Category: Columns

Mindy Newell: Kiss 2% Of The World’s Asses Good-Bye

The Leftovers“Thus, we must realize that October 21, 2011 will be the final day of this earth’s existence.” – Harold Camping, July 19, 1921 – December 15, 2013. American Christian Radio, Author, and Broadcaster.

Wow. That was dark and nihilistic. Right up my alley.

I’m talking about The Leftovers, which premiered last Sunday. Based on the 2011 book by Tom Perotta, who co-created the television series with Damon Lindelof, The Leftovers is a spin on the evangelical Christian belief in the Rapture, an event in which all those who are true believers in Jesus Christ as the son of God and the Messiah will be taken from Earth to be with Him in Heaven and which will signal the beginning of the final battle between Jesus Christ and Satan, i.e. the Anti-Christ, in the climatic Apocalypse, after which the victorious Jesus will rule over an Eden-esque Earth for a millennium. (Let me know if this nice Jewish girl got it wrong, okay?)

However, unlike the Left Behind series by Tom LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, in which the authors follows the script(ure) of evangelical Christian belief, The Leftovers offers no easy answers as to why this global Rapture-like event has occurred.

The series opens on October 14th. No year is given. We are introduced to an unnamed woman in a laundromat, a typically mundane scene. She is washing her clothes and talking on the phone over the incessant crying of her baby – in fact, we only catch snatches of her conversation because of the screaming kid. A few moments later we watch the woman, still yapping on the phone – sheesh, it takes me about two hours or more to do the laundry in my laundromat, how the hell long has this woman been on the phone? – strap the baby’s car seat into the car and then get into the driver’s seat. She turns around once to distractedly attempt to quiet her child. The camera moves to the baby, who might be looking up at heaven, and back to the mom, still on the phone…and suddenly the car is quiet.

The baby is gone.

As Mama freaks out – and finally hangs up the damn phone – we also see a young boy yelling for his father (“Where’d you go, Dad?!”) as an empty shopping cart rolls into a parked car’s fender. In the background and a few blocks away we see a (driverless) car slam into another as it speeds through a red light.

Three years later.

A man is running (for exercise, not escape) down a suburban street. He’s wearing headphones, and in an interesting commentary on television and radio punditry we hear analysts and experts and other so-called “authorities” talking about the event, not just on the runner’s headphones, but from a variety of sources. Two percent, approximately 144 million people, disappeared on that day, and everyone is trying to explain it.

Alien abductions? A God-driven event? Well, that may explain the Pope, but Gary Busey? Jennifer Lopez, Shaquille O’Neal and Anthony Bourdain are also among the celebrities vanished into thin air. (No mention of the Kardashians, though. We couldn’t be that lucky.) And if it’s about good people having been taken, then why a child beater?

And of course there’s a televised Congressional investigation with scientists and religious experts babbling on with their respective theories.

But nobody knows nothing. Except that I’m fairly certain that the cable news channels are having a field day with this. CNN and the Malaysian plane disappearance, anyone?

The man, Kevin Garvey, is the police chief of a small suburban town somewhere in New York. He’s played by Justin Theroux – of whom I knew nothing about except that he’s been stringing Jennifer Aniston along for what seems like a century, thanks to my tabloid reading while waiting on the checkout line at Stop-and-Shop. Now I know that’s he’s incredibly hot and very good at playing morose and confused, and sees visions of stags. Stuffed stags. Live stags. Run-over stags. Being torn to pieces by wild dogs stags.

About 100 people of his town disappeared in the “rapturous” experience. As the hour progressed we watch and learn how it has affected the “leftovers,” and, by extension, the rest of the remaining population of the earth.

Of course there are cults. One, called the Great Remnant, doesn’t talk, encourages cigarette smoking (“Don’t Waste Your Breath” is one of their mottos), and dresses in white, as if they are on the White Team during Color War at my summer camp. (Kevin’s wife, Laurie, whom we assumed had been whisked off to Never-Never land, is a member of the Great Remnant.) Another cult, one that has not yet been given a name, appears to be ensconced in a survivalist camp of the Neo-Nazi / White Power type somewhere in the deserts of America, although this cult is apparently okay with race, since there is a hot, young Asian chick in a bikini lounging around the camp’s pool as if it’s a luxury hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona. I also know this cult isn’t racist because it’s led by a muscularly endowed black man whose name is Wayne and whom is apparently the “know-it-all” religious leader of this cult. We discover that the police chief’s son, Tom, also belongs and has a thing for the hot young Asian chick, as does Big Kahuna Wayne, who has “plans” for her.

