0055: Syndicate Features Kings (and Queens)

I don't think I'd buy a movie on DVD simply because an artist I like drew the art on the packaging. There are plenty of DVD's and VHS tapes that have (and will) show up on this blog because I wanted the movie anyway, usually because the package artist played some part in creating the source material for the movie's subject (as with the Charles Burns costumes and set designs for "The Hard Nut" ) or was simply a good match for the art director and happened to be a comics artist. It's more rare that the artists themselves are the subject of the movie. I did have one such documentary early on, Comic Book Confidential . They're the sorts of things that I would naturally be attracted to, given my hobby. Here's a more recent one, from 2014:

The credits list 59 persons interviewed on camera and a further 18 whose interviews were to be made available online. Most of those persons were creators of syndicated newspaper comic strips, past and present, including the elusive Bill Watterson, who did the art for the front cover of the DVD box, seen above. The disc was available through the mail or by streaming at the website named on the back, StrippedFilm.com. You could very likely get it new or used, through any number of online sites you're more familiar with. I got mine by pre-ordering it through my preferred comics shop.

After the film hit art house theaters in February of 2014, Watterson became more active than he had been in the nearly 20 years since ending "Calvin And Hobbes". He did a guest week pencilling "Pearls Before Swine" and became the subject of an exhibit at Ohio State University. The exhibit can be revisited through its catalogue, "Exploring Calvin And Hobbes". That year he was also awarded the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, which ordinarily goes to European artists.

Extras include an optional directors' commentary track (there's two directors, so that apostrophe is right where it's supposed to be), a theatrical trailer and an 86-minute interview with Jim Davis which technically doubles the length of the film. Slightly more so if you consider than a good chunk of the 12 minutes of closing credits includes listing every individual contributor to the crowd-funding for the project, hundreds of them.
[Spoilers appear below the disc image.]

You can fast forward through the contributors if you want, but don't skip the credits completely or you'll miss the surprise Kate Micucci music video that's incorporated into them. Why that isn't mentioned anywhere on the outside of the box is a mystery. There's also no booklet, but that would be a disincentive to those streaming the movie. And besides, anyone would expect the booklet to include work by any of the dozens of creators who appear in the film. They can't all fit into a little insert and I'm sure the producers knew that they'd catch hell over whoever got left out by fans devoted enough to comic strips to buy a documentary about them.

0024: The Other Man Who Fell To Earth

Sure I miss David Bowie. But I can't help but worry about Mike Allred. A year ago, during the months after Bowie's death as the current "Silver Surfer" series kept getting delay after delay during the character's 50th Anniversary, I would often wonder if Allred was rocking in the fetal position somewhere. Bowie and early 70's glitter rock in general infused some of Allred's most successful work, such as "Madman" and "Red Rocket 7". Naming a regular cast member "Mott the Hoople" is not subtle. But there's always been a lot more to Allred's stories than a fruit salad of pop culture allusions. Witness: "Astroeque".

 

Dark Horse is still selling this on their website. I have no clue about its Netflix availability, but that's the perfect outlet for a movie like this. The budget is so low and so many of the cast and crew are closely ( and often literally) related that the line between "experimental film" and "home movie" blurs. According to an interview in "Modern Masters Volume 16: Mike Allred" (TwoMorrows, April 2008), Allred states that the version included as a bonus on the "G-Men From Hell" DVD is the "full screen" (meaning chopped down to the shape of a TV screen) version with sound that wasn't mixed properly. This version, released on NTSC VHS in 1998, is the version he would have preferred they use.

The movie itself, made in 1996, looks in retrospect like a rehearsal for a specific scene from Red Rocket 7, without costumes. This movie, the LP-sized comic book mini-series and the album on CD (featuring Allred's band The Gear) all feel like parts of a multimedia project, in which no one part is completely redundant to the others. Of course, that also means that no one part is complete in itself. I would recommend the film with the caveat that one should watch it both before AND after reading the collected "Red Rocket 7". The album supplements both but stands on its own as a musical work if not as a story; I would save the album for last. The comic series is the best of the three but it has a way of making parts of the movie that are ambiguous become much more specific. The movie plays on the viewers' imaginations more. Reading the comic first has the same effect as watching a music video (remember those?) before hearing a song in the context of an album as audio alone. Without the video, a piece of music can provoke different images in the imaginations of different people. After seeing it, that's the image that comes to most peoples' minds. I will say that watching the movie was much more enjoyable after reading the comic, but less thought provoking.

0021: Morris Dances While Charles Burns?

No, it doesn't stand for "Eerie Type of Adaptation".
Officially it's Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, but it's enough if you don't confuse him with Heinrich. Heinrich was the 19th Century psychiatrist whose stories inspired the Scissormen from Grant Morrison's tenure writing "Doom Patrol". E.T.A. Hoffman was the supernatural fantasist famous for writing "The Sandman", which in no way resembles the Neil Gaiman series. He's even more famous for two other works adapted for other media. One, "Tales of Hoffman", was a collection of stories that inspired an opera by Offenbach. The other, "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King", inspired a ballet by Tchaikovsky.

