Tagged: Midnight Marquee Press

The Posthumous Persistence of George E. Turner, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • December 16, 2007

George E. Turner is a familiar name among serious movie buffs – a pivotal figure in the realm of film scholarship, as influential these many years after his death as he was during a lengthy prime of productivity. George’s authorship alone of a book called The Making of King Kong (and known in its newer editions as Spawn of Skull Island) would be sufficient to cinch that credential.

But add to that George’s hitch during the 1980s and ’90s as editor of The American Cinematographer magazine and resident historian of the American Society of Cinematographers, and you come up with a pop-cultural impact of formidable staying power, beyond the reach of trendy distractions.

Where George preferred to limit his interests to the prehistory of filmmaking and the first couple of generations of Old Hollywood, he nonetheless kept a hand in current developments: His last job in a seven-year span of purported retirement was that of storyboard artist and second-unit director on the hit network teleseries Friends. And as a fan, he was as fluent in the continuing story-lines of The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as he was in the history of RKO-Radio Pictures or the careers of Boris Karloff, Claude Rains, Tod Browning and Val Lewton.

The Friends storyboarder hitch is significant: Even those who are most familiar with George Turner’s film scholarship – for example, a chronic-to-acute genre-history series that he and I launched in 1979 with a book called Forgotten Horrors – scarcely know of his parallel career as a commercial artist and gallery painter, a comics artist and newspaper illustrator, and overall an accomplished talent in practically any medium one might care to mention. His higher degrees, after all, were in commercial illustration (from the American Academy of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago), and before he re-invented his career in Hollywood during 1978-80 he had spent some 27 years as the editorial art director of a daily newspaper in Northwest Texas. (more…)

Tippy Tacker’s Yuletide Travails, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • December 9, 2007

tippy-tacker-1997-01-cover-7913124December of 1938 saw the arrival of an ad hoc comic strip called Tippy Tacker’s Christmas Adventure, signed by one Robert Pilgrim and distributed to the daily-newspaper trade by the Bell Syndicate.

The feature appears to have run its month-long course with little fanfare and only desultory, though complete, documentation of its passage. The microfilm archive in which I had found Tippy Tacker shows no advance promotion, no front-page come-ons, and no particularly prominent placement. The daily installments appear away from the formally designated Comics Page, plunked down at random amongst the general-news and advertising columns. Just a business-as-usual, matter-of-fact deployment, with no attempts to steer the reader toward a Yuletide-special attraction.

The piece came to light around 1990. I was rummaging through the files of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, my home-base newspaper for a long stretch, in aimless pursuit of who-knows-what. The Depression-era back issues had yielded considerable raw material for my contributions to the original Prowler comic-book series, along with motion-picture advertisements relevant to my Forgotten Horrors series of movie-history books. Robert Pilgrim’s Tippy Tacker cropped up during one such eyestrain marathon at the microfilm station.

Sometimes, obscurity alone is cause for a resurrection, even though many outpourings of the Popular Culture (“history in caricature,” as the novelist and cultural historian James Sallis puts it) will lapse quite deservedly into obscurity. But I happen to have built a career around the defeat of that Old Devil Obscurity — starting with the Forgotten Horrors books and progressing, or digressing, from there — and Tippy Tacker’s Christmas Adventure seemed to fit that pattern.. (more…)

My Cousin Vinnie vs. the Vampires, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • December 2, 2007

last-man-on-earth-1s-5613104Right about now, my cousin Vincent Price would be grumbling about a new film called I Am Legend (opening Dec. 14) – reminding anyone within earshot that he had been the first to star in a movie based upon that apocalyptic story and muttering, “You’d think we hadn’t done it right, the first time.”

Price (1911-1993) had said as much about another movie during our last get-together, in 1986 during a college-campus lecture-tour visit to Fort Worth, Texas. David Cronenberg’s Oscar-bait remake of The Fly was about to open, and Price – who had starred in the original Fly of 1958 – was exercising his prerogative, as a grey eminence of Hollywood’s horror-film scene, to cop an indignant stance: “Hmph! You’d think we hadn’t done it right, the first time.” Like I said…

Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend, starring Will Smith in a role corresponding to that which Price had handled, is the third filming of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel about the collapse of civilization under an epidemic of vampirism. Price’s version, issued in 1964 with little fanfare, bears the title The Last Man on Earth. Price might have grumped about a 1971 remake called The Omega Man – if not for the starring presence of his friend Charlton Heston in that one.

