putting the j in jjosh

I read this guy’s comics, and they’re nutso

Wow. I love Dash Shaw's low-fi sci-fi psychedelic aesthetic, and this animated film he's been working on looks amazing. Music is solid, building building building. It looks like a dream with a plot. Can't wait to see the final product, here's a trailer…

"The Ruined Cast" / Dash Shaw – demo teaser from Howard Gertler on Vimeo.

from Hark

It feels good to have been gone from the blog for a while, and then to come back and find things like this waiting for me on the internet….

Sometimes in the course of surfing the web, one comes across an achievement of cultural mash-uppery so epic that it defies all we know to be true. Where do people find the time? Why do they feel the need? How did they acquire the skills to make this happen? What does it say about our world?

It is within this context that I give you Paul O'Connel's re-telling of the Wicker Man as an Italian fumetti-style comic with Muppets. Take some time and read the whole thing. It's not that long, and the rewards are great.

MUPPET WICKER MAN!!!!

This is via ATDDTF, who got it from Robot 6, who got it from Tom Sp.

spent last Saturday out and about drinking and staying up late (seeing Zack G)…

spent Sunday recovering, waiting for the football game and reading Forming by Jesse Moynihan, another brilliant psychedelic-style web comic…I mean really, read this thing it's amazing…here's a link to the start of it…

and here's an example strip so you can see how cool it is…

Grant Morrison continues to stand out as a singular visionary in the world of comics:

AVC: What is it about the comics medium in particular that appeals to you as a storyteller?

GM: The essentially magical qualities of inert words and ink pictures working together with reader consciousness to create a holographic Sensurround emotional experience. What else?

(Thanks MM for hipping me to this great interview…)

At some point I got tired of trying to defend comics and prove to everyone that they are as acceptable a form of storytelling as film or literature. People’s eyes tend to glaze over and then you show them something amazing but they’re not really open to it so they don’t get it and it’s a big waste of time. Scott McCloud on the other hand never seems to get tired of it. He has a great talk on TED where he brings up how comics are going to adapt to the internet and he refs a great strip you should definitely check out:

Pup Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe

also McCloud’s talk is great, thought-provoking and exceedingly well done. If you have any interest in art, how we perceive images, or the human condition, you’ll probably find something to dig in there. It’s 17 minutes, so save it until you’ve got the time…

I’ve checked in with a bunch of webcomics over the years, ever since the internet started saying that webcomics would be the new salvation for the comic book world. But none of them have ever held my attention for more than a few episodes (webisodes?). I liked Cat and Girl, and have already expressed my love of Wigu, but none of them have captivated me the way Dash Shaw’s "Bodyworld" has. Earlier in the Fall I read his "Bottomless Belly Button" and thought it was fun and ok (all the characters are drawn normally except for one who’s got a frog head). Maybe a bit too much in the comic-self-confessional genre for me.

But "Bodyworld" is fantastic. An oddball mix of z-movie alternate reality, semi-sci-fi teen drama with a little kung fu action film mixed in, "Bodyworld" has got something for everyone: weird hallucingenic drugs, strange semi-steamy love scenes, nunchuks, aliens. Super highly recommended…

pbfcomics.com = amazing

can’t remember where I came across this for proper attribution, but thanks to whoever that was.

As with all of the hallucinogenic swirl that is the internets, I have no clue if this stuff is super-popular or totally under the radar. Either way, you should check it out. Nice animation, politically motivated, and kind of absurd. Sign me up.

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so funny…there’s more of them over here…

In 2004 when I went to the Small Press Expo (SPX) in Bethesda, MD I did a couple of things. I met Carla Speed McNeil, met another guy named Thor (my alter ego, I’ll tell you all about it later), and had a great conversation with Jeff Rowland who is the writer/artist of Wigu. I had so much fun talking to him that I bought one of his books, thoroughly enjoyed it, and now follow Wigu online. He recently started a new storyline, and I heartily recommend it…it starts here…

This description from Wikipedia is too good not to share:

The comic is centered on the adventures of a little boy named Wigu Tinkle and his family. Each chapter of the comic represents one day in Wigu’s life. Wigu is an intelligent child with an active imagination who uses much of his free time to watch television and play video games, where he encounters the beings of Butter Dimension³, primarily the intergalactic heroes Topato (a flying potato whose catch phrase is "Spring into action!" and whose primary defense mechanism consists of being made entirely of poison) and Sheriff Pony (an eloquent Space Pony who, as the storyline reveals, excretes vanilla ice cream instead of fecal waste).

