Category: Comic books & strips

Posted on

V for Vitamin

Those of you who pretend to know me through this blog pretend to know that I’m a creature of habit. When something works out for me, I stick with it till it fails. Then I kick it to the curb. When I break from this practice, I tend to get screwed.

Last week week, for example, I switched from Breathe Right brand nose strips over to the private label brand at CVS. I should’ve known something was wrong when one of the instructions was “line up the bump” and another was “hold in place for 20 seconds.”

By morning, the strip was half off one side of my nose, and removing it left a nasty mark on the bridge (where I lined up the bump). So it’s back to the same old.

Now, if you’ve made it through this far, then you know there’s gonna be some sorta payoff. In this instance, it involves fluorescent urine and potential liver and CNS damage.

See, the same day I bought the cheap-ass nose strips, I also needed to restock on my multivitamin. I had just finished a 200-count bottle of One-A-Day Men’s Health. It’s only in the past year or two that I got into the habit of taking vitamins. I can’t detect any effect, but it’s possible I’d be a deteriorated wreck by now if I hadn’t been taking the darn things.

Amy & I checked out the local health food store, since she’d never been inside. I took a look at the vitamins while she was checking out some rice. The clerk directed me to Ultra II dailies from Nature’s Plus. It cost $25 for 60 tablets, which took me aback. But I bought them, figuring “at that price, they must be good.”

That was Saturday. Wednesday evening, Amy asked how the new vitamins were. Besides expensive.

I said, “They seem fine. I gotta say, though, I had no idea my body could produce a yellow that fluorescent.” She chalked it up to the B-complex in the vitamins. I thought maybe it was polonium-210, and that the FSB was ready to silence Virtual Memories for good, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Unless she was in on it. . .

Okay, so maybe I was getting a little paranoid.

I figured that having fluorescent urine would make for a fine party gimmick, since we do have that Super Bowl bash next Sunday, but Amy decided to give my new vitamins an extra look.

After a few minutes on the laptop, and she announced, “You need to stop taking those.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, it says here that the upper daily limit of vitamin A is 10,000 IU. And your new vitamin has 25,000 IU.”

“. . . Wow! There’s a Teratology Society? Is that like the Monster Society of Evil?”

“Sigh.”

I think I’d be worried if Amy did get some of my references.

We checked out a few more reputable sources, plus wikipedia, and determined that it was probably best if I don’t risk liver collapse, osteoporosis, CNS damage and, most important, hair loss (gotta have your priorities straight). So it’s back to the same old.

(Just wondering: if they’re pseudotumors, that means they’re not as bad as regular tumors, right?)

Posted on

It was divine!

Not having a ton of family in these parts, I use the time off during the holidays to visit friends. On Friday, Amy & I went down to Lumberton, NJ to visit friends of hers who were in the area for their own holiday family-tour. We had an entertaining afternoon, centering around a lengthy meal at a P.F. Chang and a discussion of why Shawn Bradley never panned out in the NBA. Good times were had by me, which counts for a lot.

Yesterday, we drove up to Providence, RI to visit my friends Paul & Deb. They’d been having plenty of family get-togethers during the week, so it was a nice change of pace for them to get a visit from their weird friends in NJ.

I always love seeing Paul & Deb, because they have an awful lot of diverse interests and are quite passionate about them. We exchanged some holiday gifts — we brought back some neat tea from our Paris trip, and I also made them copies of a few Mad Mix CDs, while they gave us books, fancy knitting yarn, and unique coffee mugs from a local artist, before deciding we also needed to take back an amaryllis and some paperwhite bulbs. And a loaf of sweet bread from a Portuguese bakery.

In between these two bouts of gift-giving, the four of us drove over to the museum at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), which was exhibiting Wunderground: a collection of Providence poster art from the past decade, and a sculptural village called Shangri-la-la Land. I took a ton of pictures of the exhibit, before a staffer ran up to tell me that I wasn’t permitted to snap pix in the exhibition. I apologized and pretended I’d just taken one. Here’s a collection of 19 shots from the show. (The sculpture area was dimly lit, so I tried a few shots without flash, but gave up and started snapping away. I included both types.)

