This video, made in 2003, was produced to promote Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975 by Patrick Rosencrantz. The video has interviews with Gilbert Shelton, R. Crumb, Rick Griffin, Spain Rodriguez, Robert Williams and Justin Green. (I reviewed the hardback edition in 2003 for the LA Weekly) Fantagraphics has just released a revised and expanded paperback edition. Link

Mike Fontanelli wrote a great introduction to cartoon great and unrepentant hippy hater Al Capp and his Dick Tracy parody, Fearless Fosdick. The post includes the first 20 pages (scanned in high res) of the first Fearless Fosdick story, "The Poisoned Bean Case."

"The Poisoned Bean Case" is, simply put, one of Capp's masterpieces. It seems to be a special favorite with fans too, both for its astronomical body count and its sheer outrageousness. Believe it or not, this blood-drenched parody ran in family newspapers in the fifties, in Eisenhower's America, on Sundays, no less!

In the following brilliantly demented pages, no one is spared Capp's merciless needle. From the venality of the justice system to the crookedness of the media; from the corruption of big business to the fickleness and stupidity of a complacent populace. The diabolical plot, which concerns product tampering, presages the 1982 Tylenol case by some 30 years.

As a cautionary note to readers encountering this story for the first time: you are hereby warned. It's impossible not to get swept up in the maelstrom of fury that's about to be unleashed. "The Poisoned Bean Case" doesn't so much unfold, as simply detonate! For comics fans who like their irony dark, raw and relentless- we proudly present Al Capp at or near the peak of his powers...

Link

In today's episode of Boing Boing tv, Xeni visits with John Gaeta, the Academy Award-winning Visual Effects supervisor of the Matrix trilogy, to learn more about his digital craft in the new film Speed Racer. This latest Wachowski brothers project reinterprets the classic 1960s Japanese anime series of the same name, and opens in theaters nationwide on May 9.

Gaeta explains how he used VR "bubbles" and a mysterious team known as the "world unit" to create the film's "poptimistic photo-anime" feel. The live action Speed Racer is saturated in a candy-colored palette so rich, audiences may just leave the theater with a contact sugar high.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

And Gaeta adds a special message for Boing Boing tv viewers, who are already well accustomed to all things digital -- "For optimal viewing experience, see Speed Racer at a digital cinema or IMAX theater." He's not kidding, with a feature like this, analog projection just doesn't do the work justice.

View interactive samples of the digital building blocks behind the movie in a related online feature in VRMAG, "Speed Racer Uncovered."

(Special thanks: John Gaeta; Andy and Larry Wachowski; and David Pescovitz)

Today on Boing Boing tv, a sneak peek inside TOKYOLOGY, a new documentary exploring contemporary Japanese pop-culture hosted by Carrie Ann Inaba. Oh, what adventures await: sneak behind the scenes at a Japanese Rock TV show that pretends it's shot in Los Angeles, cruise Harajuku, go clubbing with goth girls in Shinjuku, shop for shoes with Lolitas, experience the madness of the Tokyo Anime Fair, visit a video game company, browse the streets of Akihabara, and meet anime creator Yoshitoshi Abe.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

DVDs are available in retail stores and online, tokyology.tv has details. (Special thanks to Tokyology co-producers Felix and Julian Mack of Nightjar.)

A redemption tale by the prolific religious comic book artist Jack Chick is born again through animation, in a classic short film by Syd Garon and Rodney Ascher.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

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Chick, born in 1924, is the most published comic book author in the world. Over decades, his publishing company has released some 500 million fundamentalist evangelical "Chick tracts" warning of the eternal consequences of a life lived without salvation.

One of these cautionary cartoon gospels, "Somebody Goofed," attracted the attention of animator-directors Syd and Rodney a decade ago -- and they transformed it into the mixed media pastiche Boing Boing tv presents to you, dear viewer, today.

This 8 minute film debuted at the DFILM Digital Film Festival in San Francisco on November 7, 1997. DFILM founder Bart Cheever tells Boing Boing tv:

We showed it all over the world. No other film came close to provoking the kind of intense, gut-level reaction that we saw with Goofed -- people really loved it or really, really hated it. Religious people called it blasphemous and threatened to organize boycotts of our shows. Anti-religious people called it religious propaganda and wrote angry letters to theater owners where we screened the festival.

To me, Goofed was the Birth of a Nation of After Effects films, and was really the aesthetic blueprint for much of what you see on TV today. So many people have copied their cool 2D photo-animations, and their style is used so heavily today on VH1, E, MTV, and so on -- it's easy to forget how groundbreaking the film was. No one had ever really done anything like it before.

