Tagged: music

Embracing Continuity in Comics… and Life

  • News
  • June 25, 2008

It’s no secret that continuity is equal parts bane and boon to comics, with no shortage of passionate arguments extolling its virtue and, in some cases, its status as the greatest threat to storytelling in the history of the printed word. Recently, comics blogger Hudson Phillips posted his own thoughts about the role of continuity in comics, including some thoughts on why you should think about your own life — and all its embarassing moments — the same way you think about continuity in comics.

According to Phillips:

 

Don’t be ashamed or where you came from. Embrace it. Then move on.

 

I think this is a great philosophy in life as well. There are some definite continuity issues in my own life. I’d love to erase parts of my past that I’m embarrassed or ashamed of… from getting into a bad relationship, ultimately ending in divorce – to letting one of the true loves of my life, music, slip through my hands – to throwing up at assembly in 7th grade or farting in algebra class in 8th.

I’d love to just get rid of my 30 years of continuity and start over. But just like in comic books… I can’t. What’s done is done. It’s out there, written in stone. There’s no changing it.

So, what choice do you have?

Head over to hudsonwrites.com for the full essay.

 

(via comicsreporter)

 

Cool Like That, by Michael Davis

 

What is cool?

As comic book fans we are pretty much in the forefront of what cool is. The history of comics is an encyclopedia of coolness. If it were not for rock’n’roll, comics would be the absolute standard of coolness. Take a look all the stuff that comics are responsible for in popular culture.

We each have our own gauge of what cool is. Me? I’m all over the place with what or who I think is cool. I think George Clooney is cool and I have little respect for “movie stars,” as any regular reader of this column knows. I think that Gary Shandling is cool and one of the funniest men on the planet. I think that DC comics are cool even if I have had issues with them and they have with me. I think American Idol is cool mostly ,because so many so-called “hip” people think it’s lame. I think HGTV is cool. I think that Stan Lee is cool because he has earned that title. I think that Prince and Patrick Swayze are cool. To me Alan Greenspan is cool and so is Brian Williams.

The shows Family Guy and American Dad are cool but so is every one of those Law and Order shows. Mike Richardson and Dark Horse comics are cool. The staff at Comic Con International and the staff at The Westin Horton Plaza Hotel (especially Jean) are cool. I think the Amish are cool. I know that ComicMix is cool.

 
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NYCC Photo Gallery: Costumes, Costumes and More Costumes…

  • News
  • April 20, 2008

After a mediocre Friday, the costumed crowd made their presence known Saturday at New York Comic Con. All of the standards were there, including Supermen, Slave Leias and Stormtroopers, but the convention soup was spiced up a bit by the addition of a few great, original takes on the standards, like the "Mr. Freeze" seen in the gallery below.

A special bit of comic cred goes out to "Superwoman" (also pictured in the gallery below) from Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman. It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t get an image of one of our favorite "costumed" guests — the guy wandering around the show with a music player ambushing attendees and rickrolling them with "Never Gonna Give You Up." Brilliant.

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The Way the Music Died, by Elayne Riggs

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  • April 9, 2008

The older I get, the more there is to keep track of. I realized this some time ago; part of being a grown-up, particularly if you’re on your own, is making hard choices. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I suddenly had to consider expenditures like rent, food, cat litter… and something had to give.

It wasn’t going to be my zine, INSIDE JOKE was my baby and my outlet and my connection to like-minded folk, and I knew that’d take up the majority of my disposable income. (See, in those days you couldn’t self-publish for free like you can do today with blogging and so forth, so those of us who tended to be responsible about our hobbies knew enough to apportion x-amount of dollars that we knew we’d never see again due to printing and postage costs, even if we charged subscribers the requisite buck or two for each issue.) And I couldn’t give up my books, I needed something to do on the subways. I just can’t stare into space, even wearing a Walkman. So music was what went by the wayside. Not kicking and screaming, just sort of fading away.

I’d chosen my hobbies. And reading and writing are activities for which I need silence, which is why to this day it irks me when religious wackos and wandering troubadors come traipsing through the subway car in which I happen to be sitting. (Why do I always get the ones with the bongos? And honestly, religious wackos with bongos are just not going to convert a lot of people, ba dum bum.) Music seemed too important to be treated as background; it demanded my aural attention in the same way reading demands attention from my eyes and imagination. And I just couldn’t spare the awareness any more. (more…)

Trailer For ‘Incredible Hulk’ Videogame Debuts

  • News
  • March 30, 2008

Sega has released the first trailer for the videogame based on the upcoming Incredible Hulk film. The footage gives us a good indication of what we can expect.

