TL; DR: Comics, Superheroes, Watchmen, and Authorship

Fine.  Let's talk about this.

This is going to be, I believe, my final word on the topic.  The topic of Before Watchmen.

I've raised my hand a few times over the last two or three years and tried to make various points about how I have felt that the current crop of 20-somethings approach comics fandom differently than how I came up as a reader and fan.  Most certainly, there's the internet and social media aspect that has become (I'd argue) more important than the comics themselves in many quarters.  And, of course, the level of fandom that seems to stem ultimately a whole lot more from being able to dress up as a character and wander around a Con for many of these "fans".  If I can be blunt, I can't shake the suspicion that they're not the same kind of fan that's sought out every appearance of a character.  And, given sales, I have to wonder if they're paying for comics at all.

There's also plenty of folks on Etsy making their own products featuring non-DC approved licensed characters, people making webcomics, etc...  In short, fan fiction is as much a part of the culture to the current target demo as the "legitimate" product.

In a way, that sort of sense of entitlement/ fan ownership could be seen as a mutant offshoot of the Big 2's insistence that the characters supersede the creators in importance.  If we aren't immediately associating Bill Finger with Batman, but some nebulous corporate entity that also owns TV, the news, the internet lines, AOL, Jerry Seinfeld, Bugs Bunny, and Six Flags...  it may be that Time Warner is simply big too see the contours.

Signal Watch Double Bill: Shock Corridor (1963) & The Naked Kiss (1964)

Holy hell, y'all.

I'm not familiar with the work of writer/ director/ producer Samuel Fuller, but he has one of those names you always hear.  And, I haven't had opportunity yet to visit the Paramount yet this summer for the summer series, nor had I ever been in the State Theater on Congress, side by side with the Paramount.  Wednesday night provided a great opportunity to knock some items off my list, and so I caught both Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964), two movies that earned their bonafides.

Of the two films, Shock Corridor may have dated more poorly, even if it still holds up very well from a narrative standpoint.  It follows a newspaper journalist who knows he can earn a Pulitzer by going undercover into an mental hospital to solve a murder the police have been unable to crack as the only three witnesses were hopelessly mentally ill.  He recruits his stripper girlfriend, played by the lovely Constance Towers, into posing as his sister who files charges of attempted sexual assault.  With training from a psychologist, Johnny Barrett sneaks in undetected.

And then learns that a mental hospital run under the common practices of mid-20th Century medicine was no picnic.

When they make my bio-pic, tell them this is exactly what I want the poster to look like, but with Jamie dancing in the corner.

D-Day Anniversary

Better writers than myself will have covered the D-Day Anniversary, but Wednesday was the 68th Anniversary of the Allies storming of Normandy, signalling the beginning of the end of the occupation of France and the end of the Third Reich.

We didn't want the day to pass with no mention of the event.

Ray Bradbury Merges with The Infinite

Like many of us English-speaking Westerners, one of the great moments of my youth was having a Ray Bradbury book put in my hand.  Oddly, it was Fahrenheit 451 and I was in fifth grade.  Most certainly I had an ambitious teacher, one who did not mind much if she shattered our cozy suburban world with a picture of dissolute marriage in an ossifying culture that was just our culture carrying on from our current trajectory.

It'd difficult to say how much of an impact the book had on me, and continues to have on me, as I've returned to it a half-dozen times, seen the movie a handful of times, and even consumed it in comic form (one of the few forms of print Bradbury would suggest would survive the end of books.  The end of ideas.*).

Just a year before Fahrenheit 451, my parents, knowing I had a thing for that red dot in the sky, took me to see a play of The Martian Chronicles, and the honesty of what it had to say about us shook my ten year old little self.  

Throw in Something Wicked This Way Comes and re-reading the Martian Chronicles two or three times and you've got the literature that left an indelible impression on a worldview.  It's completely fair to say that these books had a huge hand in shaping my perceptions, and absolutely they posed the questions that helped to lay the rail for the long haul of developing a moral perspective.  And that's the value of fiction, I think, when you're coming of age.

And, really, how many millions of us are there who understood where Mr. Bradbury was going with all this?  How many of us clenched paperbacks on the school bus or leaning up against the wall while we sat on our twin -sized beds and learned something about us that sounded perhaps deadly accurate even when wrapped up in spacesuits or demon carnivals or watching old women die in a pyre of novels?

Books. Comics. Movies. Travel. Grey Gardens.

Hello.

