Monday, March 21, 2016

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ MARCH 21, 2016


1. I love amazing art, and I especially appreciate amazing artists who work in the more traditional forms, like painters who use actual paint in their paintings. I know, groundbreaking idea, ain't it? Anyway, when I do come across an artist whose work moves me, like, for instance, this piece does...


...I like to give them a shout-out in the hopes that maybe you folks out there will enjoy the work as much as I do. And so, without further ado, here is a huge gallery featuring the obscure, broken worlds of Russian painter Sergey Kolesov, aka Peleng! Oh, and if you'd like to see his beautiful Wonder Woman portrait, just stroll on over to his LiveJournal.
 

2.  Speaking of hipping you folks to awesome stuff, it's been far too long since I last linked to Nicholas Gurewitch's Ignatz Award-winning webcomic site, Perry Bible Fellowship, which is quite possibly the most consistently funny, intelligent, and unabashedly beautiful online comic currently being published. I mean, just look at this...

Not that it can't be ridiculous for ridiculousness' sake, as in this choice example...


Sometimes, an individual strip's humor can stray perilously close to "Dad Joke" territory. For instance...


But some jokes can also be "inappropriate", NSFW, and occasionally PG-13, as in this early strip...


I guess the thing I most appreciate about the Perry Bible Fellowship is that, if you keep clicking through the archive, you're pretty much guaranteed to find a strip that will be among your all-time favorites. Probably more than just one, now that I think of it. It's that freaking good. Oh, and you should totally buy his book. Pro Tip? Get the first collection, because the second collection is going for like 800 dollars for some reason.

3. And finally for today, I bring you Citizen Shane, an amazing lo-fi documentary about a tragedy-haunted, morbidly obese, serial killer-obsessed fellow by the name of Shane Ballard who ran for sheriff of Lownes County, Mississippi, on an anti-corruption, pro-pornography platform. As fascinating as this documentary is, the story behind it is just as wild. In fact, nobody would know of its existence at all if it weren't for our old pal Don Alex of Subterranean Cinema. Don, one of the world's most respected and hardest working collectors of, and authorities on, obscure films and video, used to trade and sell tapes with Shane. One day, Shane sent Don a copy of this documentary about his life and his run for elected office, which he'd produced with the help of some friends. Shortly thereafter, Shane would take his own life, igniting a charcoal fire indoors and asphyxiating himself. So, essentially, this documentary is all that remains of Shane Ballard, a man whom I think you're going to be glad you got to know, even if only via this one hour of video on Youtube. I'd say "Enjoy", but this isn't that kind of movie. Now watch.

Friday, March 18, 2016

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ MARCH 18, 2016


1. If, like me, you're curious about the kind of people who say they want Donald Trump to be President of the United States of America, you might want to take a gander at this collection of testimonials put together by The Guardian. It's jam-packed with surprises, like the "Hispanic Attorney" who claims that Trump "has demonstrated, at heart, that he is a caring person"; the "Scientist who Likes Both Bernie and Donald" who claims to be "very concerned about radical M-Muslims"; and "the Former Occupy Protester" who claims that Trump "is ripping the soul of America apart... and we deserve it". Sounds like some pretty solid thinking going on there, doesn't it? You really need to read this collection of cuckoo-bird cries for help, even if only for the sheer entertainment value of it all. Armageddon... it's the Greatest Show on Earth, and we've got front row seats!


2. Setting aside politics for a while, I was recently reminded that I don't give sufficient thanks to some of the people and sources that have influenced, entertained, or even just impressed the hell out of me over the years. In terms of cinema, I can't think of anyone whom I haven't met in the flesh that has had a bigger influence on my own taste for and appreciation of cinema than Don Alex, creator of the great (and now sadly departed) website known as Subterranean Cinema. After going through a bunch of personal issues, and coming out on top, Don Alex has brought Subterranean Cinema back in an easier to maintain blog format (sound familiar?) and the results are very much worth your time and attention. I mean, where else are you going to find a free PDF version of the classic Amos Vogel book Film as a Subversive Art, or the legendary "lost" Rospo Pallenberg script for the long-promised film version of Stephen King's apocalyptic megabook, The Stand, or a fully illustrated web version of Alejandro Jodorowsky's long out of print book, El Topo: A Book of the Film? With so much more, and still more to come! If you're a true fan of cinema, then you need to check it out, and count your blessings!


3. You know, when it comes to nationalized embodiment of Purest Evil, it usually comes down to a shoving match between Western-style Fascism (fronted by Hitler and Mussolini) and Eastern-style Totalitarian Collectivism (fronted by Stalin and Mao). HOWEVER! In terms of kicking off some truly terrible trends, or treating political foes and colonial subjects alike as though they were of a different species, or engaging in wanton sadism on an unprecedented global scale, a pretty good case could be made for the British Empire being ranked near the very topmost among despicable world historic control projects. And no, the examples collected in the above-linked article do not all come from the late-19th century (even though many of the worst crimes listed do come from that time). Somewhere in the middle of these collected atrocities sits "The Crushing of the Iraqi Revolution", in 1920:
In 1920, the newly-formed nation of Iraq was tiring of British rule. Charged with guiding the new state towards independence, the Empire had instead installed puppet leaders. turning the place into a de facto colony. Fed up with their imperial overlords, the Iraqis turned to revolution, only for the British to unleash wave after wave of atrocities against them. 
First the RAF conducted nighttime bombing raids on civilian targets. Then they deployed chemical weapons against the fighters, gassing whole groups of them. But the real horrors came in the aftermath, when the victorious British decided to use collective punishment against the offending tribes. 
From that point on, any tribe that caused a fuss would have one of its villages randomly annihilated. Specific orders were given to exterminate every living thing within its walls, from animals to rebels to children. Other villages were subject to random searches. If the British found a single weapon, they would burn the place to the ground, destroy the crops, poison wells, and kill livestock. They’d sometimes target weddings to terrorize the population. In short, the British deliberately targeted civilians in a campaign that lasted the better part of half a decade, all because a few Iraqis had dared to ask for their country back.

