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Click here to learn the answers to those questions plus others that you would never even know to ask. A Note to Those Who Enjoy This Blog Given how irregularly I manage to add entries, you may wish to send me email asking to subscribe to my "Blog Alert" list. That way you’ll be among the first to get notified by email whenever I add a new blog post. |
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If you were paying attention to my blog a year ago you may remember that a young lady named Olivia Walker and I had all kinds of fun creating goofy images of ourselves using the special effects that come with Apple’s Photo Booth application. (If you’d like to refresh your memory, you can click here and scroll down the page a bit.) So when I got in the mood to experiment with iMovie a couple of weeks ago and needed some visual raw material to work with (having no "real" video footage as a result of having no camcorder), I decided to whip together a visual soufflé made up of those magnificently distorted photos and a bit of video created by my iMac’s built-in camera, with some animated opening credits made with Adobe Flash. It was a learning exercise and the result is rough-hewn, to say the least. But anyone who’s curious is welcome to have a look. (Yes, yes, I know that I’m no competition for James Cameron, but I’m sure you’ll bear in mind that I’m an iMovie newbie and be kind.) Here are two things I learned from this exercise: 1 I should have made the end credits larger; these are pretty unreadable. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t make it easy to insert minor changes once a video is posted. 2 Olivia’s last name is just "Walker," not "Cole-Walker." (This from her parents, Bo and Lynn, who were otherwise cheerful about the indignities imposed on their daughter.) I don’t know how I got confused about that, but I intend to revise Olivia’s IMDB listing accordingly without delay. And a final caveat: Credit Apple’s Photo Shoot application and built-in webcam for the images in this video. That Canon camera that Olivia and I are bandying about is nothing but a sneaky red herring. Fooledja, didn’t we? Today’s Extra Credit A UAB (University of Alabama in Birmingham) art history student named Stephen Smith wrote me a month or so ago to let me know that Stuck Rubber Baby and I were going to figure prominently in a paper he was writing about graphic novels as fine art. He asked if I would confirm a few facts and provide a few observations on the subject. Naturally I tried to be helpful. Getting an occasional (like, once every two decades) mention in, say, The New York Times is pleasant, but having my name bandied about in my youthful turf’s halls of ivy (or is that halls of kudzu?) is special. How well I remember when I was the guy writing papers like the once Stephen’s been laboring over! Lemme tell ya: being the guy getting written about is a lot less work. |
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I should mention that an excerpt from Stephen’s interesting paper has gotten play in the January 2010 edition of the Birmingham Free Press I learned last week—and there’s even a link to the whole treatise. Good going, Stephen…and thanks for paying attention to a hometown boy. And Now For a Little |
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Did I lie?
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Hey, here’s stuff of mine that you can buy!
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Our pal Jim Groves of Savoy departed the planet last Saturday. He and his wife Cathy were among the first North County folks to reach out and befriend Eddie and me when we moved to North Adams in 2003 and the four of us have remained close ever since. Here’s a link to the obituary for Jim that’s running today in the Eagle and Transcript. Zina’s New Project |
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I’ve introduced you to Zina Saunders before in this blog. She’s a portrait artist extraordinaire who goes way beyond capturing the mere surface attributes of the people she paints, leaving you feeling that you’ve been taken on a journey into her subjects’ inner lives. Compassion comes naturally to Zina, but she also knows how to insert a satirical needle when the inner lives in question belong to political figures whose hidden selves can’t necessarily bear up well under scrutiny. You’ll see what I mean if you check out the two book collections of her work shown above: Overlooked New York and The Party’s Over. The reason I’m mentioning Zina today is that she has recently embarked on a new series of paintings that I’ll be taking special interest in as she develops it. Its title alone, Gay Couples: Love and Marriage, should immediately clue you in to why Eddie and I are personally grabbed by her plans. As Zina explains in her introduction to the new series, "I was dismayed in December when the New York State Senate voted down the gay marriage bill, and I decided to interview and paint long-standing gay couples, both men and women, and ask them about their stories and their relationships and what marriage means to them." The first entry in Zina’s series (shown below) beautifully captures our friends Nancy Goldstein and Joan Hilty (and their dog Juno, who doesn’t seem to have a web page I can link to) while inviting them to reflect on their history as a couple. |
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A second installment in the series has already been posted, and Zina’s many fans will be eagerly awaiting future ones. A Couple of Thank-Yous |
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Joe Palmer over at the Gay League comics site recently posted a friendly review there of From Headrack to Claude. If you’d like to have a look, just click here. And let me not forget to acknowledge the similar support offered by author Wayne Courtois on January 7 in the Out In Print blog that he shares with four other reviewers. Click here to read what Wayne had to say about my book. |
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| Meanwhile over at the web site for Mother Jones magazine on December 30, my book was included in the roster called MoJo’s Top Books of 2009. Many thanks for the cool new year’s gift, mom. |
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[A NOTE TO READERS: Does anything about the appearance of this blog entry look, uh, screwed up in your browser? If so, please let me know. I'm trying to construct it using Adobe Dreamweaver instead of my old, familiar GoLive and my footing with the new software is far from secure. -H.C.]
