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Saturday, January 13, 2007 ( 1/13/2007 09:48:00 AM ) Bill S. NOT SUCH A DUMB QUESTION, AFTER ALL – Dirk Deppey gives a flippant reply to the blog discussion of why-no-fat-guys-in-boy-love-manga by joking that it's the same reason there "isn't much demand for 83-year-old porn starlets, I would imagine." And while I get his basic point (to most mainstream readers, fat is as unappealing as extreme age*), I don't think he fully answers the question. In the gay community, after all, there is a sub-grouping of chubby chasers attracted to the fuller male form – much as there is within the straight community (only there they self-refer to each other as "fat admirers"). And while I suspect it's largely an underground deal, there is erotic manga devoted to pursuing chubby women (an ish of The Comics Journal even contained an ad for an English-language manga collection called Chubby, though the publisher putting it out no longer appears to have a website), so why not comics devoted to boy-and-chubbier-boy? Yes, I know that yaoi is heavily directed at the female audience, but there are also female fat admirers in this country, and I suspect that there might also be one or two in Japan, too. I could be wrong, of course, since I have an extremely limited understanding of the yaoi phenom . . . *I'd disagree with that aesthetic premise, of course, but that's neither here nor there. # | ( 1/13/2007 07:45:00 AM ) Bill S. FAME TAKES A MAN AND MAKES HIM OVER – Been immersing myself over the past few days in a set of 4 Seasons reissues that're being released by Collector's Choice Music (first immediate fave: the group's doomed and barely remembered attempt to produce its own Sgt. Pepper, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette), and in checking some of the Jersey Boys' fan sites (like this fan club blog), I became aware of a controversy that I hadn't known was taken so close to heart by many of the group's long-running fans. When the boys were inducted into the Rock And Roll of Fame back in 1990, only the band's initial four members (singer Frankie Valli, keyboardist/songwriter Bob Gaudio, guitarist Tommy DeVito & bassist/vocal arranger Nick Massi) were admitted. Yet in 1965, Massi was replaced by Joe Long, who remained with the group for the rest of its hitmaking career. That's Massi who you hear on the breakthrough 1962-63 hits "Sherry," "Big Girls Don't Cry," and "Walk Like A Man" (among others); it's Long you hear on mid-sixties tracks like "I've Got You Under My Skin" or "C'mon Marianne." To many fans, Long's a part of the 4 Seasons' sound. I don't have a dog in this particular race (though if forced to choose, I probably would opine that Massi's bass singing on "Walk Like A Man" remains an essential part of that song), though it did get me thinking about the Hall of Fame and this year's inductees: both R.E.M. and Van Halen are bands that underwent serious personnel changes over the years, though I can't imagine there are many fans too bent-out-of-shape by the fact that Sammy Hagar isn't included as a Van Halen inductee. It does raise the question of the specific guidelines for inclusion into the Hall of Fame, though: what particular body of work is being considered? Is it primarily the early, sound-establishing stuff (in which case, Long's absence is understandable) or the broader body of work? Looking at, f'rinstance, the Rolling Stones' entry, I see that band latecomer Ron Wood is included in the inductee timeline, though he didn't join the World's Greatest Rock 'N' Roll Band 'til twelve years after its birth. In any event, I remain dubious about the entire Hall of Fame enterprise – in part, because I can't imagine a critical gauge where uninspiring arena rockers like Van Halen are placed on the same level as R.E.M. or Patti Smith or even the Ronettes – but also because I recognize that the history of the music isn't as easy to compartmentalize, as these nominations would have you believe. Maybe there are some Van Halen fans pissed off at Sammy Hagar's omission . . . # | Friday, January 12, 2007 ( 1/12/2007 07:38:00 AM ) Bill S. HELPIN' MISTER BEMIS – So I'm reading the first volume of Kurata & Yamata's Read or Die manga (review to ultimately follow), and as I'm beginning this series about a supernaturally gifted bookworm teacher, I find myself thinking of that famous Twilight Zone episode, "Time Enough At Last," wherein Burgess Meredith's put-upon reader Henry Bemis finds himself alone after a nuclear holocaust, only to "ironically" have his glasses break. Even as a kid, I found problems with that sad teledrama conclusion: whoever wrote it*, I suspected, had never worn glasses themselves. You own prescription