Archive for September, 2009

2 items.

New CD – Professor Morte’s Silver Scream Spook Show – Building the Perfect Monster

September 28th, 2009 | by alan

I just finished working on a new CD project for The Silver Scream Spook Show. I did a bit of audio engineering, played a lot of bass, and arranged one tune (the one that had to be written out for the horn players).

This tune features Tim Price (who co-wrote the tune) on guitar, Jim Mouton on Drums, Benny Boynton on piano, Geary Newman on trumpets, Paul Shane on Trombone, Scott Glazer on bass (though I did play the bass solo), Abby Summers on Sound Design. And of course, John Waterhouse as ‘the Mummy’. It is a novelty CD, and there’s a bit of acting up front.

The rest of the CD has a diverse range of styles, heavy metal, punk, swampy blues/rock, etc. I think it’ll be on sale next month.

 
icon for podpress  The Mummy's Rag [4:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
[ No Comments ]

Dragon Con 2009

September 7th, 2009 | by alan

I saw a comic creator panel at Dragon-Con 2009 that included Darwyn Cooke, as well as a couple of other creators who spoke very passionately about their concerns related to the continued increase in comics written for adults, the ‘darkening’ of heroes, heroes becoming anti-heroes, the flaunting of comic heroes sexual appetites (I felt that was a stab at the recent hype over Green Lantern’s 3-way), etc.

As much as I have heard this banded about lately by people like Chuck Dixon, I just don’t agree with the premise. See, Darwyn is a great genre entertainer. Bendis is also a great genre entertainer. Several of the other comic creators out there are not great genre entertainers and they just produce inferior content (I’m an inferior creator of comic content who wants to get better).

The flip side of their argument is that comics in the era they described enthusiastically as the greatest age of comics (when comics were cheap, there were plenty of styles being produced, and the books sold hundreds of thousands of copies) produced content I feel is almost unreadable today.

When I pick up a comic written ‘for kids’ in any era I always felt as though that comic talks down to kids. I have described this before by saying that what made such an impact  on me when I read read Miller’s Daredevil as an 8-year-old was the idea that someone wasn’t talking down to me. It’s a big part of what lit my fire, my zeal for comics.

Those guys were also very negative about motion comics, which I get. What I’m trying to do with that medium is very different from what the big 2 (Marvel and DC) are doing in that I want the elements I add (sound, mostly) to be as artful as the story and visual art components. I am not planning to ‘wiggle’ any parts of the art work around, but treat the art in more of a documentary style.

Anyway, I’m not treading any new ground with this post, but I will say that I strongly disagree that comics are going downhill because they are too dark, I think comics are going downhill because we don’t see them in the places kids buy their other entertainment (Walmart, near the video games – iTunes, etc). In fairness to Darwyn et al, they said as much in this panel.

I’ll write about some of the other panels I saw soon. They did tread some ground I have not previously written about.

[ No Comments ]