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Mutant Vegetable Escapes from North County Farm |
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Which is its "front" and which is its "back"? Who can tell? (But either option is disturbing.) Getting In Touch With Our Inner YouTube |
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Eddie and I found ourselves in the mood recently to begin converting a number of our old VHS video casettes into digital videos, with Apple’s iMovie and a camcorder, loaned to us by a friend, serving as our technological enablers. And once you’ve got a batch of newly minted video clips in hand, who could resist uploading at least a couple of them onto YouTube, no matter how little interest they may hold to anyone else among the World Wide Web’s ten billion inhabitants? Not us, that’s for sure! |
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Above: The future cartoonist at age six (or thereabouts) with his dad in 1950. See also the same kid negotiating the brambles of our Alabama woods. So if you want to see the only extant home movie showing how I and my family (and some neighborhood pals from up the street in Springville) looked back in 1950, click here. It’s chaotic and formless and it ends abruptly because my dad didn’t realize when our borrowed movie camera had run out of film. (Those scenes that we shot after the film ran out — now those would’ve been great, lemme tell ya. What a loss to cinematic history! Also, there’s a brief slapstick artifact from a Shakespeare play I was in while in college. Its mixture of film and live theatre was unconventional, but word-of-mouth about the show generated long lines outside Birmingham-Southern’s Munger Auditorium by the time the final performance rolled around. As far as I know it’s the only time Arnold Powell, the show’s director, was ever known to bow to public demand by allowing some of the latecomers to view the show from Munger’s balcony, even though the sightlines up there were terrible. Below: The future cartoonist at age nineteen in a scene (believe it or not) from my College Theatre’s 1964 production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. (That’s me with the bushy eyebrows in the leftmost circle.) |
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Also in the cast, by the way, was a fellow named Britt Leach (featured in the rightmost circle above), who played fumbling Constable Dogberry in Much Ado and who subsequently distinguished himself as a character actor in numerous movies and television shows. Below: Among Britt’s many character roles in movies and television was handyman Easy Jackson in The Waltons. |
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Glenn’s Story Before I go, let me call attention to a third online video — this being one for which Eddie and I can claim no credit. While it’s neither quaint nor amusing, as the videos cited above might be said to be, this is one that carries special resonance at a time when the Ugandan Parliament just may back away, thanks only to distressingly tardy international pressure, from its proposed law condemning gay people to death — in favor of the more "humane" alternative of merely imprisoning gay people for life. |
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This video features my friend Glenn Shadix, the Alabama-born actor about whom I’ve written before and whose blog Glenn’s Ruminations is decorated with a drawing I did for him last year. It was apparently recorded on an urban rooftop under non-optimal conditions, which means that y’gotta ignore the background traffic noises and just concentrate on the content. Glenn’s harrowing description of his encounter as a youth with attempts to "cure" his gayness with "aversion therapy" appears on the web site of Truth Wins Out, a worthy organization devoted to debunking the myths promulgated by so-called "ex-gay ministries." TWO’s is a cause that Glenn supports passionately, for reasons made obvious by his personal testimony. |
Larry also writes regularly about the regional art scene for the Berkshire Fine Arts web site, by the way. Many thanks for spotlighting From Headrack to Claude, Larry.
Adapting Wendel For Slideshows
Way back in 1983 I began presenting slideshows featuring my comics and career history before interested audiences in various cities. This was way before advancing technology allowed me to transition from presentations using Kodak’s clunky old carousel slide projectors to the more versatile, digitally empowered Powerpoint software I use today. (I wrote at some length three years ago about my felicitous switch from Kodak to Powerpoint in a 4-part series of blog entries called "Moving On From Ker-Chunk".)
