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Saturday, June 12, 2004 ( 6/12/2004 07:30:00 AM ) Bill S. VILLY! – Been spending the past week immersed in the new Fantagraphics' appreciation, Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art, an easy thing to do since the book reprints some hundred-plus pages of Elder stories from each of the humor mags lucky enough to have him as a contributor – and since Elder's celebrated dense comic artwork rewards regular re-examination. Re-reading this stuff definitely makes me sullen about DC Comics' apparent decision to pull the plug on the Mad Archives reprint series after only one volume. If any collection of comic art deserves a readily available set of hardback reprints, it's the Kurtzman-edited Mad. And, for the record, Mad Playboy of Art receives the P.C. Gadabout Seal of Approval. . . # | Thursday, June 10, 2004 ( 6/10/2004 04:14:00 PM ) Bill S. "HEY, HEY, BABY WHA'D I SAY?" – Still being beaten down by a deadline, but I had to stop and briefly note the death of Ray Charles, a more significant event in my house than the demise of an old ex-president. I've been playing Charles faithfully ever since I got a copy of his two-record 25-year anniversary retrospective back in 1971 – and was pleased to see him celebrate his fiftieth anniversary as a performer in the nineties. Essential listening for anyone interested in the roots of rock and soul: the three-disc boxed set collecting Charles' 1952-9 rhythm & blues recordings for Atlantic Records, The Birth of Soul, plus Rhino's reissue of that countrypolitan classic, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music or the single-disc Anthology, which presents the best of the ABC years ("Hit the Road, Jack," "Georgia on My Mind," "I Can't Stop Loving You," "Busted" – the hits keep comin'!). Great stuff, plain and simple. . . # | Wednesday, June 09, 2004 ( 6/09/2004 07:00:00 AM ) Bill S. THEY, THE JURY – Missed one of the two debuts of Fox's summer series, The Jury, last night. I was out doing the hunter/gatherer thing at KFC and wife Becky passed on the first airing since she thought it was just another dumb reality program from Fox. (The ads for the network's summer season deliberately, I suspect, did not make it clear that the series is a crime drama from Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson.) On the basis of the second ep, The Jury is a tidy crime show, giving us the crime from the POV of the jury arguing over what they’ve taken from the trial. (The biggest stretch of this series is its apparent presumption that everyone on the jury actually listens the entire time through a lengthy trial, but perhaps the writers will play with this more as the show progresses.) Also worthy of note is the presence of Adam Busch (Warren from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer) as a nebbishy bailiff wedged into the show to provide comic relief between jury sequesterings. Funny, every real-life bailiff I’ve seen is Older than God. How'd this kid get the job? Too, perhaps it's a question of timing, but I'm not sure I can get behind the casting of producer Levinson as the judge presiding over the show’s jury trials. Just last week, we caught an airing of Mel Brooks' High Anxiety, where a much younger Levinson plays a psycho bellboy. As a result, we kept expecting Judge Hawthorne to begin shrieking at the top of his voice and brandishing a shower-soaked newspaper. . . # | Tuesday, June 08, 2004 ( 6/08/2004 04:07:00 PM ) Bill S. ADIOS, COMICS BLOG! – After several days of hints & allegations to this effect on The Comics Journal's web boards, Dirk Deppey has officially called it quits on ¡Journalista!. We always suspected that his stated desire to return once he'd settled into the editorship at TCJ was a tad optimistic, but it still is gloomy taking it down off the blogroll. # | ( 6/08/2004 06:09:00 AM ) Bill S. DEADED DREADLINES – Got a writing deadline that'll be taking up most of my p-c time over the next couple days, so posting should remain light around these parts until Friday or so. In the meantime, you know where the blogroll is, right? # | ( 6/08/2004 06:07:00 AM ) Bill S. THE CAT DANCER – Nearly missed acknowledging the untimely death of Kate Worley, co-creator (with Reed Waller) of Omaha, the Cat Dancer, an adult-rated funny animal series that originally debuted in several underground comix titles (Bizarre Sex, Snarf and Dope), but soon received its own black-&-white title. After an extended hiatus, Worley was reportedly working on wrapping up the series with artist Waller when cancer and family financial problems derailed these plans. It's unclear how much of the final run was completed. Worley’s Omaha is often cited as one of the first "furry" comics – particularly for its explicit sexual sequences – but it was really more than just that. With a cast of well-crafted animals, Waller’s sexy/expressive cartooning and a soapishly entertaining storyline, the collected Omaha, the Cat Dancer was a charming grown-up graphic novel: the kind of work that probably would've attracted a lot of attention today if it'd been released as a manga GN series. There are several collections of the early Omaha stories originally printed by Kitchen Sink Press that are currently out of print: it'd be great if some enterprising publisher brought them out again. . . # | ( 6/08/2004 05:35:00 AM ) Bill S. SO IF PIRATES ARE THE NEW MONKEYS, WHAT DOES THAT MAKE UNDEAD MONKEY PIRATES? – Utilizing the movies-on-demand option from our cable service, we watched Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl last night. An enjoyable excursion (Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush clearly have a ball with their parts), though director Gore Verbinski could've probably slash it down by a half hour or so without doing any damage to the story. At one point during a sea battle – when one of the cursed undead pirates receives a fork right in his wooden eye and pulls it out to comic effect – my wife just shook her head, said, "This is a boy's flick, alright!" then left the room to go play with the ferrets. . . # | Monday, June 07, 2004 ( 6/07/2004 08:17:00 AM ) Bill S. BEST CABLE MOMENT OF THE WEEK – Beating out Tony Soprano's handling of a pesky family problem (Tony B.=Pie-Oh-My?): Al Swearengen's beautifully crafted soliloquy at the end of the penultimate season ep of Deadwood. . . # | Sunday, June 06, 2004 ( 6/06/2004 09:45:00 AM ) Bill S. TNE END OF THE REAGAN ERA – So Ronald Reagan has passed on, long after many of us had considered him gone. I never thought much of his presidency, which strikes me as not much different from the current regime in the way we're supposed to accept that an Average Joe surrounding himself with Top Advisors can be CEO of this country – the superficial difference being that Reagan's years of Hollywood work made him more skilled at creating the illusion he really and truly was in charge. Living in Central Illinois, less than a half hour drive from Reagan's old alma mater, Eureka College, I'm anticipating plenty of public fare-thee-wells in the next few days. The man was beloved in this region by a lot of people: I knew a good number of Illinois and Iowa farmers who more typically skewed Democrat, who voted for the man simply because they had fond memories of him as a Midwestern radio man. Reagan was a lot like Bill Clinton (now there's a comparison designed to piss some people off!) in the way that he was able to get folks who might disagree with most every aspect of his politics to vote for him by coming across more "presidential" (whatever that vague term means) than any of his opponents. He also shared Clinton's Teflon ability to keep even the most negative of political actions (think Iran/Contra) from affecting his popularity. Per the focus of this blog, I spent some time trying to recall my favorite Reagan performance from the movies. The one I finally came up with was his role in the sixties era remake of The Killers, by no means a great movie (though Don Siegel directs what was originally meant to be a teevee flick with his usual blunt efficiency) but intriguing for the way Reagan was cast against type to convincingly play a murderous crime boss. It was his last movie role, and, much like his part in the unfairly maligned B-comedy Bedtime for Bonzo, received more misdirected attention because of his later presidency than it deserved. Still, for all the slams he took over the years as a second tier leading man, Reagan definitely could act. . . # | |
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