Articles by michael-h-price
Sun Jun 15, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Rudy Ray Moore's Dolemite Shuffle, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors
Something of a preamble, here, so sit tight and now dig this: The comics-censorship ruckus of the post-WWII years had begun to peter out, if only just, as the phobic 1950s gave way to the larger struggles – expression vs. repression, in the long wake of the Depression – of the presumably more free-wheeling 1960s. All were rooted in a popular urge to embrace the freedoms that the close of World War II was supposed to have heralded; a contrary urge to confine such freedoms to a privileged few was as intense, if not necessarily as popularly widespread.
Everybody wants freedom, but not everybody wants freedom for everybody: Hence the entrenchment of Oligarchy within Democracy, like that essential flaw in Green Lantern’s otherwise limitless Power Ring.
(Some handy background: Van Jensen’s ComicMix commentary, “Was Frederic Wertham a Villain?”)
The comic-book flap was an element of a larger insurgency-and-putdown cycle that pitted, for example, Cavalier Hollywood against a Roundhead Congress in the purges of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Within the microcosm of Hollywood itself, struggles erupted over whether individual films – such as Dore Schary’s production of a pacifist fable called The Boy with Green Hair (1948) at hawkish Howard Hughes’ RKO-Radio Pictures – should convey instead a war-preparedness message in those days when much of America was still looking for another Axis to whip.
Continue reading Rudy Ray Moore's Dolemite Shuffle, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Jun 8, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Popeye and the Langridge of Heroism, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors
The breakthrough of the season, as far as superhuman heroism goes, might lie beyond such big-screen spectacles as Iron Man and the June 13 opening of The Incredible Hulk. The watershed lies, in part, in a set of Popeye the Sailor cartoons that have gone largely unseen – in authentic form, anyhow – since the late 1930s and the earlier 1940s.
A companionable development is a new series of hardcover books reprinting the original Popeye comic strips of writer-artist E.C. Segar. The current volume is Popeye Vol. 2: “Well, Blow Me Down!” (Fantagraphics Books; $29.95). A third collection is due in the fall. The elaborately packaged Fantagraphics shelf commences at the commencement with Popeye Vol. 1: “I Yam What I Yam.”
The books qualify as near-architectural marvels in their own right – towering, heavy-stock packages with die-cut front-cover windows and an interior design that showcases many days’ worth of the newspaper feature with each spread. A full-color section devotes a page to each of what originally had served as Sunday-supplement episodes, complete to the extent of reproducing Segar’s subordinate feature, Sappo, about a household in perpetual turmoil.
The stories in Vol. 2 include a wild Frontier Gothic pitting Popeye’s entourage against a mob of cattle rustlers; and a scathingly funny commentary upon charity-vs.-greed, in which Popeye attempts a banking career in defiance of all practical sense. There surfaces a gemlike example of Segar’s gift for mangling and/or improving upon the langridge: When Popeye uses the adjective liberous, does he mean “liberal,” or “generous,” huh? Neither – he means liberous, and So There. The book also sports a touching tribute to Segar from Beetle Bailey’s Mort Walker.
Continue reading Popeye and the Langridge of Heroism, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun May 25, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Stuart Gordon's 'Stuck' Unstuck, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #58
A general release has been too long in coming for Stuck
Now comes word of a Dallas opening, June 6, for Stuck – three months after a well-received showing at the American Film Institute/Dallas Festival. ThinkFilm, the distributor, keeps hedging about an opening in nearby Fort Worth. I have pressed for a film-fest slot or a commercial engagement in Fort Worth because that is where my newspaper’s core readership dwells. And because Stuck owes its dire inspiration to a real-world ordeal that took place in Fort Worth.
“Why, we couldn’t show a movie like that in Fort Worth’s very own film festival,” one leading light of the FW-based Lone Star Film Society told me last fall after I had recommended Stuck as a centerpiece for a November 2007 event. “We’re here ‘To Preserve and Present the Art of the Moving Image’ – just as our Mission Statement declares – not to dredge up any horrible memories.”
“Yeah, well,” I answered – once that “yeah, well” injunction kicks in, any such exchange is doomed to deteriorate – “an occasional reminder might do us all some sobering good. And besides, the film uses the local case only as a springboard. Changes the locale and fictionalizes a lot. More an inspiration than an explicit reflection.”