I loved the way Goofed is this rich moving collage of newsprint religious tracts, album covers (can you spot Paul's Boutique?), clips from 70's gangster films, cigarette ads from old magazines etc. To me, Goofed represented a whole new way of collaging various forms of media.

UPDATE: We reached out to the filmmakers for some thoughts on this amazing piece of work, 10 years after its creation -- Rodney Ascher tells us...

Making Somebody Goofed was 50% art experiment and 50% self-designed AfterEffects tutorial. It was the first digitally animated project for both of us (I think...). It took at least 6 months to make the thing, maybe close to a year. I was running a Powermac 7500 (Syd's always had a model 1 or 2 levels faster than mine so he was probably behind the wheel of an 8500) and we got a gasp during a Q and A when we explained that rendering some of the QuickTimes took more than a day or two and transporting the uncompressed files demanded about 12 Jaz cartridges!

It was designed to be something of a Rorschach test: we followed the original comic as rigorously as we could, resisted any temptation to change things around (for pacing, content, whatever) and allowed the audience to interpret however they liked. During its premiere at DFilm, the audience was mostly quiet and thoughtful but at a screening at the SFMoMA it played pretty much as a spoof with a lot of appreciative laughter. On the other hand, when it was shown at a screening for the Television Commercial Industry, the awkward, confused, slightly hostile silence was deafening. Happily enough, we've gotten very nice responses from both Chick Publications and The Suicide Girls.

Related posts on Boing Boing:

Photo Fictions: bizarre narrative photo show in L.A.

Rodney Ascher's short film about a freefalling parachutist

Syd and Rodney's "Jack Chick's Titanic" video

Galactus meets Jack Chick

Jack Chick's own Passion

Jack Chick profile

Parody of Jack Chick tract warns against tiki worship.

Hallowe'en, Jack Chick style

(Special thanks to Pesco, and to Syd Garon)

Boing Boing tv visits New York Comic Con, the largest comics convention on the Eastern seaboard, and we find games, geeks, and graphic novels galore. Our guide through the event's board game realms is Dr. Gregory Wilson, author and fantasy fiction professor at St. John's University of New York, who teaches us little-known tools for game quality evaluation. "You can tell this one is awesome because of the weight of the box -- it's probably about 15 pounds," he says as we pass one title. "This one takes two hours just to set up! Clear evidence that it, too, is awesome."

Part two of today's episode is a little alternate reality game of our own design -- we like to call it "Count the Cosplayer."

Link to Boing Boing tv post, with discussion and downloadable video.

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BONUS AWESOMENESS: In related news, Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City blog says: "I set up a small online quiz asking people to label unidentified visitors as either art fair or comic-con attendees. There are a few surprises in there, which keeps it interesting."

Doctor Popular says:

Check out this pic taken of a Narnia banner on the side of a San Francisco MUNI bus.

I love the unfortunate [re:awesome] placement of one of the buses yellow reflectors over Prince Caspian’s face. Imagine this evil eye blinking on and off at you as the bus makes a turn. Can you say Scott Summers? I would love to see how the Chronicles of Narnia would deal with “the mutant problem”.

Link

Bibliodyssey posted a bunch of fantastic Will Eisner covers from The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, a magazine for US Army mechanics. Will Eisner is best known as the creator of The Spirit.
Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries have just posted full copies (145 regular issues; 5 special issues and 14 index issues) of the Army publication Preventive Maintenance Monthly, illustrated by Will Eisner and covering the years 1951 to 1972. Link (Thanks, Coop!)

Jeff Newelt says:

Brian Heater of the great comix review/interview site TheDailyCrosshatch interviewed Scott and Doug for 20 minutes before their on-stage conversation, so this link has his pre-interview, and some video highlights, and the complete panel as a free mp3 download... was a doozie.

Link

In the comments section to the Monkey Doodle comic book ad, Scottfree says:

I stumbled across these creepy disney comics the other day. The last half dozen or so revolve around Mickey trying to off himself after Minney dumps him for his brother. I wouldn't know how to go about verifying their authenticity...

UPDATE: Cory blogged this in 2003.

Link

Coop says: "Please note 'No-Neck Mickey,' also, copyright-free horrorshow 'Monkey Doodle.'" Link

In 1977 when Jeremy Eaton was 13 years old, he sent a letter to the editor of The Incredible Hulk. They ran his letter, along with his mailing address. Shortly after, he received a letter from Wendy Wilson. Jeremy saved the letter and posted it on his blog. It's a terrific story.

