Early Adaptation

The other night the missus and I were looking though our instant queue on Netfilx and settled on an exploitation film. These kinds of films are kinda defined by being low budget, churned out quickly so the production values are slight, and generally made for a specific audience and set to be released in their neighborhoods.

This was a Blaxpoitation movie, and starred a young lady that was the reason we put it in the instant queue in the first place: Pam Grier.

Made in 1975 in Los Angeles, the movie is called Friday Foster. Pam Grier plays a young lady named Friday Foster, a young former model who lives with her younger brother, and now makes a living as a fashion photographer.

I was surprised to learn that this premise was actually based on a daily comic strip, and when I looked it up, I found this:

This is the Dell Comics edition/collection(?) of Friday Foster stories, where she splits her time between photography and sleuthing.

This is an early comic adaptation movie, and shows that non-superhero comics have a long history that spans to this era (Road to Perdition, From Hell).

As an exploitation movie, this is pretty good. The story and plot are convoluted and will keep you on your toes (uhh, with a grain of salt of course), and, if you compare it to Superfly or Shaft, it looks very good.

Also: if you've ever had any idea why Pam Grier was an "it" girl, watch this movie. She's smart, resourceful, loyal, has more moxy than power, is fearless, has a sense of humor, and is a young fox, showing off her stacked chest in non-gratuitous ways. It kinda reminded me of watching the 1989 Tim Burton's Batman for the first time in many years back in 2007. Having seen Kim Basinger in things like L.A. Confidential I remember thinking of how in love with her I was back during the Batman days when I was a kid. Then, 2007, and I was reminded what it was that did it.

Seeing Pam Grier in Friday Foster reminded me of a feeling that I didn't have specifically for her, but was the, "Oh...now I get it," epiphany.

Bongo Shows up in "The Simpsons"

One of the great pleasures in the alt-weekly liberal newspapers are the comics, things like "This Modern World" and "Trouble Town", and one of my favorites, the cynical and scarily brilliant "Life in Hell", from Matt Groening.

"Life in Hell", or rather a single comic given as a gift to James L. Brooks, prompted that producer to give Matt Groening a meeting, the results of which are well known by now.

Bongo is the single-eared son of Binky, the main character of "Life in Hell". He has been the star of two of my favorite single panels ever (I took these pictures from my Big Book of Hell).

So, when I was watching an episode of The Simpsons one morning while lately being on the mend, I was excited to see Bongo sitting in the front row of a studio audience during an Itchy and Scratchy segment.

This is from the "Bart After Dark" episode, when Bart gets a job working at the burlesque house. That show has one of my favorite lines, uttered by Bart, upon believing the Maison Derriere was inhabited by witches: "Lady, I've been grossly misinformed about witches."

Preface?

I wrote a piece about three topics recently in which I mentioned a few of the random comic book artists I like and would follow no matter the title or character. I didn't mention specifically the good writers I respect, like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, John Byrne, maybe John Ostrander. This was more about artists, or those really cool creators who both write and pencil the work.

What I've done for this post is go through my collection and find the random things some of the guys I named have done and have some pictures. The guys I named were Frank Miller, Tim Truman, Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, and my favorite superhero artist, Joe Quesada.

Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee and Erik Larson and Sam Kieth and Greg Capullo...the powerhouse of the Image comics lineup, while spectacular, aren't really for me. I recognized the skills, but I wasn't around while they were cutting their teeth on things like Spider-Man and the Hulk, and I always felt like going with them would be just too easy and trendy. I found my own guys I liked.

Tom Mandrake's a guy I liked, but he was the artist for a specific title I read, and I'll be getting to that one in due time.

Okay, so...Frank Miller has become mostly famous lately because of the movies made from his Sin City and 300 properties, two collections I have pretty much have all of. I first found Sin City in 1991, when it was that weird smelling paper and nothing but stark black and white, expressive silhouettes, and adolescent boy fantasy. I started then and followed it going forward. 300 was beautiful, while "based of historical events", was a fun comic miniseries.

Here's my random Frank Miller comic:

It's designed to look like an old "Tales from the Crypt" book, and has three stories, all written and illustrated by Miller. The first is a Lance Blastoff story, the first story with this character, reprinted from the A-variant cover of "Dark Horse Presents #100", but in color for the first time. The second story is a Sin City tale, and the third story is an original Lance Blastoff tale. The different styles between the two Blastoff stores is interesting; the first is the original, and the original was initially done in the black-and-white Sin City style, the stark contrasting that fans are used to. In this edition, it's colored in, but retains a bit of the original blocky flair. The second Blastoff story is similar to the cover, closer in style to a space-comic.

Tim Truman is the next guy, and his style is much different. I can't really describe the design, but "un-flashy" may be a start. He tends to bring in elements of the old west and science fiction, blending them seemlessly with his unique artwork. At first I was not a fan, but it grew on me. His most famous work may be his screwball Jonah Hex mini-series', the one of which I have is "Riders of the Worm and Such". An early project that Truman created for the small publisher Eclipse was called Scout. In this post-apocalyptic tale the main character is an Apache warrior, because in Truman's own words, "who else would still be surviving?"

