What I did on my summer vacation
click on images for larger view.
The first three pages of my long-in-development graphic novel are done, and the reviews are ecstatic!
“Those look — pretty good — ” — Robbie Busch
“They do look good, and I can definitely tell what’s going on.” — R. Sikoryak
“Great work! I don’t know how you learned to draw so quickly.” — Tony Millionaire
“Those pages look great. Good on you!” — Jackson Publick
“I mean, I don’t know anything about comics, but they look great to me.” — James Urbaniak
With ringing endorsements like this, I am hugely encouraged to continue. Messers Busch and Millionaire both detect a Kirby influence in the “big hand,” which is weird because I’ve never particularly looked at Kirby, and Mr. Busch, in a moment of extreme generosity, compared these pages to the work of Jim Sterenko. I said that these pages look like Sterenko — if Sterenko drew with a meat cleaver instead of a pen.
For the non-comics creators in my readership, please keep in mind that there will eventually be speech balloons taking up all the blank space you see here and sound effects added to make it all more dramatic.
I post these partly to promote my work and partly to comfort Senator Larry Craig, to remind him that a bathroom encounter with a strange man could end a whole lot worse.
Movie Night With Urbaniak: Pickup on South Street
Neither
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nor I have ever seen Pickup on South Street, but after The Naked Kiss I’m curious to hear his take on Samuel Fuller’s, erm, unique approach to screen acting. So he comes over and we watch the movie.
“A maddening director,” says Urbaniak. And “maddening” is certainly an apt description. You’re watching a Sam Fuller movie and you’rethinking, “this guy is so bad, he doesn’t understand the first thing about what film is,” and then out of nowhere he’ll produce some effect so daring, so creative and so sophisticated that it’ll make your head spin. And he’ll do this, mmm, about sixty times in the course of a 90-minute feature.
In Pickup there’s an actor named Murvyn Vye playing “Detective Tiger,” and there isn’t a single spontaneous, heartfelt or natural line reading, gesture or movement in his entire performance. I mean, this is a guy who looks out a window and says “He’s here,” and not only do you not believe he’s seeing anyone, you don’t believe he’s ever looked out a window before. And you despair because you’re watching a lame police drama. Then, out of nowhere, ace pro Thelma Ritter walks in, acting as though she’s in a completely different movie, and just mops up the floor with the guy. Just takes the mop handle out of the closet, screws it into the guy’s navel, and literally mops the floor with him. And just as you’re about done marveling at the great Thelma Ritter’s performance, you realize that the scene you’ve been watching has been an eight-minute long extended take, full of dollies and zooms and tracking movements, and you remember that you’re watching a movie by one of the true mad geniuses of American film.
Similarly, there’s Jean Peters as The Girl. The Girl is supposed to be a hard-nose, hard-luck dame who’s been around the block a few times, and she honestly looks like a perfectly nice young lady who’s watched a few movies. You can’t believe she’s the lead, she’s fake and flat and all surface. Then, she goes to see co-lead Richard Widmark and a weird thing happens. He picked her purse, she needs the maguffin back or its her head, and next thing you know, Widmark is putting the moves on her and she’s totally falling for him. The scene shouldn’t work on about ten different levels, but it does because Peters suddenly explodes with passion, vulnerability and deep sensuality. And suddenly a movie you could barely believe got released becomes something so intense and deeply personal that you can’t believe you’re watching it. And you realize, “that’s the audition scene,” that’s the scene that got her the part,” Fuller cast her because he knew she’d be able to sell the weirdest-ass scenes in the movie, the ones the narrative won’t work without. To give you an idea of how weird her scenes with Widmark are, imagine the famous encounter between Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe in Wild at Heart, but instead of Willem ending up with his head blown off outside a bank, Laura Dern runs off with him and it turns out he’s really a really sweet guy and a patriot to boot.
Fuller the filmmaker is no less idiosyncratic. He’ll mark time through any number of ho-hum procedural scenes, then uncork a fight scene as intense, frightening and real as anything in Raging Bull, or, conversely, he’ll ruin a beautiful death-bed monologue with an utterly unnecessary reaction shot, or spoil a love scene with a shot out of focus. It’s almost like he’s playing with you, lulling you into a false set of expectations, waiting for the next opportunity to blow your mind.