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.

Homosexual Green Lantern Clarifications

I thought I'd clear up this whole gay Green Lantern conversation. Mainly because of a stupid republican-themed comic strip in my local paper, "Mallard Filmore", kept muddling up the situation with its ignorance.

So here goes. DC Comics is considering it a brave and bold move from the company, trying to keep it cutting edge. They consider it the first "major" gay superhero, since he's pretty far from the first. Green Lantern's major, right? He did just have a big budget movie release, right? Yes and no.

In DC Comics, Green Lantern is a major character, but that would be Hal Jordan or later, Kyle Rayner.

The character they made the first "major" gay superhero is indeed a Green Lantern, but it is Allan Scott, the gentleman on the left below, labeled as the Golden Age Green Lantern.

This was the first incarnation of a hero called Green Lantern, and this is not the same as the Hal Jordan iteration and the one the film's based upon. The Green Lantern Corp from the movie and both the Silver Age and Modern Age from above is an intergalactic police force that wield rechargeable rings that manifest will power.

Alan Scott was a train conductor who found a magical meteor and forged a magical ring from it. Whereas Hal Jordan used power from the central core, Alan Scott uses an entirely different source: magic.

Above it may seem odd that Hal Jordan occupies both the Silver Age and Modern Age spots. A few notes on that. One, this set is from 1992, and the major changes in both the industry as well as the DC Universe had yet to take place. At different times after 1959 many of the early comic book characters were updated and revamped for a more modern audience. 1959 is when the first updating occurred, when the Flash became the more recognizable hooded iteration named Barry Allen. Soon after all the major DC characters followed, and a real rival, Marvel Comics, entered the market with their stable of complex characters.

Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corp were created, and the Silver Age, as it's known, was in full bloom.

The main difference you'll see between the Silver and Modern Ages above will be the silver streaks in Hal's hair. That was a construct to show that Jordan had been updated for the modern times, hence, the Modern Age.

DC had big changes in store for Hal Jordan. It turned out the the silver in his hair was the sign of an evil having inhabited his body, and it has since been purged and Hal Jordan has returned as Earth's main Green Lantern. In the interim, though, he went crazy, blew up the central core, started a huge war, was killed, was then resurrected as the Spectre, and another (white) Earth Green Lantern was found and cultivated; this is Kyle Rayner. Check out the picture below.

The first spot is labeled "Green Lantern", even if you can't read it. That's Kyle Rayner. Next is Allen Scott; then a tool named Guy Gardner, who got himself a power ring; then Sinestro, an early ally of Hal Jordan who eventually became an enemy (in the 1970s); then Hal Jordan himself in one of his super-bad-guy outfits; and then the Guardians, the creators of the central battery core and forgers of the power rings.

These cards are from maybe 1994 or '95, so the entrance of Kyle Rayner has occurred, but not Jordan's final demise before becoming the Spectre.

Now Jordan's returned to the dark haired hero with no silver streaks, and then an announcement came along saying that a Green Lantern is coming out. So...I knew it wouldn't be Hal Jordan. That would have been bold, but they're trying to market and fund the second Ryan Reynolds GL movie, and I imagine his sexual orientation would be too hot of a potato. If  it had been Guy Gardner or John Stewart, a black Green Lantern from Earth that doesn't get enough press, they wouldn't be able to say that it was a "major" character coming out.

I expected it to be Kyle Rayner. He didn't have the decades of love built up or new movies coming out. But, what he does have, or did get, is/was a promotion. He was bumped up, when Hal Jordan returned, to a character named Ion. His powers and abilities were enhanced and he's not so much a Lantern anymore. I think he might have changed again, but I haven't really found out.

So, since 1938, Alan Scott has been running around the DC Universe. First in the mainstream, but then for much longer around the edges, along the fringe. A cynical view would be that they're trying to drum up some attention to an archaic character, a nearly outdated title and premise.

But, who are we to say to what's a major character or not? I haven't really collected comics in many years and I don't know what has happened in the DC Universe since then. Maybe Allen Scott has become an important character besides just a "major" title.

In any case, good for him. Them. Eh, keep reaching for that rainbow!

Must be the Southland...

Last night, pissing me off something fierce, I had an annoying sound effect keeping me company for a sold hour, maybe more:

That's not a UFO folks, it's goddamned helicopter.

Now, I understand that we don't live in Brentwood, or Bel Aire, but we also don't live in the middle of the fucking ghetto, and this recent spike in the amount of helicopter attention later at night is more annoying to me than troubling.

I know you wouldn't fly a damn chopper over the wealthy enclaves, that's for sure...unless, like, the leader of al Quaida was running through Beverly Hills for some reason.

Have you ever seen a helicopter as close as that picture above has it? That makes it look far, but those things are LOUD. Even at that distance, when the circling is above your house you can almost feel the wind being hacked by the blades...when it's far off like in the picture, it still stops your ability to hear a conversation or a television.

I Bed-Stuy once a helicopter was much, much closer, so close it rattled our entire building. That time it had everyone out in the street yelling at it in a futile show of anger.

I've included the next picture because 1) you can kinda make out the helicopter as kind of a Morse Code symbol in the upper left quadrant; and 2) I thought it looked cool.

Cop Shows and Presidents

I was thinking about presidential administrations and police procedural television shows from that era and how that show was somehow reflective of the administration. Is is me or is this kinda weird?

I've really only gone back as far as the Clinton Administration, and with that I've chosen The X-Files. The FBI are just federal cops, so I think it works.

The X-Files, at least all the episodes before Dogget and Reyes came along to fuck everything up (consequently, that was during Bush's tenure), represent a more innocent time, when things were mysterious, hard to explain, conspiratorial, ultimately knowable, and full of sexual tension. Bill Clinton's reign, right?

Now, what authoritative cop-like show would best represent the reign of Dubya? What cop-like show could only exist in a world where someone like George W. Bush was in charge, and only last as long as his royal highness the Imperial King George II? Better not call my mom during Jack-time. Jack Bauer heads the torture department in the various long days of the various seasons of the (somehow) beloved 24. 24 is the epitome of the Bush era: macho guy does it his own way, and the hell with your conventional and antiquated ideas about privacy and international law (laws that an erstwhile administration in this same country had a major hand in writing).

How about the Obama Administration? I was thinking that the Tom Selleck vehicle Blue Bloods would fill out this list nicely. Any show that has multiple generations of New York City cops sitting around a dinner table having a civilized conversation about the benefits of legalization of drugs could only come during a time where rational discussion has been allowed to commence once again, and a more realistic view of drugs has itself become reasonable. That seems to represent the best of the reign of Barry.

I think I'll do some more thinking about it and look deeper...like Miami Vice and Reagan? Rockford Files and Carter?