Month: September 2012

By the time next week’s posting goes live, Zombie Ranch will have reached its 3rd anniversary. I reckon I’ll talk more on that once the occasion has arrived, but it does remind me that we have produced quite a few comic pages, and I’ve written quite a few of these blogs to accompany them. I ponder sometimes how much I might actually be repeating myself, since Dawn (rightly) accuses me of having a horrible memory in a lot of cases. I’ll make some comment on some commercial I find interesting, and she’ll pointedly inform me I made the exact same comment on the exact same commercial a month beforehand.

So you must accept my profound apologies if you find me making observations here that I have already made in the past. I make a concerted effort to keep the story of the comic straight, but the blog is much more of a freeform exercise, sometimes with a topic that invaded my thoughts on the very same night I compose it. The thoughts tonight are those of influence, conscious or unconscious, on a person’s writing style.

One of the bits I can’t quite recollect is if I’ve already mentioned my creative writing frustrations in my college days. Well, if I have, consider this a recap. I majored in Theater in college, and something I consider a grave mistake was letting the other people in the (non-theater) creative writing class I took part in know that. I’m pretty sure it was the teacher who had us go around the room and tell our peers about ourselves, but whatever the case, for the next few months I received no critique which did not disparagingly hinge around a dozen different variations on “this reads too much like a play”. When pressed for what the hell that meant, exactly, it seemed I was leaving far too much to the imagination, and that was abhorrent to the art of prose. On a stage we might get to see your collaborators in acting and design fill in all your missing details, but in prose, good sir, you must provide everything for us or we shall be lost.

Hemingway might have had a rebuttal at this point, but, I was young, and the wind was against me, and so I did my best to conform my writing to what the instructor and my peers seemed to want, forcing out what was to me excruciatingly overblown amounts of description and exposition… but no matter what I did, it was never enough. They would look, and “tsk”, and once again tell me that it seemed I’d be better off writing for the theater. But that wasn’t the most frustrating part; the most frustrating was that because my drama background seemed to be the beginning and end of the conversation, then insofar as I remember I had only one critique from that all that time that looked beyond that and gave me something worth a damn in terms of improving my skills.

Now of course, all writers are people, and people convey both fact and fiction from their own viewpoints. To be a writer without a “voice” is to be a non-entity, someone whose output is as entertaining as a set of electronics instructions. To be a writer with a voice, it seems only logical to consider that the voice is going to have the experiences and prejudices of a unique life experience behind it. We are all drunk upon our own lives, carrying with us those joys and pains and ups and downs, a lot of which may be the fuel driving us to tell stories in the first place.

But do they really color everything? I read Ender’s Game and don’t really see a bunch of pro-Mormon propaganda in it, but there are a lot of people who seem to honestly believe that because Orson Scott Card happens to be a Mormon, everything he writes is nothing more than a thinly veiled religious treatise, and anyone who can’t see that is being willfully blind.

How many people would have come up with that if they didn’t know (or think they know) the man (or woman) behind the tale? How many people would have critiqued my stories as being too much like stage plays if they had no idea what my main focus of study was?

You won’t find me claiming writers aren’t under the influence of their lives, but given these kinds of responses, it’s little wonder why some resort to pen names, especially when they happen to be stepping outside their comfort zone—or more accurately, the zone their audience might be comfortable with. It may be the only way for them to get an honest critique at the public’s hands.

So we’re back from Comikaze 2012… pardon me, I guess it’s full formal name now is “Stan Lee’s Comikaze – Comic, Anime, Gaming Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Expo – Shock and Awesome!”.

We were there for the inaugural show last year, and since they let us be special guests with a free Artist’s Alley table, we were not as much for the complaints that some of our fellow vendors had. Plus I always find it good practice to cut a show slack in its freshman outing (with the exception of the horrible Pasadena Rock’n Comic Con, but that was basically the Birdemic of conventions). They gave away a lot of complimentary tickets that first year and had heavy discounts on the rest, so there were crowds, and people (at least from our perspective) seemed in the mood to buy. The L.A. Convention Center is also just a quick car trip from our house, so all in all it was a laid-back experience despite some of the hiccups I mentioned.

