Comic Books Posts

« Previous

All that’s old is new again.

While meandering through the comic shop (Jim Hanley’s Universe, for those of you in NYC) last Saturday, I realized a few things:

  • It’s been a really long time since I’d been in a comic shop.
  • All the comics that I used to read have long since gone out of print or are just not being carried by JHU; most of them were independent books. Battle Pope has been picked up by Image (circa several months ago) and is being colored (for no apparent reason, IMHO) but that’s about it, as far as I know.
  • I miss hanging out with my buddies and wandering over to the comic shop after a long Saturday of playing Magic: The Gathering and wandering through the mall. (Yes, I am a nerd.)

Realizing these things made me think back on the kinder, gentler times of the late 90s and early 00s, and the comics that I read when I was first introduced to the strange and wondrous things known as ‘webcomics.’

What? I do a webcomic now, and I was in a comic store.
Moving on.

As far as I can tell, most of those comics are still doing okay. For reasons that I am not entirely sure of, I’ve stopped reading them, even though most of them are still alive and well. Maybe I’ll get back on those respective bandwagons in the near future.

The comic that first came to mind and spurred this entry is The Mr. Chuck Show, by J. Myers. This comic now resides at Keenspot, but once upon several years ago, it boasted its own little corner of the web. I believe that he was invited to join, and now Keenspot holds the comic’s “spot,” so to speak.

In it’s heyday, it chronicled the misadventures of a small cast of animals and humans who interacted in a world without backgrounds, and sometimes did ‘episodes’ of The Mr. Chuck Show, hosted by Mr. Chuck himself, who happens to be a dog. The cast is a bit dog-heavy, but they’re all so different, (in design and temperament) that it doesn’t really register unless you stop to think about it.

It had a curious blend of observational and off-color humor, and featured such pithy phrases as ‘wash your ass, kids. I’m serious,’ (a sock puppet’s advice to the audience,)* and various threats of excessive violence perpetrated with garden tools (a legitimate threat) I personally am a fan of the idea (not the practice) of beating someone with a shovel, but a rake will do in a pinch.

As if that didn’t appeal to your lowest common denominator hard enough, it also had a voluptuous blonde (in fact, the only regular female character in the strip,) who was the subject of many an inappropriate gag, although she held her own well enough.

This comic was a lot of fun, and I haven’t even mentioned the clown yet. But, I won’t. You have to go read it yourself.

In closing, I’d like to say, that like the song whose name I never knew, but still kind of remember: ‘you never really know what you have until it’s gone,’ and now that I realize that the Mr. Chuck Show has been gone for awhile, I miss it. Thanks J., for putting in the work, and taking an interesting little group of characters through a strange and wacky series of events.

I’ll see you guys next week, if not sooner.

*I don’t know if the strip is in the archive or not, but after an hour of searching the archives as quickly as I could, I couldn’t find it- there’s several years of more-than-weekly updates to go through, and a few ‘Rerun Weeks.’ Read the rest of them- I will be, and mayhap one of us will find it.

Post to Twitter

October 19, 2006 | No Comments

Sketchy Details.

Hel-lo Internet.

This is my first installment in Sapo Entertainment’s corner of the blogosphere, and I’m not entirely sure what to do with it.

It’s not that I’ve never blogged before, in fact, I have several blogs that I neglect equally, each of them started to make a comment on someone else’s blog; except for the MySpace blog, which I posted in once, and only because I didn’t know any better.

This is why I don’t have a Blogger account- most of the people I know who are on it let anyone post. As for the ones that don’t… Well, I’ll probably get around to it when one of them writes something so thought-provoking that I feel the need to go through the process of registering for another blog site.

At any rate, now that the introductions are out of the way, on with the blog.

Since I started with Sapo Entertainment, webcomics have become a large part of my work, as has reading webcomics. So, the Thursday blog will be about webcomics, at least until I think of something more interesting, because heaven knows, no one’s ever done something like that before…

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I’ll mostly be writing about comics that I actually read, whether I know/have a vested interest in the people involved with them or not, as opposed to writing about “the industry,” or affects that other industries are having on webcomics. I just don’t stay current enough with the comics in my Bookmark folder to monitor trends; I apologize ahead of time.

that having been said, if you feel like having me write something about your comic, feel free to email a link to your comic to cottonfluff at gmail dot com.

Our first installment is a comic that I stumbled across while posting in talkaboutcomics.com’s bulletin board, and is called “The Front.” It’s written and drawn by Jerry Drozd of Make Like a Tree Comics.
This comic, as it turns out, is actually a month away from ending. It’s a 6-part miniseries that I started reading about two months or so ago, and I only found out that it’s as close to ending as it is by actually looking for the homepage so I could link it in this blog posting. (The link on the forum led right to the comic, and I bookmarked it there, heedless of anything else that might actually be at the site. Shame on me.)

