Month: November 2010

Comics Events in Los Angeles: Week of 11/7/10

You don’t have to sit at home alone reading to get into comic books and graphic novels. There are always great events going on that celebrate the vitality and creativity of comics. Just here in Los Angeles, there are more events I can ever make. But I try, and so should you. You never know what you’ll discover.

Here are some local Los Angeles events coming up that celebrate the sequential art form.

This week:

Sunday, November 7, 3 PM: Stan Lee (co-creator/writer of Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, Fantastic Four) signs Marvel ArtWorks products at Every Picture Tells A Story Gallery, 1333 Montana Ave., Santa Monica 90403. Tickets: $0 (but Stan Lee is only signing Marvel ArtWorks products, so purchase may be necessary).

Sunday, November 7, 5 PM: Stan Lee introduces the documentary With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story followed by a discussion with filmmakers Terry Dougas, Nikki Frakes and Will Hess, at the Aero Theater, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica 90403 (across the street from the Every Picture Gallery event). Tickets: $11.

Wednesaday, November 10, 7 PM: Jim McCann (writer, New Avengers, ABC-TV’s One Life to Live) signs his new release Return of the Dapper Men at Meltdown Comics, 7522 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles 90046.

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The Drive Home

A little actor/improviser shop talk for you, in preparation for tonight’s show.

Reminder to self: Thinking of funnier/cleverer/betterer things I should’ve said on the drive home from a show or shoot is a waste of time.

This is fairly common among performers. I’ve done it plenty of times. I hear others talking about doing it themselves. It can feel like constructive analysis, and to a point it might be helpful for the future. But it’s very easy to get carried away and the truth of it is that it comes from a place of insecurity. Because this only happens when I feel like I wasn’t good enough.

Let me be clear, I’m not advocating blind self-congratulations devoid of the reality of how a show or shoot actually went. It’s important and helpful to look at choices made and see how they effected performances.

But when a funnier line pops into your head on the drive home, and your mind plays over and over how you should’ve said that line instead of what you actually said, that doesn’t really serve any purpose beyond heading to crazy town. For improvisation, when every show is completely different and the odds of the exact same situation presenting itself again is incredibly small, it’s basically a useless activity.

For example: OK, the next time I’m playing Hannibal Lecter who has to babysit a monkey’s carrot garden, when the baby carrots scream for more ice cream, I will say “I’ll make carrot cake out of you!” because it references that earlier scene about the carrot cake maker. Huh? That scene is never ever going to happen again! Why am I wasting my time dissecting it line by line? Unless I’m going to adapt it into something scripted like a sketch or short film, re-writing or punching up dialogue to something so temporary doesn’t help me become a stronger performer.

So how to shut off the loop in my head? Instead I focus on slightly broader questions. Was I listening? Was I open to the first opportunity to explore something potentially funny or interesting? Did I make strong choices? How were my characters? When did the laughs happen? Was I able to heighten or at least repeat what I was doing when laughs happened? This line of thinking is much more constructive as long as I answer honestly for myself.

If that doesn’t work, turn on the radio real loud and sing along even louder as a weird character with a strange but very specific voice – but make sure you get the words exactly right. Maybe you’ll find a new character you can use, and it breaks you out of that cyclical thinking. And maybe you’ll make the person in the next car laugh.

Let me know if you have any tricks for this. I’d love to hear them.

Print Comics: Still Awesome

My post on Monday about innovative experiments with digital comics doesn’t mean I don’t love me some dead tree comics. Print still has a lot to offer but digital means that the physical version has to step it up and offer more. Fortunately there are some good examples out there.

As a counter-point to the Johnny Cash digital graphic novel with soundtrack, there is BB Wolf and the Three L.P.’s by JD Arnold and Richard Koslowski from Top Shelf Productions. It can be purchased with a 7-song CD, BB Wolf and the Howlers: The Lost Recordings. The graphic novel spins 1920s race tension with the Three Little Pigs fairy tale. The CD brings the music of the titular blues singing main character to life, which is a very cool way to eliminate the guess work of what the music of a fictional character from a silent medium sounds like. You can also get the limited edition BB Wolf Box Set, which includes the graphic novel, the CD and a wooden box with laser engraved art on the cover and 2 shot glasses for that authentic hard-drinking blues effect.

Creating such an experience that goes beyond the pages is a compelling way to make it still matter to have print and physical product. But it doesn’t have to be about creating ancillary material. Savvy creators and publishers can find ways to have their published material be an aesthetic extension of the world they have created.

