2010 October
But will it get its own Facebook?
George O'Connor's sketch of Bill O'Reilly
It is with great pride that I report that my facetious headline of the other day became… a thing! As you may remember, I picked up on a story of Fox pundit Bill O’Reilly bullying an editorial cartoonist who did an unflattering portrayal of him, and suggested we do Everybody Draw Bill O’Reilly Day.
The artists at Drawbridge, a daily sketch blog, saw the post and decided to make it their theme for the day! Check out this awesome gallery of Bill O’Reilly caricatures by George O’Connor, Joe Infurnari and their compatriots.
And independent of that, Bryant Paul Johnson was inspired to do his own O’Reilly caricature. One thing several people mentioned is that O’Reilly is fun to draw, which may make him a more frequent target in the future.
- October 29, 2010 @ 03:30 PM by Brigid Alverson
Robot 666 | Friedly’s Treats by Cullen Bunn
Cullen Bunn
Continuing our run of Halloween short stories by Cullen Bunn (The Sixth Gun), we’re pleased to present “Friedly’s Treats.” You can see the previous two stories here and here, and be sure to come back on Halloween for a brand-new story!
Friedly’s Treats
By Cullen Bunn
Joshua hated Halloween. He once loved costumes and jack o’lanterns and candy. But now he dreaded the holiday.
Outside, trick-or-treaters giggled and climbed Mrs. Friedly’s porch steps. The shuddering knock sent shivers down Joshua’s spine. He squeezed his eyes shut.
The door creaked open. Cool air swept the foyer.
Guttural voices cried, “Trick or treat!”
“Aren’t you fearsome!” Mrs. Friedly beamed at the anxious little monsters. “I’ve something extra special for you.”
- October 29, 2010 @ 03:00 PM by JK Parkin
Collect This Six by 6 Now | Six horror manga that need to be translated
'Fourteen' by Kazuo Umezu
Horror comics fans have plenty of material to choose from when looking for a good, scary read this Halloween. Even if we just confine ourselves to manga (since, as we all know, the Japanese cartoonists excel at scaring the pants off their readers), there are plenty of options, from grand guginol pieces like MDP-Psycho or Ultra Gash Inferno, to more traditional, semi-bloody, spooky fare like Presents or Mail. Still, there are plenty of great, terrifying, mind-blowing manga that would delight the hardcore American horrorist if only some enterprising publisher would make an attempt at publishing them. Here are just six titles that I’d like to see translated and released in book form some time in the near future:
(Note: A potentially NSFW image lurks beneath the jump)
- October 29, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Ragtag group of webcomickers pwns Glenn Beck
Machine of Death is an anthology of speculative short stories about people who know how (but not when) they are going to die. The book is edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo and David Malki, and somehow the three of them came up with a clever idea: They asked everyone who was planning to buy the book to do so on the day it was released, Oct. 26, so they could place high on the Amazon sales charts.
“When we picked a release date, we tried to aim for a day far from other major book releases,” the authors explain on their blog. In that, they failed spectacularly: A number of potential best-sellers came out that day, including Keith Richards’s autobiography, a new Barefoot Contessa cookbook, and Glenn Beck’s latest book, Broke.
Nonetheless, the power of the internet is such that Machine of Death took the No. 1 spot on Amazon for that day.
While Keith Richards and the Barefoot Contessa seem to have taken this news with equanimity, it sent Beck into a spluttering, incoherent rage, and he went into a long rant on the air about the culture of death and Bill Ayers envying Keith Richards for snorting his father’s ashes, and not knowing what Brown Sugar refers to, and the general disrespect of “the left” for daring to buy other books on the day his book came out. (There’s a transcript and a link to the audio here.)
And as any public figure with half a brain can tell you, the effect has been exactly the opposite of what Beck intended. Rather than apologizing and buying two copies of his book, people have been laughing and pointing and, in some cases, buying extra copies of Machine of Death just to spite Glenn Beck. (Hey, it’s only ten bucks on Amazon.)
- October 29, 2010 @ 01:30 PM by Brigid Alverson
Robot 666 | Greg Hinkle illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee
We finished up our run of Parasomnia yesterday, but we’ve still got one more treat for you from artist Greg Hinkle:
“Here’s my illustrated version of Edgar Allan Poe’s short poem, Annabel Lee. I thought this was a wonderfully creepy little poem, and perfect for Halloween. The first three panels are a Robot 6 exclusive, and have never been seen by anyone, anywhere, ever before. They’re just for you and your lovely readers.”
–Greg
Thanks again to Greg (and Storm, Jason, Matt and Josh) for sharing Parasomnia with us this week. You can find the complete poem after the jump.
- October 29, 2010 @ 01:00 PM by JK Parkin
Robot 666 | S.H.O.O.T. First: ‘The House That Ate Halloween’
Earlier this year writer Justin Aclin and artist Ben Bates took MySpace Dark Horse Presents by storm with the story of the Secular Humanist Occult Obliteration Taskforce — S.H.O.O.T. First or, as Sean called them, the Super-Atheists.