In a benevolent side-effect, the heavy promotion of I Am Legend has prompted a classy widescreen-DVD release of The Last Man on Earth – issued last week via a video-label holding-company ghost traveling under the worthy old corporate name of MGM.

Vincent Price: The name conjures images as varied as the roles he tackled (romantic, comical, heroic, tragic) before typecasting kicked in to distinguish him as the baddest of bogeymen. Price was as prominent a champion of gracious living – gourmet chef, cultural scholar, published author, and discerning collector of art – as he was a reliable movie menace.. (more…)

Cowpuncher cartoonist J.R. Williams, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • October 14, 2007

williams-jr-out-our-way-01-3997422Great 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 gifted of the Western cartoonists. Russell’s illustrated correspondence, as preserved at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, helps to shore up this belief. But Russell’s leanings toward the presumably finer arts prevented him from pursuing cartooning as a career.

A near-contemporary of Russell’s, James R. Williams (1888-1957), took a different tack, becoming a working cartoonist who based a long-running daily newspaper feature upon his younger days as a ranchhand. (more…)

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Shock! Theatre, 50 years later

  • News
  • October 7, 2007

camfield-as-gorgon-3959368The 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 a similarly intense cultural phenomenon known as Shock! Theater.

The likening of Shock! to the Beatles’ impact, and to rock music as a class, will become more evident, so bear with me.

Depending upon one’s hometown locale, some folks might remember Shock! Theater under some other proxy local-teevee title. My immediate North Texas readership recollects the syndicated-television breakthrough of Shock! Theater under the localized name of Nightmare. That Fort Worth version premiered in September of 1957 over a scrappy and innovative independent channel – a distinctive presentation of a nationwide syndie-teevee blitz.

In reviving a wealth of Depression-into-WWII movie chillers from Universal Pictures Corp., Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems syndicate left the style of presentation up to the individual stations. A channel typically would assign a local-market announcer to pose as a creepy personality (such as John “the Cool Ghoul” Zacherle, in Philadelphia and New York) who would introduce the various Frankensteins, Draculas and so forth and then intrude at intervals to present blackout gags.

(more…)

MICHAEL H. PRICE: The folklore-into-fiction cycle persists

  • News
  • September 30, 2007

irish-rogues-earnie-7442174Continued 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 long enough for the verses to open the floodgates of memory, then burst out laughing: “Why, I learned that song back when I was just a boy, and it was old even then! Here: Let me show you how it really goes!”

I suspect that that communal dream-stream, rippling with the waves and the undertow of ancient Ideas That Wouldn’t, and Will Not, Stay Dead (like the Man Who Wouldn’t Stay Dead of my Grandmother Lillian’s cycle of folk-tales) is the truer basis of the fabled Unbroken Circle of Southern non-sectarian gospel-singing tradition. Our shared notions and perceptions bind our generations, one to another – more so, even, than blood kinship – if only we will bother to heed the interests in common and build upon them. The past is ever-present.

Greg Jackson and I, both natives of the Texas Panhandle with immigrant and native-tribal ancestral ties to Kansas and Oklahoma and points eastward, have enjoyed the good fortune to be involved since around 1980 with a music-making and storytelling ensemble called the Salt Lick Foundation. East Texan by origin but long based in Dallas and Fort Worth, Salt Lick is ostensibly a bluegrass band that nonetheless reserves the right to indulge in blues and honky-tonk forms, with the occasional forays into rock ’n’ roll, Latinate and Cajun idioms, and free-form jazz.

An immersion in folklore is a foregone conclusion with Salt Lick – from fiddler Earnie Taft’s (above) devotion to Irish traditionalism, to bassist Ron Green’s eerie ability to channel the presence of some 19th-century circuit-riding revivalist preacher. We deepened the connections in a stroke when we teamed in 1984 with the Wimberley-based novelist and playwright Elithe Hamilton Kirkland (1907–1992) to develop a musical stage revue called Precious Memories.

(more…)

MICHAEL H. PRICE: What’s A Fishhead?

  • News
  • September 23, 2007

jpg-cobb-irvin-s-7955816jpg-fishhead-title-page-3342739Continued 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 can be seen as an actor in such Rogers-starring films as Judge Priest (1934; deriving from Cobb’s folksier tales) and Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), both directed by John Ford. It was for other works entirely that Robert Bloch remembered Cobb.

