A.V. Club Blog

I’ve been hanging onto this for a couple of months hoping that the right context would come up to give me a reason to post it. And the news that Patrick Swayze is battling pancreatic cancer was not exactly the sort of lighthearted thing I was hoping for, but it’ll have to do. Let us all celebrate the man who gave us the genius trilogy that is Dirty Dancing, Ghost, and Road House via the 1991 unauthorized biography published by Personality Comics, posted after the "read more" link.

(Credit for finding this goes to Journalista and the original poster on the LiveJournal site Scans_Daily. If the images are too small to be legible here, check out that Scans_Daily page, which features larger versions. Also found there: Mystery Science... read more

With the old cartoonists dying off and the formerly hot young cartoonists either retiring early or taking indefinitely prolonged hiatuses, there’s been a lot more turnover on the comics page over the last few years. Which explains why one day earlier this year, I opened my local daily and was confronted with this abomination:

Now when it comes to comic strips, I’m pretty broad-minded. I’ve been reading the funnies every day since I was in single digits, and lately I’ve been loving the move towards meticulously archived collections of legendary strips like Dick Tracy and Mutt & Jeff. I know people groan at “legacy” strips like Blondie and Beetle Bailey, but at least once a month their board of directors comes up a joke that makes me hand the paper across to my wife and say, “Blondie was pretty funny today,” If a comic strip is poorly drawn but reliably amusing (like Dilbert), it gets a lot of leeway from me,... read more

(Each week, sanity dictates that I must indulge in a few positive pop-culture experiences to make up for the Transformers and National Bingo Nights of the world. Every Friday, I offer a few of them.)

1. Joshua (2007): It’s not often that we have big disagreements among the A.V. Club film staff, because we share a similar sensibility and usually have no trouble coming to a consensus, which is why we were able to put together a joint Top 10 list last year. But I’m going to have to break rank with my esteemed colleague Nathan Rabin—and a reasonable chunk of the critical community—and say that Joshua, the feature debut of Hell House director George Ratliff, is a misunderstood near-masterpiece and one of the best films I’ve seen this year. I was able to catch it on the last night of its brief run in Chicago, so interested parties will have to... read more

This has already been linked to by blogs like Boing Boing and Metafilter so a lot of you have probably seen it already, but it's too funny to ignore: Peanuts if it had been written by Charles Bukowski.

Previously noted:

• The Nietzsche Family Circus

• A 1930s newspaper strip which features Mickey Mouse attempting suicide (an actual Disney cartoon strip, not a parody)

Update: Thanks to "Inertia" in the comments section, the long-lost Cthulhu Family Circus has been found. Gaze now upon eldritch secrets man was not meant to know.

Back in junior high school I used to get up at precisely 9:55 a.m. every Saturday. I didn’t set an alarm clock, my body just awoke on its own exactly five minutes before the start of Saved By The Bell and its lesser-known follow-up, California Dreams. My devotion to these shows is best described as anti-fandom; I was fascinated by how unbelievably crappy they were, and bewildered by their apparent popularity. It wasn’t a matter of taste; these shows sunk beyond bad into flat-out incompetence. Was I the only person who noticed the bad dialogue, grade school production values, and awkward acting of these cynically assembled teen programs? (No, but I didn't know that at age 14.) I didn’t want to crack the code; biologically, I needed to.

Alas, I never succeeded at getting to the bottom of Zack Morris’ wily witchcraft. And now I’m stuck loyally following another show whose popularity I can’t quite figure out: Entourage. If you haven't seen the popular HBO comedy, which kicked off the second part of its third season Sunday (HBO isn’t TV, so it needn’t conform to your logical TV season calendars), it’s about a hunky actor named...

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My good friend and mentor Jim Ridley has been known to buy two tickets to movies he likes at his local arthouse, just to help push attendance up. I’ve never gone that far, but I do try to pay for my own comics from independent publishers whenever possible. I accept review copies (and even ask for them occasionally), but I also try a few times a year to place catalog orders from my favorite publishers, especially when they’re having a sale or need bailing out of a hole.