I’m mentioning my slideshow sideline here in an effort to tell you a little bit about what’s occupying my time these days. Other, perhaps more interesting projects are also afoot, it’s true; but these are too unformed and tentative to talk about, yet my need for blog fodder is unending. Fortunately, my preparation of new slideshow images requires no veil of secrecy.
Invitations to present my slideshows have tended to be extended of late by educational institutions (Southern Connecticut State University and Ocean County College hosted me most recently, you may recall), so my slideshows have taken the form of illustrated lectures, usually featuring background info about Stuck Rubber Baby’s creation. But in earlier times my shows were created primarily to entertain (and, of course, to hawk my books), and to that end they featured adaptations of my existing comic book stories, with me reading aloud the contents of balloons contained in a succession of individual panels.
A down side of the old Kodak mode was that (a) each image I created cost money to photograph, which ruled out the willy-nilly use of subtle variations; and (b) an obtrusive moment of blankness accompanied each change of images as the slide projector plucked one physical slide from its position in front of the lens and deposited a new one into that slot; which made any kind of smooth transition impossible.
Among the practical effects of these limitations was that, when a comic strip panel projected on the screen contained several word balloons (as in the one shown below), I had no way of preventing my audience from jumping ahead of me while I was reading. This offended my need for dramatic control.
The women gave me Clawboy’s cape to take home with me. (Understandably, I suppose, they did not give me the kitten as well.) That cape remains a valued memento that I continue to keep near at hand in my workspace.
Below: Clawboy’s cape. All it needs is a kitten.
Sidebar: A Favorite Slideshow Incident
An unexpected side benefit arising from the posting in my last blog entry of more correspondence between the late, great Theodor Seuss Geisel and myself was the discovery of a great blog called Letters of Note, whose editor, Shaun Usher, wrote from his web perch in the UK to ask if he could reproduce the letters that Dr. Seuss sent to me in his December 4 installment.
Regular readers of this blog have already had a look at my treasured Dr. Seuss letters. But those of you who wander further afield in Usher’s blog will most likely find it as dangerously addictive as I have, what with its scanned letter composed by the 1923 version of Walt Disney, a disturbing eight-page-long combination j’accuse and cri de coeur from the distressed father of Brian Wilson to his Beach Boy son, and at least two letters from J. D. Salinger (one concerning the inappropriateness of Catcher in the Rye for film; the other a courteously withering response to a young aspiring writer with a typewriter-ribbon deficiency).
Detroit’s Linocut Whiz
I’ve been intending to call attention to John’s work in this blog for quite a while, and since he’s on my mind as I write this, let’s make it today!
Though impersonating a thoroughly dead historical personage, Eddie refrained from scaring the kiddies and opted instead to mess up their minds by reciting Carroll’s nonsense poem "Jabberwocky," leaving no borogove’s mimsiness undramatized.
(Truth to tell, Eddie doesn’t bear much resemblance to Carroll; but then, Meryl Streep doesn’t look like Julia Child, either, and that didn’t stop Streep from playing Child in a movie!)
Dr. Seuss and Me: The Sequel
Remember the note I got from Dr. Seuss in 1957 in response to a fan letter I sent to him when I was thirteen? Y’know, the one I shared with you in my December 6 blog post a couple of years ago?
Well, I recently came across a carbon copy of a follow-up letter I sent to him in 1985, to which he responded with a similarly gracious reply. Both are reproduced below.
Mr. Millidge Weighs In
Doll Liberation
Can This Breakup Be Saved?
(You may notice, by the way, that the version of Gary’s book that’s available from Amazon has different cover art than the one shown above. That’s because the American version comes from Random House, whereas the copy in my bookcase comes directly from the book’s British publisher, Ilex. They do that kind of thing just to confuse you.)
What’s impressive was how moving James’ shorter and far simpler rendition of About Scott turned out to be. I know. James sent me a videotape.
From My Photo Archives It Came:
Could I Really Have Ever Looked Like This??
Jen’s longtime sweetie Emmalee couldn’t make the trip so she brought along another young cartoonist, Carlo Quispe (see below, with me and one of his drawings). If you’d like to see the online video of Laura Flanders‘ GritTV interview with both Jen and Carlo (as well as San Francisco’s Erika Lopez), click here.
Now For Some Thank-Yous
I’ve been honored of late by two friends and fellow comics creators who’ve seen fit to include laudatory mentions of me and my work in their respective blogs.
As you can see, my penchant for plaids, about which I have been teased by no less a personage than Alison Bechdel, had already been established by then and has continued uninterruptedly to this day but for a temporary side trip into paisleys during the late-’60s and half of the 1970s.
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