I am afraid it is already very late, and thanks to an evening out for dinner, followed by a catch-up call with my folks (just returned from Disneyworld), and catching up on a few things around the house, I am afraid we come to a third evening in which I have not written a post in which I review any media.  Partially, because no media has been consumed.

I feel I should post this evening because tomorrow night I am off to the movies to see a double bill of Shock Corridor and Naked Kiss at The Paramount's Stateside Theater.  You are welcome to join me.  At this time, I believe I am going alone.

Books:

During my commute, I am listening to For Whom the Bell Tolls*.  I also finally cracked Grant Morrison's Supergods over the weekend.

Supergods is covering a lot of history I already know, so I am really hoping it finds a new direction soon.  the Hemingway book is fantastic.  I'm pretty skimpy on my Hemingway, having only read short stories, some assigned stuff, and A Farewell to Arms.  Quite enjoying the audio book.


Comics:

Wednesday sees the arrival of Before Watchmen.  I won't return to discussing the project in this post, but its another DC product I'm leaving on the shelf.

But I am picking up a few books this week.  Action Comics.  Popeye.  Fury Max.  iZombie and X-O Manowar (which had at least an interesting first issue).  But looking at the picks for September...  Man, it looks a little bleak one year on from The New 52.


Movies:

Of course Wednesday, I'll be at the double bill of Shock Corridor and Naked Kiss, so maybe see you there.

Sunday I'm off to see Prometheus with Matty, Nicole and JuanD.  Should be a hoot.  I'm mostly looking forward to Scott's visual spectacle.  If the story pans out, all the better.

My Blu-Ray of John Carter is coming soon.  A movie not many saw, but which I really liked.  Here's to Planetary Romance.

For next week, I don't have anything on my Paramount schedule, but I do have a ticket to see The Old Dark  House at The Alamo Ritz.  It's a classic, but one that rarely screens.  This should be fun.  Again, I'm going alone, so if anyone wants to buy themselves a ticket, let me know.

Just FYI:  Realized tonight there's a strong chance I'm not going because...


Travel:  

Next week I'm off to Boston for most of the week for work.  I'm presenting with a colleague from Florida.  We'll be out in the "Quincy" area, wherever the heck that is.  I've never been to Boston, and I won't get to do any touristing.  It's going to be all-conference, all the time.

No, I am not telling you where or when I'm presenting, Mom and Dad.


Grey Gardens:

Home ownership has finally caught up with us.  In the past couple of weeks, we found a small stain in our laundry room was actually indicating a roof leak that hadn't leaked thanks to the SEVERE DROUGHT plaguing Texas.

May showers led to a leak that dripped between the walls of two rooms upstairs and straight down into the ceiling of our dining room.  A room which is delightfully free from any real furniture, so, it all ended okay after we lost some plaster, etc...

Then, our air conditioner died for a few days there.

I keep waiting for raccoons to start wandering through the living room.

Jamie has taken care of hiring people who can fix these things, and she has provided oversight of repairs.  We are keeping the slow decay of our home at bay for the time being.  Its just a bit taxing to even deal with, money aside.


That's it.

I gotta go to bed.

As a last thing...  the new album is out from Advance Base, if that's your thing.


*spoiler:  It tolls for THEE

Still no post Tuesday (with Audrey Totter)

Ms. Audrey Totter is here to see you through the rest of your work day.

No Post Tuesday with Marie Windsor

No post again. I got pre-occupied.

Here's Marie Windsor to keep you company as you carry on in your Tuesday.

Signal Watch Watches: The Rock-afire Explosion (2008)

My experience working at Chuck E. Cheese Pizza is fairly well documented, and so I am unsurprised that I might have a pre-disposition for an interest in the backstory and current state of part of the weird world of Pizza Parlors that double as Robot Music Shows.

The 2008 documentary, The Rock-afire Explosion (available on Netflix Streaming) seeks to uncover, really, one man's ongoing love of the robot band that made his childhood magical and the engineer who created the Rock-afire animatronic band and performances that made the Showbiz Pizza chain possible.

Honestly, it's maybe a little messed up.

see the face of your Mayan Apocalypse and behold your DOOM

I cannot begin to guess the original intentions of the filmmakers as they set out to begin interviewing private Rock-afire Explosion band owner Chris Thrash (I imagine they thought just getting Thrash and his band was plenty for a short film), but the final product is a mostly-feature-length, warm-hearted look at a man and his quirky dream.  One assumes that through Thrash the filmmakers got in touch with Aaron Fechter, the creator of the band, and an interesting guy himself.