The Hulk jumping great distances? Check. Hulk wrecking New York City? Check. The army and robots, Hulk’s favorite fodder, getting smashed? Check and check.

Also the "Coming Soon" message on the game’s official website has been replaced with all-new info, images and what may be the music from the movie. The Incredible Hulk game will be released in June 2008 for the Nintendo DS, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360 and Windows PCs.

 

“Prowling” – Juggling the Blues with the Comics, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • March 30, 2008

axe-man-8645473

“Ya gotta be a juggler to woik in dis racket,” a senior-staff powerhouse named Frosty Sloane informed me after I had landed my first job in a competitive marketplace, back around 1965.

“I thought we were selling shoes,” I answered him. Which of course we were. I had a fleeting mental picture of some Ed Sullivan Show juggling act involving wingtip clodhoppers and stiletto heels. Took a while for Frosty’s metaphor to sink in – but once I had experienced my first stampede of customers and watched Sloane accommodate ten or fifteen prospective buyers while I attempted to deal with one or two of ’em, I caught his drift, all right.

Frosty Sloane was so effective at the craft, with consistently high sales tallies to show for it, that he could afford to be overconfident. He would juggle products while juggling customers: If a shopper should ask to see one style of shoe, Sloane would bring out half-a-dozen selections and wind up selling two or three of those. And he was such a wisenheimer that I wondered how he could get away with some of his sales-floor stunts.

“Y’see, half o’ th’ customers who come in here durin’ a slower stretch – they don’t even know they’re customers, yet,” Frosty counseled me, as if dispensing the Wisdom of the Ages. “They’re jus’ sleepwalkin’, browsin’ away like as if they knew what they were doin’. An’ ya gotta figger out how t’ get their attention.” No sooner had he spoken, than a woman wandered into the department, browsin’ away – just like the man said.

“Watch dis,” Frosty said, “an’ I’ll show ya what I mean by ‘sleepwalkin.’” He strolled toward the browser, nodded in her direction, and then spoke: “Tickle your ass with a feather, ma’am?” He paced the question just rapidly enough to blur its words.

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In My Ears and In My Eyes (Part 2), by Elayne Riggs

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  • March 26, 2008

whirledpeace-8842297So as I was saying last week, by the time I hit college I went full-force into my first round of Beatlemania. I must have frequented my share of Beatlefests (as noted in the comments to last week’s column, there’s one coming up in NJ this weekend), but really only remember going to one because that’s where I got Harry Nilsson’s autograph, on the cover of his album A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night (for a reason I no longer remember, I have Jimmy Webb’s autograph on the back). From what I hear, they’re still going on. But the Beatles started influencing pretty much everything else in my life.

I named my fictitious corporation Pen-Elayne (wordplay on "Penny Lane" and "the pen of Elayne") Enterprises, which pun I borrowed again for my weekly comics reviews Pen-Elayne for Your Thoughts and my current blog Pen-Elayne on the Web. Penny Lane really became my theme song; I’d always envisaged something I can only describe as God’s Hidden Camera following my every move, so the line "And though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway" really resonated. Particularly now with Google’s Street View!

Having already gone through two years of Shakespeare in high school, I was primed to expand my Anglophilia, and the Beatles were a perfect outlet for my fascination of all things English. That interest has since culminated in marriage to an actual Englishman who, although four years my junior, is probably more knowledgeable about Beatles trivia than I’ll ever be, has hundreds of bootleg songs, keeps up on all the news items of what’s happening with their music, and generally makes my head spin. Oh, and even though Robin is a southern country boy, we like to goof around with pretty bad imitations of Liverpool accents (okay, his is better than mine, as you’d expect). Through Rob I also met artist Alan Davis and my lettering goddess Pat Prentice, who both share a birthday with Sir Paul. I seem to remember Alan introducing me to Pat by joking that she "sounds like Ringo," since she’s also from Mersey-way. (She doesn’t, although I find a female Liverpool accent as cute as a male one.)