Wigu has a teenage sister, Paisley, who is the stereotypical goth girl, though insists her being a nihilist is entirely different. She actively seeks out depression and angst. Wigu’s father Quincy makes money by composing music for porno movies. He is also a bodybuilder and tends to walk around without a shirt, which sometimes gets him into trouble.

joshgranger.com science corrospondent Pat G returns with a link to an article that suggests the reason aliens haven’t contacted us yet is that they’re probably all geeking out in their own virtual worlds. You could make an awesome virtual world that does everything you could ever want it to, and then you wouldn’t have to bother with expending all the energy to go to other planets or build more crap on your own planet.

When the conversation gets to environmental concerns (as it often does in our house), I often feel that to have hope in the face of such disaster requires a fundamentalist faith in technology. Sometimes I have to break it down like "Well, I honestly think that this crises might be the thing that spurs us to space travel to colonize other planets." And I’m not really joking, you know? But now I think this virtual reality angle is so much more energy effecient, it will become my new go-to. A bit harder to explain, but perhaps a bit easier to absorb than the whole "other planets will save us" theory.

It reminded me of this chilling scene from Carla Speed McNeil’s amazing sci-fi comics epic, Finder. If you are into comics at all and don’t know Finder, you must go and get it and get into it now. Now, I say! It is amazing. She’s the only comics person that I actually went to a convention to meet. Check her website, lightspeedpress.com, she’s got first chapters from many of her books there for you to check out, or you can order the trades from her. I recommend starting from the beginning with Sin-Eater. It’s so dense and amazing…

Anyway, this scene is from "Dream Sequence", and it shows the extension of all this thought, introducing a character who goes to work in a virtual world, in a sort of cubicle farm. It really stuck in my head because it seems so plausible…

By now the internet is full of — and links have been forwarded and re-forwarded of — the classic way to make the Garfield comic strip funny: remove Garfield’s speech or thought balloons. It also seems to make it more the way cats really behave…

But, thanks to Malcolm M I have now discovered that there’s a way to take Garfield into the stratosphere of funny: live action. This guy’s site has a ton of these…each one dramatizes a 3 panel strip and then does a weird sort of remix with a music track. Very weird, and I love it.

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ps this is a gar, so a field of those would be pretty weird too

Walking back from yoga today, Maxine and I stumbled into a new sort of graphic arts store on 3rd st, right in the middle of Gowanus. Called Picturebox, it looks like it’s in the middle of nowhere, but there were a couple of people in there when we were there, and from talking to the guy who was working there we learned that it’s been a small art and comics publisher there for a year and a half. The art was very cool, graphic, psychedelic — just my style.

I picked up a Dr. Strange treasury from 1975 that looks absolutely amazing, and reminisced with the guy working there about how cool it was that Dr. Strange lived in Manhattan on Bleeker Street! I love it.

From looking at the art, by comics legend Steve Ditko, it got me thinking of this great doc that I read about a while ago and tracked down (with quite a bit of effort). It’s by Jonathan Ross, who is a sort of British late-night talk guy, but gets a bit more respect than our Leno/Letterman dichotomy.

Called "in Search of Steve Ditko", it’s about Ross’s fascination with Ditko, and his attempts to track down the camera-shy artist. It’s really fun and tough to find, so I’m putting it here for you to download and enjoy. It’s about 600MB, and I’ve no clue what speed my server will go to, so maybe set it going overnight or something. If it’s not working, let me know in the comments and I’ll work out some other way to host it…

I originally read about it on Neil Gaiman’s blog, because he shows up at the end to help Jonathan Ross out, so if you’re a Gaiman fan, it’s got that too. And Alan Moore, in all his crazy beard, crazy rings glory.

Jonathan Ross’s "in Search Of Steve Ditko"

(right-click to download; left click to open as QT)

Tony Millionaire’s Maakies. I always see Tony Millionaire’s collections in the comic store, but I’ve never gotten one. But now that they’re showing up in cartoon form (on SNL and Adult Swim), I may have to take the plunge. I love TM’s description of the series:

"Maakies focuses on the darkly comic misadventures of Uncle Gabby (a drunken Irish monkey) and Drinky Crow (a crow who likes to drink), two antiheroes with a propensity for drunkenness, violence, suicide, and venereal disease."

Nice. Check his animations here, or check his site here. Full of good dark stuff. I love this one (thanks Bill D)…

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