance to tell his tale of poor fortune, but no more. LPW and Parker are intrigued and want to look into this case, suspecting foul play, but the doctor draws in and doesn't wish for any further disturbances of that community, and any worse slurs on his professional reputation. This strikes me as so unusual, that anybody would share a taxi and join two strangers for a glass of port without learning their names, or that LPW would ask a complete stranger up for a drink without learning who he is. Things were different in the 1920s.

Of course, LPW has no intention of keeping out of it, and we quickly meet one of his employees, the remarkable Miss Alexandra Climpson, a spinster whom LPW uses to make discreet enquiries. Within a week, having tracked down the deceased through death certificates, Miss Climpson is dispatched to the village, where she pretends to be considering a move, and gets the scoop on the late Miss Dawson, her quick-tempered niece Mary Whittaker, and the unfortunate Dr. Carr, who, people say in his absence, nobody really liked anyway.

One other talking point that I wished to note is about the first murder in the narrative. LPW and Parker place an advertisement in several papers, attempting to trace Bertha Gotobed, a servant who had been employed by Miss Dawson while she was under Dr. Carr's care, and who was dismissed from service. LPW, in his motormouthed way, pishposhes the idea that any harm could befall Ms. Gotobed as a result of his ad, but she is later found murdered, with a copy of the ad in her purse. LPW's mood in this sequence makes for very difficult reading. In the war, he'd been responsible for ordering men to their deaths, and the thought that he's responsible for Ms. Gotobed's death is unbearable. He's all business as they look over the crime scene and find a tightly wrapped meal left nearby. Shortly before, he was the smug, silly clown that we know him to be, taking delight in showing up in Dr. Carr's office after tracing his identity. But now he is dark and bleak and leaves the police station as quickly as possible, an appropriate place to close this section of the book. More next week.

Click the image above to purchase Unnatural Death from Amazon and join me in reading if you'd like!

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. Today: reviews of The Bumper Book of Solar Wind vol. 1 (Omnivistascope/Lulu, 2008) and Thor Visionaries: Walter Simonson vol. 1 (Marvel, 2001).



The British small press scene is a pretty interesting one, with lots of very talented young creators working away in relative obscurity. It's a market that I don't know very much about, and that's entirely my fault: when I was very interested a few years back, I used neither credit cards nor PayPal, and now that I use both, I'm trying to limit the number of single issue comics in the house for cost, space and storage reasons. But when the complete run of Solar Wind and its companion homage anthologies Big War Comic and Sunny for Girls were announced in low-price bookshelf editions, I ran out of excuses.

I'll look at the second collection in a month or so. This first one compiles the first five issues of Solar Wind, with work by the likes of Al Ewing, Matt Timson, Paul Scott, who edited the work, along with several others, and it is a real treat. I read the first third of it over lunch and was laughing so hard that a lady at the next table said "That must be a funny book!" It sure is. Solar Wind is a tribute to British newspaper comics of the 70s, with a smart-aleck editor, awful advertisements for stamp collecting kits, and a whole pile of over-the top comics. So the lunch in question, at the nearby "Loafing Leprechaun" faux-Irish pub, with British soccer on television and Led Zeppelin's "D'yer'maker" in the background, was a good setting!

Even better, after the first issue, each Solar Wind is a "merger" issue, so Solar Wind absorbs some other, non-existant other comics, taking on some girls' comics (Zoe Biddle, Wheelchair Ballerina is the greatest thing ever), war comics, crunching hard-man action comics and horror comics. The humor ranges from playful and loving to mean-spirited and over-the-top, and it all works very well indeed. None of the strips run for more than four pages, so those rare jokes that fall flat don't linger for long, and they're more than matched by the very successful ones. It's triumphantly silly, a real winner from start to finish, and very highly recommended, especially at less than eleven bucks! Don't be stubborn and miss out on this like I did!

Read more about the Omnivistascope small press world, from which Solar Wind emerged, at their web site!



I featured this book on my old Weekly Comics Hype in March of last year. A reread has prompted the following observations:

1. It's so nice to be able to read old comics in a vacuum. There are occasional references to other Marvel comics, but what you get in this book are twelve chapters of absolute awesome, with no backstory needed. If you know that Thor is a superhero take on the Norse god of thunder, then you're good to go.

