Posts Tagged ‘Instant Classic’
16 items.
Dec07
GUEST STRIP – BRIAN CARROLL
December 7th, 2009 |- Comics »
- Comics »
- Guest Strip
(39 votes, average: 8.90 out of 10)
If you’ve been following the site for the last couple of days, then you know Cami and I welcomed our second child into the world on Thursday. We named her Pearl Evelyn Brazelton and we brought her home yesterday. Mother and daughter are doing fine and Henry reacted splendidly to her arrival. Seriously – It couldn’t have gone better if we had scripted it. Even Truman minded his P’s and Q’s with a new baby in the house.
Anyway, with a new baby in the mix, I will be running guest strips through the rest of December. There are a lot of great artists that selflessly lent the time and talents to help out and I think you’re going to be really happy with the comics I have lined up.
Kicking off the festivities is Brian Carrol from Instant Classic. Brian and I go WAAAAY back. I’ve known Brian since he was kicking around his journal comic BriWorld around 2002 or 2003. Brian is a true Renaissance man. He not only talks the talk, but he walks the walk. By that I mean, not only is he extremely knowledgeable about movies, but he makes his own movies as well! Top that!
Fans of The Triple Feature might remember that we invited Brian on for a series of recordings in 2007. He brought a lot to the table and it was a treat having on the show for a while. Specifically because I think Brian is one of those guys that has a very high level of understanding about film, but can keep a toe in the water of more mainstream affairs. And I think that talent is plainly on display with his guest strip. The fact that he gave visual representation to Tom’s “thought filter” is evidence of that. It’s a great idea. I wish I had thought of it!
So thanks again to Brian and be sure to visit his site Instant Classic!
A few more things to mention…
I have a guest strip of my own up and running over at Dueling Analogs to help Steve celebrate his comic’s 4 year anniversary. I inserted Tom and Jared into the comic only because Dueling Analogs doesn’t have regular characters and that left me feeling a little untethered. I know how supremely lame it is to use your own characters in someone else’s guest comic, but I always have the hardest time putting these things together. I become very concerned about mirroring the original author’s style, then I start second guessing myself before I start getting e-mails like “Hey, you didn’t forget that guest comic you said you were going to do for me, right?”
Anyway, it’s up and running. So show Steve some link-love and congratulate him on his anniversary.
For those of you visiting Theater Hopper from Dueling Analogs… Welcome!
Next item of business… Kickstarter.
Since Pearl came a week early, it kind of throws a wrench in my plans in terms of promoting the fund raising campaign for Theater Hopper: Year Three.
There are THREE WEEKS LEFT in the campaign and we are $2,000 away from goal.
Things are only going to get more hectic as the holidays approach, so I really need your support NOW to help make the third book a reality.
PLEASE pledge to the campaign – even if it’s only a dollar. If everyone who visited the site on a daily basis pledged only a dollar, this book would be funded and off to the printers. Not to lay a guilt trip on you, but please consider that I have been providing free entertainment (largely uninterrupted) three times a week for over 7 years and ask yourself what that is worth to you.
Without your support, this book will not happen. And if I can’t raise the money through Kickstarter, it’s very likely that the book might NEVER happen! I will probably have to give up on self-publishing completely.
I realize that not everyone can pledge to the campaign either because they don’t have a credit card or because they are from a country outside the United States and Kickstarter doesn’t accept international credit cards.
But if you CAN pledge, PLEASE DO. Your pledge of support can make a difference. With so many obligations in my personal life at the moment, you would be doing me a great favor to help me now rather than wait until the last minute.
Last item of business… Thank you.
Thank you to everyone who sent notes of encouragement and well-wishes over the weekend when we announce Pearl’s birth. It means a lot to me that so many of you are thinking of us and offering your words of support. It makes me realize how lucky we are – Not only to have a happy and healthy little girl, but to have so many people in our lives who care and express their happiness for us. Not a drop of it goes unnoticed or unappreciated. So, thank you again – from all of us.
That’s it for now. Expect a new guest strip on Wednesday. For now, I’m off to cuddle my new baby girl!!!
[ 3 Comments ]
This wasn’t the comic I had planned on making 24 hours ago. Originally, I had something else in mind. That is, until I saw part of Brian Carroll’s Instant Classic over the weekend where he had introduced a new character. In his words, a “large, jockish, ignorant, sexist Bostonian version of Tom Brazelton from his comic Theater Hopper.” The Jay Leno jaw was a nice touch.
He also made his version of my character the boyfriend of one of his leads. So that means the Instant Classic version of Tom might be around for a while. As a matter of fact, he’s already appeared in a second comic, so you might want to check that out as well.
Brian totally nailed me with the first comic where IC-Tom talks about seeing a movie with Jared. “Actually, we didn’t even see a movie,” he says. “We just saw a poster for it in the lobby and made fun of it for a while.” Zinger received, sir.
