Hey! Did I forget to mention my Home Alone fan fiction in this space? Shame on me! Also, shame on me for writing Home Alone fan fiction!
The piece of shit you see above will not be my last comic of 2011! As Yoda once said, there is another…
CLEARLY this dude was using teh Street View!
My approach to drawing comics is a little too literal, and I feel like I always feel like need some kind of reference. Consequently, I now have a hard drive filled with pictures like this:
In the documentary Crumb, Crumb says he had a friend drive him around some city, taking pictures of mundane city sights so he could better capture the utilitarian clutter of an urban landscape; it usually turns out looking too tidy and organized if you just try to guess what some typical American shithole might look like. I get out even less often than R. Crumb, so I had to rely on Google Street View to make the landscape authentically hideous in a panel from the graphic novel I’ve been working on for the last 100 years!
And it’s not even the first time I’ve used Street View for a reference! While I was sketching out a panel for that silly comic I did about ED-209 from Robocop, the sort of background I kept envisioning was very similar to an intersection I used to walk by every day on my way home from school. Since I was gonna wind up drawing it anyway, I figured I might as well get some reference:
It doesn’t look very impressive, but I think I threw in enough little details to satisfy anyone who’s a fan of the intersection of East Glen and Sheffield!
Then there are people who are actually doing interesting things based on images from Google Street View, like the painter Bill Guffey, who’s done some great Hopper-ish paintings.
And then there’s Aaron Hobson, who is turning the utilitarian clutter (there it is again!) of Streetview images into more aesthetically-pleasing pictures.
Oh AND I just ran across this extremely impressive short film about some sort of desk ornanment going on an adventure in Google Earth.
As for me, I’m still holding out for that web application that allows you to play Final Fight in your own neighborhood!
So I figured I’d upload some miscellaneous stuff I’ve been drawing in my spare time to this blog, because what else am I gonna do with it? If this seems like a poor use of blog, feel free to pretend we’re on tumblr.
First off, my dual muses Jake and Anne. The world has probably forgotten by now, but a while back they made some sort of romantic comedy/softcore, and Entertainment Weekly took naked pictures of them to promote it. The pictures were SO AWESOME that Entertainment Weekly did a split run, as if some Love and Other Drugs megafan was going to collect all of ‘em.
They published thumbnails of the different variations and I was looking at them one day, wondering if there was some weird stuff going on outside of the frame… Maybe something like this:
Or this:
I’m not sure how many of those I set out to do originally, but I crapped out after 2. Sorry folks!
What else do we got? Well, there’s this one, inspired by Mötley Crüe:
Get it? Whew. Then we have this thing, inspired by the Goofus and Gallant cartoons in Highlights magazine:
Looks Delicious! Well, I’ll leave you with Norman Mailer and Norris Church. Is she related to that guy from MTV News?
That reminds me, I need to brush off my scanner sometime…
Hey everybody! Wow, I haven’t done much with this blog in a while! But I assure you that I’m alive and well and still doing a comics for unwinnable.com. For a complete and current list of my Unwinnable comics with links, you can check out the new and improved Comix page on the new and improved beeteedee.com!
I also made this:
I figure I’ll try and post a short strip like this or some such silly crap every once in a while. But I sure won’t be posting one next week, ’cause I’m gettin’ married! For more details on this, become one of my close personal friends!
Tags: comics, marriage, unwinnable
So apparently Eric Fournier, the man who was apparently behind the internet phenomenon Shaye St. John has died, and though I’m not sure that he’s really dead or that he really was Shaye, apparently I’m gonna blog it. This ain’t Newsweek!
I wish I had a little bit of journalistic acumen or something and could at least give you a bit of concrete info about Fournier and maybe how he came up with the character or some such bullshit, but, according to an article on the prestigious wikibin, “No commentary or insight about Shaye Saint John has ever been presented to the public by her creators.” All I know is that Fournier was a presence in the Bloomington, IN punk scene of the 80′s as a member of hardcore band Blood Farmers, and someone named Eric Fournier is listed as the director of 2004′s Shaye and Kiki, the only commercially-available piece of Shayeanna.
The only background that I could find is Shaye St. John’s fictional backstory, which was summed up well enough in an article on some site called lollipop.com:
The idea/story/mythos behind Shaye Saint John is that she was a hot woman who was horribly disfigured in a car accident. As a result, she appears in public wearing this weird-ass, creepy as fuck mask, and hobbles along with clunky prosthetic legs and hands. Her mind appears to have sustained a bit of damage as well, as the numerous short films, bits of wisdom, and assorted clickables on her website can attest.
