My mother is almost 60 years old. She has been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for almost 40 years. I don’t smoke. In fact I think it’s a stupid habit and I’m glad she told me not to do it. She told me not to smoke. I listened. I’ll get back to that…
The work of two of America’s most significant cartoonists, Bill Mauldin and Jules Feiffer, will be the subject of a major exhibit at Chicago’s Jean Albano Gallery. Feiffer is the former weekly editorial cartoonist for the Village Voice and Universal Press Syndicate. One-time writer of Will Eisner’s Spirit (and Eisner’s long-time assistant), Feiffer’s cartoons appeared…
As author of For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films (as featured in People magazine and the National Enquirer [when the National Enquirer was the National Enquirer]) and the original head writer for Fangoria magazine, don’t get me wrong: I love horror films. Of course what I’m dealing with in this installment are…
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the holidays are getting earlier every year. As an ex-mall Santa, I know that I had to report earlier and earlier every season, to the point I was in my big red throne practically the day after Halloween. And speaking of Halloween, Rob Zombie’s needless remake of John Carpenter’s movie…
Congratulations to Ted Rall on his election as incoming President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists! Rall, shown here officiating at the recent wedding of fellow cartoonists Mikhaela Reid and Makesha Wood, states on his blog that "Never, in the history of the form, has the quality of political cartoons has been as high…
I don’t remember a lot about the first time I ever did a cable TV show. It must have been in the 1980s because I know I was working for Marvel, and it was probably on one of those public access channels which still exist but never seem to have anything on them. The evening’s…
“Sht runs dwnhill.” Those words of wisdom/warning were first spoken to me back in the mid-1980s, at lunch on the first day I started consulting for CBS-TV in California. The statement came back to me several times while watching this week’s offerings (as well as many, many times over the decades as I watched businesses…
“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” That deathbed sentiment, most often attributed to either actor Edmund Kean or actor/director Sir Donald Wolfit, was much on my mind as I enjoyed this week’s offerings. Actual dying, as well as the comic derivative (in which a stand-up delivers his routine to an unamused audience), has long been…
I love action movies. So does Korean film director Ryoo Seung-wan, which is made abundantly clear in the ample extras for the Dragon Dynasty two-disc Ultimate Edition release of The City of Violence. Originally I wasn’t going to review another Dragon Dynasty DVD so soon after my praise of their Hard Boiled and Crime Story…
Way back in the late 1980s, a few film producers thought it was interesting that “comedians,” like the late Andy Kaufman, amused themselves rather than entertained their audiences. After all, if people would pay actual money to be goaded and/or irritated, that might create a much simpler genre of filmmaking. This sentiment set the stage…
Bully makes a speech buried in a comment thread on decompression in comics that I’ve been saying for years, and deserves much wider play, so I’m running part of it here (but read the whole thing): "Read the books on their own, month by month, paying $2.25 (or whatever they are now), and it’s clear:…
Twenty-five years ago, the late, great Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, tried to beat Lord of the Rings to the cinematic punch by co-writing and co-directing a similar and derivative, yet pioneering and daring, “adult” fantasy. Four years after that, approximately twenty-one years ago, he tried to combine Star Wars, Alice in Wonderland, The…
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