“I’d be careful how I used that term, ‘inspiration,’ if I were you,” came the reply. “Anyone who would find inspiration in such a ghastly occurrence has no business being allowed to make movies.” (Guardians of the Culture, take note.)
Continue reading Stuart Gordon's 'Stuck' Unstuck, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun May 18, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Women In Comics - Etta Hulme, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #57
During 1992–1993, my newspaper-of-record became a sponsor of a traveling exhibition of art tracing the centuried history of editorial-opinion cartooning in Texas. Curators Maury Forman and Bob Calvert, seeking to preserve the display as a book, enlisted me to edit their program notes into manuscript form. The finished result, Cartooning Texas (Texas A&M University Press; 1993), has outlived the exhibition by a good many years – but of course could use an update by now.
One timely offshoot was that our expo-opening ceremonies involved such working cartoonists as Ben Sargent, of the Austin American-Statesman, and Etta Parks Hulme, of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in panel discussions and sketch-demonstration sessions that served to bring the exhibition into the here-and-now. Or the there-and-then, as it were. Etta and I officed within shouting distance of one another at the Star-Telegram, and I had been pressing the Powers That Did Be for a couple of years about devoting a Telegram-spinoff book to her cartoons.
The leverage of the exhibition proved sufficient, if only just, to encourage a Hulme book from the Star-Telegram. More of a pamphlet, actually, but it rounded up a fairly generous selection of ’toons, with a page for each piece. I had suggested that we call the thing Ettatorials, but the newspaper’s marketing office preferred UnforgETTAbly Etta.
Continue reading Women In Comics - Etta Hulme, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun May 4, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Ian Shaughnessy Emerging, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #55
From V.T. Hamlin in the 1920s and Etta Hulme during the mid-century, through the Superman books of Kerry Gammill in times more recent, Tarrant County, Texas, has long yielded a wealth of storytelling artistry to the comics industry at large.
An ambitious new representative of that regional-breakout scene is graphic novelist Ian Shaughnessy, of Arlington, Texas. Shaughnessy’s books for Portland, Oregon-based Oni Press – including an edgy comedy-of-errors called Shenanigans, with the Canadian illustrator Mike Holmes – bespeak a childhood fascination with comics, filtered through a lifelong love of language and an interest in taking the words-and-pictures medium to provocative literary levels more commonly associated with the present day’s independent filmmaking sector.
“I find myself writing under the direct influence of Billy Wilder,” says Shaughnessy, 24, invoking the name of a great screenwriter-director whose career spanned from 1929 into the 1980s. “I discovered Wilder during the 1990s with The Apartment [1960], then with Double Indemnity [1944], and found myself very inspired – in a lasting way.
“With Shenanigans, I found myself attempting to honor the spirit of Billy Wilder – that mastery that he had of romantic tensions, with finding the humor in awkward situations – as a key influence.”
Any such talent needs a practical springboard. With V.T. Hamlin, the creator of a famous comic strip called Alley Oop that has survived him by many years, the springboard was a cartooning job at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Hamlin spent much of the 1920s at the daily paper, generating such local-interest attractions as a serialized feature about a formidable minor-league baseball club, the Fort Worth Cats. (A retrospective collection of Hamlin’s Oop-prototype Panther Kitten cartoons is in preparation, along with an earlier Hamlin gag strip called The Hired Hand, whose booklet edition has been out of print since the 1920s.)
For Etta Hulme, the Star-Telegram’s signature opinion-page cartoonist since 1972, an early breakthrough lay in a post-WWII comic-book series about a cowboy critter named “Red” Rabbit. Graphic designer and Web publisher Kerry Gammill spent the 1980s and earlier ’90s as an illustrator with Marvel and DC, then moved into motion-picture conceptual art on such productions as 1998’s Blues Brothers 2000 and 1999’s Storm of the Century.
Continue reading Ian Shaughnessy Emerging, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Apr 27, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Amos 'n' Andy 'n' Independents (sic), by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #54
An earlier installment of this column had examined a 1931 gorillas-at-large movie called Ingagi as an unlikely long-term influence upon the popular culture as a class. Ingagi, a chump-change production built largely around misappropriated African-safari footage and staged mock-jungle sequences, tapped a popular fascination with apes as a class even as it fostered a generalized anti-enlightenment toward natural history and racial politics.
