And Her Little Dog, Too!

I made a quick trip to the pharmacy a couple of minutes ago to pick up some cold medicine. On my way, I was listening to a podcast of an old episode of Command Performance, a radio show that aired only on Armed Forces Radio during WWII. Hosted by Bob Hope, this episode had Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra having a sing-off to be in the next movie with Judy Garland. Not a bad cast.

Well, I'm listening to Bob, Bing and Judy chat through some patter between numbers, when on the side of the road I see Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. I gotta tell ya: Hearing Judy Garland's voice on my radio, and seeing Dorothy over by the pizza place...it took me a minute to remember it was Halloween. In my congested, muddleheaded state, I thought I was seeing ghosts.

Rob

Ahoy, Indeed.

Our scanner mysteriously started working again! Which means I can bring you this tale of forbidden love on the sea:





Okay, it may not seem all that lovely-dovey, what with the spear-throwing and whatnot... but read it again with your eyes closed.

The family that whales together, impales together.

Rob

(Images from House of Mystery #183, published by DC Comics in 1969. Story by Robert Kanigher; art by Jerry Grandenetti and Wally Wood. Subtext by Abercrombie & Fitch.)

Still In Stealth Mode

Just haven't been inspired to write too much lately.

I'm sure it'll pass, but tonight might not be the night, considering it's time to clean the ferret cages. They need me more than y'all do.

With that in mind, here's a picture of a demonically powered Dude kicking Gus's ass.

Go, Dude!

Rob

Quite Peculiar in a Funny Sort of Way

The blog at Newsarama led me to Johnny Bacardi's farewell post on his comics blog, and though he wasn't a regular stop for me, I'm sorry to see him go.

But this isn't about that. This is about the other blog he mentions that has me simply fascinated. It's Solar Prestige A Gammon, in which he is examining every studio track Elton John recorded from 1969 to 1977.

This is freaking awesome.

It's exactly those albums that I picked up on vinyl for a quarter a pop from the middle school book fair when I was in high school. It's those albums that I played to death, that I taped and listened to on my walkman, that I pondered the lyrics to for hours. Exactly those. I kept buying EJ albums after that, but none ever measured up to that first bunch.

I'm going to have a lot of fun wading through his posts, oh yes I am.

Rob

The Chicago Way

"They pull a knife; you pull a gun.
They send a dog into space; you send a monkey."

Rob

Where've You Been, Rob?

I have one of two answers to that question:

1) Paranoid.

2) Hyper-aware.

Whichever it's been (and the jury is still kind of out on that, and may remain so), I've been too cranked up to write these past few days. That should change soon.

Rob

Doctor, Doctor

Very little information has been released on this so far, but it looks like...


Fifth Doctor Peter Davison will join current Doctor David Tennant for a mini-epsiode for Children In Need called "Time Crash."

Whee!

Rob

Imbordand Bessage

Ah need sub allergy medicadshun ib da worsd way.

Rob

Let's All Go To The Lobby (And Get @#&#ed Up)

Via Jim the Bastard, here are some (scary, scary) tips on movie theater etiquette courtesy of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Mastodon.



Watch it quick; it's likely Cartoon Network will pull this from YouTube right quick.

Don't make me cut you with a linoleum knife.

Rob

Is It Just Me?

Whenever I make my sleepy-eyed way out of Penn Station to walk to work, I'm confronted with a billboard across the street. Lately, the most prominent one has been for a shoe company, Aerosoles.

And every time—every time!—I see that logo, I misread it as "Arseholes."

Rob

One Face, Two-Face, Blue Face, No-Face

Eric Newsome presents part four of his Question interview with Greg Rucka -- this time focusing on Renee Montoya, the Gotham City detective who's taken up the mantle of the Question.

Rob

By Hooker, By Crook

So this recent headline at Talking Points Memo,

Hooker: Duke Cunningham Fed Me Grapes in Hot Tub

got me to thinking: Isn't ANY headline made better by positioning it as testimony from a prostitute? (It also got me wondering if "grapes" was a euphemism, but that's neither here nor there.)

The whore's eye view makes taking a look at CNN.com much more fun:

Hooker: 'Baby Jessica' waiting to collect $1 million

Tart: Bhutto mobbed upon return to Pakistan

Trollop: Children's health care bill heads for showdown

Local Roundheels: Storms Rake the Midwest

Ho: France's Sarkozy and wife announce split

Doxy: Did condemned Hussein get hair dye, cigar?

GOP sources: Hastert won't finish term

(Seriously, we know what "GOP sources" means by now... they get free grapes.)

Rob

More Thoughts About JLA #14

It came out today.

I didn’t buy it.

I did, however, look through it. And looking through it, I realized I made a couple of incorrect assumptions in my original post.

The first is that the spread in question doesn’t lead off the issue. Luthor shows Superman and Black Lightning the video a bit further into the issue. It makes the scene seem a little less prominent than it did in the preview, where it was front-and-center.

Second, a quick read of the issue shows that Luthor was showing Superman those images to really piss him off. He wanted him good and angry; the story explicitly says so. So, whether it was in the panel description or not (I’m still guessing not), I could see how Ed Benes’s reading of the full script would lead him to pose that panel in that way—because Luthor might see it as a good way to press Superman’s buttons.

I still think it’s a bad idea.

Not that it’s ineffective. I mean, clearly it works. I was pretty damn mad.