Flechter seems a bit one part Willy Wonka/ one part Ahab, a guy who struck it big with an idea when he was very young, and who built a company that he very much cared about.  The failure of the overall Showbiz Pizza company and the fate that shook out for the animatronics group he owned is still very clearly present for the man, and there's something a bit tragic about the guy when you see what he's kept from the old days (and it certainly makes you wonder about his business acumen).

Signal Watch Reads: Superman Family Adventures #1

I know some of you, especially those of you with kids, have been reading Tiny Titans for a while.  And if you haven't been reading the series, go out and find the collections.  They're absolute gold when it comes to funny comics, especially if you follow DC Comics.

Possibly due to the reboot of the DCU, sadly, Tiny Titans has now wound down.

Not to fret, Art Baltazar and Franco's work lives on!  Not only is Art Baltazar illustrating the superlative line of fun kid's books under the Super Pets banner published by Capstone (catch up with Krypto, Streaky, Ace the Bathound and others!), Franco and Baltazar have moved their efforts over to a new kid's book: Superman Family Adventures.

The first issue arrived on Wednesday, and we gave it a read Wednesday night.

Yup, its a "New 52" inspired Superman operating in a Silver Age milieu, right alongside Super Pets, his young pals, Lois, Jimmy and The Chief.  And, of course, Lex Luthor and his rampaging robots.  The book is a first issue, and so its perhaps not the well oiled machine we came to expect of Tiny Titans, but its already got the peppy voice of the Tiny Titans book, but with longer-form content.

Unlike Tiny Titans, this comic isn't a "gag" comic, but takes the length of the issue to tell the story.  It's a change in format, but the spirit seems mostly the same.  And if you liked running jokes in Tiny Titans, one nice bit about the Amazing World of Superman is that there are already plenty of running jokes for Franco and Baltazar to draw upon (Jimmy's role as "coffee fetcher" for Perry White, Clark's winkiness when it comes to his secret identity, etc...).

In a lot of ways, DC has serious ground to make up when it comes to restoring Superman to the good graces of the public.  A ponderous 2006 movie, the drudgery of ten (10!) seasons of Smallville, and doing absolutely nothing to react to 20 years of press, comics and otherwise, rambling about the irrelevancy of Superman.  And, of course, DC's own staff seeming to want to do everything in their powers to avoid owning the big, crazy world of Superman so they could pretend that comics are for serious adults (or, at least, 18 year olds trying to identify with a broody Batman).

So maybe reminding people why this world works once you take yourself out of the context of competing for Punisher readers - aiming at the kids may be exactly the right tack.  In many ways, its two completely different milieus that just happen to co-mingle in the wild world of superhero comics.  But as The Punisher was meant to reflect a Bronson-type character in the Marvel U, it may be a wise move to find ways to use various characters to reach different audiences.  Or exploit how that audience feels about different characters to cover various bases.

The single most useless comment I read online about this book basically boiled down to "I like everything about it, but I'm a Batman fan, so I would have preferred a Batman family book".  That sort of navel-gazing doesn't really get you anywhere.  It's a bit like watching Star Trek and criticizing it for not being Star Wars or wishing you had the beef sandwich instead of the ham.  But I wonder.  Its not that I think that can't work, but DC has spent so much time rebranding Batman into The Dark Knight, they pulled the superlative Brave and the Bold from television to make room for a cartoon more in line with the grim avenger model.  Certainly they don't want to miss an opportunity for profit?  Maybe we'll get a sister Batman book out of all this.

Really, I have nothing but positive things to say about the comic.  They start off without bothering to discuss Superman's origin, rockets from Krypton, etc...  and they leap right into the action with Superman joyfully saving Metropolis from collision with a meteor(ite?), running into the Planet offices as Clark, and hitting the streets when Lex unleashes three robots to wreak havoc.

The art is energetic and extremely kid friendly (see the cover above).  I'm always impressed with the range of character and expression Baltazar pulls off as a cartoonist given the simple forms he's working with, but that's what makes him so favored as a cartoonist by fans, I suppose.

Anyway, its a very promising start and a missing component in DC's line of books.  And that missing component has been anything resembling "fun" or "joy", which, if you go back over Superman's long and storied history, has been where he's shone as often as when he's battled the forces of evil with a set jaw and narrowed eyes.

I saw that Comics Alliance had posted a preview.  I think you should check it out.

And Happy Birthday to Matty Mangum

Happy birthday, man.

I know you hate my blog and think comics are stupid, but we heart you, anyway.

Tomorrow we will get you a pony ride.