Earlier in this blog I mentioned Richard Sala's greatly increased visibility due to MTV's "Liquid Television" animation anthology series. Charles Burns also had segments on the show, but he had already been a known quantity in alternative comics for nearly a decade when it first aired. He was a contributor to the original RAW series and created two of the books on its tiny imprint. In retrospect, if the Mark Morris Dance Group wanted to relocate Hoffmann's creepy mix of the supernatural and social anxiety to a 20th Century suburb, Burns would be the perfect choice. But with the 1986 stage version (based on illustrations by Maurice Sendak) circulating on cable and VHS, getting people to watch this would be an uphill climb, although this would benefit from the contrast. It's not my favorite production. (Rotten Tomatoes has no score for it whatsoever; the 1986 version gets a 72%, which is about right. In both cases, the design is the strongest asset.) Filmed in 1992 as "The Hard Nut" and broadcast on PBS' "Great Performances" on December 16th of that year, Elektra/Nonesuch released it on VHS the following year and on DVD in October 2007. It does still occasionally get rebroadcast. I thought I saw it on one of the more adventurous commercial cable channels, but that might have been a feverish dream. Anyway, it does get nearly the love that the Nureyev version gets. Still, get a load of that Pee-Wee's-Playhouse-meets-Kafka version of the Nutcracker doll being held by Drosselmeyer on the production still:

If anybody sees one of those on Etsy, let me know. And that's actually the 2005 cast, not the cast on the video. I wonder if it's the same prop, or else... they might have produced multiple copies for road productions! Aw, man, now I want one. I don't know why, though. It's for the Mark Morris Dance Group, which means a hundred guys have already put their Mouse King in it. You know what? I'm good.

Now, being a comics oriented blog, I suppose I should make more of the whole Nutcracker/Pinocchio/AstroBoy lineage, but that would involve dragging in a lot more research material (and becoming more fluent in German, Italian and Japanese beyond ordering a meal and finding a hotel), so I'll just weasel out of it by saying that I want to stick as closely as possible to whatever is already in my collection. and there'll be another bit of it later this week.

0007: Mann 'Splaining?

Many years ago I worked in a large, chain bookstore. Unlike many of its competitors (and some of its suburban mall locations), we had a pretty literate and knowledgeable staff. Inevitably, some of the quirkier corporate decisions about organization caused knowing eyerolls to be exchanged. Most were really subjective, coin-toss decisions, but one that bothered me, as a science fiction and fantasy fan, is that whenever a book falling into either of those categories was a hack, by-the-numbers, franchise installment it was shelved in the sci-fi/fantasy section, but if it was a critically acclaimed work of literature (Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Michael Crichton, even Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein") then it would be kept out of the section and shelved in General Fiction. Seeing the buzz currently surrounding the television series based on Margaret Atwood's excellent "The Handmaid's Tale", it burns me to know that people seeking out more of her work won't be finding it surrounded by Edwin Abbott's "Flatland" or Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles". At least it will be spared the indignity of competing with Volume 15 of "The Laser Gun Wars Imperative Saga" or whatever is getting mechanically cranked out these days.

On the bright side, there's the internet. Someone surfing to find out more about Atwood might come across the documentary "In The Wake Of The Flood", a record of her innovative book tour to promote her "The Year Of The Flood" before turning 70. That might lead to links about the director, Ron Mann, best known for his self-produced documentaries "Poetry In Motion" (1982), "Dream Tower" (1984), "Tales of Rat Fink" (2006) and "Altman" (2014). I'm hoping their attention will also be drawn to another film he directed which, like "In The Wake Of The Flood", was a bigger scale production involving a lot of travel and some co-producers. "Comic Book Confidential" (1988) was the right film at the right time. Four years later, one of the artists profiled would be the first graphic novelist awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Below are the cover and first page of a promotional comic published in 1988, when the documentary was released in Canada, both drawn by Chester Brown. At the time, Brown was creating the comic Yummy Fur (published by Vortex after life as a mini-comic) and was about two-thirds through the "Ed the Happy Clown" feature. By late 1989, Ed was over and Yummy Fur would begin 1990 reinvented as an autobiographical comic.

 

The inside front cover were typeset credits for the movie. The credits for the comic, such as they are, are in the indicia on that first page, below Brown's art. The inside back cover is all text mini-bios of people credited on the inside front cover. Pages 2 and 3 are below, designed by Mark Askwith and bpNichol with lettering by Ron Kasman (per the indicia):

 


Pages 4 through 14 each have two capsule biographies    

and self portraits of the creators profiled. The portraits
are usually assembled into posters to package or
promote the movie, as on the back cover (right) →









Finally, the remaining pages, 15 and 16, are a short story
by R.G. Taylor called "Addicted", actually a four-pager.

If you're curious about what else was published by Sphinx Comix, don't lose any sleep over it; Sphinx Productions is Ron Mann's film production company in Toronto, Ontario, home of several small comics publishers. Sphinx Comix was no doubt created solely to create the promotional comic and rented the resources used by any of several publishers in the area.

During the 90's the movie made the rounds on VHS (ISBN# 1559401613) while a new generation of innovators (Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, Adrian Tomine, Seth, Joe Sacco and others) emerged, often from the same publishers carrying the artist profiled in the film. The tape was followed by a CD-ROM in 1994 (ISBN# 1559402644) that added "over 120 pages of comics by the film's featured artists". Don't ask me what the contents are, specifically. I'm just quoting the package copy.

The DVD was released in 2002, including what must be the extras from the CD-ROM since, in addition to the trailers, etc., there are short stories by each of the artists that I would estimate total about 120 pages. Below is the sleeve, then the inside front cover and first page of the booklet. Brian Azzarello writes the new introduction.

The remaining eleven pages of the DVD booklet reproduces pages 4 through 14 of the free promotional comic, so if you pick up the DVD you can enlarge each of the scans above and reproduce the experience of finding the free promotional comic. It won't reproduce the experience of 1988 movie ticket prices, but what do you want from a free blog?