He was given the reins to a title I followed, Turok, Dinosaur Hunter, and drew and wrote issues 7, 8, and 9 with it's own contained story line. Here's the cover for #7, with Turok, the dinosaurs, and the Spider-people, who Truman brought into the Lost World. Up until this story line, Turok was one of the sleekest looking, dinosaur killing Miwoks ever presented in comic form. With this issue, I remember thinking, WTF? What did they do to my character? Eventually I came to like the artist and found some of his older books and kept an eye out for his newer ones.

Mike Mignola has become "famous", kinda, also, with the two Hellboy movies. Hellboy was Mignola's creation when he left the constricting gigs and was given more freedom. One of the earliest works he did is seen here, an off-regular-timeline tale of Batman, "Gotham by Gaslight." This story is set in London in the late nineteenth century, where the Wayne's are wealthy philanthropists, get gunned down, and young Bruce does his thing, and eventually we get Batman tracking down Jack the Ripper. The cover below shows off the basis of Mignola's eventual off-kilter Hellboy look.

Mike Allred is a different story. His comic here is anything but random. He's spent many a year trying to forge a career outside the mainstream, and created his most famous character, Madman, a few years before getting this almost-major company, Dark Horse, to publish a new series. The colors are eye-popping, the action is cartoony and anachronistic, and the plots are bizarre enough to be fun as hell. I have an even more random and harder to find book by Allred, from an even smaller imprint, but I'm trying to raise awareness to Madman. Allred sued Warner Brothers Animation for their character Freakazoid, who looks almsot exactly like Madman, except he's got a purple suit with a black exclamation point. I think they settled, or Allred dropped the case because he couldn't afford the court costs. He's since worked on Superman and a few other things, but his unmistakable character design always catches the eye.

Ah, on to my favorite superhero artist, and candidate for simply favorite comic artist, Joe Quesada. This is the third, and last, issue of Ninjak that Joe Quesada worked on. His work for Valiant was fast and bright. He did some covers for Solar, did the for Bloodshot #0, did the entire X-O Manowar #0, and the first three issues of Ninjak. I'm pretty sure that's all the Quasada Valiant work. Seems so bizarre, thinking about it now. Even now, fans like me can pick his work up easily.

Maybe this is some kind of introduction to a lengthy attempt to discuss my time with comics and how it's evolved through the years.

No, this isn't an introduction, it's more of a preface. A tiny taste.

Look at all the pretty pictures!

Pep Streebek Memories

Using my streaming Netflix I watched a movie that was a favorite of my brother and myself: the 1987 "classic" Dragnet. A comedic look at the police procedural from the fifties and sixties, it stars Dan Ackroyd as the anachronistic Joe Friday, acting exactly as his "uncle", the original show's star, named the same and played by the show's creator Jack Webb. Ackroyd plays is straight from the sixties, the super straight man for Tom Hank's detective Pep Streebek.

It was this night that I remembered how funny and entertaining and confident Tom Hanks was, or maybe "can be". I never watched the Med Ryan movies he made, and ever since Forrest Gump knocked out Pulp Fiction in most categories at the Oscars, I was pretty much done with Tom Hanks.

Of course you can recognize skill, and I enjoyed Catch Me if You Can, but Tom Hanks as a draw for me was over.

I had somehow buried my fond memories of what his movies use to mean for me. I'm talking the bad ones, or at least the ones other folks consider not his star-turns. I'm talking after Big, after Splash...I'm talking my old favorites. (Actually Dragnet is older than Big.)

The Big 3 as my brother and I probably see it were Dragnet (1987), The 'Burbs (1989), and, probably the weirdest one, Joe Vs the Volcano (1990), which it turns out is a Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks movie. I remember it more fondly...the brain cloud and a suicidal sacrifice...maybe I should watch it again, and try not to be too disappointed.

Maybe it was just Dragnet and The 'Burbs that endeared Tom Hanks to us. I do know that I fully loved those movies as a kid, and Tom Hanks was a funny guy who could carry a movie.

Seeing Dragnet again as an adult filled in the blanks that whooshed over my head as a kid watching a movie with those kinds of jokes. The first time newly minted partners Friday and Streebek show up at the skin mag Bait creator's Hefner-esque mansion, the lady on the intercom mistakes who they are, and with a throaty and sexy voice asks, "Vibrator repair?" How ridiculous, of course, but that was a joke that I never understood.

There were other jokes like that, but really, I was more basking in my pleasant memories of the Streebek Phenomena. How crazy a mostly wasted movie about glorifying the LA cops in 1987, the same shitty group of assholes that had lost their grip on the crack epidemic and fed the anger and fear of an entire subset of the city's population until they blew four years later in a major race riot caused me to remember the power that fucking Tom Hanks had over my imagination as a kid?

Good stuff. Also, A League of Their Own. I liked that one, too.