Cartoon, the play

Last night I went over to the Onyx Theatre (953 E. Sahara #16 in the Commercial Center) to attend a performance of Cartoon, which was written by Steven Yockey. The Onyx Theatre is a nice fairly new little theatre (low on frills, but high on intimacy) headed by John Beane, who also directs many (if not all) of the plays there, including this Vegas production of Cartoon. The resident theater group of the Oynx call themselves The Insurgo Theater Movement (http://insurgotheater.org/index.htm) and after watching them in Cartoon, I'll definitely be looking forward to their future productions.

Cartoon is an experimental piece about violence and fascism and although I didn't "get" everything that was going on, it wasn't the kind of experimental that is just mostly annoyingly clever. Cartoon as staged by the Insurgo Theatre was funny and highly entertaining and when the violence erupts it's pretty hard-hitting (no pun intended). The crowd favorite character is named Rockstar, who's played by Paul Mattingly, but in his big furry outfit, even if you know Paul (as I do, through my store), you'll forget that it's him (and while his character doesn't have a lot of stage time, Paul proves the idiom that it's quality not quantity that counts). Seriously, the whole cast was really good (with great costuming, make up and set design) so I'd recommend checking out one of the last two performances of Cartoon (it runs through March 14th).

The Insurgo Theatre Movement's next play at the Onyx is The Insect Play, which was written by Josef Capek and is a satire / examination of World War I from the Czechoslovakian perspective.

A great essay on Hiroshima...

A friend of mine, Teesh (actually she's one of my good friend, Sierra's, best friends, and I only knew Teesh as a teenager when she lived in Vegas and she'd come visit me with Sierra), is in Japan studying and recently she went to Hiroshima. Yesterday she wrote a great essay on having visited that historic city which, in a lot of ways, ended up defining the latter half of the 20th century: http://nateeshpodolske.blogspot.com/

Now that's a big comic book!

Kramers Ergot v.7 came out last year and right off the bat I was opposed to the very idea of this comic book, from its hefty price ($125.00) to its elitist contents (me saying this is probably funny to some people who know me with my elitist tastes in entertainment). I hadn't seen an actual copy of it until I went over to my friend's (Todd Murry) house a couple of months ago and he had bought one from a small company called Amazon. Anyway when you see a copy of this huge comic book (16 x 21) you can't not see it as an art object.

Kramers Ergot v.7 is an almost 100 page (so that comes to more than one dollar per page) comic book anthology with numerous alternative comic cartoonists contributing not more than three pages each. Like most anthologies the actual content varies from good to bad and I think that even with excellent contributions by artists such as Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Ivan Brunetti, that a lot of this book is just of the throw-away variety that wouldn't justify a twenty dollar price tag for a regular sized graphic novel collection (meaning work by pretenders to elitism that gives elitism a bad name). But here in this glorious over-sized format, everything looks impressive and seems to be pushing boundaries. I'm still kind of annoyed with the price as it will exclude a big section of people who would like its contents from being able to justify shelling out that much (and I've always liked the idea of comic books being the affordable art form for the masses - even though sadly with cover prices of the periodicals going up that is less true).
So after seeing my friend Todd's copy of Kramers Ergot v.7 I made it a point to see if I could still get a copy for myself from Comic Relief The Comic Book Bookstore (one of the premier comic book stores in the U.S. - they're in Berkeley), who had a booth at the San Francisco Wondercon a couple of weeks ago. I was happy to find that Todd (the new owner of Comic Relief after its founder, Rory Root, died last year) had a couple of copies left and I was more than happy to throw some money his way and was especially elated to read in the contents page that this book was dedicated to the memory of Rory Root, Dave Stevens (creator of the Rocketeer and responsible for the revival of Bettie Page's popularity), and Will Elder (Mad magazine and numerous EC comics), three giants of the comics medium who died last year. So while I wouldn't buy several pricey books like this, I'm glad to have this on (warts and all), being shown a physical copy by my friend Todd, and buying it from another Todd (of Comic Relief, natch).