eyeglasses, and you always keep the previous prescriptions in case somp'n bad happens to the first set. (Remember Ralphie breaking his peepers in A Christmas Story?) I've got my old glasses, for example, in the glove box of the car. Too, thinking further as a young glass-wearing booknerd eager to take the sting out of Bemis' plight, what was to keep the guy from stumbling to the nearest optometrist's office and rummaging through the drawers of finished prescription glasses that obviously wouldn't be picked up by the original customers? ("Time Enough," which originally aired in 1959, predates the founding of LensCrafters by 24 years.) Sorry, Rod, but once Henry stopped sobbing to himself, he could've pulled himself up and gotten back to reading all the books he wanted to. This has been your Pointless Refutation of Classic Sci-Fi Television posting for the day. *Rod Serling did the script from a short story by the otherwise-unknown-to-me Lyn Venable. # | Thursday, January 11, 2007 ( 1/11/2007 09:02:00 AM ) Bill S. OH, AND AN ACOUSTIC GUITAR GETS SMASHED! – Skipped our Chief Exec's speech last night – since advanced word was that the big plan basically entailed "surging" troop levels up with a speed which suggested the Bush Administration had reconsidered its stance against clone research – and went looking for cable channels that'd give us something different to watch while we were playing Scrabble. Had a brief moment of stoopid hope when our Insight cable menu told us that CBS, alone of all the major nets, was holding to its regular schedule and airing Criminal Minds instead of the Prez, but we knew better than to take that seriously. Instead, we wound up watching a Hallmark Mystery Woman telemovie rerun that we’d missed on the first go-round – wherein Kellie Martin investigates a murder involving a reunited proto-hippie Peter, Paul & Mary-styled group (Ellen Greene playing the TV-movie Mary Travers substitute; David Naughton being either Peter or Paul, I couldn't tell which), who had a hit song in the sixties about a "magic mushroom" in place of a dragon. Had a big peace sign banner at the faux folk group's outdoor concert – which pleasantly added to our teevee retreat from newsy reality . . . # | ( 1/11/2007 05:43:00 AM ) Bill S. "AND I'M IN HEAVEN EVERY TIME I LOOK AT YOU-HOO-HOO-HOO" –A small gentlemen's disagreement with Mr. Mark Evanier, who in a recent posting on the passing of Scooby Doo designer Iwao Takamoto notes that Randy & the Rainbows' "Denise" (from whence may've come the cartoon dawg's name) was a "medium-sized hit" for the group. Actually, in 1963, "Denise" was the last Top Ten Billboard hit for a group in the doo-wop era – which puts it a skosh above "medium-sized" in my estimation. (And just to be even more pointlessly factoid, the song later made it into the U.K. Top Ten when Blondie dropped the "e" from the title and released their version of the song as a single in '78.) Whether it really was the true source for Scoob's name remains an unknowable mystery. # | Wednesday, January 10, 2007 ( 1/10/2007 01:25:00 PM ) Bill S.  "I LIKES 'EM BIG – THEY PLOPS BETTER" – Let's dispense with the unabashed fannish gushing right away: the first volume of Fantagraphics' new Elzie Crisler Segar Popeye reprint – "I Yam What I Yam!" – is one of the coolest book repackagings ever. A tabloid-sized hardback printing six daily strips to a page, a thick die-cut cardboard cover featuring a magnified panel of the squinty ol' gob slugging a burly sparring partner and himself on the jaw: it's friggin' magnificent. Difficult to imagine a better showcase for the comic strip adventures of this larger-than-life American creation.Printing the first two years of Popeye's newspaper adventures, I Yam takes its sweet time (a good nineteen weeks of storytelling) before the sailorman makes his first appearance in "Thimble Theater," the strip he called his home. Segar's "Theater" had been running over a decade before the scene-stealin' sailorman showed up on panel – and, from all appearances, it was a pretty sprightly strip beforehand. Centered on the adventures of the Oyl family – brother Castor and sister Olive, most notably (along with Olive's sappy then-boyfriend, Ham Gravy) – the strip was a rambling series of fantastic comic adventures, typified by the tale which first brings Popeye into the fray. In it, small-fry hero Castor comes into possession of an African whiffle hen – an amazing creature that is impossible to cage who provides good luck to its owner. A number of slouchy sinister types are after the hen, of course, and before Castor even meets Popeye, he's kidnapped, tossed off a cliff and buried alive. Heading for the docks in search of a rough type to be his bodyguard, Castor