Fantagraphics Books has always excelled at this. C. Tyler‘s You’ll Never Know, both Book I: A Good and Decent Man and the new release Book II: Collateral Damage, are designed to look like scrap books or photo albums, inside and out. A visually powerful choice that is incredibly appropriate since the story centers on a woman trying to piece together her reticent father’s wartime past.

Last year, DC Comics published Wednesday Comics, an anthology of superhero and adventure stories printed on large broadsheet newsprint that folded out to 14″ x 20″ pages, approximately double the size of modern comic book pages. Reminiscent of the old Sunday comics pages from the first half of the 1900’s, it was a kick to see Green Lantern, Batman, Wonder Woman and other characters in this retro format that pre-dated nearly all of them.

There are a lot of other good examples. Some publishers, like Archaia Entertainment and Drawn & Quarterly, just have consistently great design sense in their print publications. Tumor, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Noel Tuazon, started its life as a digital graphic novel on the Amazon Kindle, but has ended up being a great looking physical product. Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library books (and really any of his books) are always intricately stunning.

So sure, digital comics are the future. But that doesn’t automatically mean print comics have to be relegated to the past. There are still new and creative ways to make an appealing print comic book or graphic novel. As the ratio of print to digital finds its level ground, it will be up to creators and publishers to make products in both realms that are compelling and worth a reader’s investment.

Eddie the Enforcer

New sketch comedy video with me!

I provided the voice-over and also appear in this mock commercial written and directed by fellow Magic Meathands performer Shane Boroomand.

Also featured are Kevin Callahan, Nikki Turner, and Mary Benedict.

I recorded most of the voice-over in one take with memories of all of those awful “as seen on TV” ads that seemed to infest daytime and late late night. I don’t know, maybe they still do.

Anyway, this is the first of a new series of sketch comedy videos that the Magic Meathands have produced and are producing. I hope you enjoy! We’ve had a blast making them! To make sure you don’t miss any of them, subscribe to either my YouTube page (for ones with me) or the Magic Meathands YouTube page.

Don’t forget: The Magic Meathands are performing at the Westside Comedy Theater in Santa Monica this Friday!

Laughter for Post-Election Blues

Depending on how today’s elections go, you might need to soothe the pain of loss. Or to celebrate the victories. Laughter is kind of a multi-purpose cure-all.

This Friday, I’m performing with the improv comedy group the Magic Meathands at the Westside Comedy Theater in Santa Monica! Following us will be the very funny Waterbrains and the theater’s own Mission IMPROVable. You can get in to see all 3 groups for just $10.

Click on the Hand o’ Meat for the Facebook event listing!

Time: Friday, November 5, 8:00pm – 11:00pm
Location: Westside Comedy Theater, 1323-A 3rd Street Promenade, Santa Monica, 90401
Price: $10.00

Creativity with digital comics

Smart comics publishers and creators are (finally!) aggressively pursuing digital platforms for their comics. Right now it’s mostly as another form of distribution – you can get your comic books and graphic novels at specialty comic shops, book stores, libraries, oh yeah and also on your iPhone or iPad and online. There’s still quite a lot of toe-dipping but that will change the more it’s acknowledged digital comics are the only growing sector of comic sales right now. *

It’s great to have a digital replica of print, but there’s also a lot of room for experimentation to create a new experience. Some are already starting to surface.

Graphic.ly started with a focus on recreating the comic shop community atmosphere by allowing users to comment on specific comic pages and panels within their digital comics reader. That’s an interesting start, but what has me excited is seeing a couple of new apps launch with very creative uses for integrating digital aspects into a story without losing the sequential art part of comics (the reason I think motion comics aren’t working).

Ave! Comics has released a digital version of the biography graphic novel Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness by Reinhard Kleist, originally published to decent acclaim last year by Abrams ComicArts. It does what has become the standard panel-to-panel “guided reading” animation thing on your iPad or iPhone, but it adds a soundtrack to the reading experience. Tracks from Johnny Cash’s stellar catalog, including the legendary At Folsom Prison, come in and out of the story as you arrive on certain pages. The trick is that the app searches for specified songs in your iTunes library. If you don’t have them, you can buy them for 99 cents through iTunes or just read without them. So there’s the potential for hidden costs (unless you happen to have a very extensive collection of Cash songs on your iPad or iPhone, which I suppose isn’t entirely out of the question if you’re buying a biography of Johnny Cash). Despite that, it’s still a very cool idea. On the iPhone, it’s broken up to 3 separate apps for $1.99 each but the iPad’s HD version is one $4.99 app for the entire story. The soundtrack-less print edition is $17.95. Here’s Ave! Comics’ demo video (don’t be scared by the French iPhone used in the video):

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