Category: Cartooning

A ‘Cul de Sac’ in Hill Valley

Maybe you’ve heard that Marty McFly is auctioning replicas of his famous back-to-the-futuristic Nike sneakers, to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

Another fundraiser for the MJ Fox Foundation is Team Cul De Sac, named after the delightfully fanciful comic strip by Richard Thompson, who has Parkinson’s. A book is in the works, full of contributions from many different artists, including a painting by Bill Watterson, of the Cul de Sac character Petey.

When the book is published, the original art will be auctioned. Here’s a video preview.

Monte Schulz moves into ‘The Big Town’

After the craziness of the Iowa straw poll, where the ostensible winner lost and the GOP front runner didn’t participate, KRUU-FM in Fairfield, IA does something more reasonable and interviews novelist Monte Schulz.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Aug/monteschulz.mp3|titles=Monte Schulz interviewed on KRUU]

According to Amazon, Monte’s next book, The Big Town, will be out in February. Nice cover!

I’m comfortable having a couple of non-fiction books going at the same time, but novels I prefer to read all the way through to avoid spoiling the mood, and I’m starting Monte’s current novel, The Last Rose of Summer. Monte has a knack for defining distinctive characters, and in the first book of his 1920’s Americana series, This Side of Jordan, Chester is as chilling a cold-blooded killer as any villain you’d never want to meet. The funniest moment in the story for me is Monte’s nod to his father that I wrote about at this link.

Eating you out of House and home

Long before Hugh Laurie’s Gregory House, there was House, a bizarre 1977 Japanese movie about a haunted house that eats unmarried girls. House adheres to the Japanese Pop culture obsession with schoolgirls, and it’s essentially a ghost story, but with an amazingly varied, unrelenting series of creatively twisted, comic-horror images.

Because the movie is so utterly strange, it’s no surprise that on Amazon the customer reviews are all over the place. Watch the trailer and you’ll know whether or not you want to see the whole thing.

King Kirby’s family loses claim to legacy

Well, this is disappointing. The family of Jack Kirby, the most powerful single creative force comic books will ever have, has lost their suit to obtain the copyrights of the characters that populate the Marvel Entertainment empire.

It’s a sad state of affairs that a settlement couldn’t be reached, where Kirby’s estate gets a share of the proceeds from the movies that are doing so well. It’s saddens me there’s so much bad blood between the Kirbys and Stan Lee, and also between Lee and Steve Ditko. I love everything these guys did, and I’m not comfortable taking sides, but the anti-Stan sentiment that has developed bothers me. Just as the Beatles did their best work together, so did Jack and Steve when working with Stan. Kirby saw the possibilities of his creations as major media entertainment, but Stan deserves credit for making it happen. I just wish the Kirbys could cash in the success of the franchise. Even better would be an alternate reality fantasy where Jack and Stan sued together as co-creators, as Siegel and Shuster did for Superman.

P.S. I haven’t seen the Captain America movie yet, so I don’t know who gets credit for the character. With Jack Kirby, Joe Simon co-created Cap, and he had his own lawsuit. Simon says (sorry, couldn’t resist), “I’ve been happy with the results of our various legal entanglements, and my relationship with Marvel is very good these days.”

P.P.S. Joe Sinnott submitted a statement to the court in March. It’s at this link.