Strange, then, that the film should have inspired a sequel (unofficial, of course, and certainly in-name-only) from a resolutely Afrocentric sector of the motion-picture industry. The production resources behind 1940’s Son of Ingagi stem from white-capitalist niche-market corporate interests – but the screenwriter and star player, and his supporting ensemble cast, all represent a trailblazing movement in black independent cinema.
From momentum that he had developed beginning with Son of Ingagi at Alfred Sack’s Texas-based Sack Amusement Enterprises, Spencer Williams, Jr., attained recognition that would lead him to a role-of-a-lifetime breakthrough in 1950, with his casting as Andrew Brown on a CBS-Television adaptation of a long-running radio serial called Amos ’n’ Andy. Though created by white-guy talents Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, Amos ’n’ Andy needed black artists for its on-screen representation. (Gosden and Correll had gotten away with blackface portrayals in 1930’s Check and Double Check – the tactic would not have borne repeating by 1950.) The partners hired a pioneering showman of the pre-Depression Harlem Renaissance period, Flournoy E. Miller, as casting director for the CBS-teevee project, and Miller came through with such memorable presences as Williams, Tim Moore as George “Kingfish” Stevens and Alvin Childress as Amos Jones, Andy Brown’s business partner.
Continue reading Amos 'n' Andy 'n' Independents (sic), by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Apr 20, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Prowling for "Sh! The Octopus," by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #53
In his frank and provocative “Writing under the Influence” commentary at ComicMix, John Ostrander speaks of imitation as “the starting point for what you eventually become” as a storyteller: “Nothing is created in a vacuum,” John avers.
Writing may often seem the loneliest of professions – and certainly so, if one lacks a reality-check communion with one’s customers and kindred souls in the racket – but who has the time to wallow in loneliness when besieged by the insistent Muses of Narrative Influence? Derivative thinking can make for an ideal springboard, given an ability to narrow the onrush of influences and a willingness to seek new tangents of thought and deed.
I have spent the past several months – with a stretch yet ahead – on a 20-years-after return to a comic-book series called Prowler for ComicMix, starting with a digital-media remastering of the original Eclipse Comics stories (1987-1988), moving into a short-stack file of unproduced scripts and raw-material ideas from that period, and settling in at length with a new novel-length Prowler yarn that will tie up some raveled plot-threads from the Eclipse episodes and then head off in other directions.
The reunion of the primary creative team (Timothy Truman, John K. Snyder III, and Yrs. Trly.) re-summons the influences with which we had sought to develop 4Winds Studios’ 10 Prowler books as a Mulligan Stew of such persistent interests as ancient Hebraic Law and American frontier vigilantism; the Deep Southern blues and gospel-music traditions as a response to repressive social and economic conditions; the now-horrific, now-heroic irrationalities of Depression-era pulp fiction; and the bizarre extravagances of Old Hollywood’s low-budget horror-movie factories.
Tim Truman and John Snyder had defined two vigilante Prowler figures, each representing a distinct generation of indignant humanity, by the time I signed on with the project, late in 1986. While Truman and I were sharing a bookstore tour to promote our respective titles at Eclipse – Tim, with Scout and Airboy, and my ownself with the movie-history book Forgotten Horrors – Tim came up with the idea of twisting the plots of some of those 1930s-period Forgotten Horrors titles to accommodate the early-day exploits of the Prowler.
Continue reading Prowling for "Sh! The Octopus," by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Apr 13, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Skipalong Rosenbloom, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #52
“In the days before the cultural faucets of radio and television had become standard equipment in each home,” wrote the social critic Gunther Anders in 1956, “the [American public] used to throng the motion-picture theaters where they collectively consumed the stereotyped mass products manufactured for them…
“[The] motion-picture industry … continues the tradition of the theater,” added Anders, “… a spectacle designed for simultaneous consumption by a large number of spectators. Such a situation is obsolete.”
