Illos for Invites

Here are some doodles I recently did in my sketchuh-ma-book that I thought my make some neat illustrations for some Halloween Party (or some other kind of party) invites. 

Pioneer Trance

 

Manga! Part I

This past May I was able to check off a lifelong ambition to visit Japan. My wife and I spent 10 days traveling around the island, riding bullet trains, climbing a mountain, eating ramen and, of course, enjoying the pop culture.

Since I love comics and classic animation, I've always enjoyed manga to a degree. It's like when you say you like comics; that covers a lot of ground. But people have a tendency to think that "I like comics" means you're in line for every comics IP movie that comes out, and have a pull box filled weekly with the latest Marvel/DC/Image titles. Yeah, I like manga, but not indiscriminately. Like American comics, I have a yen for the older stuff. I like the older style(s) of art, the silliness of comics that didn't feel the need to compete with the New York Times Bestseller list as far as content, and could just be a periodically (pun intended) amusing diversion from everyday life. 

There is a great chain of manga shops in Japan called Mandarake (Mahn-da-rah-kay). We visited one in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo. It was genuinely overwhelming. The place was in a sub-basement and was huge, filled with rows and rows of bookshelves packed with manga. Obviously, not being able to read Japanese, it was even more so. Another astounding thing about the manga at Mandarake, is how inexpensive most of it was. Most of the books I'll be showcasing here were between 200 and 400 yen, which is about $1.41 to $2.82, per book! 

With exception of the Astro Boy and Super Jetter magazines I picked up at a vintage shop. But more about that later.

First off we have Doraemon. Doraemon is a robotic cat from the 22nd Century who travels back in time to help out Nobita, the child who will become the grandfather of his inventor. It's fun, funny stuff. Lots of site gags. It was created by Fujiko F. Fujio and is huge in Japan. If you go to department stores or stop at the ever-present banks of gashapan machines, you're bound to see some Doraemon merch somewhere. I know people say Astro Boy is the Mickey Mouse of Japan, but in all honesty, I saw much more Doraemon while out and about than I did Astro Boy. 

In a similar vein we have Gaikotsu-kun, or "Skeleton". It's another whimsical manga from 1966, by George Akiyama. Akiyama, I guess, is known in Japan as a controversial manga artist who, after this, his first comic strip, did some more dark, taboo-themed material. If I understand the translation, the skeleton in question is actually the grandfather of the boy in the comic. He's come back to make sure his son and grandson are taken care of. There are a lot of site gags, as seen here with the dog stealing his bones and burying him. 

Next we have, of course, a staple, a manga version of Ultraman. This was produced in conjunction with the television series, and this particular volume (#2) is from 1968. It what you'd expect from an Ultraman comic: Ultraman battling giant monsters. The cartooning is amazing and dynamic! I believe the artist on this is Daiji Ichimine. Look at the giant bat-starfish monster rising out of the ocean above! It attacks oil tankers, and, as you might guess, causes a lot of fires.

To be honest, when I found this next one, I thought I'd happed upon an El Santo themed manga. Not the case. It turns out it is in fact titled Masked Shinigami, Wrestling Villain Series (per Google translate) and the character on the cover is NOT El Santo, el Enmascarada de plata, but Silver Faced Reaper. It's a fairly brutal comic, as you can see from above. No punches are pulled (tee-hee) in depicting brutal ring violence. There's another motif I've noted in some of the manga I purchased, which is animal abuse. There's some of that in a number of the Osamu Tezuka works I've picked up, as well as this one. Fairly graphic as well. 

This next one is admittedly a little different from the others. It's by Ichiro Iijima, and one of his Black Punch Complete Works volumes, titled "Gorilla Marriage". It's a number of Twilight Zone/ E.C. Comics-esque horror and sci-fi stories with an albeit more adult content. Some are downright upsetting, particularly the last story in the collection, about a chef who is trying to please the odd taste preferences of some new employers. The Gorilla Marriage story itself is fairly tame. It hypothesizes a world where gorillas have evolved to the level of humans and are integrated into society as such. It highlights the difficulties one might encounter engaging in a gorilla/human relationship. Bizarrely, it's not as lewd as the cover suggests.

Not To Brag

 

You can try it yourself over at MeTV.

The Plight Of Silent Sam

 This story from the March 1949 issue of Gabby Hayes Western Comics, is presented with the presumption that it is currently in the public domain. This is a well-worn issue, the previous owner apparently decided to re-staple it, presumably after the original staples came out? I don't see any evidence of oxidation or holes that would indicate as such, so I guess it's possible that it was just originally bound in the wonky way it is; which is fine for reading, but not great for scanning purposes, so forgive the slight cropping you might see at the edges of panels.

I did my best to position things so all of the text was visible, at least.

I hope y'all enjoy this taffy-fueled comic western mishap!

The Ghost And Mr. Chicken Italian Style

 

The Ghost And Mr. Chicken has long been one of my favorite films. And it's clear that I'm not alone in my adoration, since Svengoolie often remarks that it's not only one of the most often requested movies on his his Saturday Night spook 'n' snicker show, over on MeTV, but it tends to reportedly bring some of his highest ratings when aired. In the age of DVD and on-demand digital streaming, that says something!

I have full-sized posters for the film all over my house, and thought I'd been privy to all of the variations out there, until I stumbled across these Italian release posters on the internet. Apparently it was released as 7 Days Of Fear (or so Google translate tells me), in Italy, which is a head-scratcher to say the least, since that title reads more like a Dana Andrews film-noir than a Mayberry-esque comic mystery. 

