Rodanof42

Aaaaaa this twitter is horrifying aaaaaaa

To all you young artists out there: this sort of thing is likely to come your way at some point!  Don’t be fooled, rare - RARE - is the job where the “exposure” is worth a lack of/very little pay.

anonymous asked: Yo is the current drug policy racist?

Maybe just in its execution, implementation, and effects? Oh, and underlying assumptions.

johndarnielle:

upthawolfs:

http://www.tumblr.com/liked/by/johndarnielle

my favorite place on the internet

in the tags: “not sure if he knows we can do this"

anonymous asked: Is it ok for people to say all blondes are stupid?

Did you ever notice how that shit is always code for talking about women? It’s almost like sexists think this bullshit hides that fact!

It’s official: The Lone Ranger, the latest Gore Verbinski/Johnny Depp period piece film is a big flop with awful reviews, and an anemic $48.9 million in a five day holiday opening, which might not be so bad if it hadn’t cost $250 million to make and $175 million to market. And that’s AFTER it got shut down for a while during production because Disney knew it was costing too much.

“It’s very disappointing,” said Disney executive vp worldwide distribution Dave Hollis. “Everything was perfect on paper, so today was incredibly frustrating.”

Perfect on paper you say? Over at Vulture, Gilbert Cruz analyses the flop in a piece called “The Lone Ranger Represents Everything That’s Wrong With Hollywood Blockbusters”:

The Lone Ranger — a.k.a. Pirates of the Caribbean 4.5: Sparrow Goes West — is looking like it might be a huge tentpole movie (it reportedly cost $215-250 million) that goes down this weekend. It also happens to be a perfect example of almost everything that’s wrong with the current Hollywood blockbuster system. In addition to being massively expensive, The Lone Ranger demonstrates the industry’s franchise obsession, origin-story laziness, over-reliance on bloodless violence, and inability to prevent running-time bloat. These are not small problems, and there is no sign that they will be riding off into the sunset anytime soon.

Accurate enough, and something we noted all the way back in 2006 after seeing Pirates of the Caribbean 2, an alarmingly bloated, plotless and chaotic vid game of a movie that nonetheless was one of the biggest openings ever at the time.

Thus, even as Hollywood wonders more and more why people just don’t want to go to the movies anymore, they get more and more frantic. More and more action must be the answer. Where the real danger lies is that even intelligent movie-goers can no longer tell the difference between videogame action and good movies.

While it’s been entertaining to watch Johnny Depp turn into Mickey Rourke, someone has to just take the megaphone out of Verbinski’s hands. Aside from the freak hit POTC 1, he’s an awful director with no sense of pacing or drama. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who has a long series of misfires to match his hits, also needs to do a gut check. (Sorcerer’s Apprentice, anyone?)

In a much linked to—and breathlessly written—excerpt from her book, Sleepless in Hollywood, producer Lynda Obst goes on a vision quest to ask Hollywood players why things are so bad in Hollywood these days, and they definitely need a shot or two of ca phe hoa tan:

“They’re completely broke,” said a studio head, when asked by me (of course) about how different things were these days. He spoke about famous players who regularly came to him begging for favors—a picture, a handout, anything.

“Why?” his very East Coast guest asked incredulously. I recalled his exact words as I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“They have extremely high overheads,” he said to his guest with me listening in. “They have multiple houses, wives, and families to support. They’ve made movies for years, they were on top of the world and had no reason to think it would end. And then suddenly it did. They’ve gone through whatever savings they had. They can’t sell their real estate. Their overhead is as astronomical as their fees used to be. They’ve taken out loans, so they’re highly leveraged. It’s a tragedy.”

While tragic over leverage is one thing, other elements of current Hollywood anxiety: the collapse of the DVD market and increasing reliance on foreign markets to earn back these giant $250 million budgets that seem to be required for anything resembling a hit. It’s also why Hollywood is so obsessed with remaking everything in sight.

Of course, as I’ve often written about the comics industry, people who say the movies are dying really mean whatever their job was in Hollywood is dying or no longer needed. Knowbody knows anything, the maxim first coined by screenwriter William “The Princess Beide” Goldman, has never seemed so accurate.