Unfortunately, I’m probably not going to buy anything at this sale from Top Shelf. It’s a celebration sale, in honor of 10 years of existence; but I’m sure Top Shelf head honcho Chris Staros would be happy to reduce some stock and make a few extra dollars while he’s toasting ten years of quality work. And if I hadn’t placed a Top Shelf order fairly recently, I’d be sending some money his way, and getting some great comics in return.

Instead, I’ll do the next best thing, which is to urge the comics fans among our readership to check out the list of available books at that link above. (Did you miss it?... read more

In honor of this week’s comics coverage, here’s an abbreviated, comics-themed edition of the BNC:

1. Whither The Strip Collection?

Thanks to a handy application called Comictastic, I read a ton of syndicated newspaper strips every day. (With comics, as with music, movies and TV, I like a varied diet: a little art, a little craft, a little kitsch and a little trash.) One of my favorite dailies has become Brooke McEldowney’s 9 Chickweed Lane, a whimsical trifle that’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but may be the best drawn strip around, graced by a style reminiscent of Jules Ffeiffer, Al Hirschfeld, and some of the more modernist Chuck Jones animated cartoons.

9 Chickweed Lane’s been around for nearly 15 years, but I’ve only been reading it for about two, so I went looking for some collections to fill in the gaps. No luck. Outside of one book of McEldowney’s cat themed... read more

Happy National Gorilla Suit Day, everyone. Invented by Mad magazine’s Don Martin in 1963, it’s evolved into a way to celebrate the late Martin’s goofy genius thanks to the efforts of writer and blogger Mark Evanier. (Find out a little more history of the holiday on this page.) Be sure to send gifts and well-wishings to any apes, baboons, or monkeys of your acquaintance. I'm not sure what kind of gift is appropriate, but a bouquet of bananas probably would hit the spot.

Related: The Don Martin Dictionary, collecting hundreds of the bizarre sound effects that made his cartoons so memorable—everything from the dentistry-related “AAAAGH! EEEEEOOOW ACK! UGH UGH MMP AGH! AEEK” to... read more

Since

I wrote a blog post last year lamenting the fact that Harvey Pekar’’s comics-writing was getting increasingly sloppy just when public interest in his work is at its peak, it’s only fair that I tell comics fans who aren't reading already to

pick up the three issues of American Splendor that DC’s Vertigo imprint has published so far. This is vintage Pekar. Stories about petty annoyances and pleasant surprises, told straight, and illustrated by some of the best cartoonists in the business (like Eddie Campbell, Richard Corben and Rick Geary). There’s a piece in the latest issue about how much Pekar wishes he had time to take an afternoon nap that particularly struck a chord with me, since that urge tends to strike me around 1 o’clock every day, when my belly’s full of lunch and I’m sitting on my comfortable couch, trying to write. It's that sympathetic contemplation of universal human desires that’s always been Pekar's appeal. Or at least part of it.

The other day I was watching read more

I could argue that part two of part two of this probably now-completed series came so late because I wanted to save it run alongside The A.V. Club’s latest round of comics reviews, or because I wanted to make a point about “the perils of serialization” by doing my best imitation of a late-shipping Marvel comic. In truth I just got busy and lost the plot a little, which of course is one of those dreaded perils. Once you release the first installment of something out into the world, you’ve made a pronouncement of a kind; and the longer you take to finish your thought, the more your original point can fade, until you can’t even remember what it was you wanted to say.

Anyway, when we left off, I believe I was arguing that the comics medium—while wonderful in many ways—is hampered by its means of production. Mainstreamers and alt-artistes alike tend to trip the longer they run, because it’s hard to sustain a narrative that takes years to write and draw, and cartoonists tend not to go back and edit their own work. A notable exception is Gilbert Hernandez, who has been known to alter his “Palomar” stories between their original serialized run... read more