Posts Tagged ‘zombie’
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If you’re wondering who the undead, green-skinned fellow is, that’s Brian – resident zombie stud on loan from Orneryboy. His pals Orneryboy and Dirtygirl at there hanging out in the background. Odds are you’re already familiar with this great comic, but if you’re not, you have some catching up to do.
I’ve been a fan of Michael Lalonde’s excellent pop art style. He manages to mix the most grotesque scenes with the most refined graphic sensibility I’ve ever seen. You can put him right next to Scary Go Round in my book.
Michael and I used to be peers over at Dayfree Press until he decided to drop out and focus on other things. I miss the guy, and since the aforementioned Dawn of the Dead is *ALL* about zombies, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to take his characters out for a ride around the block. Y’know – borrow them for a while. Like hot-wiring a car, wheeling it around and putting it back before anyone discovers you took them out in the first place!
I hope he doesn’t mind!
I have some other thoughts I wanted to get to (Cami and I saw both Jersey Girl and The Ladykillers this weekend), but it’s about 1:30 in the morning and I need to get some sleep before work tomorrow. I’ll need to be up again a scant 5 hours from now.
Check back on the site later in the evening for more!
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The Michael Jackson concert documentary This Is It comes out today for a limited two-week run. Without getting into the sticket-wicket of commenting on the singer’s personal life, I will say that I’ve always enjoyed Jackson’s music and obvious talent. But as an “event”, This Is It doesn’t feel like something I need to participate in.
The movie is a compilation of interviews, rehearsals and backstage footage assembled as Jackson was preparing for a series of sold-out shows in London. That’s great – I mean, who wouldn’t want to see the behind-the-scenes footage of what was meant to be one of the largest concert spectacles of the last 20 years. But from a narrative standpoint, what exactly is going to be the payoff?
I mean, it’s not like we’re going to see the result of all this hard work and preparation. We’re not going to see Jackson on stage in front of tens of thousand screaming fans, pouring his heart and soul into the music and delivering the performance of a lifetime. We’re going to see him on stage at the Staples Center standing in front of a bunch of backup dancers wearing wifebeaters and track pants.
At least, that’s my impression of it.
From an entertainment perspective, I’m not sure what the audience is meant to take away from This Is It. At the end of the day, the man is dead. We’ll never know what could have been. So is the movie meant to memorialize him in some way or are the producers counting on some kind of morbid curiosity on the audience’s part to investegate Jackson’s last recorded performance.
There is a stop-and-look-at-the-car-crash element to this that I am skeptical of.
But to each his own. If you plan on checking out This Is It during its theatrical run, I’d love to hear what you thought about it!
As for the movie’s release, so precariously close to Halloween? I don’t really think anyone would show up at the theater dressed up like Zombie Michael Jackson. But if you’re going to any Halloween parties this year, I bet you’ll see more than one.
To a certain extent, it’s unavoidable. Certainly Jackson himself didn’t help matters any by setting the template for a zombiefied “look” with his video for “Thriller” over 25 years ago. Of course there is the bigger-than-life persona of the man himself. A celebrity of his stature is simply going to attract this kind of weird homage.
But if you take the macro view, it’s kind of weird dressing up as a dead celebrity for a holiday, isn’t it? I mean, how many people are going to go to a Halloween party dressed as Ed McMahon or Farrah Fawcett? Maybe they’re just not as iconic. Food for thought, I suppose.
What about the rest of you? Any ambition to see This Is It this weekend? What about Halloween? Going to any parties? What about your costumes? Share your comments below!
I have to live vicariously through you this year because we’re staying at home on Beggar’s Night. Immediately afterwords, I will be watching the live 7-hour lockdown of the Ghost Adventures crew on The Travel Channel – because I am a nerd.
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First, my apologies for the lateness of this strip. If you’ve been following me at all on Twitter or Facebook, you know that I’ve been struggling with it.
I put a lot of pressure on myself to make this comic special because it actually has roots in something I posted on Twitter back in November. After seeing the teaser trailer for Sucker Punch and bearing witness to the cornucopia of geek-approved iconography, I tweeted what became the punchline to this strip. “They should have called it ‘Stuff The Internet Likes: The Movie.'”
