kuniform

A few cool sites to waste some time over the holidaze: Magic Whistle (thanks Brendan for the link), Demain5 (I love “When I am King”), and The Sound Opinions Best of 2006 List from Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis.

DeRogatis is, frankly, annoying, but the show is good at covering a variety of genres, not just sticking with indy rock. That is the thing about these lists that are cool, as well. Gift ideas for everyone you know under 40.

Dave Cockrum died today. Here is CNN’s obituary. His X-Men were an inspiration to me as a kid. I remember my dad finding a bunch of them in a garage sale. There was a stack of roughly 40 comics, some Len Wein and Dave Cockrum, some Chris Claremont and John Byrne.

I devoured them, one after another, until my eyes ached. Then I read them again that night.

I don’t know much about Don Hertzfeld, but this video that was forwarded to me made me laugh out loud. It’s entitled “rejected” and is a series of ads, each more bizarre and violent, rejected for a cable TV network. Laugh out loud funny.

Table of Malcontents is a Marvel Secret Wars re-enactment. This really made me laugh, since it spoofs a series that came out in the early 80’s, right when I was in my long underwear comics collecting craze. This seris, and one before it whose name I can’t remember, which featured international super-heros (the non-American ones were all made up and lame, except the Black Panther), kicked off the cross-over idea for Mavel and the industry in general.

Pretty soon they realized they could make lots of moola by making kids buy issues of titles they wouldn’t have otherwise. Sheer genius. I stopped collecting comics seriously the day I took some of mine to a show with a buddy of mine. Aside from getting lowball ridiculous offers from parents of kids, and then getting worse offers from dealers, I heard a comix dealer tell a story that has stuck with me to this day.

Basically, reading the trade rags, this guy knew a major new villian was introduced to mess up Batman severely, causing his 1st appearance issue to sky-rocket in value. So, the dealer put up a sign trading all these gullible 8-12 year olds their 1st appearance for crap comics, and then a few months later sold them back those 1st appearances for tons of cash. Why not take them out in an alley and beat them up for their money? It’s about as nice. Anyway, that started me on reading things like Pogo, Krazy Kat, and graphic novels like the Watchmen, the work of Paul Pope and Fallout, a comic history of the creation of the atomic bomb.

Thanks to my friends Ann and Barry I went on opening night to see Charles Ross’ “The One Man Star Wars Trilogy” recommended here by the Sun Times. It was, simply put, incredible. I used to be a SW geek many moons ago, and have caught the new, past-history episodes on video, but this was something else.

I expected a show with many props, or one that mercilessly made fun of the storylines, quirks of fans and/or their obsessions. The kind of easy haymaking which comes to mind when dealing with fandom. Having been to many comic cons, and enjoying many things scifi, fantasy, comix or what have you, I realize how many of us are ripe for parody. This was something absolutely different. Without giving much away, let me just say that his performance was spot-on, incisive, and delightful.

He presented a language of gesture which was visually rich and iconic for each character and device, be it spaceship or droid. My first roommate in college had bootlegged the trilogy on to one extended videotape, and used to put it in every Sunday afternoon. These movies would sear into my hungover brain as I would attempt to study, but eventually gave up to watch Luke struggle in Dagobah or Han get frozen in carbonite. Ross captured many of these scenes—especially battle scenes or little model scenes (like AT-ATs on Hoth or Luke in Cloud City) well enough to cause the movie to play out in your brain.

I found myself wondering how he’d been directed; if he’d videotaped himself doing the scenes and compared them with the original. It’s hard to explain without seeing it, but he captured the composition and movement of each scene and transitioned from scene to scene seamlessly. Anyway, it made us have cool conversations about signs, symbols, and communication, and that’s what it’s all about, baby.