Here’s another homage/parody cover of mine for CAPA-Alpha, done around the
same time as the one I shared the other day.
This one’s much less of a straight copy, adding characters and ditching the logo. It
uses as its springboard Marvel Comics’ The Uncanny X-Men #179 — dated Mar. 1984, penciled by John Romita Jr., and inked by Dan Green. I drew it for Richard Rubenstein’s ’zine after we had a discussion about superheroes who were explicitly identified as Jewish.
Early this year I wrote about the most popular search terms that lead people to Blam’s Blog and shortly thereafter shared some of the weirder ones. It’s time to share again.
Like I said then, I started checking my Stats page randomly throughout the day after getting consistent chuckles from the kind of off-the-wall phrases that you only see in the Stats page’s Traffic Sources section fleetingly, usually in the “Now” view, by dint of their very strangeness; things get more normal in the “Daily” view as a search term will have to be entered multiple times to rank as one of the ten strings logged there at any given moment, and by the time we’re up to “Weekly” it’s such comparitively mundane stuff as the Muppets or Superman covers or the surprisingly popular Geoff Peterson.
I find that the funniest searches tend to fall into at least one of three categories: very specific; almost impossibly broad; and totally bizarre in juxtaposition. The phrase used for this post’s title is the first and third of those. What in the world could that be? My own search for “Imperceptible Sally” yields no clues. It doesn’t hit on the name of a blog, a book or TV or movie title, or even a band name — although it would be a great band name. The graphic that it picks up from this blog appears in my post “Foyer, Guns, and Honeys” (which looks at its predecessor in St. John’s experimental line of Picture Novels, It Rhymes with Lust) and “Sally” is elsewhere on the page in my list of labels. [Note: The cover is no longer in that post and my list of labels is no longer on every page of the blog.] Of course now that string appears on the Web, atop this post — for apparently the first time, as Googling it with quotes around the words returns nothing — without being of any help. Them’s the breaks.
Although my dreams continue to be vivid and enjoyable, I haven’t shared here lately.
The other day, however, I put together such an interesting vision in that odd twilight state between dreaming and waking up that I can’t help but write about it. While I tried my best to stay in it, I was aware that I was beginning to come out of it and I probably have my emerging consciousness to thank for its being so brief as well as having an ending — a pretty rare thing for dreams, which in my experience tend to slide into one another or quickly slip away. It was also rare in that I wasn’t actually in the dream, neither as myself nor even as a POV character.
Just so that I don’t bury the lead any farther, I’ll mention now that the dream starred the Muppets.
If you feel as though the blog has focused a bit more on my visual works recently,
well, it has. That’s due in part to me simply having so much fun putting together those Game of Thrones gags. But this entry is due to me going through files to get old articles entered for digital storage and eventually archived up on the Interwebs, files amongst which I’m also finding old sketches and cartoons.
The 1995 drawing above right is a mock cover to the nonexistent series Mr. K-a’s
Pal, Benjy Grimm, done for CAPA-Alpha, riffing on the cover to an issue of DC Comics’ Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, above left — dated June 1967, penciled
by Curt Swan, inked by George Klein, and lettered by Ira Schnapp.
I brainstormed the piece for/with a fellow member of CAPA-Alpha, a.k.a. K-a, Mike Valerio. Mike and this very picture were first mentioned on the blog a couple of years ago in a mishmash post shortly after his passing, while CAPA-Alpha was described in detail before that.
Mike pitched me an idea for what I recall was a month devoted to either writing about inter-company crossovers or producing intra-K-a collaborations, if not both, around the time that the big-deal DC vs. Marvel event was happening. Mike was an admirer of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby’s ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing, alias Ben Grimm, of the Fantastic Four; the character’s motto “It’s Clobberin’ Time!” was at least one of Mike’s ’zine titles. He also appropriated a version of Steve Ditko’s absolutist hero Mr. A as Mr. K-a for his contributions (which is a reference that if you don’t get you’re invited to research on your own). Mike presented me with both the cover that he wanted me to copy and the cover copy — what The Thing, in place of Jimmy Olsen, would be saying plus a torrent of strident text to stuff into Mr. K-a’s mouth. I surprised Mike by drawing us in as the institution’s security guard and doctor, respectively.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
This post linking to a nifty Sara Bareilles performance holds the blog's record for having been republished the most times. After going up several times last year, keyed to more than one date as I kept trying, weird problems with Blogger and Google's image-hosting service Picasa kept afflicting it. Maybe the time is right to sneak the post back up.
Where it leads is a Vevo clip of Bareilles and band doing a non-chicken, largely unexpurgated albeit truncated cover of the Cee-Lo Green sensation "F--- You", live at The Warfield in San Francisco. It serves here as a prologue to the single "Gonna Get Over You" from her excellent 2010 disc Kaleidoscope Heart, which the first time this post saw the light was relevant since Bareilles had performed said single with Urban Method on the Sing-Off finale in November. At this writing you can listen to the album in full on Bareilles's website.
