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Hey, folks. In a nutshell, SLG Publishing is having an across-the-line, no coupon necessary, 40% off everything sale for the next week or so. A tough economy and some financial curve balls have made the sale necessary in an attempt to put some coins in the coffer, wind in the sails, eggs in the basket, etc, etc, whatever the hell. SLG, as most of you know, has more or less been my publishing home for the past 20 years or so, so I'm of course hoping for the best for them during these times of hardship. And I can certainly empathize, as this has been a rotten month in a tough year for the House of Fun, which is why we've been selling off parts of our collection on e-bay and making art available that I had not ever intended on selling. Anyway, you do what you can, you do what you have to. This is a crazy business to be in even during the best of times for those of us who aren't sitting at the adults table and don't have a trust fund. Sometimes there's little you can do but keep working and hold your breath until the floodwater recedes. The SLG site can be accessed by clicking here. The search for my comic book crap is here. You can find comics by Andi Watson, Jhonen Vasquez, Faith Erin Hicks, Gene Yang, Dave Roman, James Turner, Scott Saavedra, Phil Elliot and Glenn Dakin, Derf, Serena Valentino and many others, the various Disney books SLG did, and all sorts of merch and stuff you might have been promising to get around to or were previously unaware of and might want to give the once-over twice at 40% off. There's also stuff from other publishers which I assume is included in the sale. I do know that the ten-years too late Milk and Cheese vinyl toys make good holiday gifts, they also make for something to blow up with M-80's in the backyard. Ah, me. Speaking of SLG, I will be joining Dan for the full hour of this week's SLG Radio show, the rant-fest begins at Thursday at 5 pm EST. Maybe we'll end up spending the entire time talking about lousy times in funnybook land, or working as a scientific guinea pig for cash, or selling blood or hair, or whatever the hell. Please consider calling in if you have a question or a topic or anything to say. No bill collectors, please. Thank you. |
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My computer's been on the blink for a while, so I've been using Sarah;s, which has led to a pile of post-it notes and scribbled-on scraps of paper gathering on my desk. A lot of these were reminders to post this or that on the blog, which, I obviously didn't do. Sarah spent many hours yesterday trying to revive my ailing machine, which is more or less now acting responsibly. We'll see how long that lasts. In the meantime, I'm gonna play catch-up with a few random mentions of this, that and the other: - The House of Fun Art For Sale list was updated after we got home from the Baltimore Convention, I just never told anybody because I'm such a savvy business person. We got hit with some unforeseen expenses (inc. a hefty car repair bill, ouch) so I'm offering up some new pieces, a few of them relatively big ticket items, a few of them relatively affordable -- pages from Milk and Cheese pages, Bizarro Comics/Bizarro World, Hellboy: Weird Tales, as well as a few pin-ups, odds and ends and the cover to Dork #6, which was The Eltingville Club issue (a note to the reader/customer who purchased the back cover to #6 and the Eltingville t-shirt some months back - I have lost your contact info, which is why I did not write you about the front cover. If you're reading this, please get in touch with me, because I feel badly that I screwed that up. My apologies!). Also, we've lowered the prices on a number of older pieces on the list. Several pages have already sold since we added the new artwork, as a few regular customers contacted us, but the list has been updated to reflect those purchases. If time allows we'll be adding more stuff before the holidays and we'll likely put some more layouts and small pieces up on e-Bay as well. - I am going to be appearing weekly on the SLG Radio show every Thursday, or at least every Thursday SLG head honcho Dan Vado puts a show together. My segment will be taking place in the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the show. We'll talk about comics, I guess. We'll see. So far I've mostly yammered about nothing in particular while Dan tries to get a word in edgewise. It's a live call-in show, so folks can participate if they want. Previous broadcasts are archived on the blog radio site and upcoming guests are announced on the page as well, so check it out. - Speaking of radio, I don't remember if I posted about Jill Thompson and I having been guests on Robin McConnell's Inkstuds radio program recently. You can listen to the episode here. Inkstuds is a great comic book resource, Robin's interviewed a terrific array cartoonists over the course of its 4-yr run (Happy Anniversary, btw). - Speaking of interviews, here's one