Teenagers are still going to school, but it’s a shadowbox routine, as their real life is taken up with smoking weed, drinking alcohol, fucking and pushing life to its limits – including erotic asphyxiation, which the chief’s daughter, Jill (played by Margaret Qualley, who has amazing “Elizabeth Taylor” black eyebrows and blue eyes) partakes in with some loser named Max. (It seems that Max is dead as we see Jill walk out of the bedroom after their, uh, session.)

I know that I’ve been kind of flip in talking about The Leftovers, but in actuality I’m very intrigued. I think that, in just this one premier episode, the creative team has shed a lot of hokey nonsense about a mass disappearance of humanity (I’m sorry, those of you who are Christian evangelicals, but there is nothing called the Rapture in either the Old Testament or the New – it was dreamed up by a British minister, John Nelson Darby, sometime in the 1830s after one of his parishioners claimed to have had a vision of Christ’s return) and instead has captured the crazy ways that humanity would actually deal with it.

And I do mean crazy.

None of these characters is sane. Nor should they be. Unexplained phenomena is fun to talk about and to base TV shows on – I watch my fair portion of Ancient Aliens and Ghosthunters – but if two percent of the population of the Earth just suddenly disappeared one day, the frenetic behaviors, the fanatical actions, the extreme activities of the “leftovers” would surely rate new chapters in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) of the American Psychiatric Association – that is, if there were any sane shrinks left, much less a professional association.

I think we’re in for a fun – and thought provoking – ride.

And may I say…

Thank God.

 

John Ostrander: Choice, Character, and Freedom

gandhi-1180371Which would you trust more – what a person says or what a person does? Almost anyone with life experience would say they’d trust what a person does more. Mind you, although we know better we often go with what a person says: con men, politicians and advertisers (that may be redundant) count on that.

It’s what we do with story – character is built upon choices, good or bad, which the individual makes. That’s why the writer puts them in difficult and even life-threatening situations. My late wife Kim used to ask me how I might react in a given situation. My response invariably was, “I don’t know. Ask me when I get there.” I know how I’d like to think I would act but the reality is, until faced with the given situation, I don’t really know. Nobody does.

I don’t believe it when someone says “I could never kill someone.” I think Gandhi was capable of killing given certain circumstances. The likelihood of him killing might be small, but he was human and any human is capable of the act. It’s part of our common humanity; a dark side of it, I grant you, but still part of it.

It’s not only big choices that we make that proclaim who we are (or who a character is); it’s the small ones as well. The artist in a graphic narrative, for example, must decide what a given character might wear. What we choose to wear projects how we want to present ourselves.

“Hold on there, Horsestrangler,” some of you might be saying. “I don’t care what I wear. I just throw something – possibly clean – on and go.” (Guys are more likely to say this than gals who, as usual, know better.) My response is doing so is a choice of its own and makes it own statement; it says “I don’t think that sort of thing is important. It’s shallow and trivial and doesn’t represent who I am.”

Except it does. It rejects certain values and/or it says you want to look like everyone else and blend in. Do you dress for a job interview the same way you dress for hanging with your homies? If so, good luck getting the job. If you’re going on a date with someone for the first time, how do you dress? How do you present yourself? If you had to go to a funeral, what would you choose to wear?

Different characters in comics will dress differently. Peter Parker shouldn’t dress like Tony Stark. Clark Kent shouldn’t dress like Bruce Wayne. I remember that in an early episode of The Sopranos, the producers dressed Tony in shorts and flip-flops for a backyard party to suggest more strongly the underlying suburban setting. Advisers to the show said that Tony would never dress like that – and he never did again.

Why do people wear clothing emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo or the name of their favorite sports team and turn themselves into walking billboards for that product? Because it suggests a certain tribal affiliation the same way that inner city gangs wear certain colors. It proclaims us and marks us as part of a greater, possibly stronger, whole. At least, we may think it does.

That’s a choice that people make and it’s something that writer and artists working in the graphic medium have to keep in mind. There are hundreds, thousands, of ways of communicating to the reader who this character is, what the setting is, what’s at stake and what’s going on.