Anders’ influential gadfly manifesto, The Phantom World of TV, came fairly late in the initial outcropping of a Cold War between movies and teevee. Earlier during the 1950s, the movie industry had begun arraying such competitive big-screen ripostes to television as widescreen cinematography, three-dimensional projection – and such passive-aggressive lampoons of television as Arch Oboler’s The Twonky and Sam Newfield’s Skipalong Rosenbloom.
Anders’ perception of obsolescence for moviegoing has proved no such thing over the long stretch, of course – despite many movie theaters’ best efforts during the past generation to render the experience overpriced, inconvenient and unsanitary with cheapened operational standards and automated film-handling procedures. And yet film exhibitors as a class continue to raise the question, “Is moviegoing dead?” This, as if the post-WWII threat of mass-market television had never gone away despite a sustained détente between the big auditorium screen and the smaller home-viewing screen.
Continue reading Skipalong Rosenbloom, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Mar 23, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
'Superhero Movie' Review by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #49
The superhero, and I don’t mean sandwich, has been a staple of the popular culture since well before the Depression-into-wartime beginnings of Superman and Batman. Those characters’ nascent comic-book adventures of 1938-1939 served primarily to focus a popular fascination with superhuman struggles against extravagant menaces – but similarly conceived protagonists had existed all along in ancient mythology and mass-market popular fiction. And how better to explain the superior heroic intellect of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Seabury Quinn’s phantom-fighting Jules de Grandin, or the beyond-normal escapades of Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel?
People need heroes, he said – if I may adapt a thought from Mike Gold’s recent Hope Versus Fear commentary at ComicMix. Such characters spur the imagination to assume hope in the face of fearful real-world circumstances, even if their activities and abilities (and allegorical antagonists) seem patently outside the realm of possibility. And the spiritual generosity of superheroism is such that people are willing to fork over either hard-earned cash or Daddy’s Money to experience the fantasy: Hence the proliferation of super-hero comic books in the immediate backdraft and long-term vapor-trails of Superman and Batman, and hence those characters’ fairly prompt leap into motion pictures during the 1940s.
Many people regard the superhero movie phenomenon as a fairly recent development, traceable as “far back” as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man breakthrough of 2002, or maybe to the perceived “antiquity” of Richard Donner’s Superman pictures of 1978-1980. Not by a long shot.
Nor are the inevitable superhero parodies – as seen in David Zucker’s collaborative production of Superhero Movie, due March 28 – any particular innovation. Just as there is something awe-inspiring about some guy in long-john tights, hurdling buildings or piercing the veil with a blast of X-ray vision, there also is something innately ridiculous about such a spectacle. Even some of the earlier superhero films, such as Columbia Pictures’ Batman serials of the 1940s, emerged as unwitting parodies despite (or because of) their more earnest aims.
The formal parodies are a rarer breed. Zucker had proved himself a capable spoofer with 1980’s Airplane! – a well-received lampoon of the large-ensemble disaster-movie genre – much as Mel Brooks had parodied such genres as the Western epic and the Gothic horror film (1974’s Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein) to pleasing effect. Both artists were springing from the influence of Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad magazine of the mid-century, with its recurring demonstration that a parody must harbor an affectionate understanding of the story it intends to spoof.
Continue reading 'Superhero Movie' Review by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Mar 16, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Blues Poetry: Rough-And-Raw, by Michael H. Price
Forgotton Horrors #47
Fort Worth, Texas’ Wesley Race is a businessman in much the same way that the Chicago blues singer Little Walter Jacobs once proclaimed himself a businessman: “I’m a business man,” Jacobs growls on a 1964 recording called (what else?) “I’m a Business Man,” allowing songwriter Willie Dixon’s lyric to leave the nature of the business open to suggestion but permitting no doubt of a businesslike attitude.
Walter Jacobs had died, a casualty of a busy sideline in street-fighting, a year before Wes Race’s arrival in 1969 on Chicago’s blues-club scene in search of raw emotive authenticity. Jacobs, among such others as the singer-guitarists Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, had embodied the urbanized and electrified Deep Blues style that had drawn Race to Chicago – perhaps less for the raucous nightlife, than for the poetic ferocity that Race had long perceived in the blues.
