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.
Another fine film from Andrew Jones. A solid mix of several varieties of pulp from different eras, blended in a dynamically quirky style. Better if I don’t say more.
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.
While we’re on the subject of lurid pulp covers, here’s a link to a gorgeous (albeit small) gallery of Plan 9 and Glen or Glenda director Ed Wood, Jr.’s pulp covers.
The Killer in Drag cover seems misleading: at best, that is a killer in post-operative transsexuality, not drag. And given the cover copy for Satan, Demons and Dildoes — “A journey into the darkness of man’s soul!” — the unwary reader, expecting the dildonic probing of the redhead on the cover, might instead have been exposed to a cautionary tale about pegging.
If I had to pick a favorite, though, it’s this one: Watts… The Difference. The title punningly attempts to reference the recent Watts Race Riots, but the book itself seems to have had a very different plot, according to this Ed. Wood Jr. bibliography: “A series of flashbacks as a Hollywood cowboy actor and his lover reminisce. While not a transvestite-themed novel, one of the main characters does have an angora fetish.”
Other novels that Ed Wood wrote include such luminous titles as The Sexecutives, Night Time, Lez and the unforgettable It Takes A Homo.
I can’t help but think that, were these mechanical cops to have been produced, they would have immediately been drafted into service by private entities. Indeed, the inset in the upper left of this illustration brings to my mind, not of the police sedating a mob — something that, along with “war purposes”, it is well suited for, according to the numerous mentions of each in the write-up — but of the private security forces of the Ford Motor Co., tearing through the picket lines of striking employees. The idea of, say, John Pierpont Morgan, his rhinophyma riddled visage contorted in murderous glee, controlling an army of unstoppable automatons, chills me to the bone. At the very least it would keep the machines from helping those in who are truly in need of robotic justice, like the young lady being harassed by this floating Rape-Bot. Maybe it’s just me, but I wonder just who was looking forward to the future of 1924.
Witness the candy deliciousness that is Saturday morning cartoons: creamy, comedy goodness in a sweet, crunchy anime shell!
• FLCL continues its meteoric, guitar wielding, robot spooging, sexually awkward descent into madness, in the second episode, “Firestarter”.
• Some of my earliest and fondest memories of Nickelodeon involve Rocko’s Modern Life. Featured today are two episodes, “No Pain, No Gain” and “Unbalanced Load”. The intro is the version from season two, featuring the talents of The B-52s.
• I am no fan of Seinfeld so I maintain that Duckman is the best work Jason Alexander has ever done. “The Noir Gang” does a fantastic job of incorporating the show’s perverted, foul-mouthed detective and porcine sidekick into a black and white film noir motif.
• If you had told me that a re-boot of Max Fleischer’s Felix the Cat would be worth it, I may have condescendingly sniffed at the idea. However Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat was an amazing cornucopia of oddity and downright weirdness. Two episodes for you: “Phony Phelix” and “The Petrified Cheese” which features a cleverly named shamus named Seamus. “Ok, pally, let me fill you in on the facts. The skinny. The scam. The poop.”
• Paranoia Agent “The Golden Shoes”. Who is Lil’ Slugger? For Yuichi “Ichi” Taira, the most popular kid in school, top of his class in academics and sports, who plans to run for Student Council President, his golden roller blades and red baseball cap are cause for growing concern among his peers, turning his life upside down. Now, paranoid and looking for a way out of this new nightmare, he focuses his attention on foreign transfer student Shogo “Usshi” Ushiyama, convince he is trying to ruin him.
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.