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In My Ears and In My Eyes (Part 1), by Elayne Riggs

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  • March 19, 2008

Last week we were casting about, as usual, for something interesting to watch in the 100-200 channel range of our cable system. The local PBS stations were hip-deep in pledge drives, which meant 20-minute breaks between segments of shows that would otherwise have been enjoyable but which we’d mostly seen anyway by this point. (Did anyone else think it just a tad disconcerting that WLIW, the Long Island-based PBS station, could afford to send its two high muckety-mucks out to broadcast from Innsbruck during the pledge breaks for Visions of Austria, but made sure to keep reminding us that Viewers Like You made all that possible? Oh great, I should give to their station to sponsor their executives’ vacations?)

The few writers’ strike-delayed shows that we usually watch on the networks haven’t begun running new episodes, and in their place were the same tired crop of cringeworthy reality shows. Keith Olbermann and MSNBC are turning into FOX-lite (but that’s another column). And how many times can I watch the Ghana episode of Tony Bourdain’s No Reservations? (Not including subconscious reruns during REM sleep, approximately ten, but not consecutively; give me a break, Travel Channel!)

So it was that we found our way up the dial to a delightful programme all about amber hosted by "Dickie-Love’s" brother David Attenborough — and now little impressionable ol’ me suddenly wants some new amber earrings — which we then followed up with a Biography Channel episode on The Beatles’ Wives, which itself preceded two recent Paul McCartney concerts, one from 2005 and the other from 2007, on that same channel, both horribly chopped from the originals. And suddenly there I was, fascinated all over again. (more…)

Blues Poetry: Rough-And-Raw, by Michael H. Price

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  • March 16, 2008

<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK1″>race-wes-cd-cover-9303079Fort Worth, Texas’ Wesley Race is a businessman in much the same way that the Chicago blues singer Little Walter Jacobs once proclaimed himself a businessman: “I’m a business<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK2″> man,” Jacobs growls on a 1964 recording called (what else?) “I’m a Business Man,” allowing songwriter Willie Dixon’s lyric to leave the nature of the business open to suggestion but permitting no doubt of a businesslike attitude.

<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK1″>Walter Jacobs had died, a casualty of a busy sideline in street-fighting, a year before Wes Race’s arrival in 1969 on Chicago’s blues-club scene in search of raw emotive authenticity. Jacobs, among such others as the singer-guitarists Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, had embodied the urbanized and electrified Deep Blues style that had drawn Race to Chicago – perhaps less for the raucous nightlife, than for the poetic ferocity that Race had long perceived in the blues.

<span style=”mso-bookmark:

OLE_LINK1″>Race’s path, winding but decisive, has led to the release this month of a début CD-album of his original poetry, recited with real-time spontaneity against a blues-rooted musical backdrop. The recording, Cryptic Whalin’ (Cool Groove Records), is a production of the guitarist and engineer Jim Colegrove, with instrumental contributions from such additional mainstays of Fort Worth’s roots-music scene as saxophonists Johnny Reno and René Ozuna, guitarists Sumter Bruton and James Hinkle, drummers Steve Springer and Larry Reynolds, steel guitarist David McMillan and keyboard artists Jeff Gutcheon and Ruf Rufner.

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Foo Fighters Sue Marvel For Copyright Infringement

  • News
  • February 22, 2008

Today, Rolling Stone is reporting that the Foo Fighters are suing Marvel Entertainment, First Serve International, Toonz Animation in India and First Serve Toonz for copyright infringement. According to the article:

The band alleges that Marvel used “substantial excerpts” of their songs “Best of You” and “Free Me” as the music for the trailer of the new animated series Wolverine and the X-Men.

The trailer, which showed up online back at the beginning of February, has since been taken down from YouTube. However, as in most cases like this, that doesn’t really help much because you can still get a look at it over at Movieweb. Well, at least you could have up until a few minutes ago. But now, "at the request of the studio", it’s gone.

If you were able to watch the trailer, which I was able to do before it went bye-bye, its pretty obvious that the Foo Fighters songs were used — a lot. Seeing this kind of thing makes me wonder how the people responsible thought they could get away with something like this?

Don’t they realize that once something hits the Internet, this kind of thing can’t stay a secret? Someone is going to get a strongly-worded letter in his or her permanent file over this, just you wait and see.

 

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