Related: Muppet Monday • 41 Favorites: #5 • Look and Listen
I saw a headline earlier today that mistakenly omitted a space between the fourth
and fifth words in the title of the new ABC comedy Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23.
My immediate reaction was that I would totally be curious about a show called Don't Trust the Bitchin' Apartment 23.
Why not? Is the place haunted? Could it have some sort of weird Lost mystery going on? Does it trap you in the 1980s? Maybe it's actually a sentient traveling location like Danny the Street from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol (which had the added curiosity
of being a transvestite sentient traveling location). Does it come with a secret freezer-closet of cold beer like in those commercials — or, being Apartment 23, perhaps cans
of Dr. Pepper — but they're dosed, and the furniture takes crude photos with you after you pass out?
I need to know how simultaneously rad and dangerous Apartment 23 is that we should not trust it despite its bitchin' nature.
This post has been brought to you by the number 23 and the letter B.
Related: Coin Drop • A-Ha Moment • Cold Beans
I made it to a 12:01 a.m. showing of The Cabin in the Woods late Thursday night – well, first thing on the morning of Friday the 13th.
And I loved it. But I can't really talk about it.
Honestly, I can't. You may have read that audiences have been urged at advance screenings not to divulge any of Cabin's twists, and that's with good reason. If you have read that, you're probably enough of a movie (or media) buff to know whether or not you want to see the film; I'm guessing, furthermore, that you do.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
What follows was taken out of a post from last month due to technical problems.
I paused at the above panel of Wolverine when reading along for the methodical
X-Men examinations done by Austin Gorton under the nom du blog Teebore. Source
is The Uncanny X-Men #147, whose battle between Doctor Doom and Marvel's merry mutants (or so Smilin' Stan Lee often called them; they're actually infamously angst-ridden) was underwhelming to many readers, as reflected in Teebore's assessment of that issue and the follow-up comments.
The nice panel composition and set dressing aside, I'm really keen on the way the character's face and smoldering chest are recessed in shadow, although I don't know how much to credit recently returned penciler Dave Cockrum. While pencilers tend to mark off areas of solid black even when they're only roughing out art for an inker to embellish, Josef Rubinstein could have a heavy hand in that role. More curious to me is how little the figure work resembles Cockrum's, because Wolverine is usually depicted in the comics as about a foot shorter than his silver-screen vessel Hugh Jackman — whereas in this panel and the preceding one, unlike the rest of the issue, he's clearly musclebound but lankier and longer-limbed than his usual stocky, compact self, akin
to how Brent Anderson drew him.
I came up with a personal record number of entries for this week’s Top Ten contest [dead link] at the Late Show with David Letterman website.
My frustration with the Phillies’ rough start to the 2012 baseball season could have fueled the creative burst. Whatever the impetus, I hereby offer up my overly obvious, voluminous, and hopefully humorous...
Top Seventeen Punch Lines to Dirty Baseball Jokes
17. “That’s the pitcher’s mound.”
16. “Actually, I play for the other team.”
15. “Try the split-finger grip.”
Here’s a neat video retelling — in 4½ minutes — the story of the Jews’ Exodus from Egypt, performed by the Attraction Black-Light and Shadow Theatre group, forwarded to me by my mother.
I saw The Hunger Games opening day. Based on the strength of Suzanne Collins' novel, on how good I expected Jennifer Lawrence to be in the lead role, and on advance word that the movie was not a complete travesty, I wanted to show my support for the film. So I was a small part of the $152.5 million it racked up that weekend in the US — making it third on the list of domestic opening weekends to date, behind 2008's The Dark Knight and 2011's final Harry Potter flick.
A few spoiler-free remarks follow.
“What could be the harm in burning the beard off of this really strong homeless guy?”
That’s what Johnny Storm thought, more or less, in the example of #badcomic bookchoices made between the tiers of panels reproduced below.
The state of the blog is once again a clog, and I have only myself to blame.
While Blogger is highly complicit in making even slightly tricky posts much trickier than they should be, I’m supposed to remember that. Yet here I sit with things backed up in part because I wanted to present some image-heavy offerings before taking the kind of extended break that I so often try to schedule and never really get to follow through on — because an unintentional hiatus manifests first, leaving me with a drive to just get those “last” few efforts published for peace of mind and personal satisfaction.
So I’m riding out the waves of a perfect storm comprising the usual technical snafus
and health issues combined with the prolonged wake of a sad occasion that I’ve been trying and failing to write about, ever more exhausted, producing sentences that run on like Bart Allen after too much Halloween candy and too little patience to suss out a good simile. I therefore, hereby, and forthwith offer up another slice of the vocabularium imaginarium that is my log of word-verification definitions, whose backstory can be found on their dedicated page, with hopes but no promises that posts will resume flowing after some requisite spring cleaning.
• adangst — [ad angst] n. What keeps us tuning in to watch Don Draper.
• barifti — [bar eef tee] pl. n. Ftarbuckf employeef.
• calvic — [kal vik] adj. Having a stuffed tiger that comes to life when nobody else is around.
• chirk — [churk] n. An obnoxiously noisy little bird.
• explo — [eks ploh] n. A dynamite convention.
