And Now for Something Completely Honky-Tonk, by Michael H. Price
Some recent installments of this so-called Forgotten Horrors feature – the title suggests a resurrection of obscurities more so than it proclaims any particular shivers – have established the music-making imperative as essential to the standing of Robert Crumb as a Great American Cartoonist. Other such pieces have touched upon the kinship that I have perceived over the long haul amongst comics, movies, and music. This inclusive bias was cinched as early as the moment I noticed, as a grammar-school kid during the 1950s, that a honky-tonking musician neighbor named “Honest Jess” Williams was (unlike most other grown-ups in my orbit) a comic-book enthusiast.
The connection was reinforced around this same time, when I met Fats Domino backstage on a Texas engagement and learned that the great New Orleans pianist included in his traveling gear plenty of issues of Little Lulu, Archie, and Tales from the Crypt. Later on, as a junior high-schooler, I discovered that a stack of newsstand-fresh funnybooks always seemed to exert their thrall more effectively with a hefty stack of 45-r.p.m. phonograph records on the changer. (“Flash of Two Worlds” plus Charlie Blackwell’s Warners-label recording of “None of ’Em Glow like You,” augmented with a wad of Bazooka-brand bubblegum, add up to undiluted pleasure – well, the combination worked for me, anyhow.)
This latest unearthed obscurity has more to do with music – and a peculiar strain of indigenous Texas music, at that – than with any other influence. But the parallel tracks of American roots music, comics, and motion pictures tend to cross spontaneously. There is only one Show Business, and if not for the early revelation that such a fine Western swing guitarist as Jess Williams followed the comic books avidly (his favorites were Tomahawk and Blackhawk, the comics’ great “hawks” after Will Eisner’s Hawk of the Seas), I doubt that conclusion would have struck home with me. (more…)
It’s common knowledge that once a comics-related site appears on 
A heads-up, folks, that tonight at 10 PM Eastern, the TV series NUM3ERs will present its "Graphic episode," much of which takes place at a fictional comics convention featuring lots of work by very real creators, like 
On this day in 1995, Disney and Pixar released 