Comics Reporter and official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon wrote a great (and lengthy) article about Fort Thunder, one of the main groups of the Providence arts scene during that period:

Fort Thunder was different. The Providence, RI group has achieved importance not just for the sum total of its considerable artists but for its collective impact and its value as a symbol of unfettered artistic expression. The key to understanding Fort Thunder is that it was not just a group of cartoonists who lived near each other, obsessed about comics and socialized. It was a group of artists, many of whom pursued comics among other kinds of media, who lived together and shared the same workspace.

As an outgrowth of the Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] where nearly all of them attended (some even graduating), Fort Thunder provided a common setting for creation that imposed almost no economic imperative to conform to commercial standards or to change in an attempt to catch the next big wave. They were young, rents were cheap, and incidental money could be had by dipping into other more commercial areas of artistic enterprise such as silk-screening rock posters. Fort Thunder was also fairly isolated, both in terms of influences that breached its walls and how that work was released to the outside world. This allowed its artists to produce a significant body of work that most people have yet to see. It also fueled the group’s lasting mystique. The urge — even seven years after discovering the group — is not to dig too deeply, so as not to uncover the grim and probably unromantic particulars.

We had a great time in the exhibition. Over the years, Paul & Deb had snagged several of the posters from lampposts and walls in town, but they told us that most of the posters were stuck with pretty heavy glue, making it impossible to take home these amazing pieces. I figured it said something about the confluence of art, commerce and paste, but I say that about everything. I think it was also the first museum exhibition I’d been to where the art was held up by thumbtacks.

Before visiting the museum, Paul wanted to show us one of his favorite places in town, the Providence Atheneum. It’s America’s 4th oldest library (est. 1753) and requires an annual membership. Paul pays it gladly, because he loves coming to the place, reading magazines and newspapers, checking out the great collection, and soaking in the ambience.

After the Atheneum and the Wunderground exhibition, we were off to a Portuguese restaurant where I ordered the Shish-Kebab of Damocles, evidently an Iberian specialty.

If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you probably realize that a day that includes

  1. a comics-related art exhibition,
  2. an old library,
  3. some bizarre cuisine, and
  4. conversation with good friends

is pretty much as good as it gets.

(If you want to see pix from the whole day, go here. If you just want that Wunderground set, head over here. And you can check out Amy’s pix from that day over here.)

Posted on

Happy Holiday

Have a great Christmas, dear gentile readers! I don’t know why you’re on the internet on Christmas, instead of in the family room, ripping through the gift-wrap on your presents, but that’s your problem.

Amy’s busy putting together a drum-kit for her godson, so his parents will hate us forever. I’ll go give her a hand in a minute.

If you still don’t wanna join your family for a few minutes, read some of the curiously touching Christmas memories Tom Spurgeon posted in “Wallowing In Nostalgia Chapter 146”. And have a good holiday.

Posted on

If only they had Bizarro King

I’m not a gamer. This isn’t because I think video games are beneath me, but because if I had a game console I would play obsessively and ruin my life. The only console I’ve owned was a Sega DreamCast that was a hand-me-down from my dad. I played NBA2K on it for a while, but it wasn’t as much fun as when I used to hang out at my buddy Sang’s place and play our customized version of the New Jersey Nets: the backcourt was comprised of me and Sang, and the frontcourt featured souped up versions of Dr. J, Buck Williams and Sam Bowie.

I’ve avoided the game craze for years, but a couple of recent discoveries may tip me over the edge.

First, I found out that the new Superman Returns video game includes the ability to play as Bizarro Superman, wrecking as much of Metropolis as you can before the big blue guy shows up to stop you. As longtime readers know, I’m a huge fan of Bizarro. I’m hoping the game is successful enough to spawn a video game set on Bizarro’s home world, a square planet where everything is backwards.

As if that weren’t enough, I saw a commercial this weekend for a video game based on my second favorite character: the King.

No, not Elvis; it’s that Burger King mascot, and his surreal episodes of delivering BK fare to an unsuspecting populace. I first gained respect for the King when he got into those NFL commercials, making interceptions and high-stepping it into the end zone. There was something about that eternally grinning mask, that Guy Fawkes of fast food vibe, that caught me.

