I finally watched most of the third X-Men movie on HBO last night, and found I didn’t really miss the absence of Patrick Stewart for half the film.  A major reason for that, of course, was another wonderful performance by Stewart’s fellow Shakespearean thesp, Sir Ian McKellan.

Sir Ian, not to be outdone by news of Stewart appearing in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet alongside Dr. Who‘s David Tennant, has been headlining  ex-RSC director (and old Cambridge mate) Sir Trevor Nunn’s production of King Lear, which plays this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  Alas, notes the NY Times preview, all performances are sold out.  The Dr. Who connection here is that Sylvester McCoy (Doctor #7) appears in the role of Lear’s Fool.

The production, which began in Stratford upon Avon in repertory with Chekhov’s The Seagull (that’s Anton Chekhov, not Pavel) and has been touring the world, will wind up in London’s West End in November.

More information and photos can be found on Sir Ian’s website.

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 box-office attraction, Crane was visiting his syndicate’s client-papers, one after another, to help promote this touch of newfound momentum for Sawyer as a circulation-builder.

Now, George and I were admirers of Crane’s storytelling artistry from ’way back, and we were as interested in an earlier example called Wash Tubbs. Crane had shepherded Tubbs during the 1920s from a gag-a-day feature to a full-fledged high-adventure vehicle of sustained force, then entrusted it in 1943 to his boyhood pal and studio assistant, Leslie Turner, when the opportunity came to develop Buz Sawyer.

For a good many readers, the greater attraction of Wash Tubbs lay not so much in its title character – a boyish adventurer with an affinity for trouble – as in Washington Tubbs’ cohort, a man of action known as Captain Easy. Easy seemed to George Turner and me an essence of resourceful heroism, and we had wondered: Who might have been the life-model for the rough-and-ready Southerner? (Wash Tubbs’ origins seemed an easier call – in part, a wish-fulfillment projection of Crane himself.)

So while visiting with Crane, we asked about Easy. One of us set forth the theory that Easy was based upon either Richard Dix or Jack Holt, square-jawed, hawk-nosed figures who were noted for their tough-guy movies at the time Easy had appeared. Crane smiled and changed the subject.

George and I were hardly alone in the wondering. Historian Ron Goulart also had asked; Crane had replied simply that his brother-in-law had suggested that Washington Tubbs needed a strong sidekick, and that he, Roy Crane, had concocted Easy in response to the idea. Goulart had said that Easy seemed reminiscent of Tom Mix, the cowboy star, but Crane had dismissed the idea by saying that he had used his brother-in-law as a model.

But according to separately collected but unanimous opinions from school-days friends of Crane, Mr. William Lee, a.k.a. Captain Easy, was modeled after a college pal. Journalist-turned-novelist Carlton Stowers put us on the track after he had visited with another friend from Crane’s youth.

(more…)

Chance in Hell is Gilbert Hernandez’s second stand-alone graphic novel, after Sloth. Like Sloth, it’s unconnected to his Love & Rockets work, but – unlike Sloth – it’s deeply metaphorical and difficult to follow. It’s set among unnamed people, living in unnamed places in an unspecified time, worrying about criminals with monikers but not names and slaughtering each other at whim. I’m afraid it’s all supposed to be an allegory for something, most likely the Iraq war, but I couldn’t quite bring that into focus.

The story takes place in three time periods in the life of one woman, but they’re not separated or otherwise marked as chapters; there are no captions at all. Our protagonist is called “the Empress,” and she’s the only person with a name – besides “the Babykiller,” whom is talked about but never shown – out of dozens in this graphic novel.

We meet the Empress as a young girl, living among people prone to extreme violence in a Mad Max-ian trash heap. Eight or ten unnamed male characters, mostly teenagers, fight over her, while two technicians try to maintain a fence around a large, dangerous piece of unspecified machinery. Empress is perhaps four or five, playing with a doll and not talking much. At the end of this scene, after much bloodshed, a man in a suit takes Empress away, with a promise to become her new “daddy.”

(more…)