Are there exceptions to this rule? Yep. Sure are. There are situations when you have no choice to make. You can’t choose which shoes to wear when you can’t afford any shoes. Choice exists only if there is more than one thing from which to choose. Otherwise, you have to take what is given.

There is no freedom where there is no freedom of choice.

 

Marc Alan Fishman: Your Mother’s A Tracer!

fish_pic_articleSo the book we’ve been building for the past two weeks (starting here) has now been plotted and all visual resources gathered. What else is left to do? Oh yeah. Draw the damned thing! You know, that big step that takes a bunch of words on a page and interestingly shapes them into visual communication of plot, character, nuance, and depth. It’s the thing that makes our medium truly special. Like a movie, but slaved over a single moment in time, at a time.

OK kiddos. Time to wear my heart on my sleeve. For all my piss and vinegar, pomp and circumstance, beard and bite, I have long hidden my entire creative process from prying eyes. Why? Because I’m man enough to admit for a very long time, I was ashamed of it. As noted last week, when Matt informed me I should either poop or get off the toilet (when it came to contributing to Unshaven Comics). I accepted his challenge. But I did so on my terms. I would use every trick in the book of my professional life as a graphic designer. I’d be fine to draw… so long as I could cheat. Let me peel back now exactly how I cheat – and in doing so end up with a finished product I am proud to attach my name to.

Picture Perfect Illustration

As we covered before, at the point I’m ready to illustrate I already have the entire comic page and panel layout. Simply enough, I open up my first page in Adobe Illustrator and get familiar with what I’ll be drawing. I then open the cache of photo references taken prior, and drop in the appropriate references in for the panel I’m building. I then drop the opacity down, and then I… I…

I trace.

There. I said it. It’s out there. And it can’t be taken back. With it being said though, I sternly suggest that what I end up doing is far more than tracing. When I make my mark in Illustrator, it’s tied to my pressure sensitive Wacom tablet. And the brush tools I use to make my lines have been custom built and tweaked by me to give me the line I envision in my head when I make my mark via the computer. Furthermore, anyone who traces learns quickly that every line – especially in comics – is crucial to personal style as well as building the right form. And when one works in a photorealistic style, line choice is the difference between making someone look their age or 40 years older. Line weight, and composition come into play. A thicker line can be used to separate forms, as well as add depth to flat objects. To the point: I trace, but I trace with a degree in fine art, and knowledge that I could replicate the results without tracing – just in twice the amount of time. Time I could be spending making more comics.

Building A World That Doesn’t Exist

Aside from using my photo references for the actual characters in The Samurnauts, no doubt you’ll note that they don’t fight zombie-cyborg pirates from space in a vacuum. Well, OK, sometimes they do. But you get my drift. Furthermore, as hard as we’ve tried Unshaven Comics has yet to procure a humanoid-monkey hybrid capable of performing kung-fu that we could afford. Nor have we any advanced degrees in cybernetic technology. And beyond all that, we don’t live in a futuristic city, have giant robots, or even own laser swords or shoulder mounted cannons. Lucky for me, I own an imagination and can afford to commission 3-D models of the props needed to flesh out each panel in our comic that I’m responsible for.

Much like staging for TV or movies, I am firm believer in building only what you have to show. When there’s need to show more, we show more. Matt, as the antithesis to my mantra, lives for building out sketches in every angle. And that of course leads me to the other half of this story:

Matt Wright. Penciler, Inker, Craft Beer Drinker.

Here I was spending all my precious time standing on my soapbox, defending my process to the masses… and I forgot that I only constitute 50% of the content of each issue of The Samunauts! Whilst I toil at my computer with photos, 3-D models, and a second screen of Google images, Matt Wright is doing things the traditional way. With a blank page, a dark basement, and a pile of actual art tools, Matt’s half of The Samurnauts is made the way you’d think all comics should be made. While Matt will keep reference materials at arms length, he typically draws from the figures and fantasies that lie betwixt his ears. It’s a skill I sadly lost literally within moments of meeting Matt, back in sixth grade.

