CulturePulp.

UPDATED: The Sabertooth Vampire: now in Dark Horse Presents.

I drew a few single-page "Sabertooth Vampire" comic strips (with colors by the great Bill Mudron) for three upcoming issues of "Dark Horse Presents":

•  #12, on sale May 23
• #14, on sale July 18
• #15, on sale August 22

The issues will be available digitally day-and-date with the print releases.

You can read Dark Horse's press release here. If you're new to the strip, here are links to all the online comics.

 

SEASON ONE

Tragedy of the Sabertooth Vampire • Horrifying Transformation of the Sabertooth Vampire • Fiendish Romance of the Sabertooth Vampire • Sabertooth Vampire Baseball • Renfield, Minion of the Sabertooth Vampire • Tomb of the Sabertooth Vampire • Abbott & Costello Meet the Sabertooth Vampire • Eternal Curse of the Sabertooth Vampire • Agony of the Sabertooth Vampire • Attack of the Sabertooth Vampire • Hunt the Sabertooth Vampire

 

SEASON TWO

Previously on the Sabertooth Vampire • Secret Origins of the Sabertooth Vampire • Evolution of the Sabertooth Vampire • Journey of the Sabertooth Vampire • Choose Your Own Sabertooth Vampire • Moist Horror of the Sabertooth Vampire • Super-Genius of the Sabertooth Vampire • House of the Sabertooth Vampire • Sabertooth Vampire Reborn • Art Therapy of the Sabertooth Vampire • A Sabertooth Vampire in King Arthur's Court • I Was a Teenage Sabertooth Vampire • Merchandising of the Sabertooth Vampire • Reflection of the Sabertooth Vampire

 

(Also: I've received a surprising amount of textiles-based fan-art. I drew some con sketches. io9 interviewed me once. And I'm selling a couple of minicomics.

 

CORT AND FATBOY: The Bill Plympton interview.

Indie animation legend Bill Plympton dropped by the Friday, May 18 "Cort & Fatboy" podcast in support of a new documentary about him, "Adventures in Plymptoons" -- which is making a tour of McMenamins beer-theaters for the rest of the month.

We had a nice wide-ranging chat with Bill and the doc's director, Alexia Anastasio.Topics discussed: "Plympton’s career, the making of the documentary, and the strange path to stardom Plympton took -- starting on the banks of the Clackamas, winding through illustrations for a succession of skin mags, animating bumpers for MTV, getting short films screened with Don Herzfeldt and Mike Judge, turning down a million-dollar contract from Disney, and populated with people like Terry Gilliam, Ron Jeremy, David Carradine, Matthew Modine and Kanye West."

(Also, for a few minutes at the end, I just straight-up loathed "Battleship.")

Show-notes here.

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, May 18, 2012) [ iTunes feed ]

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Battleship'

Movie review in the Friday, May 18 Oregonian....

Mainstream big-screen filmmaking is in a weird, risk-averse rut right now. As detailed in Mark Harris' 2011 GQ essay "The Day the Movies Died" and elsewhere, studios are now building their major releases almost exclusively around existing, easily recognized brands instead of original stories -- and it's led to a stunning lack of variety at your local cineplex.

As Harris points out, "brands" can be book series, theme-park rides, toys, or previous hits that can be sequelized, prequelized or remade. Sometimes, as in the case of "The Avengers," the brand is a comic book and the movie is executed beautifully.

But sometimes the brand turns out to be the Hasbro board game "Battleship" -- and it results in the dopiest, least-essential summer blockbuster since "Transformers 2."

Director Peter Berg ("The Rundown") takes a game about sticking pegs in a board full of plastic boats and re-imagines it as the story of military warships trying to fight off an alien invasion while trapped inside a force-field bubble that appears over Hawaii. The original board-game dynamics make a cameo in one scene where our heroes (commanded by Taylor Kitsch) try and figure out where the alien ships are on a gridded screen and shoot missiles at their best guesses.