happens upon Popeye, and the resultant initial exchange is comic strip history: "Hey there," Castor asks, "are you a sailor?"From that point on, "Thimble Theater" was forever changed. Ham Gravy was unceremoniously shuffled off-stage in a couple of Sunday strips, Olive quickly warmed up to the idea that this mug with a face like a mule was her new beau, and Castor spent his time alternately ineffectively trying to boss Popeye around and breaking off their partnership. Castor still remained an important part of the cast – would-be brains to Popeye's brawn – though in time he too would get shunted off to the Irrelevant Characters Home. In Volume One, however, the "Theater" is still half Castor's. It's he who gets the plots rolling, usually with a moneymaking scheme (taking the whiffle hen to the aptly named Dice Island, promoting Popeye as a prize fighter, opening a detective agency to investigate "myskeries"), though it's safe to say that Popeye provides most of the action. And if big-headed Castor continued to treat our hero like he was a supporting character throughout the two years repped here, it's a different story for the reader. Soon as Segar gave the malaprop-spouting roughneck more than two panels to speak, he grabbed a hold of our attention. To those primarily familiar with the Popeye of the cartoons, the original Segar model is an even more unrefined figure. "Unidjicated" and prone to brawling for the fun of it, the early Popeye is an unrestrained, if big-hearted, bruiser prone to popping guys in the jaw just because he doesn't like their looks, much to the dismay of his would-be boss Castor. (That Popeye's "instincks" invariably prove right is, of course, part of the joke.) Profoundly superstitious (and fearful of "spiriks"), he's childlike in his readiness to take credit for Castor's occasional bouts of real braininess, yet ever ready to defend anyone he thinks is being unfairly picked on. He's a much more full-dimensional character than the one audiences saw in the eight-minute Fleischer cartoons, in other words – in large part, because Segar had the space and inclination to let all of his main cast be their comically flawed selves. There's a lotta reading in this volume of strips: unlike today's newspaper funnies, Segar had the room to tell each day in five to six panel offerings, which he crammed with colorful dialog. The pacing is subsequently much more leisurely than most modern comics readers are accustomed, but it pays off in the strip's delightfully quirky characterization. Much of Volume One's adventures are devoted to misdeeds of a series of land-lubbing sneaks and swindlers – most notably a Mister Snork who shows up twice to riddle Popeye full of bullets, only to have the indefatigable bruiser rise up and smack him on the chin. (Snork has, Popeye sez more than once, a chin he loves to smack.) In one episode, Popeye is taken to the hospital to get a brace of Snork's slugs removed, only to be distressed when he learns that the surgeons have left an unlucky thirteen bullets still inside him. He demands to be cut open again, so they can take another slug out or put one back in. But the most memorable antagonist in this opening volley of Popeye adventures is a character we meet at sea: the nefarious Sea Hag. A malevolent and avaricious creature who would bedevil Popeye over the years, the Hag shows Segar mining a realm of comic spookiness with a sense of the genuinely sinister that few cartoonists would even dare to try and match. Though his drawing remained cartoonish and confined to the same visual plane (the Thimble Theater being largely seen through an imaginary comic strip proscenium), there are images of the Hag that linger long after you've squeezed this collection onto your bookshelf. She was one creepy creation. Since it took some time for the Popeye of the daily strips to make it to the Sunday funnies, the first volume only features forty-eight pages of color comics. As with Dark Horse's reprints of the color "Li'l Abner" strips, there's a certain amount of color fade on these strips (and a few panels where blobs from what must have been the other side of the original Sunday page bleed into the images), but what're ya gonna do? The color Sundays remain fun: in addition to Ham Gravy's aforementioned departure, we get the start of Popeye's career as a professional boxer, a comical series of strips where both Castor and Olive unsuccessfully attempt to gentrify our seafaring proletarian, plus two strips where the dainty Miz Oyl hauls off on some uppity skirt who also has her eye on Popeye. For a stringy girl, she sure puts up a fight, but, then, we knew that from watching her swing at Bluto in the cartoons. As a bonus, the Sunday pages also