And guess what, folks? That's, like, one of the LEAST brutal and offensive entries on this Quasi-Satanic Top Ten List. I strongly urge you to familiarize yourself with this information. It really helps put the current "crisis" - troubling as it may be - in its proper, historical perspective. You'll be thanking whatever God you believe in that the Sun finally set on "the Empire on which the Sun Never Set".

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

THE LAST HALLOWEEN: COMIC AND FILM STILLS SET TO SCORE

This is pretty great. My long-time creative partner Marc Roussel, who directed the short film version of my 8 page comic The Last Halloween based on a script we co-wrote, has put together a video to showcase our film's amazing score, which was created by our friend and frequent collaborator Christopher Guglick, pairing it with stills from the film and pages from my comic. Thanks, Marc... Now it's time to get back to work on our next batch of projects!


Friday, March 4, 2016

SUGGESTED READING LIST (TRUMP EDITION) ~ MARCH 3, 2016


1. If, like many other Americans (and citizens of the world) these days, you're sitting at home scratching your head trying to puzzle out how the USA could possibly have reached the abyssal precipice upon which it now stands poised... you shouldn't be. Because the tracks were laid for the Trump Train - which so many of our fellow humans seem all to eager to hop aboard as it
chugs with increasingly dread-fraught inevitability towards an unprecedented apocalyptic abyss - was first laid over fifteen years ago. In an article entitled Revenge of the Simple, Rolling Stone Magazine's Matt Taibi explains: 
To hear GOP insiders tell it, Doomsday is here. If Donald Trump scores huge tonight and seizes control of the nomination in the Super Tuesday primaries, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party, and perhaps the presidency. But Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's nightmare possible. 
People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president. Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any setting. ... Bush went to the best schools but was totally ignorant of history, philosophy, science, geography, languages and the arts. ... Bush showed no interest in learning and angrily rejected the idea that a president ought to be able to think his way through problems. ...  
There are educational apps that use groups of images to teach two-year-olds to recognize that an orange is like an orange while a banana is a banana. Bush was stalled at that developmental moment. And we elected him president.
The always excellent Taibi goes on to explain how Preznit Dubya's personal Svengali, Karl Rove, banked on the notion that decades of cultural debasement, combined with highly orchestrated right-wing talk radio propaganda campaigns cooked up in billionaire-funded conservative think tanks "left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked at paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming to steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building." It's an excellent series of riffs, and it ultimately leads to a discussion about the blowback from such ambitious civilizational engineering which leads, now, to...
... Washington freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron. That's really what it comes down to. And all of the Beltway's hooting and hollering about how "embarrassing" and "dangerous" Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as Americans can be, they're smart enough to remember being told that it was OK to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.
There is no comfort offered here, folks. Taibi claims that "we're about to enter a dark period in the history of the American experiment", and yer old pal Jerky couldn't agree more.

2. Make no mistake... yer old pal Jerky is no fan of Mitt Romney. He's a New Millennium Republican after all, and is thus a willing representative of, and standard bearer for, the worst, most greedy, venal, arrogant, bigoted, ignorant, elitist, phony, limited, authoritarian and spite-fueled voting bloc in the history of American democracy. And yet his speech today at the Hinckley Institute in Utah, wherein he savaged Donald Trump with a withering volley of honest, fair and accurate put-downs and insults, was a thing of beauty, and not just because watching right-wingers devour their own makes for great entertainment. It was beautiful because, watching it, you got the sense that there's a very real possibility that the GOP may actually be disintegrating from the inside out. I mean, just watch this thing!


"His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University." Savor that. Swish it around in your mouth for a while, then swallow it. Nice, isn't it? Now consider; whether the Republican establishment's obvious contempt for Trump ultimately leads them to force a brokered convention where they pull some smoky backroom shenanigans to oust him (thereby alienating a huge segment of their base), or simply pushes Trump into exiting the party in order to mount a third party campaign (thereby guaranteeing a Republican defeat), it's all bad news for the Conservative Movement. Because, let's face it; they can slice that shit cake any way they like, but they're still gonna be left with a plate full of shit.

3. John Oliver, host of HBO's satirical news magazine Last Week Tonight, has tried his best to make his show a Trump-free zone. It was a laudable goal, but the stress and strain of trying to cast his gaze away as Trump's bloated, reptoid countenance continued to bloat, swell, and metastasize across and throughout the media ultimately proved impossible. Which brings us to the following video, which serves as yet another bit of evidence in support of the thesis that the best contemporary political news reporting comes from comedians and/or comedy show hosts. Just watch, and maybe when you're done, stroll on over to MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain.com and install Oliver's "Drumpfinator" app. It transforms all web-based instances of Donald Trump's name into his original archaic German family name, "Drumpf", for multiple reasons, all of which will become obvious once you've watched the video.