There's almost nothing to "Battleship" beyond its grindingly dull, digitally rendered naval warfare; the flick could easily be retitled "Flying Ordnance and Forgettable Stars: The Motion Picture." Berg directs the film like he knows how silly and glandular and sub-Michael Bay it all is -- but even the winks don't excuse the sheer insulting amount of belief suspension he asks of the audience.

This is a movie where the aliens repeatedly and conveniently choose to hold their fire when they really shouldn't; where a decommissioned battleship can be instantly re-armed and staffed by elderly sailors who seemingly turn up by magic; where nearly every character is a doofus who makes bad decisions and speaks in rudimentary questions; and where mashing up imagery from a Hasbro board game, "Halo" and the Pearl Harbor attack seemed like a fine, tasteful idea.
_____

(131 min., rated PG-13) Grade: D-plus

'Battleship' (The Oregonian, Friday, May 18, 2012)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Dark Shadows' and aging things

During the Friday, May 11 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we talked about "Dark Shadows" and the critical gang-up on Tim Burton; how "Fight Club" is weirdly old-media and dated now; and a bunch of other stuff.

Show-notes here, in the comments.

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, May 11, 2012) [ iTunes feed ]

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Sound of My Voice'

Movie review in the Friday, May 11 Oregonian....

  

Last year, indie darling Brit Marling enjoyed a singular breakthrough: She co-wrote and starred in two films at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and both films were picked up for theatrical distribution. The first to hit screens was director Mike Cahill's pretty, pretentious, wildly overrated sci-fi drama "Another Earth" -- in which Marling played an artfully distressed convicted manslaughterer and the movie spent most of its time worshipping her with cinematography.

Marling's second Sundance flick, director Zal Batmanglij's "Sound of My Voice," is a vastly better and more nuanced experience.

"Voice" has a lot in common with "Earth" in that both films are lightly dusted with science fiction, flirt with enigmatic developments and create showcase roles for Marling in which she's afforded special attention. In "Voice," this feels more organic because the actress is cast as a cult leader -- an ethereal mystery woman named Maggie who tells a growing army of followers gathered in a basement that she time-traveled from the year 2054 to prepare them for an ecological civil war. Infiltrating the cult are a documentarian slumming as a substitute teacher (Christopher Denham) and his recovering-wild-child girlfriend (Nicole Vicius) who aim to expose Maggie as a fraud.

Batmanglij and co-writer Marling do a calm job of muddying the relationship waters, playing with cult logic (a scene where Maggie deals with being asked to sing a popular song from the future is a highlight) and patiently introducing side elements that cast a curious light on Maggie's claims. (You can watch the movie's first 12 minutes here; it sets the tone.) And with the exception of two technically amateurish scenes involving target practice and police work, the movie is directed with real confidence by Batmanglij -- he lets his actors breathe, builds suspense in one group-purge brainwashing scene, and lets the mystery unfold in an immersive way that's probably a bit more compelling than its actual scripted payoff deserves.
_____

(85 min.; rated R; playing in Portland at the Fox Tower) Grade: B-minus

'Sound of My Voice' (The Oregonian, Friday, May 11, 2012)

Candide: The Live Comics Adaptation.

Occasionally, the awesome folks at the Portland Opera invite a bunch of cartoonists (incl. yrs. truly) to come watch dress rehearsals and sketch whatever we want.

On Monday, the Opera invited us to the dress rehearsal of "Candide." (Everyone's Twitter posts from the evening are collected here and at #pdxcandide. The Opera is rounding up everyone's drawings here.) As usual, I speed-drew a "live comics adaptation" of the show, during the show. When the lights came up, I put down my pen.

The resulting comic is after the jump.