Jill and I did with Crimespree Magazine regarding Beasts of Burden. - Speaking of Beasts of Burden, here's a preview of the first three pages of the upcoming third issue, which is an Orphan solo adventure. While the orders for the series have been less than stellar, the response has been extremely gratifying, and it doesn't look like retailers are getting stuck with too many copies dying on their racks. We've also received some very nice comments about the series from creators like Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Len Wein, James Robinson and Eric Powell (all on Twitter), which has been cool as all hell to see, I must admit. #3 ships on the 25th, and hopefully will be a fun sort of palate cleanser after the downbeat second issue. At least that was the plan. - Geek Alert: Universal Monster movie fans take note - I accidentally stumbled across a reference to The Universal Cult Horror Collection, a set of five lesser-known weirdies including Murders In The Zoo, The Mad Ghoul and Rondo Hatton as The Creeper in House of Horrors. The set is only being sold through TCM.com (and one other online source, but the price is the same, iirc), it's part of a deal TCM made with Universal to release some films on demand, and hopes are high that perhaps this could lead to getting Island of Lost Souls out on DVD. The films can be bought separately, as well. I haven't seen any of these, I'm sure they're nutty jerk-fests, but I love this stuff. Now, if I could only afford them... -I've got something like seven new Fun Strips done or almost done. I've gridded up a batch of strips and pages to work on whenever the ink's drying on another job, so who knows, I may have some Dork-type comics to show you folks sooner or later. Still trying to get more done on that Milk and Cheese strip I started and posted a bit from a little while back, but it's slow going. - I'm also working on a pin-up for a charity auction that has been fun, little cartoony versions of as many old Marvel Comics villains as I can remember the details for. It's a small piece but I'm trying to get as many figures in as possible, I think I have thirty or so right now. I'm trying to see how many characters I can draw more or less by memory, and then I'll get the reference out and see what I screwed up, and complete the details on the characters I don't know well. Some characters I can't even lay a single line down for, so they'll need reference. In my head I can see The Mandarin and Klaw, but on paper...nada (besides the sonic weapon -- weird!). But it looks like 80% of these bums are still floating around in my memory banks while I forget my social security number and my own phone numbers. Maybe I'll scan it as it stands and post an in-progress image. Or maybe not. - If the November issue of Nickelodeon was the swan song for the magazine, I'm depressed. If December turns out to be the final issue, still depressed. We had a gag panel in the November Nick...what a bummer to see it end. And just when Emily started reading it, of course. - I've been reading a lot of Spider pulps, my first Avenger pulp, old horror short story collections, some Fritz Leiber SF short stories, some Robert Bloch, some recent young adult fantasy series (The Magic Thief and The Last Apprentice), some David Goodis crime novels, some lesser-known (to me, at least) Black Lizard crime reprints (The Vengeance Man, You Play the Red and the Black Comes Up), some Jim Thompson, and some Blackjack manga. Nothing heavy, nothing too depressing. The Lawgiver is planning a house move, and is culling his library, so I've been hauling bags of old paperbacks over here to digest and then donate. I'm keeping the Spider paperbacks, though. It's been a lot of fun, and a lot of it is research for projects, so it's sort of work, as well. Some days I just want to stay in bed and read until I fall back asleep, like when I was a kid on a rainy day. - I'm doing a lot of stuff for Bongo right now, and for the foreseeable future --, and it's time I got back to that. Latersville, all. |
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Apparently the first volume in the IDW King Aroo reprint project has been solicited in this months Previews eyesore -- this is a series I'm really looking forward to as I find Jack Kent's strip delightful (there's a word I rarely type) and an example of great pure cartooning chops. And my daughter might enjoy it, as well. Maybe. I'm basing this on the character designs, all the cute creatures running around in the strip, and the gentle nature and humor of the strip. And the puns, she's getting into corny old gags in the way most of us did when we were little. I never know what comics she's going to respond to, to be honest. For a long while she wouldn't read anything with people in it, Dennis the Menace was out for that reason. Now she has taken the Toon Treasury away from me and has gone through it multiple times, without missing funny animals, kids, gag pages, even the Briefer Frankenstein