So, Matt’s process is thus: light blue pencil gestures within pre-planned panels, followed by heavier pencils to clarify form and details, followed by finished pencil artwork. After every page has been penciled to his liking, Matt will then take to his ink and brush to lay out blacks and grey tones. As his sequences in our books typically encapsulate the past, Matt has explored a variety of media – gouache, water color, copic marker, and ink washes – to create the weathered, nostalgic look. As most people see upon viewing of the completed comic note, the juxtaposition of Matt’s well-rendered fine art mixes with the sterile, cel-animation-esque digital art I contribute. At the end of the day, it’s an aesthetic we’re proud is wholly ours, serves a purpose in our story telling, and is truly unique within the artist alleys we frequent.

Sage Advice I was Once Given

“Celebrate your successes, but cherish your failures. It’s only when we lose do we learn to win.”

And a personal favorite: “You think your fans care that it took you two-hundred hours to make that book in their hand? Hardly. All they care about is if it’s actually worth the time you invested in it.”

After this, it’s on to the finishes – flatting, coloring, lettering, and the cover. We’ll cover that (natch) next week… in our epic conclusion!

 

THE LAW IS A ASS #319: INSPECTOR? I BARELY KNOW HER

cq140526Every Monday I read Inspector Danger’s Crime Quiz. You’ll notice I didn’t say read with pleasure. Usually I don’t.

I’m a big fan of whodunits with their intricate plots and subtle clues and challenging mind games. Inspector Danger’s Crime Quiz, a weekly comic strip syndicated by the Universal Press Syndicate and available on UPS’s GoComics.com, is a whodunit; but one without the intricacies, subtleties, and, usually, the challenge. Each week The Inspector’s one-page comic story presents us with a mystery and the clues necessary to solve it. Then the actual solution is printed upside down on the bottom of the page.

The problem is that the mysteries are frequently inane and the solutions preposterous. Like the recent one about a burglary at an art collector’s house. The collector said his dim-witted cleaning lady, who he keeps because she has a cleaning compulsion, saw the burglar. She did but couldn’t identify him. The Inspector saw the broken glass in the door the burglar used to enter the house and noted there was no broken glass on the floor. He deduced the cleaning lady must have broken the window herself to pretend there was a theft, then gave into her compulsive cleaning and cleaned up the broken glass. Somehow that proved that she was the thief and there was no burglar.

Problem is, if the cleaning lady’s compulsion was so strong that she’d clean up glass she broke herself to fake a burglary, she’d have had the same compulsion to clean up the broken glass if it had really been broken by a burglar. So the absence of broken glass only proved that the cleaning lady compulsively cleaned it up, not who broke it.

That’s an example of when the strip’s solution is stupid. Sometimes the solution isn’t stupid, just annoying. Like the May 26th installment.

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Martha Thomases: Independents Day

James MurrayI love comics.

Is that too obvious? Is it like saying, “I love breathing,” or “I love skin?”

But, really, I love them. I love the big, splashy comics from The Big Two, with their shiny covers and fancy computer coloring. I love black-and-white self-published pamphlets, loving hand-stapled by the creators as the pages come off the copier.

If it’s words and pictures working together to tell a story, I’m going to at least sample it.

Graphic storytelling, like rock’n’roll, is a uniquely American art form. Like rock’n’roll, it started out as throwaway culture, designed to be an impulse purchase for impulsive children. And like rock’n’roll, anybody can pick up a pencil and create comics.

When I was growing up, it never occurred to me to consider comic book creation as a career. It didn’t occur to me that humans created them, not anymore than it occurred to me that Oreos came from a baker.

Later, when I met people who wrote and drew comics for a living, I was in awe. These folks got to decide what Superman did! Unfortunately, they didn’t get paid a very large proportion of what Superman earned. I don’t mean as a comic book, because there is that throwaway economic model to which I referred above. I mean the value of keeping the property alive for decades.

That was then. This is now. Talented people can keep their own copyrights and trademarks. There are enough successful independent publishers like this and this and this, just for examples to create a competitive marketplace for writers and artists.

And yet, some people still self-publish. Maybe they do it because they can’t find a publisher. Maybe the story has no commercial potential. Maybe it does, but the only way to find out is to do it.

I met one of these people at the recent Reed Show in New York. He’s James Murray, and in addition to comics, he’s a novelist and a poet and he has a YouTube Channel. The comics I saw were about classic monsters and horror. Not my genre, but clearly one that absorbs his interest and channels his creativity.

