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Thursday, October 28, 2004
I'VE GOT A GREAT IDEA!
All damn week long I have been answering the phone to either nobody or to the ending portion of recorded message telling me who I should vote for. About ten times a day. Thanks automated dialing! I thought we got rid of you philistines when this country outlawed telemarketers with the list.
Now my idea: I think we should find these people doing this and break cricket bats on their faces. Repeatedly.
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NOSTALGIA
Everyone suffers from nostalgia to some degree or another. What is nostalgia? I believe it is more than a simple curiosity with something from your past. It goes beyond a fascination with things from your childhood, lets say. I believe it is a personal archeology, an affinity for things from previous generations' cultures if not the generation immediately preceding yours.
I believe that in many cases it is as simple as romanticizing about a time gone by. The "good ol' days". I seriously doubt that any particular period of history was more golden than any other. But we sure seem willing to impose a lens of happiness onto them. I wonder if people think that they could escape their daily stressors in a different era. Probably not.
It is easy to become fascinated with a different generation's culture. And it is a culture. From clothing designs, architecture, music, movies, art, etc. All these are produced from people influenced by everything around them at that point in time. And we are constantly being influenced even from childhood. That is why our music, buildings, heck, even the shape of my computer was designed in a certain way. People growing up in the sixties and seventies were influenced by their surroundings which was designed by people who grew up in the forties and thirties. And so on and so on. Don't think this is true? Try writing a fifties song that doesn't sound like a parody.
Which brings us right up to retro. Retro is somebody trying to recreate artifacts from the past. Usually in order to fill some void in a fad for economic gain. They usually miss the point. They can grab the surface but not the essence. Looking at some old magazines to swipe some shirt designs for your new line of bowling shirts is not the same as being there.
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Tuesday, October 26, 2004
I recently was at a young girls' slumber party (chaperone, chaperone). They stayed up watching movies one of which was Labyrinth. I haven't seen this since it came out about twenty years ago. It was a mad hybrid of Henson and Sid and Marty Krofft styles of puppetry. Wow. I had forgotten so much of it. My memory must be going. I remember thinking that it was silly but tolerable but had no specific memories of it. And I was right.
It also features David Bowie as a gay Dracula.
And a cameo by Elton John's penis.
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Sunday, October 17, 2004
IT COMES IN THREE'S
The old cliche' of celebrities dying in three's. We had the passing of Christopher Reeve, as well as Rodney Dangerfield. One is getting respect up in comic's Heaven with one liners and the other is probably wrestling horses down in Hell. I'll let you figure out which is which.
So, who is next to fill out this trifecta of expiration? As loathe as I am to voice this thought into the world, my marker is on Abe Vigoda. Don't get me wrong I am a great fan of Vigoda. "Fish" is in the hizzows!! My girlfriend has money on Larry King. That sounds like a sure bet. The guy is on his fourteenth bypass, and his fifth marriage to a seventeen year old. Or is it his seventeenth marriage to a five year old? I think the contrast shirts and suspenders are all that is holding him together.
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Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Man this Burt's Bees stuff is everywhere I look. But look at the mug on this guy.
Should we be buying product from Burt? Does he look sane to you? I don't know if he looks like a farmer..
or the uni-balmer.
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Monday, October 11, 2004
SPX BETHESDA
I attended the SPX show in Bethesda, MD last weekend. I was going partly to promote Expert's Guide to Killing Things That Go Bump in the Night.
Expert's Guide is the book I penciled and I am now working on the second issue. I attended the show to help out my buddy Dern, the writer of said book because he would be unable to attend the full weekend. I flew out Thursday and I guess I just don't travel well. I always have these ultra pessimistic thoughts conjuring up worst case scenarios of lost luggage, cancelled flights, etc. Now on with the con report.
FRIDAY
The show didn't start until 3:00 so I got up and hung out with Dern and his wife Kendra. Then it was time for lunch. When Dern and Kendra were out to San Diego in August for Comic-Con he took me and my girlfriend out to lunch. During lunch I made some joke about him living in clam chowder country and he corrected me. Apparently Baltimore and the greater surrounding area is actually crab country. They have crab in everything out there. I remember him talking it up so I demanded that they take me somewhere for Maryland cuisine, figuring I would get some good seafood. Right? Not really. I don't think I had one good meal during the whole trip with one exception. They took me to some local eatery and when the waitress came by to ask me if I wanted a to-go box for my half eaten sandwich I said, "no I wanted a to-stay plate. Oh I have one."
Mignolia and I
Sean Wang and I
Then we had to get on the road and we barely made it to the show right as it opened to the public.
Dern ran upstairs to get our table set up as I checked into the hotel. Got everything squared away and went upstairs to find that through no fault of Dern's we are somehow sharing a table with another exhibitor. O.K. it is a long table I can deal with that. Just like my buddy Jeff Parker (read down a bit) has rules for attending a con I think there has to be rules for exhibiting at a con.
Rules like:
1.Don't borrow a silver metallic sharpie to sign a book and then not return and set it down among your pens and equipment like it is yours. They used to call this stealing.