pages, which I thought might turn her off. Then again, she read print-outs of the first issue of Beasts of Burden #1 in black and white, while we weren't around, and startled us at the dinner table one night by quoting the "eat 'em up frog" (as she put it) demon (she also calls it the "eat everything frog"). She quoted the frog in a funny kid monster voice, and it was very funny, but Sarah gave me the "I thought we agreed not to leave those pages lying around" look. And we did agree not to let her see the pages because some of them are kind of nasty, and as it turned out, Emily was bothered by some of the events in the first issue, and told me I wrote it "wrong", because the deaths of two animals in it upset her. We have since never admitted the existence of Beasts #2, for reasons some of you might understand after reading that issue. She knows #3 exists because she's seen pages on the computer, it's the "Orphan goes looking for his girlfriend" story (as she puts it), and while there are some gory bits, it's an adventure and not a downbeat, depressing bit of work. There's no way she's seeing #4, because there's some horror stuff in there that I don't think she'd like. She's also been "stealing" my copy of the first Cul De Sac collection lately, and she seems to like it, although she doesn't get a lot of the strips. But she keeps reading it. Kills me to watch her reading comics. You see, there's this kid in my house, right, and she's little and cute and she's ours and she's reading some of them there funnybooks. Who'd have thunk it? Not me. Anyway, off tangent, what else is new. Didn't expect to be posting, but I'm taking a break in-between working on some strip layouts and so there you go and here I go and who knows where it goes. But speaking of the Dick Briefer Frankenstein comics, I read that Fantagraphics has announced a new slate of books, including a reprinting of this material. To which I say sweet, because along with oddballness like Herbie Popnecker and a few other projects, this is a cult series that many folks have wanted to see back in print. Hopefully enough folks out there are interested in order to make it viable for the long haul. Who knows. And it gets better, or worse, if you consider your wallet and shelf space, because FBI's also doing collections of lesser-known 50's horror comics, an Alex Toth collection of his Standard Comics work, a pre-Plastic Man Jack Cole collection, a book on EC cartoonists' work at other companies, and a Basil Wolverton book. So, you folks who are into these sorts of things better start taking a few bills outta your mom's bag or your dad's wallet each and every week because this is gonna be an assault on the cents-less. So many good books, and I'm not half-wise to everything IDW is announcing (I did read about a Polly and Her Pals oversize Sundays collection, apparently a $75 "Champagne Edition" -- hell, I like bells and whistles and all, but give me a decent Budweiser Edition, fer chrissakes!), or Dark Horse, or whoever else is helping grow the pile. Hell, Captain Easy still hasn't debuted, supposedly Walt and Skeezix is getting back on track, the John Stanley library is up and running, more Harvey stuff, more DHC Little Lulu, I mean, holy goodnight! You can't sell a comic book outside of Marvel and DC that isn't Buffy or whatever-related (I oughta know, after seeing the numbers on beasts #1), and they're not even selling a ton of the aforementioned, but somehow scores of classic comic collections are making their way into the world. Not that I'm complaining. It's just so unprecedented and unforeseen; going back a few years, that it's hard to imagine it isn't a geekanerd fever dream. Anyway, I just hope 2010 isn't the dam bursting on the reprint trend and we're not hitting the motherlode overload anytime soon, because at some point this has to start choking shelves and bringing consumers to their financial knees, but while the gettin's good, this is a goddamned Golden Age of great comic gatherings, guys and gals. This is history in the re-packaging, and bears attention. Or maybe it's a sinister alliance with Ikea to sell even more Billy bookcases. So, anybody looking forward to any of this stuff? Anything you've heard about that is of interest? How about them Yankees? No, no Yankees, I don't really care, in fact I really don't care, anti-care, could care less. No Yankees, no NYC mayoral race, no creepy rich people sports of any kind. Just funnybooks, today. Glorious, ridiculous funnybooks. Them I understand. |
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So, basically, things have been pretty tense here recently. And now, thankfully, they're not as tense. Talk to you folks soon. |
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Haven't done one of these in a long time, dunno if there's any interest out there, but...any questions? Now's the time. |