Wendy lived in Kingston, Jamaica. Her letter arrived in early August, just a few weeks after I’d first discovered my name and address had become a part of the Marvel Universe. Her envelope, a delicate, soft, airmail blue, cut like a cyclone through my introverted, adolescent existence, spewing a flurry of feminine considerations. She told me of her eyes. Black eyes, she said, with a poetic force beyond her years. She told me of her hair. Black hair, she teased. She told me of her body. Slim build, with lovely shape, she smiled, seeming to literally breathe from the lightly-scented, decorative note paper, stationary that featured an illustration, in the lower left-hand corner, of two Keane-styled children, a boy and a girl, dressed respectively in overalls and a petticoat, tromping barefoot through a pasture of bright daisies. This idyllic drawing was accompanied by a script-written quote: “We’re not the only ones in love… we just think we are”, to which Wendy had coyly added Remember m, remember e, put them together and remember me. She went on to inform me she was, in no uncertain terms, a very pretty and attractive girl, very romantic and fun-loving. She told me her favorite sports were lawn tennis, table tennis, and basket ball (two words in Jamaica, apparently). She told me her ambition was to become an airline stewardess, “otherwise known as a ground hostess”. She told me that, in her spare time, she would be a singer.

Nearly twelve months my senior, Wendy was, in essence, a fourteen year-old siren, a rock I’d gladly have smashed into, ultimately perishing of starvation, thirst, and delirium. In my already-fevered imagination, one fed on the hyperbole of Smilin’ Stan Lee and the voluptuous curves of Jack Kirby (the curves of his female characters, not his), I saw Wendy calling me onward, urging me to leave my 25¢ vessel, a flimsy, pulp-hewn, four-color yacht held together by staples, to join her, to lose myself in her smooth, brown limbs.

Link

Mike Baehr of Fantagraphics writes: "We recently received a large package of original art from Al Jaffee for our upcoming complete Humbug collection. Here's just one amazing example." Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Al Jaffee profile in NY Times

Animator and comics artist Guy Delisle's travelogue Shenzhen is a fascinating, meandering look at one of China's most storied new cities: Shenzhen, the enormous, lightspeed boom-town factory megalopolis just the other side of Hong Kong. Delisle was stationed there as a supervisor for some animation that had been outsourced to China, and he dwelt there in an introspective solitude, drawing and writing about the city as he inhabited his own mind.

I'm endlessly fascinated by these Chinese new cities (I'm working on a novel that's partly set in them), where buildings can grow by a storey a day, where people flock from the countryside to do information-age labor at pre-industrial wages, where commerce and control wage an endless war for dominance in the most populous nation on Earth.

Shenzhen is a really lovely, idiosyncratic, first hand warts-and-all account of the city as seen through the eyes of foreigner. The good, bad and ugly are here, built around Delisle's running account of the daring food adventures he takes himself on. Link

Before St Trinians was a (ho-hum with some bright moments) big-screen movie, it was a series of Charles Addams-esque cartoons by Ronald Searle (who also wrote illustrated the hilarious, dark and evergreen Molesworth books). Searle began the St Trinians books just before he was drafted to fight in WWII, whence he was promptly captured by the Japanese and interned in the notorious death/POW camp Changi (immortalized in my all-time favorite war-novel, James Clavell's King Rat).

St Trinian's: The Entire Appalling Business collects Searle's strips in a handsome hardcover package that is an absolute delight. Some of this material was apparently drawn in Changi, on paper stolen from the Japanese guards, using a smuggled fountain pen, and it all shines with the sweaty dark light of a (literally) tortured comic genius.

I haven't seen the 1950s films based on these strips, but I think I'll track them down now. Link

Two stories about evil infants crossed my desk this weekend, one from 1951, the other from 2008.
First, this old one: a scan of a comic book story from 1951 about a killer baby.

Next, a satire about a lascivious newborn, from Rogier van Bakel, who says: "We've recently seen a six-year-old turned over to the police for having playfully slapped a classmate on the behind. A four-year-old was punished for sexual harassment two years ago after he allegedly pressed his face into the pre-school teacher's décolletage during a hug. Where does it end? I wrote a little Onionesque fantasy about that here:

CLOVIS, NM — Just hours after being born, an allegedly sex-obsessed infant was taken into custody on charges of harassment.

