It’s two different views of one historical period. First, the Steampunk genre is at the heart of a new competition series on The Game Show Network. Host Jeannie Mai talks about the deeds and the drama of STEAMPUNKED. Then mix DOWNTON ABBEY with KEEPING UP WEITH THE KARDASHIANS and you get ANOTHER PEROID. Creators Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome tell us where the idea for this Comedy Central hit came from.
Count your blessings.
Inside every dark cloud there’s a silver lining.
I’m happy as a clam.
I may be jumping the gun here, but take a look at the artwork above. If you haven’t heard, or read (and, personally, I’d rather be read than dead), Berke Breathed is once again coming out of retirement – or, more to the point, his classic surreal comic strip Bloom County seems to be coming back to life. This is according to his Facebook page, which was a little unclear if he was actually returning to Bloom County on a regular basis or just for another brief run through the campaign season.
Let’s hope for the best and while hoping, let’s look at Breathed’s motivation. Again, according to his Facebook page he’s returning to the fold because of one man – America’s asshole-in-chief, the sweetheart of the Mexican rodeo, the mouse underneath the rat, ladies and gentlemen I give you… Donald Trump!
The Donald brings the best out in political satirists. This past weekend while the Cool Kids were hobnobbing at the annual San Diego clusterfuck, David Letterman came out of retirement to crash Steve Martin and Martin Short’s gig in San Antonio Texas to deliver a truly funny Top 10 list: the Top 10 interesting facts about Donald Trump. We’ll see how long it takes Jon Stewart to stay off of the Trump beat after he leaves The Daily Show at the end of this month.
As his “sample” strip indicates, Breathed certainly won’t limit his repertoire to the Donald, even though the bastard is the gift that keeps on giving – you know, much like herpes. His characters are too well developed, as original as, say, the folks in Walt Kelly’s Okefenokee Swamp and Al Capp’s Dogpatch.
Today newspaper strips thrive not in newspapers (they all have pretty much the same line-up) but on the Internet, on such services as Go Comics and Comics Kingdom. Indeed, Go Comics has had Bloom County among its classic strips content since its inception. In an act of possibly not-coincidence, Go Comics has just about finished reprinting the entire run. Let’s hear it for fortuitous timing!
As I said, Breathed was a bit vague as to when, how and even if Bloom County will truly be returning. Doing seven strips a week is tough, and he’s gone back to that well a few times. But keep your shirt on.
You just can’t keep a good man down.
On the other hand, don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
O.K. Mike has left the building.
“But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again. Because I don’t need anybody’s money. It’s nice. I don’t need anybody’s money. I’m using my own money. I’m not using lobbyists, I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich.”
Who said that?
This being ComicMix, and you being a comics fan, I wouldn’t be surprised if you said it was Superman’s arch-enemy, Lex Luthor.
This being ComicMix, and you being a comics reader, I wouldn’t be surprised if you picked up on the interesting concept of life imitating art as you witnessed Barak Obama’s arch-enemy, Donald Trump, announce his candidacy for the office of the President of the United States on Tuesday, June 16, 2015.
Yesterday, out for a stroll with Alix, Jeff, and little Meyer, we browsed an outdoor celebration of Jersey City’s multi-cultural milieu, which included a terrific, mesmerizing, head-nodding, toe-tapping “Bollywood” dance performance by a professional Indian theatre group. What would “the Donald” say about that? Oh, wait, they weren’t Mexicans, so I guess they’re okay.
Anyway, continuing our stroll, we went to Jersey City’s greatest (and only) independent bookstore, The Word. While browsing the shelves, I picked up Neil Gaiman’s – and please don’t tell me that I have to remind you who Neil Gaiman is, this being ComicMix and you being a comics reader – new collection of short stories, Trigger Warnings: Short Fictions and Disturbances. Here’s some of what the New York Times had to say about it (and about Neil):
“One of the most enjoyable pieces of writing in Trigger Warning, which assembles a range of previously published material from the past seven or eight years, along with a new story that revisits the world of Gaiman’s best-selling novel American Gods, is the author’s introduction, delivered in the chatty, generous and digressive style familiar to readers of his blog. He supplies contextual anecdotes for every story or poem in the book, apologizes (unnecessarily) for its inherent shagginess and lack of thematic clarity, and expends rather too much effort explicating his title, a puckish reference to the Internet-spawned notion that all potentially provocative material should be flagged in advance, lest it engage latent trauma in its audience.
“I wonder, are fictions safe places?” Gaiman writes. “And then I ask myself, should they be safe places?” He means to suggest that his fiction may indeed prove disturbing and that we’re on our own, but that last part isn’t quite true. We have a guide. In practice, Gaiman’s writing answers the introduction’s questions both in the negative and in the affirmative. In his fictional worlds, reality is frequently subject to disturbing or hilarious slippage: A moonlight stroll in search of a defunct local attraction shifts without warning into a Shirley Jackson-style murderous ritual (“A Lunar Labyrinth”); a talkative woman in a small-town pub turns out to be a spectral jilted lover with a gruesome secret to reveal (in ‘Black Dog,’ a new adventure of Shadow Moon, the hero of American Gods); a teenage girl’s addiction to tanning lotion may result in the creation of a shimmering orange entity known as ‘Her Immanence,’ or to her sister as ‘the Great Oompa-Loompa.’ (That story, ‘Orange,’ is skillfully constructed as a litany of unsatisfying answers to official questions.)
One of the things I love about Neil is that he embraces his own fan sensibility and geekhood; Trigger Warning not only includes the afore-mentioned Oompa-Loopa, but also stories featuring Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who.
I was also amused – well, I’m not sure if “amused” is the right word, unless it’s used in the ironic sense – to find G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Aphona’s Ms. Marvel series in the “Graphic Novels/Comics” section of the bookstore. I couldn’t help wondering if Kamala Khan, who lives in Jersey City, sometimes comes into The Word. (Um, that’s the “ironically amused” part.)
And I also couldn’t help wondering if “the Donald” would be okay with her. But she’s not a Mexican, so I guess he would be.
Wait a minute, she’s Muslim!
Just like President Barak Obama. Right, Donny?
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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