You might get a little more mileage out of this mock-beef if you know a little bit about Brian as a person. I would share details here, but I don’t want to misrepresent him further than what I’m doing with this comic. The Orson Welles worship is something I think he would cop to, though. ;D
It’s all in good fun, of course. No animosity. Again, in Brian’s words, “Of course I don’t think Tom’s a bad guy – this is more to the tune of the celebrity guests on Extras where they play grotesque versions of themselves.
I think that’s a clever approach and one I would kind of like to explore. But at the same time, it’s weird. Because MY version of myself is already a grotesque caricature. Bending that image through the lens of another artist’s vision makes things even more bizarre and twisted. How far can we go before it loops back on itself, causing a space-time anomaly that forms a psychic feedback destroying our true sense of self?
Maybe I’m being a little over-dramatic.
Any way you slice it, we’re definitely flying by the seat of our pants. This isn’t something Brian and I worked out in advance. So it will be an interesting little tightrope walk.
Originally, I thought I would do one rebuttal comic, but now I’m starting to wonder if I can’t do a little story line with this! What do you guys think? Do you want to see Brian and I continue to warp and twist each other’s illustrated personas for our individual comics? It could be fun!
Leave your comments below. If you have any dirt I can use against Brian in my next comment, leave those in the comments section as well. ;D
[ 21 Comments ]
So I know that today’s comic isn’t fall-down funny, but it adds a nice little bit of progression to the plot and adds a dash of relationship conflict between Tom and Cami. I always jump at the opportunity to develop their relationship further, even if it’s only by a tiny increment.
So I guess now we’re in the thick of a “crossover” between Theater Hopper and Instant Classic. Although I don’t know if you can really call it a crossover, since we’re not sharing a storyline. I’m not sure what you would call it other than one artist gently making fun of the other in tandem with each other.
It’s funny, because I didn’t really intend for this to happen. I had only wanted to return fire from the comic Brian Carroll originally posted on his site on Sunday.
But then Brian posted a second comic and now a THIRD comic and I couldn’t let it slide.
Of course, it doesn’t help that you guys are egging me on from the sidelines. Your blood lust knows no bounds! Certainly, we are no better than the Romans…
I kid, I kid. This is all in good fun and a good way to beat back the January to February doldrums – when there are no new movies in theaters worth talking about. I mean, c’mon. Would you rather I do this, or do a comic about When In Rome? I know what I’d rather be doing…
Brian says that his next comic will be his last featuring his loutish parody version of Tom. I’m not sure if my version of Brian will extend beyond this Friday’s comic or not. I have a few ideas on how I can exaggerate my parody further, but we’ll have to wait and see. I wouldn’t want the gimmick to wear out its welcome. And besides, it looks a little mean when one guy is making fun of the other and the other guy is, like, “Yeah, I’m doing something else now?…”
That’s all for the blogging today. Thanks for swinging by the site. If you have any thoughts / reactions to our little feud, please post your comments below!
[ 8 Comments ]
Well, here’s part three in the quasi-crossover I’m having with Brian Carroll and his strip, Instant Classic. Brian wrapped up his arc yesterday placing his version of Tom at the transformative genesis of one of his lead characters in her past. Pretty cool. Kind of hard to live up to. Sincere thanks to Brian for including me.
I like the version of Brian that I’ve created for my story arc, but I have a nagging feeling like I could have pushed it further or been a little more incendiary. It’s hard for me, though, because it goes against my nature to be outwardly mean when it comes to my contemporaries – even if they invite the onslaught as Brian has. Brian has been a great sport and has actively encouraged me to go for the jugular. I’m just saying it’s difficult to slip into that headspace. It’s actually one of the reasons I don’t draw more guest strips. I have a pathological fear of misrepresenting what someone else has invested their lives into creating.
I know that I have no problem being mean about certain actors, directors or movie franchises featuring 30 foot tall transforming robots. So there is a little bit of hypocrisy at work here. But it’s a lot easier to make fun of something you don’t respect as opposed to something you do.
At this point in the storyline, I kind of feel like I would be telling the same joke over and over again by demonstrating the ways in which TH-Brian is annoying to Tom. I would kind of like to see their confrontation spill over into violence for the catharsis alone. But right now, things are pretty one-sided. If I decide these two should come to blows, the focus shouldn’t exclusively be about how Tom finds him irritating. That’s assault. But if there has always been something about Tom that TH-Brian has hated as well… then we might have something.
Sorry. I feel like I’m working this out in front of you guys and not leaving very much mystery to the proceedings. I guess I don’t know what else to write about. Things might pick up a little next week, though. I have a joke for From Paris With Love that I’ve been dying to use for two weeks.
Not much more for me to talk about. I hope you guys have enjoyed the comics this week – and the peek inside my head, apparently. See you here on Monday!