2. Don't keep creeping your books further and further over the clearly dividing halfway line of the table into my section.
3. Don't finish your drink in a paper cup and then set it absent mindedly right down in front of me as I am trying to draw.
4. Don't talk to yourself. Because I will turn to answer your question and then realize that "oh you are talking to yourself." Creepy.
5. Don't sit and twitch in your chair. More creepy.
6. And please, please, when your buddy brings you lunch, no matter how hungry you are, don't make sex noises as you eat. Ultra-creepy.
7. Most of all, don't try to steal customers who I am talking into buying my book by interrupting and suggesting your own book!
What's with that smile, Dern?
That's basically how Friday went for me. Until the show ended. Grabbed a bite of dinner and hung out in the hotel bar schmoozing with other exhibitors for several hours.
Kyle Baker and I
the new Jack Kirby, I mean it, Tom Scioli
Wizard's/Ape Entertainment's Brent Erwin
SATURDAY
Saturday I was flying solo all day. Not a lot of sales so I spent the day talking to people from the comic's media. Newsrama , Heidi MacDonald, and others, so the show was not a complete loss. Did a few sketches for some people in their sketchbooks. And if they email me scans of them I might post them in the future.
They had a cash bar all day at the show. So I saw plenty of exhibitors as well as attendees walking around with beers. This just proved a little theory of mine:
comic guys+beer=lots of burping
All day long from various quarters of the room you could hear belching.
Just Sketchin' officer. Honest
Unisex facilities?!? What kind of crazy world am I trapped in?
Stepped out for a bite to eat at lunch. Walked down the street a block until I hit the "Taste of Bethesda" festival. Looked at the food stalls and decided to pass. Wound up at a nice little Chinese restaurant called Foong Lin. This was the culinary exception to my trip. And even then it was just O.K.
Back to the show for the rest of the day until it ended at 8:00. More of the same. Show ends. Now I am on my own in downtown Bethesda on a Saturday night looking for dinner. I had already eaten at the shitty bbq joint across from the hotel. So I wander around a bit. So I wind up at a Mexican place called "Guapo's". I should have known better. I should have known that Mexican food in Maryland is just science fiction. Just imagine if a person who had only read about Mexican food but had never actually eaten any and tried to cook some up. But you have to play to your audience in the restaurant business. The waitstaff appeared to be Mexican so I refused to speak anything but Spanish there. The waiter comes over and I speak to him in Spanish and he looks right at me and says "...You're not from Maryland are you?".
Here comes the kicker. The waiter and I are conversing in Spanish for about five minutes, we're telling jokes and such, and then he is "HAHA I will bring you another beer" on him, without me asking for one. Then I noticed it has gotten quieter in the room. There is a white couple off to the left and a large white family to the right, and various gavauchos around the room staring at me. I can just hear Thurston Howell III saying, "My gawd Lovey, he looks like one of us but he's really one of them".
Which leads me into a rather bizarre observation about my limited time in Maryland. Nothing but white people. I hope I am not one of those people who can't see past people's outer appearances. I can only hope that it is because I am coming in from LA. LA is polycultural ground zero. Where we have one of everything. So to drop into a town that is more or less ethnically homogenous it becomes readily noticeable.
Went back to the hotel bar and hung out with various cartoonist until late talking printers, foreign markets and shit.
Old school cartoonist John Terhorst
A little Rick Spears and Rob G action for ya!
SUNDAY
Flying out today. The show didn't start until 11:00 so I walked around taking pictures of the downtown for reference. Got back to the show to hang out a bit, to work the table, to check out, and to wait for the shuttle to take to the airport. This time the trip back home seemed to take less time than going. Glad to be home and back to work
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Thursday, October 07, 2004
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!
It is strange what getting older can do to you. I don't mean even the additional physical aches and pains, but things that just never get noticed before. Or more specifically, you were never capable of noticing before. I was listening to Grand Funk Railroad's 70's jam I'm Your Captain. It gets to the part after the bridge where the protagonist of the song is singing "I'm getting closer to my home". A nice sentiment right? Finally coming home after a long sea voyage. And it struck me, he is not singing about going "home". He has lost consciousness due to strangulation and his life is slowing leaving him. The song is about death. Birthdays, heh.
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Tuesday, October 05, 2004
DEBATE? WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING DEBATE!
I missed the presidential debate last week as I was flying out to Maryland for the SPX show that weekend. (A report is forthcoming). They were actually showing the debate on tv moniters at Hartsville airport in Atlanta. I caught just the first question before boarding began. As much as all the news and comedy shows have gone over and over it in a week I feel like I actually have seen it.
Personally, I would much rather watch a presidential Indian leg wrestling contest than a debate. Wouldn't you? C'mon, old Crazy-Legs Kerry vs George "I will answer your questions telepathically" Bush. Man, what a show that would be. It's actually how Andrew Jackson was elected.
At the houses of Parliment
Everybody's talking about the president
We all chipped in for a bag of cement.
Junior's farm
Sir Paul McCartney
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