Actually, now that I’m scouring back through my November 2011 blogs, it seems like I never talked about Comikaze. So I guess I didn’t really mention anything, good or bad. Well, I covered the good already, and the bad could be chalked up mostly to inexperience… such as having no separate rooms for the panels and expecting curtained off areas on the convention floor to work as a viable substitute. Since we were not part of any panels we did not suffer from this, but I empathized with those who did because an open-on-top, curtained off area does not stop outside sound, and there was a lot of it, particularly in the form of very loud P.A. announcements that drowned people out so badly the panels had to just pause until they were over.

If that had happened again this year, I would honestly wonder what the organizers were smoking, but it did not. Many things were improved, not the least of which was moving the show out of the basement area it was held in last year. I cannot, however, argue with a couple of reviews of this year’s show that I’ve read, one from the perspective of veteran exhibitor Travis Hanson going to Comikaze for the first time, and the other from veteran attendee Whitney Drake doing the same.

Reading Whitney Drake’s account of the line to get in was stunning, because yes, the weather was terribly hot. On Saturday morning when we showed up to get our exhibitor badges we were inside the lobby, but the sun coming through the glass was enough to break the exhibitors waiting into a sweat, and there were a surprising amount of exhibitors waiting. Word was that for whatever reason, no badges could be printed and distributed prior to 9am, and so everyone was jammed up, not to mention anxious since the show opened at 10. We were stuck there for at least a half an hour before we were able to get into the exhibit hall and start setting up. I heard some people claim that because of the delay security were willing to let people in to set up without badges, but that’s a whole other can o’ worms.

Drake’s report on the attendee line? That makes me feel that we got off easy. Ouch. I did have one friend who texted us saying he tried to make it down around 1pm or so and didn’t even make it as far as a line, the parking situation alone at that point made him give up and drive back home. Honestly, it took me about 20 minutes after we finished setting up before I started to relax and feel sane and reasonable again… I can’t imagine the effect on the general crowds. Actually, I suppose it might answer the question of why it seemed so slow for us for the first several hours on Saturday despite the crowds, because those crowds might have also been trying to overcome a grumpy beginning to their outing.

I did also think of something else when I read Drake’s suggestion that they might have wanted to have more people processing tickets. There’s a good friend of the Ranch named Gregory who likes to volunteer around at the L.A. area shows, and he showed up to say hi on Saturday afternoon with a strange story that he’d been turned away because of some ruling that because Comikaze was a for-profit enterprise, they weren’t permitted to recruit volunteers. Anyone who’s been to any of the Comic-Con International shows knows just how important the volunteers are to beefing up your staffing. Now the Comic-Con organization is non-profit, but I think there’s other for-profit conventions that recruit volunteers with no problem. I think even Comikaze had volunteers last year. I don’t know what changed, but the new policy seemed to have blindsided the organizers as much as anyone else, and because of that might have left them severely short on working bodies. That bottleneck likely contributed to all the “traffic jams”, with too many attendees and not enough people to process them efficiently.

Travis Hanson’s point about the P.A. is also valid; it wasn’t interrupting panels this year, but it still felt intrusive, particularly towards the end of Sunday when they appeared to be getting almost desperate to sell off their Comikaze merchandise. First was the announcement everything was slashed to 50% off, and then, I kid you not, there was a point two staffers with armloads of Comikaze t-shirts went down the aisles shouting they were selling them for $5 apiece, like they were street vendors hawking their wares. Whether under orders to do so or not, that was just weird, and I suppose underscores the point of not making your exhibitors feel like you’re in competition with them.

As for the idea of bells and whistles at the expense of basics? I’m honestly surprised neither blog made more mention of the Zombie Apocalypse course, which was a fairly late addition that I’m sure was inspired by the one AMC put on at Petco Park during San Diego Comic-Con. There was a separate admission charged to be part of that, but that made sense since it wasn’t even being run by the same company. Here it was a $30 charge to be a survivor (later discounted to $20 in the course of the show) and a $70 charge to be a zombie, and the zombies needed a two hour training session in addition to time for make-up. The course itself was made up mostly of inflatable slides and the like, which looked somewhat fun, but when I finally got over to take a close look at it through the “quarantine fence”, it seemed very deserted. Maybe I just caught it between runs, but then again, I think it’s entirely possible that the amount of would-be zombies willing to pay $70 to be part of the experience was vastly overestimated. And without zombies, where’s the experience for the would-be survivors?