Race’s path, winding but decisive, has led to the release this month of a début CD-album of his original poetry, recited with real-time spontaneity against a blues-rooted musical backdrop. The recording, Cryptic Whalin’ (Cool Groove Records), is a production of the guitarist and engineer Jim Colegrove, with instrumental contributions from such additional mainstays of Fort Worth’s roots-music scene as saxophonists Johnny Reno and René Ozuna, guitarists Sumter Bruton and James Hinkle, drummers Steve Springer and Larry Reynolds, steel guitarist David McMillan and keyboard artists Jeff Gutcheon and Ruf Rufner.
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Sun Mar 2, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Still More Modern Art, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #46
If any one outcropping of the cultural skyline of Fort Worth, Texas, can be said to state a case for a Bold New Millennium, it is the 2002 landmark address of the Modern Art Museum, designed by the architect Tadao Ando as a sculptural statement in itself. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is at once the oldest such museum in Texas – chartered in 1892 – and handily the newest in aspect. I spend a great deal of time there for both workaday and leisurely purposes: The Modern’s art-film theatre is descended from an imports-and-independents movie program that I developed during 1996–2002 at one of the downtown movie houses, and my jazz trio performs at the Modern as a matter of routine. Full disclosure, and all that.
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Sun Feb 24, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Mo’ Dern’ Modern Art from Texas, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #45
The Fort Worth Circle – a fabled and enduringly relevant colony of artists who transcended their provincial Texas bearings to help redefine art as a class during the 1940s and ’50s – comes full-circle in a massive exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The styles of painting and etching – often veering toward cartooning, like their European counterparts in the somewhat earlier dawning Age of Picasso – are too wildly diversified to allow any simple description: One might say the members shared an impulse to describe how it felt to be alive at a time of unbridled creative enthusiasm and reciprocal encouragement.Continue reading Mo’ Dern’ Modern Art from Texas, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Feb 10, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
George A. Romero's 'Diary of the Dead' in Review, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #43
The film-trade press tends increasingly to hail Pittsburgh’s George A. Romero as “the godfather of gore,” in a smirking nod to his new picture, Diary of the Dead, and to the persistent influence of Romero’s breakout film of 1968, Night of the Living Dead. The facile assumption, here, is that Romero’s films must rely more upon visceral shock value than upon narrative ferocity or scathing social criticism – qualities that constitute his larger impact as a filmmaking artist. and Color Me Blood Red (1963–1965) had championed the pageantry of bloodletting spectacle to the near-exclusion of storytelling values. (Interesting to see a homage-to-Lewis sequence turn up in the Jason Reitman’s indie-film Oscar-bait hit Juno. Enough with the digressions, already.), from 2002; Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Shaun of the Dead, from 2004; and Robert Kirkman’s comics-chapbook novel The Walking Dead, from 2003 et seq.), goes so far as to channel the humane, defiant desperation of John Steinbeck, suggesting a Grapes of Wrath-like prophecy of America as a Third World country – harshly divided amongst a small monied class, an impoverished mass population, and a gathering horde of once-human predators, with no remedies in sight and no perceptible middle-class buffer zone. Romero, like Francis Ford Coppola with his Godfather suite or Ingmar Bergman in his film-by-film search for a Meaning of Life, has accomplished more with one recurring concern, so outlandish that it becomes plausible, than many another writer–director from either the maverick or studio-establishment ranks could perform with any succession of self-contained ideas.Continue reading George A. Romero's 'Diary of the Dead' in Review, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Feb 3, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Capt. Marvel and Serial Retro-Mania, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #42
Apart from some chronic bouts of concentrated cliffhanger enthusiasm in visits with the pioneering Texas cartoonist-turned-fine artist Frank Stack, I haven’t paid a great deal of attention in recent years to the extinct form of Hollywood filmmaking known as serials, or chapter-plays.Continue reading Capt. Marvel and Serial Retro-Mania, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Jan 27, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Ingagi: Gorillas in Our Midst, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #41
If a long-mislaid but vividly documented Depression-era motion picture called Ingagi should ever re-surface – in the manner that such lost-and-found titles as the 1931 Spanish-language Dracula or the 1912 Richard III have cropped up, in unexpected out-of-the-way locations – its rediscovery alone would justify a monumental curatorial celebration and an overpriced DVD edition.Continue reading Ingagi: Gorillas in Our Midst, by Michael H. Price ›