San Francisco Wondercon 2009 pt. 2

If GI Joe was about characters like this gal in her GI Joe costume, I might actually care about the upcoming movie. Actually the movie may turn out to be good for what it is, but I've never was into GI Joe as a kid (different era) so the whole fascination for things GI Joe or Transformers related things just makes my mind shut down.
A great Batgirl costume with the old Batman television camera angle in full force!







Trina Robbins (in this photo on the left of course), was one of the first underground female cartoonists and wrote many books about women in comics. Until I looked her up on wikipedia just now, I hadn't know that she designed Vampirella's costume back in the late 1960's (how did I not know that!)!

In this photo is Trina's long time partner, Steve Leialoha. Steve Leialoha has been an highly acclaimed inker since the 1970's (working on such titles as Warlock, Howard The Duck, Spider-Woman, and Star Wars) and is known by most comic fans today for his excellent inking on Fables. Leialoha is also an excellent artist and one of my favorite series by him was Trypto The Acid Dog.

Last Friday night after the first day of Wondercon, there was a benefit for the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco and Kate and I attended that. In addition to the uber cool Watchmen movie props and original artwork they had on display from that series, they had an entire room focusing on the fantastic art of Gene Colan (Tomb of Dracula, Howard The Duck, Night Force, Daredevil, and really too many more titles to mention). Steve Leialoha inked Colan on Howard the Duck and there were several Howard pages on display (I don't own any Howard originals, sob, sob), most of them from the collection of novelist Glen David Gold (his Carter Beats The Devil is EXCELLENT and has some nods to his love of comics). The only Howard original on display that was from Leialoha's collection was from issue #11 and I was surprised to see that it had a notation of in addition to being inked by Leialoha, Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson contibuted their artistic wizardry to that page as well (this wasn't mentioned in the credits of the comic when it was published)! I saw Steve Leialoha in the lobby Friday / Saturday morning after the Watchmen sneak screening and after asking him what he thought of the movie (he mostly like it), asked him about that page from Howard I'd seen earlier and he told me that Adams and Wrightson were visting him at his studio at the time and wanted to draw over Colan's pencils, so of course he couldn't say no!
Just some cool "I don't know what they are exactly" things I saw while walking the convention floor.






The funniest shirt I saw at the convention.

San Francisco Wondercon 2009 pt.1

San Francisco Wondercon is like the little sister of the crazy huge San Diego Comic-Con. Wondercon is much more relaxed with about 25-30 thousand people versus Comic-Con's 125,000! The hugeness of Comic-Con has its pros and cons and should be experienced at least once, but Kate and I are thinking that we're going to make Wondercon our main convention (and thus skipping Comic-Con this year to make room for other people). Actually Saturday of Wondercon was pretty dense with people on the exhibit floor and it felt like Comic-Con and the air flow could have been better, but a person could still walk the whole exhibit floor in a couple of hours.
This lovely lass is sporting the movie version of the Silk Spectre costume.








A female Comedian (in the center or course). I wish I'd asked her and all the others who wore Watchmen costumes if they'd read the graphic novel already or if they were just attracted to the characters from what they'd seen from the movie (which they hadn't seen while they were working on their costumes). One would assume that if they went to the trouble to make those elaborate costumes that they read the book, but a lot of people just like superhero movies and will glom onto the characters from that source.
I asked R2D2 why the Star Wars prequel movies were so bad, but his reply was just a series of robotic noises and I didn't have a translator with me.



I wonder how many women have dressed up in the slave Leia costume since Return of The Jedi? I don't see how people who dress up in costumes (especially the ones guys with cameras fixate on) actually get to enjoy conventions because they're always getting asked to have their photo taken - but of course all of the attention they get has to be part of why they do this in the first place.