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Ahhh, this one made me sad. I wasn't old enough to have seen the glory days of the Soupbone, his legendary nerd hipster kid's show that caught on with adults back in the 60's, pre-Uncle Floyd, pre-Pee-Wee Herman, pre-Andy Kaufman's singing along with Mighty Mouse records. A good-natured comedian, he kept slapstick and kitsch and silliness alive on tv when it was disappearing from the face of the tv and movie screen, puppets, copious pies in the face, bad gags, parodies, dopey songs. Nevertheless, if you were on the east coast, or were a nerdling obsessed with pop culture and television and show business in the 70's, Soupy Sales was ever-present, and by osmosis you learned about him, his show, his single, "Do the Mouse", etc. And eventually WPIX aired the later incarnation of his show, for a short but fun run, with White Fang, and Black Tooth and Pookie, and the pies kept coming, as did the usual goofy horsehockey that was unfunny/funny, or funny/unfunny, depending on your tastes. I loved it, and always thought Soupy Sales was aces, a man in the game to entertain whoever wanted to come along, making the kids laugh and winking at the adults. He took approximately 20,000 pies to the face, or so they say. There's a legacy, and no, I'm not being snide. I'd have been happy to have been Soupy Sales, and I'm happy there was a Soupy Sales. Mention of his name brings a smile to my face unassailed by snark, cynicism, or scandal. I just like the guy and his show and his shtick, he made me laugh and I was a fan. R.I.P.Milton Supman, aka, Soupy Sales. Some Youtube clips for the curious: Soupy Sales: old school, "Do the Mouse" clip The later Soupy Sales tv show: Alice Cooper guest star There are also complete 60's episodes on Youtube which I wish I had time to watch, and, I can't find it right now after a quick search, maybe it isn't posted on Youtube, but a great, great clip is of a relatively unknown Soupy Sales on the old panel game show "I've Got a Secret". I think it's early '60s, possibly 1961, possibly an episode with Ronald Reagan as the special guest. Soupy's secret is the amount of pies he's had tossed at him at the time, the time being when he was a local east coast phenomenon and the panelists had not heard of him. Or the viewing audience, by and large. He's energetic and funny and willing to look foolish, giving a lesson on getting hit with a pie (with drum beat for effect). I laughed at this clip every time I saw it on the Game Show Network when they were running old episodes of black and white game shows (and we had cable). It predates Monty Python's pie-throwing seminar routine and I dunno, might even be funnier. Well, different approaches, it's not like Sales was doing a cerebral, deadpan dissecting kind of skit about showbiz nonsense. He was just being a goof. Long Live Soupy Sales. |
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Jill and I will be appearing on Robin McConnell's comic book-oriented radio talk show Inkstuds tomorrow. I've been on the show before and it was a good time. According to Robin, the show will be live (5 pm EST) through www.citr.ca or 101.9 fm in Vancouver, and re broadcasted either through www.inkstuds.com or several stations across Canada at a later time. Check it out, see what songs we picked get played, see if either of us says anything doofusy. Also, FYI, the second part of my Inside Look article discussing the first issue of Beasts of Burden has been posted at Broken Frontier. It includes some script pages for folks who like to see that stuff, and how the finished pages worked off the script, what Jill changes, broke down further, etc. Okay, over and out. Hope some of you folks hunted down a copy of Beasts #2 today, hope it provides an interesting read. Latersville. |
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Like it says, Beasts of Burden #2 ships to comic shops tomorrow. My thanks in advance to those of you who plan to pick it up. I hope you like the issue, there's some amazing work from Jill in this one, especially one particular image in the book that is, imho, pretty stunning. Anyway, as posted earlier, CBR ran a preview of the first six pages of #2. If you are interested in reading them, click here. Also, I did an "Inside Look" feature for Broken Frontier about Beasts of Burden #1, a sort of director's commentary breaking down a five or six page sequence from the first issue, along with an overview of the series and some background . I wrote too much -- go figure -- so the Inside Look will be running in two parts, today and tomorrow. You can read the first half here. Okay, then, I guess that's it. #2, tomorrow. Hope you'll be there, hope it's worth it. |