I decided to ask him a few questions about why he does it. And I thought the Fourth of July was the right time.

When did you start reading comics? Did you always write?

I was fascinated by reading at a real young age. When I was really little I would sit with the newspaper and say out loud words and letters I recognized. My mom said when I was little and she’d take me to the store I wouldn’t ask for a lot of toys but I’d ask for books. I remember making this 32-page story called G. I. Joe vs the Moon Monster. This was before I was even in kindergarten, mind you. I drew a little bit but I was never that kid that was doodling in class all the time and stuff like that. I don’t really have that aptitude for drawing so other people drew my comics.

When I got older I didn’t write too much but in 9th grade I took a creative writing class and my senior year I took writing seminar. As a teenager I became a metal head, big Axel Rose and Ozzy Osbourne fan. I wasn’t a musician but got into writing poetry and was partly inspired by the music I liked. In college I started going to poetry readings at the local coffee shop. I really ran hard with poetry for a long time, and always sought out readings. At this point I’ve even read poems in South Korea and Australia.

As far as comics go when I was in college comics almost died. My freshmen year of college there were three comic stores in my college town, by the time I graduated there were none. A few years back Comics Experience with Andy Schmidt started offering online classes geared to writing comics. I took those and learned a lot about how to actually get stuff done. I’d been teaching in Korea for a while and had some money saved up and decided to go for it. In late 2011 I came back to America and took a year off. I self published my first comic, a short novella, and a collection of poetry. I also had some finite web-comics up and sold my books at conventions. In 2013 some stuff came up and I couldn’t do shows but I’m back at it now and hope to keep doing conventions and making books.

Why horror?

I liked monster movies when I was little. When I was starting to talk to people about making comics the advice I was given from people that made their own books was to do something different. I figured I didn’t want to plan some 60-issue epic. I thought if I could do a comic I’d want to do a one and done story, and I knew making a black and white book was less expensive than color. So I thought, black and white, one shot, and something different. Remembering how I liked monster movies I thought of Classic Horror Comics, the idea of mimicking seeing a movie during the Golden Age of Hollywood, complete with news reel footage before the film starts etc.

You write comics and poetry. Was picking up bottles at the side of the road too much of a high-profit business?

If that’s not bad enough, I teach for a living. Why do all my passions promise poverty? I’m a glutton for punishment I guess.

How do you find people with whom to work?

My first comic I found the artist on Digital Webbing. Sarah Benkin, I met at the New York Comic-con in 2011. It was at Creator Exchange, which is like Speed Dating for creators. We did a short webcomic called Shock Value and that turned out well so then we did my newest comic, Curse of the Mummy’s Stone. The cover for my Frankenstein Novella was done by someone I met through Concept Art.org. Pat Volz, who did the Phantom Flyer webcomic, is a friend I met teaching in Korea. I was at an open mic reading a piece about how awesome the Punisher is, and he made a point to introduce himself to me because he likes comics too.

What is your dream project?

I love crossovers, Superman/Aliens, Robocop/Terminator etc. I’d love to write some of those. My prose stories, which I call the Crosso-verse, are what I hope to be a life long project. My ultimate dream is that someday Disney buys Hasbro and that I get to write a massive Marvel meets Star Wars meets Transformers meets G. I. Joe in the world of Tron, with appearances by Gargoyles, Dungeons and Dragons, Visionaries and the Inhumanoids.

How can people buy your books?

My website is www.hardcoalstudios.com Through there print copies of my books can be ordered, My comics can be purchased there digitally as well. On my site I also have the two finite webcomics, Shock Value and the Phantom Flyer, and the sequel to my novella which is called Nemo: The Power of the Coming Race. My blog is linked there www.jemurr.wordpress.com on which I have the story Frankenstein: The Last Man. This summer I’ll be posting online my new prose story, The Last Vampire.

 

Tweeks: Vidcon Special

vidconlogo-1089031Last week’s 5th Annual Vidcon at the Anaheim Convention Center brought together video content creators, industry and fans to celebrate the medium.  As we expected, it was a con filled with lots of tween and teen girls screaming for their favorite YouTubers, but it also featured an industry keynote from YouTube’s CEO announcing all kind of new features for the site like a “tip jar” for content creators, fan translations and a radio show on Sirius.   Through the panels, concerts and signings it was clear that kids our age see online video like our elders see TV – so this con, started by the Vlogbrothers (Hank & John Green) is only going to grow in importance.  Watch our video for a taste of the experience.