“Have you ever read Irvin Cobb’s ‘Fishhead’?” Bloch asked me around 1979-1980. “Well, if it was good enough for Howard Lovecraft to single out as a nightmare-on-paper [in the 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Fiction], then I was ready and willing to tear into it. Which I did. Changed my entire direction, that one story did.”

I can relate, all right. In 1995, independent publisher Lawrence Adam Shell and I set about to adapt as a graphic novel Cobb’s 1911 tale of righteous vengeance, “Fishhead,” in which a swamp-dwelling hermit of grotesque aspect runs afoul of malicious neighbors. If Irvin Cobb had drawn upon regional folklore to lend his title character a gift of supernatural communion with the wildlife, then our crew reckoned we must treat Cobb’s story itself as folklore – subject to sympathetic re-interpretation and elaboration as a condition of respect.

And otherwise, why adapt at all? Cobb would have done a greater service to scholarship than to popular literature if he had contented himself merely with compiling the various old-time rumors about reclusive souls presumed to possess spiritual bonds with the wastelands. The audacious job that Cobb called “Fishhead” backfired at first, accumulating rejections from one magazine after another on account of its unabashed gruesomeness and its sharp contrast with his gathering reputation as a sure-fire humorist. One editor, Bob Davis, of an adventurous magazine called The Cavalier, wrote to Cobb in 1911: “It is inconceivable how one so saturated with the humors of life can present so appalling a picture.”

But after Davis had relented and published the yarn in 1913, “Fishhead” proved a watershed, helping to trigger the so-called “bizarre pulp” explosion that would gerrymander the boundaries of mass-market fiction during the two-and-a-half decades to follow. By mid-century, when Cobb’s lighthearted and bucolic tales had become by-and-large forgotten, “Fishhead” was still reappearing as a magazine-and-anthology favorite.

(more…)

MICHAEL H. PRICE: The folklore-into-fiction connection

  • News
  • September 16, 2007

bloch-copy-3318422Recycling-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 early-day Americana, that is – just fine and dandy.

I am speaking of folklore – the oral-tradition narrative medium that encloses and defines any and all cultures and stands poised as a chronic muse (often ill-heeded or, if heeded, ill-acknowledged) for anyone who attempts to relate a tale for popular consumption. This is a self-evident truth so obvious as to go overlooked.

Yes, and the barrier between folklore and commercial fiction is as slender as the upper E-string on a guitar, and just as sensitive. Pluck that string and watch it vibrate, and the blurred image suggests a vivid metaphor. The inspiration, at any rate, is as close within reach as air and water, and often less subject to pollution.

“So! Where do you-all get your ideas, anyhow?” The question, vaguely indignant, crops up every time a published author goes out communing with the readership. Stephen King has long since perfected a suitably snarky reply: “I get mine from an idea-subscription service in Utica.”

King is joking, of course, and even the most cursory reading of the humongous body of work that he represents will find King tapped into a deep lode of rustic folklore. Witness, for example, The Shining, a 1977 novel-become-movie in which a key supporting character takes prompt notice of a precocious child’s thought-projecting abilities: “My grandmother and I could hold conversations … without ever opening our mouths. She called it ‘shining.’”

I grew up in close quarters with two grandmothers like that – not in Stephen King’s sense of “shining,” as such, although with each I felt a communicative bond that ran deeper than articulated speech. Each, that is, seemed to sense what might be burdening my thoughts at any given moment, whether or not I might care to put any such thoughts into words. And each grandmother, too, was a prolific and spontaneous storyteller, dispensing colorful family-history tales, fables in the Aesopic tradition, and hair-raising horrors divided more-or-less equally between waking-life ordeals and dreamlike supernatural hauntings. With such living-history resources at hand, who needed Little Golden Books?

My maternal-side grandmother, Lillian Beatrice Ralston Wilson Lomen (1895–1982), characterized her ghostlier yarns as “haint stories” – haint being a back-country variant of haunt. She knew by heart James Whitcomb Riley’s famous moral-lesson poem of 1885, “Little Orphant Annie, (sic)” with its recurring admonition that “the Gobble: ’Uns’ll git you ef [if] you don’t watch out!” And she could concoct – or recollect, or fabricate from combined experience and imagination – stories and verses every bit as horrific, and as absurd and uproarious.

(more…)

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Backwater Texana and a music-biznis digression

  • News
  • August 26, 2007

price-brown-100-5711826The 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 for a funnybook-soundtrack recording that accompanies a chapter of the Prowler series, first as an Eva-Tone Soundsheet insert and eventually as a digital file.