Adventure Time: Fionna & Cake

Natasha Allegri (w, a, c), Patrick Seery (c) Britt Wilson (l), Noelle Stevenson, Lucy Knisley (back-ups), Shannon Watters (e)

Here’s a six-issue miniseries from Kaboom, who have spent the past few years making work-for-hire franchise comics feel like creator-owned independent comics. Adventure Time: Fionna & Cake is a spin-off from a particular handful of episodes of the TV series, in which the regular cast of the show were all gender-swapped for an experiment. This miniseries, taking that idea and extending it out into a longer story, is written and drawn by the woman who first created the characters on the show, Natasha Allegri. The basic premise is that, well, the characters are gender swapped. That’s basically it! The rest is just Natasha Allegri going absolutely bonkers for twenty or so pages a month. And it’s glorious.

There’s a much different sensibility in Fionna & Cake than there is in the regular Adventure Time comic. Rather than the characters being exactly the same except girls, Allegri’s sense of humour plays out in a much different manner than you might expect. They’re far dirtier than Finn and Jake, for one thing – they’re more scatalogical, and more willing to play dirty and mess things up. They’re actually far more nihilistic than you might expect, as well, going on rampages and rants with little provocation. They feel like more dangerous, unpredictable characters, and the miniseries feels delightfully unhinged as a result.

Their friendship comes across strongly, and creates a centre which holds all the crazy silly moments in orbit. Whilst this story gets VERY silly at times (always a compliment, by the way), the friendship between the two main characters offers readers a reason to continue reading. It’s not just a book where weird things happen – it’s a book where weird things happen to characters you like.

Oh, and the art!

Allegri lays waste to each page, refusing to be generic or ordinary at every turn. Her panels frequently burst and shatter across the page, the lettering flies into every corner and flips fonts at random. The artwork takes the idea of the established style for these characters and setting and goes wild, exaggerating and enhancing the body language to an incredible degree. Allegri created these characters for the show, but experiments with them frequently, apparently delighted with the way she can structure a page or switch perspective.

Britt Wilson’s lettering is incredibly showy, and really entertaining for it. Whilst the artwork can sometimes get out of focus and hard to put together, Wilson’s letters stand out above everything and push even more energy into proceedings. The story itself is simple and manic, more interested in creating exciting images than in telling any kind of complex plot. Which, I suppose, is what you expect from Adventure Time.

This’ll make for a really good trade. There are a massive number of variant covers from all sorts of people – from Lea Hernandez to Faith Erin Hicks to Colleen Coover – and a handful of back-up stories from Noelle Stevenson and Lucy Knisley. Both create short stories which play to the show whilst being, in turn, very much stories by Noelle Stevenson and Lucy Knisley. They establish their own artistic styles and humour over the characters and world of the show, so it remains recognisable whilst telling very different tales to the main story. It remains coherent, just, and Knisley’s story (seen in the above page) has a superb, first-class pun about sinuses in it.

Stevenson’s story, in the first issue, is also excellent fun:

With this miniseries now concluded, I would absolutely love to see some more work from Natasha Allegri at some point in future. High-paced, manic – and above all distinctly her own creation – Fionna & Cake is the first Adventure Time-related thing I’ve ever properly enjoyed. If you find the main show distracting rather than fun (like me) then don’t let that put you off this trade – it’s bonkers, and wonderful

You know how warm and cuddly and special Alan Moore gets when they makes movies from his work?

Well imagine how happy and chipper he’ll be if there is a weekly League of Extraordinary Gentlemen TV show on Fox.

THR is reporting that Fox —which produced the generally petryfyingly awful LOEG movie, a film so misguided it drove Sean Connery away from the movie business entirely—has put in a pilot order for a comic based on the Moore/Kevin O’Neill classic about public domain good guys and bad good buys who band together to fight other public domain bad bad guys.

Michael Green (Green Lantern, Kings, The River, Heroes, Smallville) will serve as writer and executive producer and, should the project go to series, showrunner. 3 Arts’ Erwin Stoff (The Matrix, Kings) will also executive produce. Neither Moore nor O’Neill will be producers on the series.

YA THINK??!!?!??

The project comes as classic literary characters including Jekyll and Hyde and others continues to be popular on the small screen. NBC for its part attempted a Jekyll and Hyde drama (Do No Harm) last year, which was canceled after two episodes. Showtime, meanwhile, is prepping Penny Dreadful, a monster origin story drama series featuring classic monsters from Dracula like Dr. Frankenstein and more. NBC will also launch its own Dracula series in the fall with Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Producers Don Murphy and Joel Silver were involved with LoeG when it was a movie—no word on their involvement this time, but they’ll probably get a percentage.

