Wafflin' Wednesday

Random sharing of online oddities for you this morning... I'm midweek in my CCS teaching schedule and in Neil Gaiman book land every other available minute, so I'm just not in a blogging frame of mind this AM. Still, here's something or three to spark your day, if you're so disposed.

21st Century Goona-Goona

Battle at Kruger: "I can't stop watching it. I'm obsessed with these water buffaloes protecting their baby. Warning: If you're freaked out by wild animals attacking each other, you might not like this." - Sarah Stewart Taylor

Ever since the early 1900s, filmmakers amateur and professional have been cranking cameras to catch unique moments in the lives and deaths of wildlife from around the globe. The more exotic the animals, the more savage the action, the wider the audience. They used to call these 'goona-goona' films in the wake of the 1930 shot-in-Bali curio Goona Goona, and whether they were distributed by major studios (Dark Rapture, etc.) or roadshowed out of the back seat of huckster's cars (Ingagi, most elusive and once the most successful of all goona-goona), the animal action would back asses into seats. Well, OK, the native nudity helped. The Walt Disney True-Life Adventures, the 1970s wildlife features from Sunn International, cable TV Shark Week and Animal Planet and Fox TV fare like When Animals Attack are all part of this venerable tradition, and here's the most recent slice of

21st Century goona-goona to kiss my eyes, and this'll have you jumping out of your seat.

Thanks to fellow CCS instructor and vet mystery novelist Sarah Stewart Taylor for that link!

Say What -- ??

"Oh you gain flesh": CCS senior Penina Gal posted this incredible link, the most hilarious subtitling job imaginable on a familiar artifact of American pop culture,

and funny stuff whether you're an Arrested Development fan or not (I'm not). Fans of Hong Kong and Asian films have savored decades of insane subtitles, and we all have our personal favorites, but this case history beats 'em all!

Bissette Art on Ebay

I've held off posting ebay links for the various slices of my past that have popped up in the past few months -- they're not my auctions -- but here's a blast from the past you might wish to bid on if you get this in time (the auction ends later today). This is of interest, perhaps, as it's one of my rare wash comics works from the early 1980s, and one of my few Marvel Comics gigs I'm still pretty much proud of (except for a couple of really rushed pages -- brrrrrrrr, there's a couple of stinkers in this otherwise solid piece of work). Plus, it's going for cheap, so give it a look --

This vintage Bissette page (scripted by Steve Perry) from the Marvel Comics Bizarre Adventures story "The Blood Bequest" could find a new home today --

-- thanks to Mark for sending the link along this AM.

This particular page was completed with an assist from Rick Veitch (look like Veitch laid it out and likely pencilled the first panel), who lettered the entire story. This is also one of a handful of pages in this story directly referencing the Marv Wolfman/Neal Adams origin of Dracula story from Marvel's Dracula Lives! black-and-white zine. This was the last Marvel gig I completed before John Totleben and I began work on Saga of the Swamp Thing, and my last wash comics creation for any publisher except Scholastic: the shoddy, inconsistent quality of printing in those days destroyed the work that went into these pages.

OK, better blogging tomorrow, promise.

Have a woolly Wednesday, one and all...

Garry Trudeau, Petro-Paleo Art, Prez Privilege and Private Platoons

I'm cramming for an afternoon CCS lecture on Garry Trudeau (who is coming to visit The Center for Cartoon Studies in October, participating in fundraising for CCS and more!) and mystery novelist and fellow CCS instructor Sarah Stewart Taylor and I have a heady senior thesis class ahead I want to do a little more prep for. It's been a little weird resurrecting art from a beloved project writer Tom Veitch and I never could find a publisher for -- Grumm, which we pitched to Archie Goodwin at Epic (shot down due to a Native American component to Tom's narrative concepts, though one that was not central to the miniseries; as Archie put it, "Coyote and Time Spirits just haven't done that well for us") and Karen Berger during Vertigo's first year (and which, after a year, was rejected, though the rather clumsy conversation with Karen that followed at an otherwise pleasant lunch together at the World Horror Con I've ever attended left me with the impression Karen simply had not read the proposal, or had forgotten it completely -- sigh). Grumm still looks pretty good to me, and the proposal and sample art holds up well; anyway, this is part of what I'm bringing in to share with the seniors today.

On a completely unrelated track, I've also been excavating and prepping an expanded dino comics history piece, which has led me into research on the 1930s Sinclair Oil dinosaur promotional artists and campaigns, a curious slice of petro-promo history I'm finding more fascinating than I should. More on that -- later.

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Will the Congress ever step on this ceaseless expansion of Executive privilege and domestic spying program?

I can't see how, given the fact that the Republicans are still calling the shots in the Congress -- note the 4-vote loss last night of yet another Democratic bill intended to somehow curb President Bush's Iraq War "strategy," in this case an attempt to limit the length of a soldier's Iraq combat tour. President Bush's allies blocked the bill.

Huh, so the interminable tours -- which have precipitated the highest suicide rate in the history of the U.S. Army and the National Guard -- will go on. As I've pointed out here before, this treatment of our soldiers is oddly parallel -- almost identical -- to that of those imprisoned in Guantanamo and elsewhere in this interminable "War on Terror." How long can anyone hold out once they find themselves in what is, essentially, service/imprisonment without defined parameters, limit or end? This Kafkaesque nightmare for those entrapped in Bush's concept of "service" and "justifiable incarceration" is an abomination, a form of psychological torture the Congress has sanctioned now (with inaction, and refusal to debate or act) for years now.

Is this how the GOP honors our servicemen? Is this how they "support our troops"? How long will we stomach the Republican stonewalling of any change, however incremental, in the Bush policies the American people have had enough of? Honestly, with precious few exceptions, I simply cannot see how anyone can continue to justify this reprehensible crap. The Republican refusal to honor or impose any measure of checks or balances is reaping the whirlwind, and we all will pay (but none more than military families, still the only part of the American public to bear the brunt of sacrifice in the wars Bush is intent upon treading water within).

The complicity of the still-Republican-led Congress in all the various shitstorms coming to a head presently begs the question: how can any American conscientiously continue to support the party?

In other quarters, the lack of Congressional oversight -- again, blame the GOP Senators (and complicit Democrats like Joseph Lieberman, who is behaving like an ideological scum-of-the-earth, crowing over the blocking of the bill last night) who have rubber-stamped and refused to probe such a plethora of insanity that one doesn't know where to even begin. Inaction is as hazardous as action: for instance,

will the privatization of foreign policy operations ever be addressed, in any public arena? There's reportedly more private contractors in Iraq than there are US military serving -- all quietly established as if it were "business as usual."

For excellent historical reasons, "most countries forbid their citizens fighting in foreign wars unless they are under the control of their own national armed forces,"

a premise the Bush Administration blithely ignored (as they have other facets of the Geneva Convention). With the usual perverse skewed logic of this hyena pack, they've conveniently forgotten

the role similarly hired hands -- the Hessians -- played in the American Revolution, and our colonial forefathers's "insurgent" defeat of both the Hessians and the army of their employer, Great Britain, though of course Blackwater is paying its mercenaries much better these days.

But of course, that's not a lesson learned, nor does the Bush Administration or GOP care to make that correlation.
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Have a great Thursday...