Dennis O’Neil: Wonderful Bat-Toys

batmobile-2529797Where does he get those wonderful toys? the Joker wonders in the 1989 Batman and it’s a pretty good question. Where did the Batplane come from and how does it happened to be equipped with exactly the hardware Batman needs to thwart the Joker’s mass homicide? And that line-shooting gadget Batman totes: a device that stores a cable (or something similar) able to reach several stories into the air and whatever propels it, all crammed into something the size of a handgun. And the Batmobile… nobody notices it on the highways in and out of Gotham ad figures out where it must come from? Nothing in Tim Burton’s movie tells us that Bruce Wayne, bright guy that he is, has the kind of engineering/scientific smarts to devise such stuff and get it past the prototype stage virtually overnight. He just has what he needs when he needs it and we, sitting and watching in the darkness, don’t wonder how that can be. We’re being entertained, and entertainment is what we paid for.

We don’t ask how the gangster the Joker used to be mixed up some disfiguring chemicals and snuck in into (presumably) thousands of retail packages. Nor do we ask where Wiley E. Coyote gets those heavy objects he drops onto the Road Runner when they’re in the middle of nowhere, either.

Which is why, maybe, that I don’t have a name for the kind of screenplay Burton’s Batman is. It has to be a hybrid of crime story and cartoon and it works as what it is and, while we’re on the subject, the cartoon aspect is why we shouldn’t worry about collateral damage. Batman blows up an industrial plant and fills Gotham’s air with toxins? Does he poison his home town? If not, why not? Go away! You want hard facts, seek them elsewhere. That’s not what we’re selling here. And neither are we here to let you pick holes in a story that, really, doesn’t claim not to have those kind of holes. Fact is, in this context, they can’t be called holes. What, then? Narrative tropes?

Do we really care?

Later Batman films do, in fact, fill some holes. The wonderful toys are supplied by a genius who works for Bruce Wayne’s family corporation and he’s had prototypes of them in storage because the company’s number crunchers couldn’t figure a way for them to turn a profit. But in The Dark Knight, Batman and his resident genius put together an apparatus that allows them to monitor every electronic transmission in a city of 7,000,000 and have it up and running in a couple of days. Even if the technology preexisted…a couple of days?

We don’t live in Silicon Valley, we lovers of the strange and unnamed fantasy-melodrama we’re discussing. No, find us in the disembodied realm of myth and fairy tale. Very sophisticated myths and fairy tales, to be sure, but nobody says these things can’t be sophisticated. Today’s Batmobile might have been a horse-drawn pumpkin in times past and… we still don’t have a name for it, do we?

Aw, who cares?

 

 

 

 

Mike Gold: The Internet – Meet Your New Boss…

doctor-doom-7257850The thrill is gone / The thrill is gone away / The thrill is gone baby / The thrill is gone away – Roy Hawkins and Rick R. Darnell

I was going to write about something else today. Actually, I had several topics to choose from. Then I had a conversation with Glenn Hauman, the invisible hand of ComicMix, and then this screed shot out of my fingers.

As this new medium flourished, I was excited about the opportunity for anybody to communicate in virtually all ways (print, audio, video; instantly, eventually, historically) and to do so directly without outside interference. As I’ve said before, I am a first amendment absolutist: people should be able to express themselves the way they want, in the form they want, using the language they feel most appropriate. The Internet, I felt, allowed all of us to communicate without these ridiculous and unwarranted barriers.

Sure, there’s a price to pay. There’s a lot of bullshit out there, options and outright lies presented as fact. And the rush to judgment that we see on cable’s 24 hour “news” channels (which, oddly, don’t offer very much in the way of news) is exceptionally prevalent. I literally come from the “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” school of journalism. But those are growing pains, and the outrageous lies and distortions generally are limited to sites where they wear their prejudices on their sleeves. I don’t except a eulogy about the three teenagers Hamas slaughtered in Israel to appear on an American Nazi Party website. Or vice versa.

I don’t want or need big business or the government – any government – to tell me what I cannot say… to the extent that there’s a difference between the two. But it didn’t take very long before big business did exactly that by banishing that which they find objectionable from their services.