Take My Love, Wear This Shirt

The PDX Browncoats asked me to design the t-shirt for this year's "Can't Stop the Serenity" charity screenings in Portland -- where they'll show Joss Whedon's "Serenity" (or, as I like to call it, "Han Solo: The Movie") plus the "Firefly" episode "Out of Gas" to raise money for Equality Now. I gather the event will also feature a performance by the delightful Doubleclicks.

So here you go. Kinda went for a vague Nostromo crew patch vibe. Lines by me. Colors by the great Bill Mudron.

Can't Stop the Serenity 2012 (PDX Browncoats)

[ Pre-order tickets here ]

Con Sketches of the Sabertooth Vampire.

So over the last month and change I signed books at Emerald City Comicon (thanks for the table space, PDX Browncoats!) and the Stumptown Comics Fest. After the jump: some of the sketches folks asked me to draw, in person and via Twitter. Click on any image to enlarge.

The closest I'll get to writing a review of Whit Stillman's 'Damsels in Distress'

 

FELLOW WHIT STILLMAN NERD BECKY OHLSEN, VIA EMAIL: Well, I'm still bummed that I missed the "Damsels" screening.

ME, REPLYING A DAY OR TWO LATER: Ah, I keep forgetting to send you my pocket review of Whit Stillman's "Damsels in Distress," which is essentially: I think Stillman may have gone slightly mad while he wasn't making movies for 13 years. (NOTE: I do not actually think this.)

The Stillman-y half of the film is about what you'd expect, and it's very deadpan funny, if quite a bit weirder than previous Stillman. Greta Gerwig (who was more or less engineered in a lab to star in this guy's movies) leads a group of college girls on a ludicrous mission to (a) save depressed students with dance lessons and (b) reform the idiot frat boys that overwhelmingly populate the mid-list college the girls attend. Everyone uses elaborate language and manners as a shield in true Stillman style, but it's all MUCH stranger than in his first three flicks -- Gerwig's language masks the fact that she's clinically depressed and OCD and generally batshit insane, and there's one lengthy subplot in which a guy eloquently professes Catharist beliefs to the film's young ingénue so he can try out his favorite sexual positions, &tc. It's all pretty great stuff.

But what REALLY makes the movie kind of enjoyably nuts is that Stillman tries to marry this with a bunch of cartoony slapstick at which he absolutely does not excel at directing. But I sort of loved the attempt (this is not the work of a lazy filmmaker) and how completely personal and '90s-indie-film-sloppy it made the movie feel. Like, you'll have a great bone-dry dialogue scene that's hilarious, and then there will be idiot frat boys falling off things and trying to throw square envelopes as Frisbees, none of it particularly well-executed. It's really bizarre.

Also, the movie has this completely gratuitous bit where Stillman just flat-out tries to invent a dance craze called the "Sambola," and devotes a huge chunk of the end credits to dance lessons, basically. He blames it on Gerwig's character, but you totally know he actually wants people to try it out in real life. You'll see what I mean.

So it's absolutely worth seeing, but strap in. You may be pleased to hear that Stillman has miraculously found a young actor (Zach Woods) who can convincingly play the movie's Chris Eigeman Role -- an arrogant and condescending campus-newspaper editor. You'll see what I mean. Dude's got the voice and everything.

(POSTSCRIPT: OHLSEN'S FOLLOW-UP E-MAIL, A WEEK AND CHANGE LATER: Loved "Damsels." Didn't seem all that crazy to me. Soap and dancing totally cure depression! Also, Adam Brody. Rrrrr. (I really loved the shifting sympathies, too, the way Violet magically defeats [REDACTED]. Greta Gerwig is fantastic in this.)
_____

'Damsels in Distress' (official movie site) [ iTunes film clips ]

CORT AND FATBOY: 'The Avengers' and mortality

 

During the Friday, May 4 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we talked about the death of Adam "MCA" Yauch, "The Avengers," the inaccuracy of "May the Fourth Be With You," '80s cartoons and the sad passage of years, among other things.

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, May 4, 2012) [ iTunes feed ]