A maternity nurse present at the birth of Ryan Sambora, the son of Gabriel and Mindy Sambora of Kingfisher Lane, called police after she determined the child had "enjoyed his time in the birth canal a little too much." The hospital worker, Valerie Shales, a six-year veteran of Gouldsborough Family Health Centers, said the woman was clearly in discomfort, even agony, while the son seemed "unwilling to dislodge himself from the mother's vagina."

"He cried in protest as soon as we got him out," Shales explained the ordeal. "He just seemed really determined not to leave Mindy's genitals in peace." Shales said she was obligated to notify the police by the hospital's zero-tolerance sexual-harassment policies.

Continue reading...

Jay Kinney found an interesting old comic book cover, shown here.

He says: "Check out this vintage comic cover (circa the Korean War, 1951) when "suicide bombers" were the good guys -- as long as they were on our side!"

Last year, Jay sent this vintage comic book gem to Boing Boing. It's a story that Dick Cheney undoubtedly read as a boy and later used as his foreign policy blueprint. Link

I've just finished DMZ: Friendly Fire, the fourth collection for Brian Wood's incredible, next-gen war comic that is busily redefining the genre as something more relevant and important than it ever was before. In the DMZ storyline, America is plunged into civil war, a war between the redneck Free States movement and the authoritarian, Iraq-shocked US military. The two armies meet in New York, turning Manhattan into a giant, rent-asunder demilitarized zone, where only one reporter, the unlikely young Matty Roth, tells the real story of what goes on in the latest, endless war.

The DMZ stories manage to combine the tough, thrilling character of golden age war comics with sharp and complex analysis of the big questions underpinning the modern age of politicized, commercialized warfare.

In Friendly Fire, Matty is charged with covering the military tribunal for the squad who conducted the Day 204 Massacre in which nearly 200 peaceful protesters were gunned down by a hair-trigger force who thought they saw a gun (or did see a gun, or planted a gun). Wood's tight, super-focused storytelling never tells us what exactly happened on Day 204, and manages to make heroes out of the worst villains and villains out of the biggest heroes.

DMZ keeps getting better and better. Between this and books like The Walking Dead, Fables and Y: The Last Man, it feels like we're living in a renaissance of amazing comic book storytelling. Link

See also:
DMZ: graphic novel, a worthy successor to Transmetropolitan
DMZ Public Works: New collection of moving, thrilling graphic novel
Cory and DMZ's Brian Wood interviewed on iFanBoy
DMZ comic t-shirt

KCET has a series of fantastic video interviews with LA cartoonists, including Jaime Hernandez (shown here), Johnny Ryan, Carol Lay, Esther Pearl Watson, and Mark Todd. Link

JahFurry sez,

CBLDF Presents New York Comics Week!

Next week the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund celebrates comics in New York City with a week of events leading up to the New York Comic Con!

Tuesday, April 15.
CBLDF's DRINK & DRAW! Tax Day is Over! Now drink up with NYC's best cartoonists and party for a good cause! Featuring Jeffrey Brown, Molly Crabapple, David Finch, Dan Goldman, Dean Haspiel, Alex Maleev, Paul Maybury, and dozens of NY's Finest Cartoonists. Sponsored by ComicSpace.com and Image Comics, premiering Paul Maybury's graphic novel AQUA LEUNG. Additional support provided by ACT-I-VATE, The Daily Crosshatch, SMITH Magazine & JahFurry
7:00 to 11:00 PM at Village Pourhouse
64 3rd Avenue at 11th St, Drink Specials all night!, $5 Suggested Donation; $20 for VIP Schwag Bag

Wednesday, April 16.
RASL Premiere Party! Come meet Jeff Smith in person at his only New York City appearance of the season, enjoy an open bar, and get a takeaway bag of tons of exclusive RASL goodies. Only 100 general admission tickets and 26 VIP tickets are available so get your ticket now!
8:00 to 11:00 PM at Coolture Spain, 409 W 39th St (between 9th and 10th),

Friday, April 18.
An Evening With Neil Gaiman! Experience the magic of Neil Gaiman at an exclusive reading to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Gaiman presents the reading at New York Comic-Con! Seating is limited and going fast.

I'm a proud donor to the CBLDF and I only wish I could make some of these boss events. Link (Thanks, JahFurry!)

io9's Annalee Newitz points to a post on that science fiction blog today which reveals that Iron Man fights on the side of proprietary software in a new comic book due out this summer.

"He's explicitly anti-Linux," she says. "Totally freakin weird!"

Link.

I just got a copy of a new 208-page graphic novel from Image called Aqua Leung, by Mark Andrew Smith and Paul Maybury. I have not had a chance to read it yet, but the art is stunning. (Preview here.)