The posters themselves are odd; particularly the top one. A just-been-goosed faced Joan Staley gawks from behind a curiously obscured ghost (I thought it was a plume of smoke or potentially an illustrated page roll to separate her from the Italo-obvious splash of vibrant yellow behind the other figures, but noted that the yellow bled above the ghost and that the white plume had little mitten hands). Why you would hide the ghost behind the title, I'm not sure. The whole composition seems oddly haphazard. Why Don Knotts is tied up and pleading to a bored Jim Begg, I don't know. This poster makes it seem like Knotts is the criminal, which, I suppose is a better marketing misdirection than the American poster hanging on the office wall beside me as I type this, which essentially reveals the mystery of the supposedly haunted Simmons house for all to see. And why the two bored cops? They couldn't work in a Burt Mustin or Dick Sargent in there?

The bottom example captures the comic book kookiness a little better with a John Stanley-esque patchwork ghost, but juxtaposed with a very dramatic depiction of our two leads; depicted as if Maurizio Merli were just off the page with a loaded machine gun or something. Oddly enough, this image of Knotts and Staley was used in the cover design for the cd release of the film's soundtrack, put out by Percepto records back in 2004. Even though I don't think the depiction of Don Knotts is particularly adroit, making him look sunken yet oddly muscular–like some sort of Frank Sinatra / Joe Piscopo hybrid.

I always enjoy seeing some yet-undiscovered piece of information or ephemera pop up for things like this; I suppose it's a way for the things that I love to be continuously-giving gifts. 

And speaking of previously unseen ephemera, I was completely unaware of this Luther Heggs action figure put out by Brentz Dolz! 

Certain Types of Movies

Some screenshots from the 1945 film The Spider, starring Richard Conte, Mantan Moreland, Faye Marlowe, Kurt Krueger and Martin Kosleck. I've always been interested in type and typefaces, the use of type design to convey a message. You wouldn't know it from looking at this ramshackle blog, but I even have a BFA in graphic design! 

One thing I like about old movies is the art of type and title design that seems to have largely gone away or fallen to two or three presets. Maybe that's a gross overstatement or misdiagnosis. But even the worst Poverty Row (or sub-PR) picture could have a stunningly designed title or interesting title sequence to ease you into the sinkhole of the film.  If you're interested in title design, type design, graphic design, I recommend looking up folks like Robert Brownjohn, Alvin Lustig, Saul Bass, Herb Luballin, Snap Wyatt, Susan Kare and April Greiman.

If you're interested in The Spider, you can stream it online. It's a tight little B-thriller that clocks in at under an hour. Not great--it has plot holes you can drive a Volkswagen bus through --but fun enough. No spider to be seen aside from the spider motif of the faux mind-reader played by Marlowe. If they addressed her as "the spider", I missed it. 

 

Anywho, I've included some other great movie typefaces I've seen as of late, below:

The Flintstones

 Some random stills (and a gif, if it's functioning in your browser) from The Flintstones. I'm a big fan of classic animation, including but not limited to Popeye, the early Looney Tunes, Fleischer studios' Superman cartoons and Gumby, to name a few. 

The Flintstones, in its initial incarnation, can clearly be distilled down to a Honeymooners pastiche with a way-out scenario change, but clearly developed beyond that seed of inspiration. After all, The Honeymooners lasted one season and today is primarily exempt from the lexicon of the last couple of generations, unless they are MeTV aficionados; and The Flintstones are still a pop culture phenomenon. Sure, Fred Flintstone is an impression-concerned blowhard, but his heart and conscience always win out over his ego in the end, and unlike Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden, I don't think I've ever heard Fred threaten to beat Wilma. 

I find the series visually stunning with its bright, candy pop colors and the amazing textures the production designers and artists worked into the backgrounds. It doesn't hurt that the writers and producers also happened to work in all of the pop cultural earmarks of the 1960s that I find so personally appealing, in attempt to keep the audience tuning in: the surf culture, the garage pop, the renewed interest in monsters and comic book culture, Bond-esque spy adventures, etcetera. 

Since The Flintsones and The Jetsons are both Hanna-Barbera productions, they are often described as same-same 1:1 concepts, as if The Jetsons are simply The Flintstones in a sci-fi futurist setting. I don't share this view. Where Fred Flintstone is a bombastic big-mouth who often talks his way into happenstance at the expense of his pride (and the safety of those around him), he a character with range and while his adventures can be often bizarre when writers need to tailor some impetus to dress a bigger plot, or repetitive when writers were short for ideas (how many times was Fred the heir to some property, be it a creepy castle or a hillbilly hovel, that required his family and the Rubbles stay there to take ownership?), there is always fun to be had along the way. George Jetson simply comes across as a broken middle-class worker drone who hates his job, is exasperated to despair by his children, and rarely seems to stumble into any circumstance that brings him even a modicum of joy.

No thanks, kids. I'll take The Flintstones' cartoonish past over The Jetsons' bleak future any old day.

Signifier Of Spring

You can bet that spring 

Is going to stick around

When the porta-johns appear

Around town.

 

Waiting Room

 

Here's a pictorial homage to John Register.

Despite My Education...

 

"Despite My Education..." acrylic on canvas

A Sentence of Death!

 

Today I thought I'd share a tight little noirror tale I came across this morning, while reading a copy of the August 1939 issue of Strange Stories pulp mag. I use the word noirror to describe stories that have both noir and horror elements to them. 

A Sentence Of Death is a short little shocker with a nasty comeuppance for a hired knife-man.