Now we’re really excited to present an original prose story that Justin wrote for Robot 666 Week — S.H.O.O.T. First: “The House That Ate Halloween.” And Justin even invited his brother, Jesse, to contribute illustrations for it!
So a big thank you to the Bros. Aclin for spending part of their Halloween with us … check out the story below!
S.H.O.O.T. First: “The House That Ate Halloween”
By Justin Aclin. Illustrations by Jesse Aclin
S.H.O.O.T. First created by Justin Aclin and Ben Bates
“We have a Craigslist ad?”
The man who currently called himself Codename: Infidel took off his baseball cap and shook his head in amazement. An average day with the Secular Humanist Occult Obliteration Taskforce was strange—S.H.O.O.T. had the very important job of protecting humanity from seemingly supernatural creatures who were trying to manipulate and harm us for their own reasons, so things tended to get weird pretty frequently. Maybe it was the fact that he had never celebrated Halloween in his native Afghanistan, maybe it was the fact that he was currently dressed up as a member of the Boston Red Sox—complete with cleats and a large, awkward practice duffel. But for whatever reason, S.H.O.O.T. having a Craigslist ad struck Infidel as just about the weirdest thing that he’d heard in the few months since he’d joined up.
- October 29, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
Robot 666 | A Weird and Scratching Beauty: The Art of John Coulthart and Call of Cthulhu
Lovecraft is a hard act to follow, and an even harder one to adapt. “Oh you mean HP Lovecraft, the guy who came up with Cthulhu and all those cute little plush toys.” Yeah, the guy who launched a thousand little cottage industries pumping out VOTE FOR CTHULHU: THE STARS ARE RIGHT bumper stickers and Mythos Hunting Guides and all that stuff. Yeah, him. I do wonder if he’d be tickled or appalled at his legacy and all the eldritch dust-catchers and t-shirts and radio plays.
Well, he’d probably like the radio plays. He’d probably have even approved of the silent film adaptation of THE CALL OF CTHULHU, arguably his single most famous piece of fiction, certainly the one that’s lodged most deeply in the collective consciousness, for good or for ill. The film adaptation ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478988/ for the IMDB page, and it’s streaming on Netflix) gets a solid recommendation from me, and anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m pretty hard to please as this stuff goes. Not because I think Lovecraft’s every word is sacred and perfect. I don’t. My relationship with HPL’s work is problematic, mostly in terms of the execution. I like characters. I like it when characters drive the plot. HPL couldn’t be bothered with that by and large, except when it was an incessant curiosity on the part of the players that made the eldritch secrets of the plot unfurl to their almost unerringly messy conclusions.
So I find HPL’s conceptual work rightly celebrated even if I find his prose nigh-unimpenetrable at times. Which is why I’m often attracted to adaptations of his work, where creators have a desire to stick to the template that HPL laid out, and often there’s some sense of respect for the source material, but it’s filtered through a different sense of aesthetics. HPL-inspired stuff that stars HPL himself? Not so much. Though there was that beautifully-illustrated LOVECRAFT OGN with art by Enrique Breccia that was so wonderful that I simply didn’t care about the story. Though I suppose there’s an interesting vein to mine when talking about Lovecraft as fictional construct rather than historical figure, but that’s for someone else to do.
- October 29, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Matt Maxwell
Actor in Spider-Man musical breaks wrists during failed stunt
Kevin Aubin, displaying his casts on a photo from his Facebook page
Just as the long-troubled musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark appeared back on track, an accident has raised concerns about the safety of the big-budget Broadway production.
The New York Post reports that last week dancer Kevin Aubin, one of several performers who doubles as Spider-Man, broke both of his wrists when he was catapulted through the air to the lip of the stage, where he landed with bone-snapping force. The New York Times notes that on his Facebook page, now set to private, Aubin wrote: “well i dont know what im allowed to say. but something went wrong and i fell on my hands from a high distance. It happens, no one to blame. I’m alive and ok.”
Producer Michael Cohl issued a statement saying, “With a show as complex as this, safety is the top priority for everyone at Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”
Showbiz411′s Roger Friedman voiced reservations more than two weeks ago about the safety of the complicated aerial extravaganza: “Apparently the actors will be flying over the audience’s heads and all over the theater. This isn’t Peter Pan with a little onstage aerial. And the people who are flying are not from Cirque du Soleil or trained acrobats. ‘They’re muscular actors who got flying training and are into it,’ says a source.”
- October 29, 2010 @ 10:30 AM by Kevin Melrose
Frank Santoro gets back on the grid with Watchmen
The great cartoonist and critic Frank Santoro is once again tackling grid-pattern panel layouts, and this time he’s talking about arguably the most famous nine-panel grids of all: Those used by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in their stone-classic superhero dissection Watchmen. Here’s a sample that includes an insight about the art in that book that had never occurred to me before:
- October 29, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Robot 666 | Your video of the day: The Horror! The Horror!