Joe Keating of Image described it this way: "In a nutshell - the royal family of Atlantis is slaughtered, with their murderer taking up the throne. What he doesn't know is their young prince survived and is battling across the ocean to get his revenge." Link

A Japanese roboticist plans to build a 13-foot-high Gundam clone (and wants to take it one further and build a six-storey version!)

[Takayuki Furuta,] the director of the Future Robotics Technology Center in Chiba, Japan, figured out how to make a real-life, six-story-tall Gundam, the classic battle robot from Japanese anime. He ran computer models on every aspect of the bot to determine what parts he would need to power and control the beast. Then he surfed electronics and industry-equipment catalogs to find the components. The result: a complete blueprint for a $742 million bot. By showing how the anime fixture can actually be built, he hopes to get schoolkids fired up about robotics. Well, that and he actually intends to build one. A 60-foot-tall robot may not be financially feasible, Furuta says, but he's going to try making a version that could be as tall as 13 feet. He aims to have it working by 2011, when, ideally, someone will have created something for it to fight.

Link (via Futurismic)

Barron YoungSmith of The New Republic says:

I think you and your readers at Boing Boing will enjoy The New Republic’s fascinating slide-show: Terrifying Early-1950s Comic Book Covers.

These grim, pop-art images of severed heads and disintegrating human beings were selected by cultural critic David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, to illustrate the comic book culture that created mass panic during the 1950s.The lurid content led to congressional hearings, widespread comic book burnings, and ultimately the censorship of the industry.

In addition, check out Part One of TNR’s debate between Hajdu and American culture guru Douglas Wolk: Are these grim images responsible for the marginalization of comic books throughout the late-20th century? Are we, just now, coming into the golden age of American graphic novels? Find out here.

Link

In 1956 Harvey Kurtzman (wiki), creator of Mad, asked his publisher, William Gaines, for a controlling interest in the comic book. Gaines fired him. Kurtzman went to his fan, Hugh Hefner, and launched a beautifully produced humor magazine for Playboy called Trump, but Hefner spiked the project after two issues. Bruised but not beaten, he called on a number of Mad alumni (including Jack Davis, Will Elder, and Al Jaffee) to launch another humor magazine, Humbug. It ran out of money after 11 issues.

This summer, Fantagraphics is publishing the entire run of Humbug in a 2-volume slipcased set (pre-order it on Amazon for $31.50 and save 5%).

On the Fantagraphics site, production ace Paul Baresh provides a step-by-step tour of how he restored a page from Humbug.

Link

Here's an online comic book about this history of LSD done up in the style of one of those hateful Chick tracts. Link (Via Grow a Brain)

Kenny Be says: "I am a cartoonist for Westword in Denver. I have been working on a web feature for Westword. It is part field guide and part travel guide for the upcoming 2008 Democratic National Convention to be held in Denver in August of 2008. It is a field guide to help Denver residents identify the delegates from the 56 states and territories of the US. It is part tour guide in that it helps delegates to find the Colorado bars, restaurants and day trips most like home. It is a project that allows me to make fun of/pay homage to everyone in America, while I make fun of/celebrate the city of Denver.

"I started the project in July of 2007, and have added a delegation every week since then. The final delegation of Wyoming will appear two weeks before the convention begins."

How to Recognize a Nevada Delegate:

Nevadans like to claim that their state was named for the Spanish word that means "covered in snow." This, of course, seems deliberately misleading to anyone who has visited Las Vegas during the summer (which starts in February and runs through December). In Spanish, the word nevada can also be translated as "snow job," to describe "a deception or concealment of one's real motive in an attempt to shake down tourists." The second definition is far more believable and can be supported with much evidence. For starters, 90 percent of all America's gold is mined in "The Silver State." (Alaska is the leader in the production of silver.) And then there are the alien conspiracy theories surrounding Area 51 that were created by the state tourism department, and perpetuated by the CIA, to cover up the trillions of dollars spent to buy stealthy, super-secret, hypersonic space planes to spy on imaginary enemies. When trying to identify Nevada delegates in Denver, just remember that as America's foremost deliberate misleaders, Nevadans can't help but become oxymoronic oddballs. And their deception will be further concealed by the natural split in state politics. By and large, northern Nevadans will look like college professors who are actually pro-life, and southern Nevadans will look like war veterans who are actually trade-union supporters. The all-inclusive giveaway will be that they all look slightly overdressed, as their summer wardrobes include light, solid-color sweaters needed to guard against the chill of Nevada's air-conditioned indoor climate.

Link