I would say that Shaye St. John represented a bold new strain of alternative comedy, but I have no idea what those words mean. I just think that anyone who can find the yuks in Neil Hamburger’s shtick should be able to appreciate this finely-crafted nightmare fuel/comedy.
I’m not sure what makes Shaye so disturbing. Is it the hacked-up mannequin parts, including a mask that bears a frightening resemblance to Carl von Cosel’s girlfriend? The burned-up baby doll she sometimes talks to? The disembodied chipmunk voice spewing gibberish about “modeling sesh-ons” and “kitty candy”? The whiplash editing and random use of video filters and sound effects? The honky-tonk website with Progeria-victim wallpaper and annoying autoplay sound? I don’t fucking know. Whatever the case, don’t worry – it’s only disturbing until it becomes HILARIOUS.
It’s particularly hilarious to watch it with a group of people and observe their reactions, and when I watch it alone it is, OK, ever so slightly terrifying. But I’ll tell ya, this is great date movie material! And it is on Netflix!
We can only hope that Fournier pulled a ‘Zmuda and had someone lined up to don the mannequin parts and play Shaye for the rest of eternity… Right, gang? We’re hoping for that, aren’t we?
Tags: comix
Does it seem weird to you that the guys behind the Found Footage Festival would do a documentary on an insanely obscure country music artist from the middle of nowhere? Well, it isn’t. See, in addition to being a documentary on the history of dirty music, Dirty Country is also a movie about discovering weird-ass shit; the movie’s central story is about a bunch of guys becoming hardcore fans of dirty country artist Larry Pierce after one of them ran across his CD at a truck stop. So there.
Anyways, they definitely had some good ideas going into this. Though he’s not as amusing to talk to as Blowfly, Larry Pierce is a pretty good subject for a documentary! He’s very relatable, in that his music career hasn’t effected his lifestyle in any way. He’s a guy with a blue collar job who lives with his wife of 800 years in some small-ass town, and he just happens to put out a few albums of dick-joke music every year on a small label. He’s sorta like the guys from Anvil, except that when we meet him he doesn’t have bandmates and he doesn’t really play gigs at all, so he’s even more removed from anything that resembles a rock star lifestyle. Larry hasn’t cultivated any sort of stage persona like John Valby’s “Dr. Dirty” or anything.
As an introduction to the history of scumbaggery in popular music, Dirty Country is sorta informative, although at the outset I was sorta bugged by a few glaring omissions, such as G.G. Allin and David Allen Coe. Of course, Coe is old as hell nowadays if he’s not dead yet, and I’m sure he’d prefer to be remembered more for his mainstream country material than for “Fuckin’ in the Butt”, and I guess the omission of dirty punk acts was a necessity if they were going to keep the running time under 5 hours. Christ, the people at Rhino could probably put together a 4-disc set full of nothing but dirty, filthy music – That’d be more realistic than a comprehensive documentary!
The movie has a sort of loosely-defined focus on stuff that could more or less be defined as novelty music, stuff that’s dirty but also kinda silly. You know, somethin’ like “Shaving Cream” by Benny Bell. The ol’ folks called it “bawdy”! Of course, plenty of punk acts and rap acts did joke songs that were sly with their scumbaggery, but generally the genres are known for songs that are a lot less adorable.
So anyway, interspersed with the little featurettes on Blowfly, John Valby, and Doug Clark, we get the story of Larry’s budding friendship with the band -Itis, the guys who discovered his stuff at a truck stop. Despite apparently being a rap-metal (or nü-metal or whatever) band that no one has ever heard of, they are apparently men of means, or the guys from the Found Footage Festival are. They manage to track down Larry, present him with a guitar, and play a show with him as his backing band. It’s a pretty touching story arc for a documentary on people who write songs about buttsex.
I’ll withhold my opinions on their music, because the dudes in -Itis seem like some pretty swell guys, although the movie does tend to beat you over the head with the whole “THESE REALLY COOL GUYS WITH HOT DREADLOCKED GIRLFRIENDS DEIGNED TO HANG OUT WITH A MIDDLE AGED DORK! ISN’T THAT AMAZING?” thing, but I suppose you can blame that more on the Found Footage guys and their choice to pepper Larry Pierce’s climactic performance with interview snippets of anonymous dudes singing Larry’s praises, which I guess is supposed to be a half-assed equivalent of that part in the Anvil movie where Lars Ulrich and a bunch of other successful metal artists are talking up Anvil. Still, this movie will warm the cockles of your heart!
Tags: comix
Welcome back to my HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL blog series Seekrit History! I learned something after my previous installment: Never express opinions… Unless they’re positive!