include a secondary strip that Segar drew for the papers, "Sappo." A two-tiered strip, it concerns the adventures of a married man (who kinda looks like Castor with a mustache) and his zaftig wife, who is not averse to using a rolling pin on her hubby when he strays too much from the straight and narrow. Though much more quick-moving than "Theater," the Sappo strips provide an extra sense of what Segar's main feature would've been like had Popeye not wandered onstage: Sappo and his frau even had a western adventure just before Castor & Popeye went off on their Wild West excursion. The resulting strips are amusing – Segar was too much the natural-born cartoonist for 'em to be otherwise – but they simply don't have the sheer wonderfulness of Popeye. With the creation of that hard-hewn s.o.b., Segar had moved from gifted funnyguy into comic strip greatness. Book o' the Year, I tells ya! # | ( 1/10/2007 12:22:00 PM ) Bill S. "INTRODUCING FOR THE FIRST TIME: PHAROAH ON THE MICROPHONE" – For this week's music vid posting, we're checking out the New Pornographers' video for "The Laws Have Changed" (from Electric Version). Was inspired to put this 'un up by a discussion on Tom the Dog's blog which mentioned sometime Pornographer Neko Case's most recent studio elpee. # | Tuesday, January 09, 2007 ( 1/09/2007 05:57:00 PM ) Bill S. "YOU'LL THANK ME LATER" – Took way too much time over the past few days pulling out review titles from the Gadabout's first year to list on the right sidebar after the template mysteriously lost 2002 several months back: yeah, I know, time I could've spent writing something new was instead frittered on going through reviews of the likes of the unlamented She Spies. It's a sickness . . . # | Monday, January 08, 2007 ( 1/08/2007 10:22:00 AM ) Bill S. FAREWELL TO MISTER PANCAKES – Put me down as another former regular viewer none-too-bothered by news that The O.C. has been cancelled as Feb. 22nd. Though we've watched a few of this season's eps, it hasn't been with the same degree of weekly commitment that we once felt for the series: for a lotta fans, last season's pointless lesbian subplot was the deal-breaker, but for us the disenchantment started earlier in the season when they introduced Jeri Ryan as a conniving villainess – and basically squandered her. Too, the further the show got from Seth Cohen's comic book geekiness, the less interesting that character grew: Seth as a pothead? Puh-leeze . . . That said, we'll still miss the gang, even if we haven't been stopping by as often as we useta. Peter Gallagher & Kelly Rowan remain one of the more believable and appealing married parents on television, while Autumn Reeser's Taylor has evolved from a major irritant into an agreeably quirky young woman, even if we still don't buy her romance with Ben McKenzie's ever-boring Ryan Atwood. Adam Brody's Seth & Rachel Bilson's Summer (put some weight back on, girl!) remain the most consistently enjoyable coupling on the series, though the contrivances that the writers introduced to keep 'em together have been as underdone as Mischa Barton's acting abilities. But that's the way they do romance in the O.C., bitch . . . (Yes, I know that last line was an obvious way to end this post mortem, but, c'mon, when else will I get to use it?) # | Sunday, January 07, 2007 ( 1/07/2007 10:38:00 AM ) Bill S. AND NOW A BRIEF COMMERCIAL WORD FROM THE MAKERS OF VISINE – A quick note to Dick Van Dyke on the occasion of the broadcast of Hallmark Channel's most recent Murder 101 telemovie: Dear Dick:# | ( 1/07/2007 07:56:00 AM ) Bill S. HOSING OFF THE DIRT – Watched the Friday night rerun of Dirt's debut, and I largely agree with Ben's assessment of the much-hyped fx series. (I used to like that Peter Gabriel song.) I don't particularly give a rat's ass about the problems of paparazzi-bedeviled celebs either, any more than I do the super-rich who'll apparently be the center of yet another "edgy" upcoming fx series, so it'll be up to the series to give me a reason to keep watching. Courtney Cox's neurotic bitch magazine editor is plainly meant to be our central figure. But on the basis of the premiere, she appears to be doing a variation on the same character she played in Scream (only with corporate status thrown into the mix), so I'm not sure how much new there is to see there. More intriguing is the character of schizophrenic photog Don (Ian Hart, who played Professor Quirrel in the first Harry Potter movie), whose hallucinogenic struggles without his psychotropic meds and love for a dying cat provided the only real doses of sympathetic humanity in the series pilot. Wanna wager whether this character'll survive the season? # | |
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