This game looks like it consists of trying to sneak up on people and give ’em burgers. I can’t argue with that, although I do wanna see him get added to the next edition of Madden.

So I ask you: Bizarro Superman and the King? Can a man resist?

Fortunately, they’re only on Xbox, and I don’t wanna give Gates, Ballmer, et al. my money . . .

Posted on

Cloudburst

“The things we crave are either near us or far, whereas time is about process. I have lived many years and I have learned not to trust process. Creation, destruction: these are not the real story. When we dwell on such things, we inevitably lapse into cliché. The true drama is in these relationships of space.”

–Emil Kopen

I’ve bought a lot of comic books over the years, but I’m not what you’d call a collector. When a store clerk asks if I want a bag-and-board for a new purchase, I answer, “No, thanks. I just read ’em.” I used to have some “valuable” comics, but I sold most of them off during college. I don’t remember what I needed the money for. A few years ago, I gave away a ton of “worthless” ones to some friends of mine. They treasure them.

You could say I own a couple of expensive comics, but that depends on your definition of “expensive”. Is $100 too much to spend on a hardcover collection of Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strips, reprinted at their original size (21″ x 16″)? Is $95 too much to spend on a three-volume slipcased edition of the complete Calvin & Hobbes, the best comic strip post-Peanuts? Is $125 too much to spend on the trade paperbacks of the final 100 issues of Cerebus? (Okay, don’t answer that one.)

And is $3,000 too much to spend on Hicksville?

There’s certainly nothing on its cover to indicate that Hicksville carries such an extravagant price. In fact, my edition reads, “$19.95 US / $24.95 CANADA”. It’s no rare, pulled-from-circulation issue, has no first appearance of Wolverine nor the death of a well-loved character (“Not a dream! Not a hoax!”).

But Hicksville brought me to the other side of the world, to small towns and jade factories, to wineries and bungee-platforms, to glaciers and Bunny Hell, to myself and beyond. It brought me to New Zealand.

Hicksville collects a story from the early-to-mid-1990s comics of Dylan Horrocks, about a comics journalist who travels to a small town to research the childhood of a famous cartoonist. The journalist discovers that everyone in this town is a comics aficionado. It’s a dream that I think all comics readers had at some point in their lives, that there’s a place in which we’re home.

But it wasn’t this vision that stayed with me over the years and led me to call my travel-industry friends to set up a two-week tour of the North & South Islands. I wasn’t naïve enough to think there was a comics Shangri-La waiting there. (That’s in Angouleme!)

What brought me to New Zealand was the sky. It’s no mean feat in a black-and-white comic book to convey such subtlety in clouds. In fact, Horrocks’ scratchy pen style would seem to dictate against it, mere outlines separating absence from absence. But there was something in his skies that stayed with me. I was captured by the romance of it, right down to the Maori name for the country: Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud.

In 2003, I decided to go there and see it for myself. My friend Liz set me up on an “adventure tour” group, which was an extensively mixed bag of people (one of whom has stayed a good friend ever since). For the first few days, all I saw were clouds. Oh, and rain. Lots of rain.

But by the time our tour headed to the South Island via the Wellington-Picton ferry, the sky cleared and I started to understand things that I can’t explain. By the end of the trip, at the peak of the Ben Lomond trail, a mile or so above Queenstown, I knew where I was.

A day later, I would spend 24 hours in planes and airports, replaying Emil Kopen’s remarks about space, not time, being the essence of storytelling, as I jetted from Queenstown to Auckland to LA to Newark. Today marks the third anniversary of my return from NZ. Time and space.

I bought my copy of Hicksville at a small press comics expo in Maryland in 1998. Dylan Horrocks was in attendance, signing copies (he’d been brought in to give a presentation on the history of comics in NZ). He made a sketch on the first page of my copy, along with the inscription, “Hey Gil! You’re always welcome in Hicksville!”

And I am.

(You really want to look through my photos from that trip.)

Posted on

It’s a Rap!