That off-handed comment was picked up by the good people over at Topless Robot and included in their write-up of the trailer. And, well, I’ve basically been sitting on my hands, waiting to use it ever since.
Fast forward to last Sunday night and I am wracking my brain trying to figure out how to cram everything I want into my usual four-panel setup. I think I sidestepped the issue pretty well with the large diagonal panel in the middle. But it didn’t solve the problem of actually having to DRAW things that are normally way outside my comfort zone.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to illustrate and color a spinning propeller blade? REALLY HARD! Especially when you’ve never done it before.
There were moments when I was drawing this comic that I absolutely hated it and wanted to throw it away. I finished this one in baby steps, that’s for sure.
I will say that after figuring out the problem with the layout, it gave me just enough momentum to start the pencils. And while I hated the pencils when I was drawing them, finishing them gave me just enough momentum to start the inks… and so on.
After nearly 9 years of producing this comic, some things fall into place very easily. NOTHING about this comic was easy. So I really hope you enjoy it!
Feeling guilty yet? Let’s ignore the comic for a minute and talk about Sucker Punch.
I think most people are familiar with my stance against Zack Snyder. He might be the victim of studio marketing trying to position him as the Next Great Visionary Director, but he’s also not shying away from it and I find his hubris off-putting.
Did 300 and Watchmen look good? Sure, they looked good. But how much of that was organic to Snyder – especially when he basically had storyboards from some of the world’s best graphic artists at his fingertips for reference (iconic images that he relied on heavily).
Sucker Punch will be the true test of Snyder’s visual acuity and – begrudgingly – I have to admit, from the trailers, it looks like he will pass.
I do think he’s leaning pretty heavily on the geek iconography, though. It’s like he went to Comic Con and started cherry picking idea from the most popular booths. “Ooo! Girls in short skirts and too much make-up? Okay! Samurai swords? Toss that in! Mech battle suits? I’ll order ten!” Cynically, I believe Snyder’s little shopping spree was set up as a distraction so he would get a pass from Geek Nation.
What’s worse I that I think Snyder is justifying this with mock analysis. In a photo gallery on Entertainment Weekly, Snyder talked about the costuming of the actresses in the film and how the short skirts and plunging necklines reflect objectification.
“…But Snyder says his intention was to make a movie about the very subject of female objectification,” writes Entertainment Weekly. “The look of Babydoll (Emily Browning) was designed to be ”the personification of innocence and vulnerability,” says Snyder, causing the skeevy men in the movie to both target her and underestimate her.
‘The women in the movie take control of the sexual trappings foisted upon them, even turn [that iconography] into their own weapons. The challenge was to confront the concept of exploitation of women without creating exploitative imagery.'”
So, yeah… I call shenanigans on that.
This is off-topic a little bit, but did anyone catch last week’s episode of 30 Rock where they were parodying The Real Housewives series on Bravo? I hated that episode and here’s why… Even when you’re parodying trash television, you’re still MAKING trash television. You dig?
If Snyder thinks he is confronting the concept of exploitation without creating exploitative imagery, he’s failed. Sucker Punch is exploitation PERSONIFIED. It’s 2 hours of explosions and eyeliner. If it doesn’t exploit the women in the film specifically, it is certainly exploiting the audience, their expectations and their passions.
Not that it will matter all that much. Geeks are only fickle when you get the thing they love wrong by getting it mixed up with something else. But the elements of Sucker Punch are non-specific enough that it looks like it’ll push all the appropriate geek response buttons without any of the negative backlash. It’s kind of sinister and brilliant, when you think about it.
Against my better judgement, I might actually end up seeing Sucker Punch this weekend. If I do, I know I’ll be going by myself. This might as well have “NO WUMANS ALLOW’D” stamped on it with big, red letters.
All I know is that it’s been another long winter with dud after dud being dropped into theaters throughout January and February. I might think Zack Snyder is a first-rate hack, but I could be watching Season of the Witch.
And no one wants that.
What’s your take on Sucker Punch? Are you excited to see it this weekend? Are you at all wary of the flotsam of geek iconography that is littering the landscape of this film or am I a completely paranoid jerk?
LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS BELOW!
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