In the weeks to come, we’ll be exploring the world of Nick Zedd. I chose to start with Electra Elf & Fluffer . It forces one to retain their patience through occasional banal dialogue that is salt and peppered with nuggets of hilarity, clever wit, sarcasm, super gross stuff, and insanity.
The premise of the show is a classic civie by day, superhero by night scenario. Electra Elf, played by Rev Jen, is an elven superhero. Her sidekick Fluffer is a talking Chihuahua with radioactive pee that paralyzes her enemies. To say the show is low budget is an understatement. (Which is brilliant!) Overlays of dogs licking over a beaver shot, sea monkey monsters, goth band divas that try to take over the world, traces of a very Tim and Eric style in technique and humour way before Tim and Eric.
It’s available on DVD and it gives one the sensation of watching a brilliant show that you and your art star friends made. It’s difficult to believe that someone else made it. Why didn’t you make this, and watch at home with your friends?
My favourite segment to the show is the “One to Grow On” segment that happens at the end of some of the episodes.
The track above is from The Magnetic Fields 1999 triple album “69 Love Songs.” As I’ve not heard the rest of the album, and I can’t write any more about the band, the album or the track. I honestly don’t know enough about any of them. I will aim to correct this oversight soonish.
No, the reason I’m writing a post called “I Don’t Believe in the Sun” is because of an excellent comic written and drawn by Lem for a project called “How Fucking Romantic” which is a group effort to illustrating each of the sixty-nine songs on 69 Love Songs.
The first page of Lem’s comic is below, and clicking on the image will take you to the rest of the six page minicomic. The intention behind the strip is to listen to the song and to read the comic as the music plays. Think of this as the comic equivalent of a music video.
You’ve all heard of Watchmen. I feel comfortable making that assertion, and given the audience of Ectoplasmosis I’m sure that most people reading this have read the book or seen the film. So I won’t give any description of the series, because there’s little point.
This episode of Prisoners of Gravity was broadcast in 1991 and it is a half hour documentary about Alan Moore and David Gibbons’ genre twisting series Watchmen. Contained within this video is the presenter, Command Rick, asking both David Gibbons and Alan Moore a series of questions about the structures they imposed on the series and the various thematic layers within the twelve issues.
This is a short, neat and entertaining insight into the classic comic.
There will be more episodes of the series Prisoners of Gravity posted here in the near future, probably selecting episodes in a semi-random fashion linked only by my immediate interest in the subject that the episode covers.
‘The Sandman’ is a comic serial that while not my favourite, because I don’t play the game of picking favourites, is something that I rate really highly. Certainly part of my particular fondness for the series comes from the circumstances that I read it. I read the series in the ten trade paperback collections, and for a semester during my first year at university used to buy one a week every Wednesday from my local comic book shop (Forbidden Planet, Leicester). I’d read them on the bus journey home from labs, and they made a welcome and much needed detraction from the tedium of taking classes in a subject you already knew.
It also probably helped quite a lot that I was eighteen and pretty much the perfect age to first get exposed to the series.
Part of why I think ‘The Sandman’ is such an enjoyable entity is that its a broad and deep epic about stories and endings and families and life. Sure it’s filtered through the idea of seven immortal Endless, but there’s a lot that’s recognizable here as quite intimate drama. There is also a manic interest and love of ideas which I think this is because of a trend that I’ve a tendency to often point out about the fact that comic writers tend to peak creatively around their late twenties to mid-thirties. At around the age there is a balance of youth driven enthusiasm and there is still plenty of physical endurance left, but this is combined with a growing maturation of ability in telling stories acquired through years of practice
Frank Frazetta died of a stroke today. He was born in 1928, which, to put it into perspective for most of the children reading/posting on this site, means he was alive for every single Marx Brothers theatrical release.
The man was incredibly influential, of course. Moreso than is generally acknowledged, even by his fans. His influence was not only near-universal in modern figurative genre art, but at no point has anyone surmounted the bar he set for his own style. Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, and the rest of the artists working in the cheesy-paperback-cover genre absorbed his tricks and cheats, but somehow never achieved his level of charm. I believe Frazetta’s true talent lay in his power of suggestion: he knew what not to paint.
The Moon Maid
date unknown
One of my favorite Frank Frazetta pieces. The colors here are what does it. Frazetta was a master of skin tone, and it was from him, via my father, that I learned the trick of combining contrasting colors to make realistic skin tones. Note the yellow ochre and lavender on the girl’s skin—eyepopping colors combining to produce a super-organic pallor. Nobody since Sargent could paint skin like this (see the infamous Madame X), and nobody but Frazetta bothered to render all the dimples, ruffles, creases and swellings of a voluptuous woman’s butt. His anatomy could be sloppy when he was in a rush, but he knew exactly how much to paint and how much to imply. Her hands are mere suggestive brushstrokes, her face is a sweet nothing, and the background fades into a mauve mist. The little realisms, like this princess’ fat ass and heavy breasts, sold the image, and transported her from yet another yawn-inducing pinup, to a vulnerable, round, strong, soft, sexy being.
The exquisitely-illustrated, Lovecraftian comic book ELDRITCH is battling for first place in a Zuda Comics contest. The prize: enough money to finish the book, plus a publishing contract to take it all the way out of the park.
Drew Rausch and Aaron Alexovich are friends of Ectomo, and thus have I cast my vote. They’re currently surfing the #2 position, but have far outstripped all other entries in favorites, views, and overall quality. The color and linework here is unbelievable, and the writing is both snappy and skillful.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