I don’t know how it went on Saturday, but on Sunday all I saw was a couple of zombies shambling around the bounce castles, with the whole area being uncrowded enough some FemmeLoki cosplayer was having a photoshoot at the fence, complete with stand-up reflectors. All in all, it seems like they poured a lot of effort into that aspect of the convention for not much return, which is then when you start wondering if they could have spent the money and time more wisely. Comikaze’s sophomore show fixed some things, but other experiments didn’t quite pan out.

Will Dawn and I go back next year? That depends on a lot of factors. This year we didn’t get a free booth but we at least got to take advantage of an offered “grandfather clause” which gave us a good discount for having been present at the first show. If they raise up their prices, we might need to make some hard decisions, which are also complicated by not quite knowing yet what the SoCal convention scene will be like in 2013.

I do know that we finally listened to what all our friends and peers kept telling us and booked a table for Phoenix. So anyone out Arizona way, if you’re free Memorial Day weekend, Dawn and I will be coming your way!

Sometimes it’s nice just to kick back and watch a movie for the sheer hell of it. Last week I got all deeply analytical and philosophical on the subject of Once Upon A Time In The West, a film made with meticulous care and a measured, operatic pace.

This week, I popped open a cold one and fired up Smokey and the Bandit. This is one of those movies that was on TV all the time when I was a little kid. All. The. Time. And I remember just eating it up, because it had fast cars, cartoony characters, and just plain seemed like everyone involved in the production was having a hell of a good time.

Revisiting it as an adult? Well, it ain’t no masterpiece of cinema, but it’s still a lot of fun. For one thing, I had forgotten that the big bootlegging crux of the film is transporting 400 cases of Coors beer from East Texas to Georgia. In 1977 America, it was illegal to bring Coors east of the Mississippi river without a special permit, a concept that baffles my mind because, well… Coors. 2012 is a year where so many better domestic and imported brews are so widely available, for such cheap prices, it boggles my mind that anyone could ever risk incarceration over Coors. Coors for me is the stuff people fall back on when they just need mass quantities of beer and don’t care what it is.

And yet, yeah, I suppose prior to the 1990s the beer market in the U.S. wasn’t nearly as diverse, and apparently, quite jealously guarded in some cases. I still love the concept that the main impetus of the movie is based around driving a truckload of cheap beer from Texarkana to Atlanta as fast as possible, dodging every kind of law along the way. This isn’t cocaine or bioweapons, it’s Coors, and there’s a certain innocence to that.

The whole movie shares that sort of childlike innocence, like a Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon brought to live action and moved to the highways of the Deep South, or at least a fantasy version of it where everyone has a CB Radio and is more than willing to mess around with the law so that a charismatic, carefree rebel can win the day. Cars crash and property gets destroyed, but there’s no lasting consequences beyond some frustrated “countie mountie” stomping on his Smokey hat. Burt Reynolds as The Bandit could easily be seen as a lower-rent template for Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark. Jackie Gleason’s portrayal of Sherriff Buford T. Justice is such a stereotype he all but transcends the concept, and has resonated down through the decades into such strange descendants as Eric Cartman of South Park shouting about his “Authori-TY!”. Even Sally Field’s love interest character in the movie seems somehow more vibrant than many modern equivalents.

Again, not claiming great cinema here, but Smokey and the Bandit really never tries to be profound. You don’t get that weird whiplash effect of movies like Transformers which occasionally seem to feel the need to say something about the human condition, instead of just sticking to giant robots duking it out. Smokey and the Bandit is what it is, straightforward escapist entertainment, presented with no regrets, no apologies, and a big charming grin on its mustachioed mug. It’s also a movie from back when “PC” barely even meant Personal Computer, much less Political Correctness, so I suppose I perhaps ought to warn off the easily offended—but the only openly racist character also happens to be the villain, and again, he’s racist in the way Cartman is racist, so overblown you can’t really take him seriously.

For me, it held up as 90 minutes of well-paced fun, and when a movie can do that whether you’re nine years old or thirty years past that mark, there’s something special to it. Call it a guilty pleasure if you must… I’ll just call it a pleasure, plain and simple.

Longtime readers will know of my love for Sergio Leone’s westerns, particularly The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I may have even gone so far as to call that particular film his masterpiece.