Well, this time around, I’m going to blast a sugarcoated rainbow through the dark heart of this blog. And why not? I’m writing about magical Christmas music!
BACKSTORY: Last year at around this time a friend of mine introduced me to a true Seekrit Gem, an EP of Christmas songs by a bloke (that means dude!) named Simon Panrucker, evidently made as a Christmas gift for his friends. I’m not sure if that’s actually the case or I just assumed as much, but it does come across as a labour (that means labor!) of love.
MEGA-BACKSTORY: Actually, this was not the first time I’d heard Simon Panrucker’s stuff! way back around the turn of the century, the aforementioned friend turned me on to Panrucker’s early music/comedy project Grubnuts, which produced a handful of charmingly jeuvenile songs, including a supremely irritating kazoo-drenched cover of frat party staple “Zombie Nation” and “Emlyn’s Gay”, a gleefully immature inside joke that’s amusing as hell even if you’ve never met anyone named Emlyn in your life. Amazingly, the angelfire website where we found all of the grubnuts songs is still there! Check it out, it’s pretty classic stuff.
In the years since those Grubnuts songs were recorded, Panrucker has evidently learned a thing or two about songwriting and production, and every song on Happy Christmas, You Guys! is impressive in some way. The first song, “Snowflakes Falling Down”, is impressive in every way! With a memorable melodic hook and an extravaganza of instrumentation that includes piano, chromatic bells, and a goddamned sax solo, this song doesn’t need humor to get by, which is good because it’s not particularly funny in and of itself. But I suspect that to those who know the dude, it’s probably sorta amusing to hear Panrucker earnestly longing for a white ChrisTmas (gotta love that proper pronunciation!) and I myself am amused when I remember this is the same guy who did “The Annoying Song”!
Next up is “Everyone is Sleeping”, another ostensibly straight-faced ditty that certainly involves some serious songwriting. Unlike the kitchen-sink production of “Snowflakes Falling Down”, this one is intentionally minimalistical, successfully evoking the feeling of being the last one up.
Next up is the title track, and probably my favorite tune on the EP! “Happy Christmas, You Guys!” is one of the funniest Christmas songs ever, and it’s probably one of my all-time faves, up there with “Father Christmas” by the Kinks. Unlike certain other hilarious Christmas songs, you can actually bust it out at family gatherings or whatever… It’s pretty clean! The comedy here all stems from the insane level of enthusiasm, a sort of demented bliss reminiscent of Steve Martin in The Jerk that invokes possibly the greatest ever lead-in lyric for a breakdown in the history of Christmas songs that have breakdowns: “I’m so psyched, super pumped/I’ve been waiting for this one day for 12 months/I’ve had a run around and a skip and a jump/Now let me take a deep breath while I listen to my heart thump…”
“Leave My Nuts Alone” takes things back to those Grubnuts roots a bit for some good juvenile fun. The double-entendre might be more subtle than anything Grubnuts would have done, but it has a similar appeal to those Grubnuts hits of yore, and that singalong chorus is fookin’ infectious.
In short, these are the best Christmas songs since “Jingle Bells”, and they’re probably more fun than that Bob Dylan Christmas album. Go download the EP now. You can even name your own price, Radiohead-style!
He also has a brand-spanking new rap album that’s pretty hilarious, if for some reason you enjoy listening to music that isn’t about Christmas. Go check it out, if only for the cover art (but the music is good too!).
Tags: seekrit_history
Paul Stanley is known to recycle stage banter in order to elicit the same reaction from different crowds, so it only seems fair that different crowds would use the same tactics to elicit a response from Paul Stanley, right? In Paul’s case, the desired response would be applause; in the audience’s case, the desired response might be Paul threatening to shove something up an audience member’s ass.
It would seem that busting out a laser pointer is a road-tested method for eliciting the latter response. It worked in NJ:
And it worked in Portland, OR:
While I’m sure that, being a guy in the audience at a KISS concert, the laser pointer guy is likely a fan of the “triple-X channels” and the Playboy magazines, I must say it’s rather unconscionable for Paul to steal Steve Martin’s standard heckler retort “I remember my first beer”. And anyway, I think the laser pointer guy has his heart in the right place – watching Paul Stanley stick a laser pointer up someone’s ass would probably be a lot more entertaining for the rest of the audience than watching his fat ass fly over the crowd on a zip line.
But you gotta hand it to Paul: as these 2 clips clearly illustrate, he’s a master of the smooth segue between lecturing an unruly audience member to trying to get the rest of the audience pumped up!