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The venerable and veteran, and I do mean veteran, cartoonist George Tuska has passed away. I was a fan of his silver age and 70's (whatever the hell that age is called, Bronze Age -? Roy Thomas Age--? Last Hurrah Age --?) Marvel work, I followed his long Iron Man run, his work on Luke Cage, Hero For Hire/Power Man/White Man's Fever Dream, and if I recall correctly, he had a run on the oddball team book The Champions, or at least did some fill-ins (inked by John Byrne, iirc, of all people). My 70's Marvel is hazy these days, especially on all the fill-ins and secondary titles someone like Tuska would have contributed to, so that's most of what I recall, other than the connective pages in a Marvel Treasury Holiday collection, where he drew most of the Marvel icons tossing snowballs at one another in-between Christmas reprints. In fact, one of the reprints just may have been a Tuska-drawn Luke Cage mess, some dopey thing about some idiot villain in a terrible costume quoting Shakespeare or Dickens or something dumb like that. Sweet Christmas! Anyway, I liked Tuska, I know many didn't, his stuff was cartoony and old school. I didn't mind, he got the job done with enough aplomb, and characters had decent fights and there was good flow and motion in a Tuska book, especially when he was "on". I recently read his Tower contributions to the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents line and I thought they were kind of dismal, but a lot of the older pros seemed to knock the Tower stuff out quickly, I'm betting the pay was pretty lousy, and save for a few folks like Wood and Adkins, perhaps, it was hardly a labor of love. One of Tuska's signature cartooning tics, at least during the 60's and 70's, was to draw a lot of folks with big damned teeth. Especially any character who was supposed to be a maroon, or a sharpie, or a putz. But the big teeth could spread to regular folks and heroes alike, and it was memorable (obviously). Sometimes I could just look at the teeth in a book and know it was Tuska if the inking marred the penciling. Geez, them teeth. Choppers, is more like it. If he ever drew Ironjaw the comics world would have fainted. Sometimes seemingly one big tooth represented the upper jaw, and sometimes terrifyingly buck-toothed individuals would flit around a Tuska page. It could be disconcerting. I'm going by memory here, and other stylizations I seem to recall are bodies in motion entering and slicing through the panels, which gave his pages some heft and motion, and often a tight foreshortening of hands, sometimes to the point where the hand would be thrust forward and bent down in a funny way, with little or no indication of the arm structure behind it. I always noticed this because as a kid I would trace Tuska hands, the lack of much forearm or arm behind it seemed like a wonderful way to get around drawing anatomy. Which is not to say Tuska couldn't draw arms, it was just a bit of business, like how often a cartoon character's bent knee will feature a foot dangling beneath it, with no shin or ankle to be seen. It often heightens the action, and can look dynamic. I also seem to recall Tuska's Iron Man, like Trimpe's, as having a helmet that somehow managed to emote -- the 70's saw a bunch of folks putting emotions across Ol' Shellhead's kisser, squashing and stretching the mouth and eye slits in expressive ways, a practice I never could completely reconcile as a kid. To this day I'm not sure how I feel about that approach, it was kooky as all hell, but kind of worked, I remember friends of mine hated whenever anyone drew an anguished Iron Man (he was always getting crushed in the suit back then. Ultimo crushed him, The Blood Brothers crushed him, Titanium Man crushed him, The Freak crushed him, folks really liked some fresh-squeezed Tony Stark back then. Nowadays it looks like Iron man is always getting hit with Photoshop effects. It ain't the same, baby. I say crush that bastard, Matt Fraction or whoever's writing Iron man these days. Crush him! Crush him good! Crinkle that industrialist in a can!). Anyway, I liked Tuska's Iron Man just fine. Even if the Mandarin and Happy Hogan and everybody had crazy big teeth. For a nice write-up of Tuska's long career and strengths as a cartoonist, please see Tom Spurgeon's fine obituary at The Comics Reporter. Tuska had been around a lot longer than I was aware of as a young Marvel reader, along with folks like Lee Elias and Frank Robbins I had no clue he'd been kicking around for decades and had done successful (and arguably stronger) work in the newspaper strip field and the golden age of comics I was surprised to learn this years back, comics was such a weird place as far as letting out information on the artists, even in the 70's and 80's, only certain fans seemed aware of the length and breadth of most superhero cartoonists' careers. You just assumed they showed up one day and went to work for Marvel or DC, and switched around between the two. I thought they were all in their 20's until Marvel published photographs of their writers and artists in the calendars and pages of FOOM. Which was a stunner, for me, back in the day. Adults drawing comic books? Old people adults? Anyway, R.I.P. George Tuska, he had a long run, drew many pages, and entertained many folks. Cool. |
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