From the monthly archives:

January 2008

Lisboa, Lisbon

Warren Craghead, a singular cartoonist and a fine fine artist, has released his latest tiny chapbook on his web site. I picked his interpretation of Apollonaire, How To Be Everywhere, as the finest comic of ‘07. So it’s a treat to see another book so early in ‘08.
Best of all, you can download [...]

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Chicken With Plums

With the early, sudden success of her memoir Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi has found herself in a tough place. She spoke to the divide between the West and Iran, and so came dangerously close to becoming one of the few Voices of Iran out there. Yet speaking for her country would require broad generalizations, [...]

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Cloverfield

My brother and I spent our childhoods checking out Monsters of Toho Studios from the library over and over. So when a new monster took a page from Blair Witch, we met some of our oldest friends at the theater on opening night. I mean, come on: giant monsters.

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The Stacks by Mark Bell

Something to get lost in, The Stacks opens with at least a partial map. As if he understands we’ll need some help, Marc Bell offers four pages of “secret codes,” clueing us in to the fact that “oven mitt means ‘take it easy’” and “nipple’s [sic] mean macho—man very much alive.” Forty pages [...]

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The Beaver Trilogy

Somehow I saw The Beaver Trilogy by Trent Harris recently. A friend had unearthed a copy of this profoundly odd film, with Young Sean Penn aping a guy who impersonates Olivia Newton-John, along with Crispin Glover and the actual guy. The film’s one of those back alley masterpieces, like The Holy Mountain or [...]

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Dateline Sucks

Always interesting Harold Henderson has summed up an article in Technology Review on television news quite well:
TV “news” isn’t liberal or conservative, it’s stupid.
Written by former Dateline NBC producer John Hockenberry, it covers twelve years of missed chances as producers continually look for an “emotional core” where there isn’t one. Not Al Qaeda’s complexities; [...]

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Animated Woodring

This has probably made the rounds already, but: Researching an article on KONDOU Akino, I ran across a link to FUYAMA Taruto’s animated take on Jim Woodring’s Frank.Here’s the link.
(Picturebox has a clip on Youtube, but the above links to the whole short.)

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Best of 2007, part II (Nov & Dec)

My list of the Best Five Comics of 2007 should be at the printer for issue 288 of TCJ. I sent it off in October, but proceeded to play catch up in the interim. Looking at other lists online– especially Time’s, which seems to have been compiled by algorithm– I rather like mine [...]

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Elephant Six movie on the way

Apparently some of the Elephant Six folk down Athens way have finished Major Organ and the Adding Machine, a long-dreamt movie project. Orange Twin has a .flv trailer up for download, get VLC or Miro to watch it.
I can’t wait– it looks goofy as all get out and undoubtedly undistributed, in the great [...]

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Thanks, Mr. Rosenbaum

In his Best of 2007 column for The Chicago Reader, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has announced that he will retire when he turns 65 in February.
At first I was horrified, considering Harold Henderson was just excused from the paper. But it turns out to be just a well-earned retirement. He will no doubt [...]

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