If you’re familiar with Leone’s work, you might be about to argue with me… and I’ll admit, you might very well be right. As a wizened old Dagobah muppet once said: “there is another…”. 

Once Upon a Time in the West is that other, and many consider it not only to be the pinnacle of Leone’s career, not only one of the greatest westerns ever made, but one of the best films ever made, period.

Why? That’s not something easily told. In fact, the first time that I watched it (and I can’t even remember the year), I don’t think I found it particularly memorable. Maybe I was too disappointed in the lack of Clint Eastwood, since I vaguely remember being in a big Man With No Name fanboy phase. Maybe it was a bad copy. I hadn’t revisited it since, even when I went into my western binge with the development of Zombie Ranch. Even after I found a 2-disc DVD set for $4 at my local Blockbuster’s closeout sale and decided “what the heck, I’ll own that”, I just had never gotten around to a viewing.

It comforts me that I’m not alone and that articles like this exist, commisserating the notion that this is one of those movies you should see that you just (for whatever reason) don’t get around to seeing. Or even worse in my case, that I’d seen and (for whatever reason) remained unmoved. It was thus not really possible for me to jump in on the conversation with some of my film buff friends over the weekend as they hailed it as near perfection in cinema. I just nodded along, and then the next day decided I had a few hours to kill so I might as well dig out the DVD and give things a second look. That’s definitely one thing to warn people about going in, there’s a time commitment involved.

And a commitment of attention. I’ve spoken before about how the old-school classics found a way to be interesting without needing to throw action scenes at us every minute, and Once Upon a Time in the West takes a stand on this right from the beginning, with a ten-minute sequence of three men waiting for a train. If that sounds reminiscent of the opening of High Noon, it is unabashedly so, homaged along with several other classics by a director freely admitting his influences… Leone doing what we might think of as Quentin Tarantino’s shtick, when the latter was still barely 5 years old. But still, this particular sequence is unique. Barely any dialogue. No music. No sound, besides the kinds of sounds you only notice when you’re waiting for something to happen.

This is where I began to realize what one of the biggest problems was with my prior viewing. Last time, I had a crappy print shown on a tiny, crappy television. This time, I had it playing on a 40″ HDTV, and even though it wasn’t a Blu-Ray disc, the print was so clear and vivid that it about blows my mind to think it could get any better. Simply put, I think that in order to watch Once Upon a Time in the West properly, you need to be able to see the pores in every craggy face. You should have the capability to notice that one of Charles Bronson’s eyes has slightly different irises from the other, because you’ll have the time and close-ups to do so. Leone wants to tell you his story through his visuals, through every carefully framed shot… so trying to get the sense of that on a small and low-rez screen is like being half-blind. If you don’t lose yourself in the audio/visuals, you’ll be on the outside of the storytelling; Leone leans so heavily on that part of his equation over, say, plot and dialogue, that if you don’t get fascinated by the cinematics, it might just seem boring.

Because really, it’s a much more somber film than his earlier westerns. And quieter. This is less a celebration of the untamed frontier than a funeral for it, albeit a moving one. The pacing reminds me a lot of Shane, with much of the runtime devoted to the anticipation of violence rather than its commitment. Or as the wikipedia article aptly puts it, “Leone was far more interested in the rituals preceding violence than in the violence itself.”

In a way the opening of the film could be seen as a litmus test on the viewer. If you’re not being entertained by those three guys killing time waiting at a train station, then you might want to skip watching the rest, or at least save it for a day and time when you’re in the proper mood, with the proper environment. Let’s just say this time around, I had that going, and it makes all the difference. Once Upon a Time in the West is a deliberate film, as harsh and beautiful as the desert that makes up its setting, where something as simple as the drip of water onto a man’s hat takes on a mythic significance. Like Citizen Kane, it’s a movie first and foremost for those who love movies, the way Watchmen could be said to be a comic for those who love comics. Not to say the story isn’t compelling or the characters and dialogue aren’t memorable, but it’s one of those films that’s fascinating to approach from the perspective of how it was made as much as the subject matter being presented; a movie where the director’s every choice matters.

And it’s a damn fine western, too. I’m glad I gave it a second look. If you haven’t even given it a first, consider doing so. Just don’t judge our Frank here by his namesake there; I don’t think either one would appreciate that.