Ironically, for me this started with Apple. They do not distribute magazines or books that they find violates their standards. Do they have the basic right to do this? Of course. It’s their tubes and wires. But they enforce these standards in a hypocritical manner. There is a ton of music, television and movies for sale on iTunes that Apple would not sell in electronic print form on iBooks, had that content been presented in that medium. And if the object in question is from a big name author or has an enormous amount of buzz about it, well, often it manages to be listed on their service anyway.

Does this differ from, say, WalMart? No… except that WalMart (et al) is consistent. If it doesn’t meet WalMart’s standards, popularity or mass-salability doesn’t enter into it. Playboy could have an interview with Jesus Christ and WalMart wouldn’t stock it.

And then we have Google.

Google may very well be the Doctor Doom of the Internet. They have so much information on each and every one of us that the National Security Agency actually tapped (taps? who’s to know?) Google’s files in their spying-on-the-citizenry jag. That’s bad and ugly and evil, but for the purpose of this particular column it illustrates their corporate culture.

If Google divines what you’re posting is objectionable, they de-list you. In fact, this almost happened to ComicMix. If you’re de-listed by Google, you are screwed. You are left alone in outer space, where nobody can hear you scream.

There’s a good graphic novel in that. But I doubt Apple and Google and their fellow travelers would allow you to use their tubes and wires to sell it.

“Meet your new boss,” Pete Townshend famously wrote. “Same as your old boss.”

And I won’t get fooled again.

Box Office Democracy: “Transformers: Age of Extinction”

Transformers: Age of Extinction is 165 minutes long.  This should really be the entire review.  Either you want to watch nearly three hours of Michael Bay throwing robots at the screen or you don’t.  If you’ve seen any of his movies you’ve basically seen this one, there isn’t anything new just the older stuff louder, brighter and longer.  Apparently this is something that has a lot of pent up demand.  People can’t get enough of this.  Isn’t that depressing?

I admit there’s something intrinsically seductive about his visual style.  Everything is so slick and the camera moves are so majestic that it’s very easy to just settle in and let your eyes bliss out a little bit.  This is broken up a bit when the giant robots have to fight because event through four movies Bay hasn’t quite figured out a good visual shorthand for keeping the robots separate so the big fights, when not in slow motion, have a tendency to just look like a bunch of rolling metal until things shakeout and you can determine who won.  This is made dramatically more difficult by a new kind of Transformer introduced in this movie that transforms by turning into many tiny cubes and then floating in to a new form.  This just fills the screen with the equivalent of giant dust.  Bay is definitely capable of using the visual language of film and communicating a kind of poetry with it I just wish the poems weren’t profanity-laced limericks.

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Emily S. Whitten: Neil Gaiman’s Recipe for An Amazing Evening

Truth Is A Cave in the Black MountainsThis recipe was originally concocted in August 2010 for the Sydney Opera House’s “Graphic” Festival. On June 27 it was recreated at Carnegie Hall, to the great enjoyment of yours truly. It is a rare and delightful treat, which is only due to be served three more times at present. This connoisseur of unusual cuisine highly recommends that you go and experience the moveable feast in London or in Edinburgh if at all possible. And if not possible, well then, at the very least I can share with you what made this epicurean oddity so enjoyable.

The Truth Is A Cave in the Black Mountains, Original Recipe

Ingredients:

Act One:

  • Begin with decadent caramel layer concocted of Doctor Who theme and several excellent original songs performed by FourPlay String Quartet
  • Follow with heady gingerbread slice of Gaiman reading his new, slightly creepy, illustrated version of Hansel & Gretel (out this October!)
  • Bake in thin layer of intermission made of chocolate marshmallow cookies (courtesy of Carnegie Hall’s Citi Cafe)

Act Two:

  • Delicately blend haunting strains of string quartet, complex concoction of elements in Gaiman’s illustrated Scottish folk novelette as it is read aloud, and edgy art of Campbell being projected above the stage at Carnegie Hall into rich textured layer of eerie action, regret, violence, love, and vengeance.

Encore:

  • Top with delightfully dark chocolate mousse and evilly humorous fluffy whipped cream of Psycho” to the strains of the quartet’s strings in order to “leave the crowd in a cheerful mood,” before exiting to a standing ovation.

It truly was a unique and delicious evening. This food (and art) critic gives it five stars.

 

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