i've got a headache like a pillow
Right, what have you been up to? Me, I’ve been making comics for one stupid-ass country that’s about to get a whole lot stupider.* I mean, are people even trying anymore. I’m telling you. That’s my new motto. I should change the tagline. Things continue this way, I’ll get a whole lot more inspiration for the comic, which is good, though I may be too broke to afford a computer. God knows.
*(It has been advanced that democracy is proof against this sort of thing but nooooo)
NIGHT AT THE NOBODY SCORES DRIVE-IN
Just this week I finally got around to watching two movies that have been mentioned in this space so I figure it’s like my responsibility to tell my readership about ‘em. They are both totally and completely drive-in movies and I’ll bet Joe Bob Briggs actually reviewed one of ‘em back in the day.
Setting the scene: couple years ago sometime a commenter mentioned that The Paste That Binds reminded him of a movie, a movie called The Stuff. So I netflixed it since that is how I do my visual entertainment and last week I finally get around to seeing it and oh my fucking god. Ok, literally (if not quite word for word) the opening scene:
OLD ENGINEER GUY AT A MINE OR SOMETHING: Huh, what’s that stuff bubbling up from the ground?
CUT TO what looks like bubbling plaster in a hole in the ground.
OLD ENGINEER GUY: Hmm.
OLD ENGINEER GUY leans over, dips his hand in, and TASTES it.
OLD ENGINEER GUY: Mmmmm! This is delicious!
THAT’S EXACTLY HOW IT GOES. Exactly as if I were writing Jane Doe in that situation. I ain’t lyin’ here swear to god. The rest of it is at once self-aware camp (of ‘50s horror movies) and so totally heavyhandedly hit-you-over-the-head with-the-message ‘80s that it gains a second level of camp and watching it now you can’t tell where one level of camp ends and the other begins. But it is endlessly entertaining in an “I can’t believe they played it like that” way, and if you are doing some dorkass totally-’80s party you have got to procure this movie for the watching as it will be so much more entertaining than Romancing The Stone or the fuckin’ Breakfast Club. John Hughes is tired, he wants to rest for a couple years, people.
That’s one. The second movie I was excited about seeing and said so in this space: The Machine Girl. Whose trailer advertises a campy, grindhouse splatterfest, and indeed it delivers on that front: but it never made US theatrical release, and for a good reason – it is a very, very Japanese campy grindhouse splatterfest. Meaning, the characters work like anime characters, in that at some points they are nice and normal if broadly drawn and the next they are over-the-top tough, and the movie jumps from guitar-riffing fight scenes and training montages (there is a training montage!) to piano-plinking melodrama (in which I took to be self-aware irony) – and also. I had to look this up on Wikipedia: tokusatsu. In American terms: Power Rangers shit. That shows up in there and I promise I’m not spoiling anything because you’ll be just as fucking floored when it happens if you know it in advance. So, yeah. Right. Pipe fu. Carpenter fu. Bra fu. Tempura fu. Two breasts (destroyed). BBolt says check it out.
META-CULTURAL SHIT
Haven’t found anything new in culture to speak of, so I’ve been reading stuff about culture instead. Stuff like iPhone comics. Is the iPhone the future of comics? Short answer from me: minicomics, maybe. The thought of it reminds me of the Bloom County strips where they make fun of shrinking newspaper comics, which reminds me of the few times I’ve seen referrals for Nobody Scores seriously coming from iPhones, which prompts me to craft the official Nobody Scores! statement on releasing an iPhone-compatible comic:
“I feel for the motherfucker who tries to read Nobody Scores! on an iPhone.”
Seriously man you got to be jonesin’ or just masochistical to try reading this shit on a hand-size screen. Save your eyes, people! I don’t even understand how people read print comics on their computers in .cbr format. Shit seems actively painful to me. Seriously. The screen has massive resolution deficiencies compared to the page, stuff I have to try to compensate for all the damn time. Don’t believe me, read Edward Tufte on that point. This really matters for comics.
Also I haven’t even seen The Dark Knight but this vaguely Marxist take on the movie struck a chord with me. I’ll say it right out: I don’t like Batman. I don’t really like superheroes, though I’m more’n happy to watch them in movies, but I don’t like Batman. “Only superhero without superpowers,” my ass: Batman’s superpower is plot. See Chuck Jones re James Bond:
Even James Bond is one of the world’s greatest screwups, to put it mildly, of this or any other century. With every advantage that modern technology can provide, he manages to stumble over the same rake handle that we do, only he falls into a swimming pool of piranhas, while we flap into a cow flop. Fortunately for 007, however, his enemies are just as hamfisted as he is. On one filmic occasion they attempted to spoil his sleep with an attack by a poisonous spider, a simple enough task, one might say – just push a black widow through a keyhole – but no, these KGBirds employed a muscular tarantula the size of a cat, a sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger with fur. This gargantuan joker lumbering over the bed awakens even James Bond. The result? A mano-a-mano bit of arm wrestling which the tarantula would have easily won – if it hadn’t tripped over five of its unoccupied legs. James Bond and Daffy Duck – the only difference is that Daffy fails to succeed, while Bond ultimately succeeds in spite of two hours of unmitigated, illogical failures.
I feel this way about Batman. Chuck Jones shoulda lived to see the remake of Casino Royale, though, it’s quite good.
NOBODY SCORES WITH INFORMATION
After two flailing attempts at extended stories I shall flail at two one-shots this week. Then I will return with stronger kung fu.
COMMENTS POLICY
Basically I am a whimsical but very very lazy Stalin. I am a little disappointed that nobody’s pissed me off yet. I think people can smell this. But, somebody in a previous post apologized for being off-topic, to which the official reply is: sheeeeit, I can’t even stay on-topic in my own god-damn comics, you think I care if you stay on-topic in the comments section? Go nuts! Only reason I ever say like “discuss the circumference of my ass” and shit is to spur convos. Just don’t be a dick.