But I think, even in a world where Luthor is a bad, bad guy, he should refrain from sexually exploiting Justice Leaguers. It devalues Wonder Woman and the others to build up Luthor, which is, frankly, a bad trade. Luthor is already pretty much the worst guy in the DCU—he’s already made his rep. Victimizing Wonder Woman does nothing for him that capturing her wouldn’t do, and it makes her...well, a victim.

But never mind that. What does it make the audience?

Looking at the Newsarama boards after the preview. the argument for the scene’s inclusion predominantly wasn’t “It’s exactly what Luthor would do to make them angry and easier to defeat” (although a few perceptive souls did point this out), but instead that comics aren’t just for kids, and that grownups like the jiggle, that complainers shouldn't be so prudish because there’s more T&A on any TV show and, of course, “HAWT.” With a lot -- I mean a LOT -- of boob jokes thrown in for good measure.

I wonder how all those appreciative fans feel now that they know that the scene they were getting off to was supposed to piss them off?

And that’s my problem with the entire episode. I’ve read a lot of heroic fiction where protagonists or sidekicks were tied up, and have never given it a second thought. If the plot called for it, it called for it, and that was that. But prompts the audience to react in the exact opposite way that the viewpoint character (Superman) is reacting, and the dissonance works against the story.

What the scene in JLA looks like is not that they were tied up for the villains. They look like they were tied up for me. As, I dunno, a present. A gift. Fan service, is what they call it.

No thanks. I'd rather have cash.

Rob

(On the plus side, I used that very cash to buy the first issue of The Umbrella Academy instead. So it’s not a complete loss.)

EXTRA LINKY GOODNESS: Val at Occasional Superheroine presents a similar argument (but with HAWT pix!) and Cheryl Lynne at Digital Femme offers a simple rule to publish by, days before the tempest touched down in the Justice League's teapot. Both are good reading.

Monkey Newsday

Either CBS News has an infinite number of monkeys clacking away on an infinite number of typewriters...

...or it plagiarized an article from the conservative website WorldNetDaily.


What do YOU think?

Rob

Slow Posting Day...

... so I thought I'd just take the opportunity to remind everyone of the official Laughing At The Pieces seal:


Rob

How's That Again?

We stayed in a hotel last night -- the Westin in Falls Church, Virginia. Great room, big, comfy bed -- and I got to wake up and take a swim in the morning. When I was down at the pool, I noticed something odd. There was a sign that read, in big letters: "Warning: Lifeguard is on duty." There was some smaller print under it, but I couldn't read it because my glasses weren't on.

But why on earth should I be warned that a lifeguard was on duty? Shouldn't I be warned if there was no lifeguard on duty, and I was taking my safety into my own hands?

Maybe the smaller print would have clarified things. Like:

WARNING:

LIFEGUARD IS ON DUTY

And she's a cannibal.

or

WARNING:
LIFEGUARD IS ON DUTY

But those who know fear burn at her touch.

or

WARNING:

LIFEGUARD IS ON DUTY

Elsewhere.

Any other possibilities?

Rob

Travelin'

Goin' south to meet my nephew Ben today. As is traditional in my family, I'll be bringing a stuffed animal and an mp3 of his uncle saying a Japanese word.

Have a good weekend, heroes.

Rob

What is...The Nozzle???

Been meaning to link to Stephen DeStefano's blog for a while now. He's a comics artists and animator who's been working on the Gold Standard of Whacked-Out Cartoon Shows, Venture Bros. And every now and then, he posts some behind-the-scenes art.

Like these sketches of facial expressions for Brock.

And these mysterious Season Three teaser images. ("The nozzle"? What?)

And these awesome Big Venture Posts!

There's plenty of other cool stuff on his blog, too. Look around.

Rob

Tongue-tied and Twisted

Recently in the Comics Cave, we'd been talking about Blender's list of the 40 Worst Lyricists in Rock. The list is tremendously subjective, and as at least one of us pointed out, treats lyrics like poetry rather than part of a musical whole. What works when sung often lies flat on paper.

A good example of the subjectivity of "good" and "bad" lyrics. In his Secret Broadcast Cave, my friend Don just flashed back to Joe Jackson's "Breaking Us In Two." (With a video and everything; check it out.) I think Jackson is an amazing lyricist. At one point, describing the break-up, he writes

You don't do the things that I do
You wanna do things I can't do

Now, it'd be easy to tear those lyrics apart for being vague and inarticulate--hell, for rhyming "do" with "do". But as much as I love the whole song, it's these two lines that hit me the hardest. They're very plain, very bare. And in saying almost nothing specific, they really say it all.

Context isn't everything, but everything is context.

Rob

Schroeder and Hobbes

Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) has reviewed David Michaelis's controversial new biography of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. Here's one interesting passage:

The strips used as illustrations in "Schulz and Peanuts" are reproduced at eye-straining reduction and are often removed from the context of their stories, but they vividly demonstrate how Schulz used his cartoons to work through private concerns. We discover, for example, that in the recurring scenes of Lucy annoying Schroeder at the piano, the crabby and bossy Lucy stands in for Joyce, and the obsessive and talented Schroeder is a surrogate for Schulz.

Reading these strips in light of the information Mr. Michaelis unearths, I was struck less by the fact that Schulz drew on his troubled first marriage for material than by the sympathy that he shows for his tormentor and by his ability to poke fun at himself.

Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder's commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but also to the fact that his musical genius is performed on a child's toy (not unlike a serious artist drawing a comic strip). Schroeder's fanaticism is ludicrous, and Lucy's love is wasted. Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy. I think that's a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world.

The whole review is worth a read. As is, I imagine, the whole book.

Rob

(Via Mark Evanier.)