Great cultures yield great artists, and I’m not talking necessarily about Ancient Rome or the Renaissance periods of either Italy or Harlem. The cowboy culture of the Southwestern Frontier has spawned its share of artistry, from poets and musicians to painters and, yes, cartoonists. Conventional wisdom holds that Charles M. Russell (1864-1926), was the most…
The 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ arrival in North America occurred in 2004. So what else is new? That occasion could hardly be treated as commonplace nostalgia, so urgent has the influence remained. Witness Julie Taymor’s newly opened film, Across the Universe. Nor can mere nostalgia account for the significance of the 50th anniversary of…
Continued from last week… An Arlington, Texas-based songwriting and guitar-building partner of mine named Greg Jackson tells of the time when, as a schoolboy intent upon advancing his family’s music-making traditions, he brought home a just-learned story-song called “Five Nights Drunk” and demonstrated it to his folk-singing father as a fresh revelation. Manny Jackson listened…
Continued from last week … We had left Robert Bloch hanging in mid-conversation last week, speaking of Irvin S. Cobb as a forerunner of the “bizarre pulp” movement in popular fiction. Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (1876–1944) was a crony and occasional collaborator of Will Rogers, and a key influence upon Rogers’ droll sense of humor. He…
Recycling-in-action: Herewith, an encore of a presentation I delivered earlier this month at Tarleton State University’s Langdon Weekend arts-and-farces festival at Granbury, Texas. If it was good enough for Aesop and Shakespeare and Mark Twain, then it should suit the rest of us – as tradition-bound storytellers with roots in the Old World and in…
Continued from last week… The following text contains the remarks of comic-strip master Roy Crane (1901 – 1977) from a visit with George E. Turner and Yrs. Trly. on May 13, 1969, in the Editorial Art Department of the Daily News & Globe-Times at Amarillo, Texas. George and I had become acquainted with the Texas-bred…
Back during the middle 1960s, my newsroom mentor George E. Turner and I became acquainted with the Texas-bred cartoonist Roy Crane (1901–1977), whose daily strip Buz Sawyer – a staple of the local newspaper’s funnies section – had recently landed a Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society. Like some Oscar-anointed filmmaker with a current…
The songwriter and guitar-builder Greg Jackson, a key music-making cohort of mine since 1981, has taken the occasional hand in the comics racket, as well, as a consequence of the affiliation. Greg is the life-model, for example, for the character of Jackson Walker in Timothy Truman’s Scout books, and Greg supplied the lap-steel guitar riffs…
The kinship between science and fantasy runs deep into antiquity – deeper, yet, than the well-aged but comparatively modern notion of science fiction. The filmmaker Ray Harryhausen, in his foreword to my revised edition of the late George E. Turner’s Spawn of Skull Island: The Making of King Kong (2002), invokes the spirit of the…
You just can’t live in Texas if you don’t have a lot of soul, as Doug Sahm would have it. No, and you can’t live in Arizona if you don’t have a sense of Yuma. But we were talking about Texas, where you also just can’t live without an immersion in the lore of Billy…
Steven Okazaki’s documentary feature White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will arrive August 6 over the HBO premium-cable network, marking the 62nd anniversary of the arrival of thermonuclear warfare. The film’s harrowing impact has been a matter of record since its in-competition run during last January’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Though…
George McManus (1884-1954), once a household name via his long-running domestic-shenanigans comic strip Bringing Up Father, stands as a practical embodiment of the comics’ industry’s cinematic possibilities. The last of his comics-into-movies adaptations, Jiggs and Maggie Out West (Monogram Pictures; 1950), came to hand recently during the excavation process for a fifth volume of novelist…
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