2. Simonson's pacing is very odd in places. There's a sequence in the early pages where the warrior Volstagg is relating a tale, but several days seem to pass in the "meanwhile" of the main story before he finishes.

3. "The Last Viking" story is just amazing. Much has been written about Simonson's run on Thor, but I think this brilliant story, full to bursting with heart and life, is often overlooked.

4. Is this the best American superhero book of the 1980s? It's certainly close. Unless I'm overlooking one, it's either this or Levitz/Giffen Legion.

5. There are now five volumes of Simonson Thor in Marvel's Visionaries line. The second and third are still pretty hard to come by, but a couple of months ago, the company promised that new editions would be in print soon.

So anyway, what else went on this weekend? Well, we stopped by Bizarro Wuxtry, which as you might have heard, is America's finest comic shop. None better anywhere! I picked up Amor y Cohetes, the newest collection of classic Hernandez Brothers work, and volume one of Osamu Tezuka's Dororo and that newish collection of Harvey Comics' Hot Stuff. I also picked up issue # 26 of Blue Beetle, having accepted a fellow's offer to pick up the low-selling title of my choice in exchange for my buying his low-selling favorite. He agreed to start buying The Spirit and I have this on my pull list for a few months.

Anyway, downstairs is one of America's finest record stores. This time up, I ordered the final Mendoza Line album... they broke up and released a farewell album last year and I had no freaking idea. How annoying, but also how sad. I really love this group, and I'm sorry to hear they've split up. Also this trip, I picked up Rabbit Fur Coat by Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins. We listened to some of that while driving around and I really like it. Click the link in the picture to visit Wuxtry's website.



While at Wuxtry, Devlin - who was the first person to learn about our engagement - told us that "Final Markdown," a small chain of closeout stores, similar to Big Lots, was selling big ole glass bottles of Hosmer soda. These appear to be repurposed bottles from the Connecticut-based company's old home distribution network. If there is a Final Markdown store nearby, you can get a whole lot of really good soda for for only 59 cents a bottle. The root beer is almost as good as Frostie and Henry Weinhard's! The link below may not be working. I was looking over their company website yesterday, but it appears to be down tonight.



You know how I was saying that one of the State Botanical Gardens trails takes you along the banks of the Oconee? Perhaps the only positive element of Georgia's drought is that the river is so low that you and a loved one can wade right into the middle of the river and make out. And, provided there are no smirking jackasses on the shore whose camera sports a pretty darn good zoom, you can probably have the time of your life without worrying about your canoodlin' being captured for posterity. Smile, lovebirds!



Well, while we were gettin' engaged and spyin' on folk and buyin' stuff and hopefully showing off houses to the right people, the Hipster Kids' mother came into town for the first time since gettin' hitched herself. She brought her husband and the Hipster Nephew along and they went to Stone Mountain and went to see Speed Racer. The kids think this movie is COMPLETELY AWESOME, but Deb growled about losing almost three hours and ten bucks on it. But she didn't like The Godfather, Citizen Kane or Heavenly Creatures either, so she may not have had her "knows good movies" circuit installed at the factory. Anyway, here she is with all three of her kids. I'm incredibly pleased with this picture.



Well, it's about 9.43 and what sounds like a tornado siren (over at Dobbins?) has been going for about ten minutes. I've been looking at the news and weather sites but they're all reporting clear skies. I wonder if that's going to stop anytime soon. The kids are grousing that they'd like to go to sleep.

Okay, I think I'm going to add a few images to the previous post and then we're done with happy fun update stuff for now. More news on TV and comics you should be reading tomorrow, all right? Take care, everybody!

Well, I promised people a photo or two of us from Saturday. I should point out, for anyone not from 'round these parts, that among the reasons that Athens is the finest city around is that the State Botanical Gardens of Georgia are located here. Many Atlantans are familiar with the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, but for a beautiful, very long series of walks through the woods, with wetlands and the beautiful Oconee River, you really need to come to Athens and give yourself a few hours. It is wonderful!

Some sillier photos of other people, places and things were also taken this weekend, but more about those another time.


( Eight pictures of Marie and me from Saturday behind the cut )