This has to be the book title of the year: The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read! The good folks at Abrams ComicArts have put together a pretty swell little trailer for this collection of pre-Comics Code horror and crime comics from the ’50s, edited and contextualized by Jim Trombetta with an introduction by Mr. Goosebumps himself, R.L. Stine. You can gather a couple of salient points from the video: 1) These things really were almost unbelievably lurid and gross, especially when you consider the relentlessly wholesome state of pop culture in general at the time; 2) Based on the video’s snippets from an anti-comic book TV report called Confidential File, which is included in its entirety on a DVD that comes with the book, men in suits took this stuff way too seriously back in the day.
- October 29, 2010 @ 09:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Legal
Crime | A St. Louis retailer was subdued Thursday night after a nearly four-hour standoff with police, who had attempted to arrest him on rape and weapons charges. Officers reportedly arrived at Legends Comics & Sports Cards late Thursday afternoon to serve warrants Kenneth McClure when the 57-year-old store owner drew a gun. The officers took cover inside the store and radioed for assistance, and by 9 p.m. McClure was taken into custody. He had been charged in the first-degree statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl, third-degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon. McClure is being held on a $75,000 bond. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Riverfront Times]
Graphic novels | Jeff Lemire’s Essex County and Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki Skim are among the CBC’s prestigious Canada Reads program’s Top 40 Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade. Voting continues online through Nov. 7 for the final Top 10. [Canada Reads, via Top Shelf]
- October 29, 2010 @ 08:13 AM by Kevin Melrose
Looking for a great sci-fi experience? Open up a pair of PictureBox’s fall releases
from Powr Mastrs 3 by CF
Over on the CBR mothership, Tim Callahan takes a close look at two books sure to be shortlisted for Best of 2010 honors in another month or two: CF’s Powr Mastrs 3 and Brian Chippendale’s If ‘n Oof, both from PictureBox Inc. Tim argues that the two books’ combination of sci-fi/fantasy trappings with the oblique storytelling techniques and challenging visuals of art-comics create the same sense of wonder and discovery that comics held for him as a kid. Here he is on Power Mastrs:
- October 29, 2010 @ 06:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Ghastly Old Fan | Better dead than Red
Vampire Batman
There is a fundamental tension between the horror and superhero genres. Clearly the two aren’t incompatible, but in the stories which blend them, often one genre will dominate. At the risk of gross oversimplification, there’s no guarantee of a horror story having a happy ending; whereas superhero stories are generally about saving the day. Put another way, superheroes generally stop monsters.
Such was the case with 1991′s graphic novel Batman & Dracula: Red Rain, in which the Lord of Vampires comes to Gotham City. Red Rain was written by longtime Bat-scribe Doug Moench, boasted the distinctively eerie pencils of Kelley Jones, and polished off its sinister, downbeat mood through Malcolm Jones III’s inks, Les Dorscheid’s colors, and Todd Klein’s letters. SPOILERS FOLLOW … but is not much of a spoiler to note that Batman defeats Dracula, because a) that is what Batman does, and b) Tomb of Dracula notwithstanding, that is how Drac usually winds up. Furthermore, Red Rain was far from the Darknight Detective’s only run-in with more malevolent creatures of the night, because he’d been fighting vampires and werewolves as far back as 1939′s Detective Comics #30.
No, what makes Red Rain and its two sequels different is their overwhelming sense of doom. Red Rain is a superhero horror story which eventually turns Batman’s world inside-out more than any traditional deconstruction ever could.
- October 28, 2010 @ 04:00 PM by Tom Bondurant
Robot 666 | The Littlest Pirate King exclusive preview
If you didn’t get enough from the preview Sean linked to the other day, we’ve got you covered. Courtesy of our fiendishly fantastic friends at Fantagraphics, we’re pleased to bring you seven more pages from The Littlest Pirate King, David B.’s adaptation of a short story by Pierre Mac Orlan.
It features both pirates and the undead, two of my favorite things. You can find more information on the book, plus the preview, after the jump.
- October 28, 2010 @ 03:00 PM by JK Parkin
Robot 666 | Take the horror home with Johnny Ryan
Exorcist print by Johnny Ryan
Fresh from perverting Small Wonder, Prison Pit‘s Johnny Ryan tweets that this is the last week you can buy art from his show at the Mishka NYC gallery. That means it’s your last chance to snag extremely affordable takes on an array of horror icons, from the Exorcist print above to pieces based on The Fly, Scanners, It’s Alive, Basket Case, H.P. Lovecraft, the Coffin Joe movies, Ryan’s own Prison Pit rogues and beasts, and much more. What are you waiting for, fright fans?
- October 28, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by Sean T. Collins