(You know you wanna check out the pix from my meanders in Toronto on Friday)

Home from Toronto a lot easier than my boss, whose flight home on Friday got cancelled due to “the airspace over Boston,” according to his pilot. He asked if this meant the bad weather & high winds we had all over the northeast, and was told that it did not. So, after 4 hours in an Embraer 145, he was allowed to leave and headed back to our hotel, where he sat in the bar and watched hockey.

Meanwhile, official VM buddy Sam and I went to see the Raptors play the Celtics in what Sam called “battle of the worst coaches in the NBA.” Since the Raptors have a game tonight against the Knicks, we figured maybe it’s a round-robin tournament.

We had fun at the game, but it was despite the action on the court. Sam’s now been to two NBA games with me (we hit a Dallas game against Orlando in April 2005), and he’s convinced I have NBA-Tourette’s, in which a constant stream of analysis & invective pours forth from my mouth during professional basketball games. We joined up with my boss after the game for a drink or two. He seemed pretty exhausted by the hurry-up-and-wait. I admit: if I were stuck in an Embraer for 4 hours, I’d probably go bananas.

Earlier in the day, after I visited Sam’s company in Oakville and toured the company’s produciton facilities (not as heavy-duty containment suiting as I wore on Thursday), I wandered around Toronto a little, while the weather was clear.

Unfortunately, this wandering didn’t coincide exactly with the clear weather, and I was stuck in some darned cold rain for a while. Early in my meander, I stopped at the Roots store in the Eaton Centre to get a hat and gloves. But then I decided that they were kinda pricey and, besides, the weather was okay now, so it would stay that way forever.

From there, I exited onto Yonge Street, which I forgot was an interesting amalgam of high-end retail, good record stores, and low-rent strip clubs. I headed off from there to a used bookstore I remembered from a past trip, but didn’t find anything.

I decided I’d walk through the University district and visit the famed comic store, The Beguiling. I spent a while there, hoping the weather would clear again and trying to justify spending $240 (Canadian) for a limited print by Sammy Harkham of a golem walking in the forest. I held off (I’ll wait till the USD appreciates against Canada’s dollar, and I’d probably be fine with a panel from The Poor Sailor anyway).

One of the nice things about having started doing yoga is that rambling ambles like this one don’t seem to give me the slight mid-back pain I was getting the past few years. I’ve only been on it for a few weeks or so, so hey.

During this walk, I came across two things I didn’t take pictures of: the Bata Shoe Museum and the Robarts Library. The former looks entertaining enough, and I bought a postcard from there for Amy, to give us yet another reason to take a long weekend here in the springtime.

The Library, on the other hand, is one of the most overwhelmingly depressing buildings I’ve ever seen. It may’ve been worse because of the rain and gray skies, but I can’t imagine a scenario which the appearance of this building inspires anything but fear and dread. Don’t let 1970s architecture happen to you!

After I left The Beguiling emptyhanded, it was time for another overpriced cab ride back to the hotel. I was amazed by the cost of cab rides in this city, as well as the ones I had to take to the pharma companies, which were outside the city. The flat-rate limo-y cars were also awfully expensive, including $51 CAD for the 20-minute ride from downtown to the airport.

In keeping with my recent post about accumulating all sorts of change and foreign currency, I returned home this morning with about $47 in Canadian bills and change. I feel like George Soros.

Anyway, a really neat thing happened during the short (54-minute) flight today. We completed our initial descent through the cloud cover, and all I could see were brown-gray hills and a few houses and a winding road or two. I thought, “We’re only 15 minutes from landing, but I have NO idea where we are right now.” It looked like Pennsylvania farmland, or far western NJ.

Then I noticed the Sheraton Crossroads to port, and it hit me: I was looking down at my morning commute! Sure enough, Rt. 17 threaded away from the Sheraton, southeast to Ramsey. Our plane followed Rt. 208 for a bit, as I picked out landmark after landmark (the Nabisco plant, the Ikea across from Garden State Plaza, even the Lukoil I stopped in last week). I’ve only had this perspective from a plane once before. Usually, I come home at night, or on different flight paths.

It helps to see things from different angles. Except Raptors/Celtics games.

(check out a couple of pix from my Toronto walkabout)