Greg and I have a rambunctious Texas Plains upbringing in common, too – our hometown areas sit within half-an-hour’s drive from one another, and we attended West Texas Suitcase University during the late 1960s and had many of the same musical accompanists – although we never met until after both of us had resettled in North Central Texas. A steady influence overall has been the work of the Oklahoma-to-Texas balladeer Woody Guthrie, whose rough-hewn autobiography of the 1940s, Bound for Glory, once inspired Greg and me to begin thinking about a composite memoir. Guthrie’s equally rough-hewn cartoons had suggested that a comic-book composite memoir might suit the Jackson-Price agenda just fine: Call it Rebound for Glory.

A worthy thought, but the music-making imperative has taken prior claim to such an extent that what stories Greg and I have managed to tell together have all turned out to be songs. Postmodern folkie-scare material, for the most part, but with nods all along to a shared family-band tradition. Our first album of Texas Panhandle ballads – ballards, as Greg calls ’em – arrived in 2006 under the title Mortal Coils, with as emphatic a nod to Aldous Huxley and Mr. Shakespeare as to Woody Guthrie.

The origins of some such material predate Greg’s and my efforts by a good many years, including quite a bit of resurrected ancestral material from the 1930s – 1950s. We’ll be taking the Mortal Coils songbook out for an in-person jaunt on September 5, 2007, at Granbury, Texas. The plan is to vary the program to include some recitations of neo-Texana by my longtime newspaper publisher, Rich Connor, with whom I work at The Business Press of Fort Worth, in Texas, and the daily Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (not far, incidentally, from Tim Truman’s turf). The spoken word and the gargled lyric have quite a bit in common, in this instance.

Did I say “predate” – ?? Back in 1934, the silent symphony of a Southwestern dawn inspired two music-making brothers to begin a long-in-the-making song called “Mornin’ on the Desert.” One of the authors, Manny Jackson, eventually became the father of Greg Jackson, a like-minded soul who eventually would retool the verses into a coffeehouse ballad. (more…)

MICHAEL H. PRICE: The canine Frankenstein from 1934

  • News
  • August 19, 2007

price-brown-100-7438729The 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 alchemist Paraceleus (1494 –1541) in describing the imaginative zeal necessary to bring (seemingly) to life the impossible creatures of cinema.

Paraceleus, of course, believed that the power of imagination also was necessary to the development of real-world scientific breakthroughs. His speculations about the creation of life in a laboratory setting prefigured nothing so much as that most influential novel of science fiction, Mary W. Shelley’s 19th-century morality play Frankenstein, or a Modern Prometheus. (Prometheus, of course, had beaten both Ms. Shelley and Paraceleus to the punch, if only in the realm of ancient mythology.)

History and science have long since validated Frankenstein as a plausible argument. Real science absorbs the most extravagant science-fictional influences, wonders, “Why not?” – and then proceeds to maneuver fiction into plausible fact. Hence the experimentation that has long since led to the transplanting of limbs and organs in workable, life-saving terms, if not to the creation of Life Its Ownself. The relationship will continue apace as long as Big Science holds humankind in a thrall of mingled hope and unease.

life-returns-1975875One of the odder collisions between science-fantasy and credentialed research took place during the spring of 1934, in a University of California research laboratory at Berkeley. Here, Dr. Robert E. Cornish announced that his team had restored life to a dog, Lazarus by name, that had been put to death by clinical means. Cornish bolstered his claim – a purported breakthrough that seems to have led no further – with motion-picture footage. The resulting publicity attracted such attention that the college’s administration booted Cornish off the campus. A June-of-1934 report in Time magazine describes a saddening follow-through:

With undying hope in his voice, hollow-eyed young Dr. Robert Cornish last week repeated, over and over, the name of the dog he had killed almost two months ago with ether and nitrogen, revived with chemical and mechanical resuscitants … Lazarus gave no sign that he heard.

But the bony white mongrel was no longer crawling on his mat. He was walking, slowly, with stiff, dragging hind legs and vacant eyes. He ate regularly but without enthusiasm. Dr. Cornish realized that part of the dog’s brain was still dead, might remain so for months or years of apathetic existence.

Last week, too, Lazarus was no longer in the shabby little laboratory on the University of California campus where he had tasted four minutes of death. He was in the Cornish home in Berkeley, where Dr. Cornish had taken him when the university provost asked [Cornish] to vacate…

Cornish carried on, via a follow-through described in a credulous 1935 report from Modern Mechanix & Inventions magazine: (more…)

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks