Joe Blevins's Blog, page 12

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 13: The unpleasant side of my personality (WARNING: SKIP THIS ONE)

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2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 12: Another Batman one already? Yes!

What can I say? I watch a lot of Batman.
Most of the comics and cartoons I've used in this series have been oldies. I've had them saved to my hard drive for a while and just wanted to post them to this blog for posterity before deleting them from my computer. But today's cartoon is brand new and written especially for this project. A couple of days ago, I saw an ad for a Batman Unmasked action figure and thought, "What if Bruce Wayne walked around looking like that? Would Commissioner Gordon finally figure it out?" Honestly, he might not figure it out even then. Neil Hamilton's version of the character is a pretty dim bulb.
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2024 Fun Comics Advent Calendar, Day 11: Tina and the Comedy Factory

I just noticed that I never actually mentioned Tina Fey's last name in this comic. Whoops!
This was originally going to be a much longer piece. I had planned to do the complete ending scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Lorne Michaels as Willy Wonka and Tina Fey as Charlie Bucket. I even had dreams of selling it to a humor website for $50 or so. But as I got further into it, I realized my plan wouldn't be practical and that no editor would buy it anyway. So I just kind of bailed on it after a few panels. Those panels are visible above. I think this is about as good as it was ever going to be. Sorry or you're welcome, I don't know which.
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Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 206: Greg Javer (1968-2024)

"The bell has rung on his great career."
"Where's Greg?"
That is the question I've gotten most frequently over the last year and a half from readers of this blog. The remarkable Greg Javer, a soft-spoken Pennsylvanian who often wrote under the name Greg Dziawer, contributed a great deal of material to this series from 2015 to 2023. He started out with numerous Ed Wood Wednesdays articles before eventually launching his own series of YouTube videos called  The Ed Wood Summit Podcast . His interests were wide-ranging, even within the seemingly limited field of Woodology. He was just as likely to cover Eddie's childhood in Poughkeepsie as he was to discuss Ed's pornographic loops of the 1970s.
He was, in short, a major player in the world of Wood research and a significant presence on this blog for eight years. He was also my friend, someone I just loved talking to and working with on various projects. Then, about midway through last year, he vanished. The articles stopped. The videos stopped. Even the emails (for the most part) stopped. Where had he gone, people wondered? I am not one to pry, so I didn't. I'd occasionally hear rumors that he had other matters—perhaps personal, perhaps professional—to attend to. I trusted that he'd eventually find his way back into this strange, little world and would contact me when he was ready to start anew. It just never happened.
On Sunday, December 1, 2024, we finally received a definitive answer about what had happened to Greg, and the news could not have been worse. Not long after receiving a devastating cancer diagnosis, , leaving behind a daughter, Elyse Rosario, and his partner of 18 years, Jennifer "Kitten" Rosario. I can't help but think how he only outlived Ed Wood by two years (Eddie died at 54 in 1978) and that both men were claimed in the month of December. I wonder if those same thoughts occurred to Greg in his final days.
I asked Jennifer to say a few words in remembrance of Greg, and here is how she responded:

A passionate admirer of Ed Wood Jr., he combined his love of film with his dedication to research and writing, leaving his mark as a contributing author. He found joy in life’s simple pleasures—reading, spending time with family, and delving into thought-provoking documentaries. One thing I want to note is that he considered all of you real friends. I could log into his Gmail right now and find numerous emails of people checking in on him, along with text messages. I can't make every name, but everyone he has worked with since the start of this Ed Wood Jr. journey would fall under this umbrella, at least 10 years or more.  He would tell me a story or something that was found, and it always started with "my buddy ____" or "my friend ___." And I know he cherished each and every friendship made along the way.

Rob Huffman has started a GoFundMe to cover some of Greg's final expenses. The proceeds will go directly to Jennifer and Elyse. Please consider donating. Every little bit helps, as they say. And, if you can't afford it, please forward the link to others on social media so that they can donate. It's the least we can do, considering all Greg did for us.

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Podcast Tuesday: "Oy, Canada!"

Fonzie (Henry Winkler, right) confronts a villain on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang.
Cartoons are educational! And I don't just mean the ones that are trying to be, like The Magic School Bus or Tennessee Tuxedo. I mean pretty much all the cartoons we grew up on, including Looney Tunes and the collected works of Hanna-Barbera. Like it or not, you did learn some stuff while watching those, if only through osmosis. Looking back, we were introduced to classical music, opera, and even important names and events from history while watching the adventures of Bugs, Daffy, and the rest.
But it goes beyond that. Cartoons have also served as a great museum of show business history. Long before I knew who Peter Lorre, Jimmy Durante, Mae West, and Humphrey Bogart were, I'd seen parodies of them in old cartoons. And it's through cartoons that I was introduced to the trope of the top-hat-wearing, mustache-twirling villain. Characters like these appeared in silent films of the 1910s but trace their lineage back to stage melodramas of the 1840s and 1850s! So latter-day cartoon characters such as Snidely Whiplash and Dick Dastardly have quite a heritage.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast , we review an episode called "Perilous Pauline" that takes place in the late 1800s in Canada. It draws on both the silent films and the stage melodramas I mentioned earlier. But is it any fun? Let's find out together, huh?
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2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 10: Elsewhere in the Green Lantern-verse

You know Green Lantern, right? The muscly, masked dude in green who flies around and wears a power ring that he has to charge occasionally? Yeah, that guy. I'd say he's up there in the pantheon of superheroes. He's not in Superman or Batman territory, though. Like, Superman and Batman were on Super Friends right from the beginning, but it took a few seasons before GL joined. And he did eventually get a movie, but it didn't do well, and they didn't make any more. He had a TV show, too, but it only lasted 26 episodes.
Just like Superman and Batman have their own supporting characters, some of whom are popular enough to merit spinoffs across multiple media, Green Lantern has his own colorful repertory company. Today's comic spotlights the Guardians of the Universe, a council of wise, immortal aliens who (I think) mainly sit around in a semi-circle and have meetings. I saw a picture of them somewhere on social media and decided to turn it into a little slapstick adventure. Oh, and the sound effects panel is yellow because... well, if you know, you know. Before we leave the topic of Green Lantern, here's a picture of him just lounging on a pile of pillows in Stewie Griffin's room.
Welcome to pillow world, Bri!
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2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 9: Joy to the world! Your God is dead!

Did you find all six differences?

What's the holiday season without a little harmless blasphemy, huh? Relax. God's got a sense of humor about these things, I'm sure of it.
Today, we pay backhanded tribute to cartoonist Henry Boltinoff (1914-2001), who worked for decades in both comic strips and books. He's what you'd call a journeyman. His magnum opus, however, may be a long-running newspaper feature called Hocus Focus in which he would present two seemingly identical versions of a cartoon and ask us, the readers, to spot six obscure differences between them. I used to pore over such puzzles as a kid, though I never got good at finding the differences.
"Find all six differences" cartoons are still fairly common even today. You'll see them in Slylock Fox on a regular basis, for instance, and they're still used as filler in newspapers, newsletters, and fliers. Recently, at the office complex where I work, there was a cartoon like this projected on a monitor across from the elevators. I suppose it was there to keep people entertained while they waited.
I decided to take one of Henry's rather innocent cartoons from 1959 (plucked from Comics Outta Context) and take it in a darker direction. Or maybe Henry's cartoon wasn't so innocent! Obviously, these college students from 1959 are pretty square looking, but one of them is concerned enough about the state of the world that he worries the new year will not arrive. Can you sympathize with him? I can.
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2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 8: In the Malph of Madness

Here, we see how comedy is subjective.
What, you thought we were getting through this without some Happy Days content? If you've been following this blog at all for the last few years, you know that I've been the co-host of a Happy Days podcast since 2018. We're currently making our way through an early '80s animated spinoff of the long-running sitcom called The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. 
On the cartoon version of Happy Days, Don Most reprises his role as Ralph Malph and is there to serve a few basic functions, namely to be the show's resident coward (a la Shaggy from Scooby-Doo) and to crack corny jokes. Rest assured, he does plenty of both. His "comedy" tends to provoke groans from his friends and outright anger from his enemies. The latter is depicted above. The angry fellow in the middle is again something I found through Comics Outta Context. Anyone know who he was or where he originally appeared?
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2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 7: In which I get annoyingly artsy

Any minute now.
Like I said at the beginning of this series, I've been a comics fan almost my entire life. I was introduced to the medium at a very early age through newspaper comic strips, with Beetle Bailey, Peanuts, Hagar the Horrible, Hi & Lois, and the formidable Bloom County being among my favorites. My love of "sequential art" deepened as I discovered Marvel and DC, mainly through "spinner racks" of cheap comic books at the local drug store. (Was the original Crisis on Infinite Earths a major part of your childhood, too? How about the Ambush Bug miniseries? Spider-Man's costume change?)
It wasn't really until my late teens, however, that I discovered the weirder, edgier, darker side of comics. First, there was the documentary Crumb (1994). Then there were the graphic novels I discovered in the college library. I would spend hours poring over those, plus Art Spiegelman's anthology RAW. And my trusty guidebook was Scott McCloud's seminal Understanding Comics (1993). I think the comic strip above is my attempt at doing something McCloud-ish that plays with the medium of comics, using repeated panels to suggest the passage of time. The artwork is again cribbed from the much-missed Comics Outta Context Twitter account.
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2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 6: Alice in Somethingland

They totally ripped off that Tom Petty video.
Have you ever heard a good answer to the Mad Hatter's famous riddle about why a raven is like a writing desk? Of the explanations I've heard, the one I like best is that Poe wrote on both of them. (He wrote about a raven while literally writing on a desk. Get it?) But even that didn't satisfy me, so I scripted the vignette you see above. Actually, this little comic was my way of reusing some famous artwork by Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914). In particular, I like the expression he gave Alice here. You can tell she's just about had it with the Hatter.
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