Anyway, the art style’s superheroic, but not like anything that I’ve ever seen before (which might not be saying much), and is probably reminicent of something that I would know if I’d read more physical comics.* But I am a different breed of geek, so I do the best that I can.

I’ve only gotten to Part 3 so far, and I’ve found it to be quite an entertaining read. It’s a “coming of age” story, it’s got metahumans, and it even pokes fun at some of our traditional concepts of villainy. The only issue I’ve had with it is that it’s in black and white- and that only because there is a character who gets referred to several times by the other characters as “Orange Guy.”

So yeah, I’m not complaining very much about The Front, and you probably won’t either. I’ll be clicking back to it tomorrow on my lunch hour.

That’s it for this installment of [insert catchy column name here, probably something along the lines of "Webcomics Weekly"] I’ll see you next week; I actually have to finish my own comic pages.

*About 15 minutes after writing that, I stumbled over another part of the Make Like a Tree site, and it turns out that they did all three issues of PPV, a physical comic which I’ve actually bought, enjoyed, and wished that there had been more of. Life’s funny like that, I suppose.

It also turns out that they do/have done a number of other real-life things, go look over their site for more.

Post to Twitter

October 5, 2006 | No Comments

Hollywood is ruining comic books part 1

There are a few things in this large universe that I do not quite understand, yet. There is quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, atomic physics, molecular physics, computational chemistry, quantum chemistry, particle physics, and nuclear physics. Yet the most baffling thing I have found in this universe has been the comic book movies. Yes you read right, the comic book movie baffles the hell out of me.

To understand why it throws me for a loop, you first have to understand how a movie is brought to life. The first thing you need is a story to tell. Writers are a good source for story telling. The writer creates a story, and then passes the story off to a screenwriter who organizes it into a screenplay. After you have the story in screenplay form, you have to create a visual representation of that story. That usually happens with storyboard artists. The storyboard artists’ draws the whole story out so the director has a sense of what everything would look like. Then you get the actors, film crew, sets, props, and a whole lot of money. Then boom your making a movie. This process has not changed in Hollywood since filmmaking was discovered.

If you think about this process, and you think about what a comic book is you start to put a couple of things together. Wow a comic book is a story with a script in a visual format. All the really hard work is done. Now here is the part that baffles me. If comics book have already did all the hard work, why is the story on the screen never, and I mean never, the story that I have read in the comic book. It’s absolutely drives me insane. I would not mind if the story was a little different or they worked on parts that have not been written before. The newest Batman movie ‘Batman Begins’ did a good job of covering a part of the Batman story that is not completely covered in the comics. I have not read Batman in a long time but watching the movie I did not get that ‘they really screwed this one up.’ Feeling. Of course I could go into depth, on every comic book movie and pick them apart. That’s not what I want to do right now.

I want to take a stab at why Hollywood ruins a perfectly good story by changing it. I believe it all comes down to ego. Everyone in Hollywood is an expert on what the audience wants, so much so that there is a formula they follow down to the wire.  With the comic book movies they take the parts they like then mix it into the formula out the other end come the same movie again and again. I watched an interview with Sam Raimi, I am not going to quote him cause I don’t remember his exact words. He said something like he changed parts of Spiderman’s origin because they did not make sense in today’s world and the audience would not believe it. That’s why the spider is not radioactive and Peter Parker did not create the web shooters. Now I like Sam Raimi, I think he does really good work when, he has created the story. I do however think that it takes some set of brass balls to change Spiderman’s story in any way shape or form. The problem is he thought his ideas were better and he thought he knew the audience better.  I believe the truth is he wanted to put a little of himself in the story to make it his. In the end you don’t so much have the story you grew up on and expected to see, you have a version that they think you want to see.

That’s what makes me sad I did not read these comics because I wanted to eventfully see a ‘better’ version of it on the big screen. I read the comics because I enjoyed the story; I go to see the movies hoping to watch that same story in motion. I have been nothing but disappointed. Wake up Hollywood your not the smartest guys in the room anymore.

Thanks

Sean “Sapo” Pisano

In part 2 I explore what the movies have done to the comic book world.

Post to Twitter

August 18, 2006 | No Comments
« Previous

  • This is Sidebar 2, used in three column layouts. You can add content to this sidebar using Widgets from the WordPress control panel. Adding widgets to this sidebar will remove this message.