For those who don’t remember, Froggy was a character from early children’s programming: as a kid, I remember seeing him on Andy’s Gang, a series featuring raspy voiced character actor Andy Devine, though he first debuted on a radio show in the forties entitled Smilin’ Ed’s Gang. Befitting his name, Froggy was a magical creature who appeared when host and audience shouted the evocative phrase, “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!” On TV, he was repped by a frog puppet, natch.

The character was a mischief-maker who loved messing around with figures of adult authority. He’d take these folks — typically presented as full of themselves — and humiliate them by making them do something against their will. Intoning, “You will, you will,” he forced them to go against the high-flown images of themselves that they’d been working so hard to maintain. Sometimes it was by making them admit something deflating about themselves; other times it was through the simple slapstick expedience of a self-inflicted pie in the mush. . .

As we’re inundated with obnoxious political ads this time of year, I can’t help daydreaming about an invasion of Froggies popping up on television to prick all the nonsense. So that when spokesfolk for a pharmaceutical company pretending to be part of a senior’s organization attacking health care reform, Froggy’d show up on their shoulder and make them say, “I’m paid to deliver this b.s.!” Or when any politician tried to sell us on the fact that they’re “independent from influence and the Washington mainstream,” they’d be forced to pull out a long rolling list of all the lobbying money they’ve received — then hit themselves in the face with a cream puff.

I know I’d stop muting campaign ads if this happened.

Labels: american weirdness

“WE DON’T WANT ANY LISTENERS OUT THERE TO THINK THIS LITTLE INVASION OF OURS IS REAL.” Imagine the original Night of the Living set in the Depression -- and without any fleshing-eating ghouls – and you have a sense of what Eric Hobbs and Noel Tuazon’s The Broadcast (NBM) is about. Set in rural Indiana the day and night of Orson Welles’ notorious “War of the Worlds” radio cast, the graphic novel strands a cast of ordinary folk in an isolated farmhouse, surrounded (they think) by hostile creatures, and lets ‘em go at each other. All very Maple Street, for those who remember that particular Twilight Zone episode.

The divisions -- none too surprisingly, given The Broadcast’s period setting -- work on class grounds. The house where our group of would-be survivors holds up is owned by Tom Schrader, the town’s rich man. Tom and his wife catch part of the Mercury Theatre’s broadcast, only to have the power go out in a storm before it’s all revealed to be a sci-fi Halloween play. Convinced that alien invaders are on their way, four different families -- plus an elderly black man who shows up to adds some racial tension into the mix -- argue and fuss about who is going into Schrader’s storm cellar. The conflict grows more heated, and you just know (if only from the cover shot of a frightened farmer listening to a Zenith with a rifle in his hand) that it’ll ultimately grow violent.

Scripter Hobbs also tosses in a thwarted love between Schrader’s would-be writer daughter Kim and poor-but-honest son-of-a-farmer Gavin, which pretty much goes the way you’d expect it to. More intriguing are the panicky rural workers, Jacob and Dawson, who react quite differently to the news of imminent alien attack. Jacob, the closest to a villain that we have in the book, challenges Schrader over who gets to go into the shelter. His increasingly more desperate fear for the life of his little daughter would make him a sympathetic figure if he wasn’t painted as so whiny and pathetic.

Noel Tuazon’s sketchy, heavily gray-washed art neatly captures the look of an old and faded public domain movie, though at times the art works against the more active moments. Kind of like that cheapie DVD of NotLD you once bought at Dollar Tree, but without the added irritation of crackly, barely heard sound. It’s strong on the silent moments, though: a scene where Marvin, the black stranger in town, is threatened by two locals is particularly effective. Who needs Martians to do us in, The Broadcast asks, when you’ve got red-blooded American racists?

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: modern comics

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Wednesday, September 22, 2010
      ( 9/22/2010 09:24:00 PM ) Bill S.  

MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Let's get messy with OK Go:

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Sunday, September 19, 2010
      ( 9/19/2010 11:21:00 AM ) Bill S.  

“I’LL MAKE YOU A GHOST AT THIS SCHOOL!” Collecting all three volumes of Queenie Chan’s Original English Language manga, The Dreaming Collection (Tokyopop) is a hefty and largely satisfying gothic graphic novel aimed at teen readers. Set in an Australian boarding school isolated in the middle of the Outback, The Dreaming is one of the first OEL manga to be released in America -- and, arguably, one of the most successful, with a 3-D feature adaptation reportedly in the works. Chan, an Australian/Chinese manga creator who has also worked in collaboration with Dean Koontz, is a skillful visual storyteller, capable of slathering on the atmosphere. She utilizes her bushland setting effectively, incorporating pieces of aboriginal folklore into her supernatural storyline, and at the end of the first volume even includes an appended overview of her setting for us egocentrically ignorant Yanks. Clearly she knows her audience.

The book centers on twin sisters, Amber and Jenny Malkin, who are sent to Greenwich Private College presumably because their Aunt Jessie is headmistress there and can watch out for them. Yet as soon as the twins arrive, their aunt tells them she has to leave for three months, after warning the pair to not let the school’s creepy vice-principal, Mrs. Skeener, know that they are twins. “I told her you two sisters were born a year apart,” she explains, which right away ought to set off some warning bells, though our girls go along with the deception.

While Aunt Jessie seems a friendly enough sort, the actual teaching staff at Greenwich proves to be a harsh crew, tossing off demerits for the slightest rule infraction. Part of the reason for their strictness appears to be rooted in the school’s history: planted in the middle of nowhere, the old Victorian school has periodically seen a rash of schoolgirl disappearances, young students inexplicably wandering off into the bush. When the twins begin having shared dreams that appear to be about these missing students, Jenny, the more extroverted and less sensitive of the two, begins to investigate the school’s history.

There is no shortage of clues in the place: a mysterious locked room, a dressmaking dummy with a blood-red Victorian dress on it, a series of paintings showing young girls up to something in the woods, not to mention crone-like Miss Skeener’s strange antipathy toward twins. After one of the students goes missing, only to reappear dead and floating in the water like Ophelia, the need to unravel Greenwich’s mystery becomes even stronger.

Chan paces her story deliberately -- perhaps a bit too much so at times – and if occasionally the story construction seems a bit rickety (that absent aunt never does reappear: the better to keep our two girls isolated), in omnibus form Chan is able to keep our attention. In visual tone and style, The Dreaming is like one of those black-and-white Old Dark House flicks from the thirties and forties: overly talky in places but confident in its moody setting’s capacity to hold our attention. With her isolated outback school, Chan has the right place, all right: so far away from any civilized lights that “for some reason, moonlight never seems to penetrate the school grounds.” The artist is particularly strong in the silent something’s gonna happen moments.

In an afterward to the first volume, the writer/artist claims to have been partially inspired by Picnic at Hanging Rock, the novel and Peter Weir movie about the disappearance of three Australian schoolgirls, though I also caught a trace of Dario Argento’s Suspiria in places (sans the Italian director’s bloodier giallo moments, of course). Watching Jenny snoop down Greenwich’s dark and sinister corridors, I could almost hear Goblin blaring on the soundtrack of the upcoming 3-D movie. Though that’s probably just some horror fannish dreaming on my part. . .

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: sixty-minute manga

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