[ 10 Comments ]
For the record, I have to state that I do not PERSONALLY think Orson Welles is a failure. But in order to create conflict and move the plot forward, I have to put comic-Tom in an aggressive stance and have him say something inflammatory to provoke our guest – Brian Carroll from Instant Classic.
Comic-Tom is taking the short view on Welles’s career. One mired by depression, morbid obesity and borderline alcoholism. All of which are handily (sadly) represented in these infamous out-takes from a commercial Welles did for California Champagne company Paul Masson.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the most visible representation of Welles in the last 15 years comes from this parody piece from The Critic. Which, I have to admit, played a role in defining Welles as a individual for me several years before I studied him or even knew who he was…
This, of course, being a satirical twist on the also infamous audio outtakes from a radio spot Welles did for a company that sold frozen peas.
Think about this for a minute: The director of what is argued to be The Greatest Motion Picture of All Time arguing with some marketing guy about the copy he’s being paid to read in a frozen peas radio commercial. It’s just… bizarre.
Of course, these late-career foibles are easy to reach for when you’re trying to make an argument against Welles and his impact. Personally, I think he was a genius. If maybe a genius who got in his own way a little too often.
But put it in context. If you made Citizen Kane and followed up with The Magnificent Ambersons, I think that means you pretty much get a free pass career-wise for the rest of your life. Those were two big, important, stylistically rich films that everyone not only needs to see, but to own. It’s important film history – work the set the template for countless films that followed.
There’s a reason everyone recognizes “Rosebud,” even if they don’t know what it means.
I don’t know if I would have been compelled to add this disclaimer under normal circumstances. But I’ve already gotten a few people writing to ask “Why do you hate Orson Welles.” I don’t hate Orson Welles. I think he’s awesome. I’m just sacrificing my comic avatar for the sake of moving the plot forward.
I think I’m going to wrap up this story line on Wednesday, so be sure to come back for that. Afterwords, it’ll be back to making fun of what’s currently in theaters!
See you then. Have a great day, everyone!
[ 18 Comments ]
As much as it would have been fun to draw a protracted fight scene (not), it was time to stick a fork in this little story arc and move on.
My thanks to Brian Carroll for the inspiration to do these strips. Hopefully neither of us have damaged each other’s reputations too much. 
I recognize the punchline to today’s comic is kind of dark. But you’d be surprised by the thought process that led me to it. I spent serious time contemplating what was funnier – “coma ward,” “burn ward” or “graveyard.”
I certainly don’t mean to make light of anyone who is in a coma, been horribly burned or is dead. But looking for something shocking and weighing my options, I decided to go with “coma ward” because, well, people come out of comas all the time, right?!
It might also fertile ground to harvest another story from later. Admit it – Who’s a little curious to meet the guy that Jared put in a coma? Exactly. Y’see, you guys are just as twisted as me.
As you probably know, Oscar nominations were announced yesterday. The big news is that there are now 10 films in contention for the night’s big prize – Best Picture.
I can’t say I was particularly surprised by any of the nominations except for possibly District 9. Even though I thought it was a smart film with some original ideas, it kind of played like a sci-fi shoot em up by the end. I think of it more like a summer blockbuster than a Best Picture contender.
Naturally, I was pleased to see Up nominated. In my heart of hearts, I’d like to see it win. But I know it won’t. Up is a good movie, but not Pixar’s best. If they’re going to take the award, I really want them to earn it. Wishing they would win is more of a reaction to Up being the first animated movie to be nominated in this category since Beauty and The Beast in 1992. But the nomination in itself is a reward and I hope the AMPAS continues to look at the field of animation when making their Best Picture nominations in the future.
What do I think will win? Avatar. It’s not the best movie among the nominees. Not by a long shot. But I think Academy voters won’t be able to resister rewarding director James Cameron for his technical achievement or his box office success. As of this writing, the movie has been number one at the American box office for nearly 2 months. It’s made over $2 billion dollars in world-wide box office. These are numbers too big to ignore. As much as some people idealistically think the Oscar’s should be about artistic merit, it’s also about business. James Cameron is now the man with the two largest grossing films of all time. The story of his success alone will secure a win for Avatar.
Interestingly enough, I heard yesterday that Avatar is only one of three films in Oscar history that has been nominated for Best Picture without being nominated in any of the writing or acting categories. Some food for thought.
As for the other nominations? Well, I’ll save some of my predictions for later.
In the meantime, if you’d like to download an Oscar ballot you can use to make your OWN predictions – and then compare them to the actual winners on March 7 – you can download it here.
What do you guys think about widening the field of Best Picture nominees to 10? Do you think all of the Best Picture nominees are deserving or are some just filler? What nominations surprised you the most? Do you think there is an opportunity for an upset in any of the categories? Share your thoughts and reactions below!
[ 44 Comments ]