Comics Journal & Lynda Barry

I've been reading The Comics Journal for years and while I no longer seem to have the time to read everything from cover to cover like I used to, I still am happy for its existence as it is the only publication that discusses this medium with anything approaching real criticism and analysis. One criticism that people levy toward The Comics Journal is that it is too elitist, which is true, but it's also true that the medium needs a forum which presents a dialogue of this medium's finest creations that go toe to toe with the finest of any of the other "real" art forms like novels, gallery art, and or movies. My biggest problem with The Comics Journal is that they seem to pick an image for their covers that only appeals to those that know that particular artists' work and doesn't compel people who might like that artist or the contents within to actually want to pick up the magazine (it's almost like they're trying to sell as few copies as possible).

The greatest attraction of The Comics Journal is usually their massive in-depth forty plus page interviews with comic book creators. The two interviews in the newest issue, with Lynda Barry and Frank Quitely, are amongst the shortest they've done in a while (13 and 6 pages respectively). Actually the Frank Quitely interview is so short that I'm wondering why they even bothered. Even though the Lynda Barry (fantastic cartoonist of One! Hundred! Demons! and What It Is) interview is only thirteen pages long, it still is a great look into the mind of one of the most unique comic creators ever (seriously click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynda_Barry, read any of her books and you'll have discovered a unique voice / style). And although Lynda Barry has some thoughts on the nature of creativity and the imagination that are similar to Alan Moore's, I'm fairly certain she hasn't read any of Moore's works, but I sure would like to see the two of them in the same room bouncing ideas off of each other.

There is one twenty plus long interview in the newest Comic Journal with Dash Shaw (cartoonist of last years 720 page graphic novel Bottomless Bellybutton) that I haven't read yet and am looking forward to doing. This issue also feature several comic creators with their picks of the best of last year and there's a few seems that I was previously unaware of. The annoying thing about this best of 2008 part of this Comics Journal is that it wasn't all contained in one part of the issue, rather it was inbetween the various interviews for some crazy reason.

Who reads The Reader?

Firstly I'd like to apologize for my lame attempt at being funny with the title of this entry. I finally saw The Reader a couple of weeks ago and the next day bought the book because I wanted to see how it differed from the movie. This blog entry will have some very minor spoilers of the novel and movie, but none that most people couldn't figure out for themselves just from watching the trailer.

I thought The Reader worked very well as a movie, it had great acting and told the complex story very well. The movie hasn't gotten the best reviews, with it only tracking at 60% favorable, but not having read any of those reviews yet, I can't see why it wasn't better received. Basically the set up of The Reader is that a young guy (about 15 years old), Micheal, ends up having an affair with a much older woman (she's about 30 years old), Hanna, who he later finds out while attending a trial as part of his law schooling, was a guard at one of the concentration camps. At this point it had been several years since he'd seen her and finding out about this part of her past with all that he'd shared with her, just totally blind-sides him.

I don't know if I could say whether I liked The Reader better as a novel (called Der Vorleser when it was originally published in Germany in 1995) or as a movie because they both have their strengths. I am glad that I saw the movie first in this case, although I might have felt differently if I'd read the book first. There aren't any great differences between the book and the movie, but the book, even though it's not real long (it's only 217 pages) manages to flesh out some of the details (as novels are often wont to do) with a prose style which surprised me with its visual richness.

I thought both the novel and movie did a great job at communicating how the Holocaust affected German people that didn't even have any direct involvement in the atrocities committed during World War II for many years afterwards. Thinking about this now, I'm going to guess that some reviewers or people who saw the movie may think that The Reader downplays the horrors of the Holocaust, but as a recent documentary on PBS that unearthed a journal and photos of some workers at one of the death camps shows, the people working at the camps were not all monsters, they could do horrific things during the day and just act as if it was another job that needed to be done. That is why I think The Reader is so powerful, as it illustrates that the most seemingly "normal" person has the capacity to do horrific things.