I will say I do hope this TV show gets a greenlight if for NO OTHER REASON than that Top Shelf—current publisher of new League materials—will make lots and lots and lots and lots of money. DC COmics, previous publisher, will also make lots of money, and that’s okay too.

"Crime has no sex and yet to-day
I wear the brand of shame;
Whilst he amid the gay and proud
Still bears an honored name.

Can you blame me if I’ve learned to think
Your hate of vice a sham,
When you so coldly crushed me down
And then excused the man?"

 

These lines, from the poem "A Double Standard" by Frances E.W. Harper, were published in 1855. It’s about a woman whose reputation is ruined after a sexual encounter with a man who suffers no ill effects.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this poem in the context of misogyny but also class and race in America. (Harper was an African American female born in 1825 in Maryland.) We have plenty of American narratives about what we now call slut-shaming, from The Scarlet Letter onward, but what usually goes unexplored in those stories is the ideological disconnect inherent to American misogyny. (I would argue The Scarlet Letter is more an anti-Puritanism novel than an anti-sexism novel.)

What the narrator of Harper’s poem wants is to be treated equally—not to go unpunished if she committed a crime* but to be treated the same as any other citizen. This is one of the fundamental ideas of America, but of course our rhetoric has always run up against entrenched power structures that do not actually wish for a world of equal opportunity for all people. Our hatred of vice has always been a sham, born not of a desire to protect the innocent but to allow the powerful to retain their power.

When America has moved forward as a nation, it has been when the oppressed have demanded the U.S. live up to its rhetoric. And that is why African American history is not at the periphery of American history but in fact at the center of it.

 

* Obviously to our sensibilities bonking outside of marriage is no crime, but this was 1855.

Since his quirky, moving, and massive Bottomless Belly Button made every person in the world's best books of 2008 list, cartoonist Dash Shaw has turned his attention to shorter forms and new media. The long-running webcomic Bodyworld, the short story collection The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century AD, and the IFC animated shorts of the same name have all been marked successes, but many readers, myself included, wondered how long it would be before Shaw cycled back around to a new original graphic novel.

New School, the artist’s first long-form OGN in five years, is now available from Fantagraphics Books, and it answers our wonder with its own. A hardbound, 340-page story of brotherhood, prophecy, and theme parks,  New School is surreal, emotional, and delirious with color.

Continue reading…

“LYDEN: You commissioned a dozen studies on women in media from the Annenberg School at USC. Some of the figures just really boggled the imagination when you think that women are half of all moviegoers. If we didn’t go to the movies, maybe this would make more sense. But we turn out in droves.

DAVIS: I know. It really does boggle the mind. In family films and kids television shows, for every one female character, there are three male characters. But lest people think that it’s all bad news, we were able to see an increase in the percentage of female characters in family films, such that if we add female characters at the rate we have been for the past 20 years, we will achieve parity in 700 years.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVIS: And my institute, we have dedicated ourselves to cutting that in half. And we will not rest until it’s only 350 years.

LYDEN: Why is this the case?

DAVIS: My theory is that since all anybody has seen when they are growing up is this big imbalance that the movies that they’ve watched are about, let’s say, five-to-one as far as female presence is concerned. That’s what starts to look normal. And let’s think about in difference segments of society - 17 percent of cardiac surgeons are women, 17 percent of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isn’t that strange that that’s also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if we’re actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when you’re an adult, you don’t notice?

LYDEN: I wonder what the impact is of all of this lack of female representation.

DAVIS: We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.

LYDEN: Oh, my goodness.

DAVIS: So is it possible that 17 percent women has become so comfortable and so normal that that’s just sort of unconsciously expected?

LYDEN: Why else, Geena Davis, do these kinds of disparities matter?

DAVIS: What we’re in effect doing is training children to see that women and girls are less important than men and boys. We’re training them to perceive that women take up only 17 percent of the space in the world. And if you add on top of that that so many female characters are sexualized, even in things that are aimed at little kids, that’s having an enormous impact as well.”

- NPR, “Casting Call: Hollywood Needs More Women" [x] (via mswyrr)

http://www.GiantITP.com/comics/oots0897.html