NO MO BUSHWA

I want a president who rocks, or at least tries to.

ACTS OF GODZILLA By Jim Knipfel

Jim Knipfel is the author of the riotous Slackjaw.

The suspension of disbelief—or rather, the inability to suspend disbelief—is another cultural difference that may help explain why these films get such a bad rap in the States. To American audiences, if something looks fake, the critics and moviegoers alike are going to call attention to it. These films are suddenly declared "bad" or "cheesy" because you can see the wires or because the monsters don't look real (think about that one for a second). They forget that these movies are fables above all, intricate fairy tales about nature lashing back at human arrogance. If Tanaka and Honda wanted, they could've shown the realistic effects of radiation poisoning on the population of a city. Instead, they embodied that fear in a giant lizard—one who, paradoxically enough, would be presented as an heroic protector of Japan as the series progressed.

(via GreenCine daily)

e-sheep (aka Patrick Farley) has created an amazing collection of online comics. His manga version of the book of Revelations, Apocamon, has to be seen to be believed. Inspired stuff...

Fay Wray RIP

EIGHTBALL

I've been reading Dan Clowes' comics for over 15 years now, and its been interesting to chart his progression from the the retro hipsterism of Lloyd Llewellyn to the Lynchian Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and on to his biggest popular success, the gen x angst of Ghost World. He has a way of synthesizing his influences (notably B. Krigstein, Will Elder and R. Crumb) so that he creates something new and completely his own.

What's most surprising about the novella in Eightball #23, The Death Ray, is that he takes on the superhero myth. That's right, alt-comics cynic Clowes, who's always mercilessly mocked the
world of superhero fandom in the past (most notably with his nerd character Dan Pussey), here writes and draws his own version of the same. The story he tells is not too terribly far from a 60s issue of Spiderman. What makes it different is both the depth of the characters and the level of bleakness conveyed. He also experiments with storytelling and plays with changing
typical comics vocabulary (each "chapter" is drawn as a different strip, and information that would normally be placed in a thought balloon is spoken in a dialogue balloon).

While I thought the story was quite good, I do miss the goofier lowbrow side of Clowes' work--whatever happened to Needledick fer christ's sake?