Wolfgang's Artist of the Week: Jinyoung Shin

Jinyoung Shin is a young woman from New York whose art I admire so strongly that I often sputter when asked about it. It is stylish, and not particularly digestible as something that you would see in comics or even character design, which isn't to say it isn't understandable or unapproachable, but rather is deeply artistic and, for me, inspiring. Ms. Shin's art is something I adore because it is so unique and solitary.

Obviously manga influenced and slightly gothic in tone, Jinyoung takes styles well beyond their normal borders and makes them completely her own: ethereal, bizarre, playful, extremely stylized and sort of frightening all at once. The utterly over-exaggerated, anorexic limbs, the surrealist and modern, geometric art of the various details and backgrounds are real hallmarks of her work. I really like the x-ray-like layering she does with clothes, limbs and positioning in many of the pictures. And while her images are busy — almost frenetic — they are never messy or cluttered, but precise and focused.
One thing I really come away with from this art (which may not have ever been intended by the artist) is a feeling of how important it is to experiment and push limits. Manga bishounen? Pfff. Manga bishounen on surrealist benders, with commentary intact on the absurdities of the genre, and it looks like art!

Orrin's Artist of the Week: Prometheus

Niklas Jansson, who seems to go by the name of Prometheus, mostly does pictures of old-school video game characters, robots, and monsters. Not that there's anything at all wrong with that. Though the monsters are, of course, my favorite part, I first encountered his work thanks to his redesigns of Megaman characters as cute anime girls. He has an interesting approach to digital coloring that lends all of his works a very appealing (and immediately recognizable) texture.

His most visible work out in the world is probably his work on the Dragonmech D20 setting. I've never actually read the books or used them to game, but the art is certainly nice. I think what ultimately won my heart, though, was the fact that he redesigned the characters and monsters from Fester's Quest, proving that he's the only person besides me who ever so much as played that game.

Wolfgang's Artist of the Week

For my half of the new feature's premiere, I'm going to focus on a fellow by the name of Mattias O Adolfsson. That links to his portfolio, but he has a sketch blog to look at with more current things, in process works and detail snippets of larger works.

I think this guy is amazing. A blend of Richard Scarry and everything that is awesome about robots, flying (or otherwise ambulatory) houses, cartoon animals and monsters that look like people (or caricatures of people). I love his use of watercolor and delicate ink, and the way everything he does has this consistent storybook tone. It really tickles me how he focuses on houses, buildings and transportation as having personality and motive, and I adore the tiniest details he puts into everything: faces in the window, expressions on clouds, and elephants in the street.

In short: awesome!

Orrin's Artist of the Week: Les McClaine

This is a new feature we're trying out. Every Wednesday, we'll each highlight a new artist that we really like. We're going to try to stick with smaller names that you might not know, and avoid folks like, say, Mike Mignola. This week, my contribution is Les McClaine. He's probably best known for his newstrip-style adventure comic Johnny Crossbones, although with there being a TV show of his comic The Minute Man coming out soon, that may change. I like him best, though, when he's riffing on classic horror tropes. Recently, he premiered this image on his website:
I love so many things about that picture. I love the way he draws the damsel-in-distress, I love the Jack Kirby dots, I love the butler-y attitude of the monster, I love the simian qualities of the mad doctor and his creations, I love the brain in the jar, I love the skylight roof, and I love the girl sneaking in through the window with a shovel. He's also got penciled and inked versions of the picture up, which show the process as well as any images I've seen.

For more of his great work on horror tropes, try his dullahan or his completely brilliant ghoul.

Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

God, I love wax museum stories.

This isn't quite the first horror movie about a wax museum, as that plum goes to the 1924 German film Waxworks (or, to use the much more evocative German title, Das Wachsfigurekabinet), but it's a pretty close follow-up. It was filmed in two-strip technicolor, which gives it very weird, vivid colors, especially lots of pastels for a very, well, peculiar look.

As a movie it's actually pretty good, though not as atmospheric as I could've liked (which makes sense, as it's less of a horror movie and more of a mystery, hence the title). The actors mostly do good work, especially Lionel Atwill, but the standout bit is Glenda Farrell's spunky girl reporter protagonist, who gets most of the best lines and delivers them all in an incredibly rapid patois that is almost impossible to understand at times.

Though the movie may not be as heavy on the atmosphere as, say, the Universal monster movies of the same era, it has the incredible set design that I've come to associate with older horror films. The London Wax Museum at the beginning is amazing, both outside and in, and the workroom set at the end of the movie is equal parts Dr. Frankenstein's lab and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Beautiful.

Special mention should also go to the makeup design of the villain, which is remarkably iconic and deserves to rank alongside many of the Universal monsters as emblems of early horror cinema, at least if you want my take on it.

The Strange Worlds of Coffin Joe

Up until a few days ago, I'd never even heard of Coffin Joe, who is (or was?) apparently something of a weird horror-host-esque superstar in Mexico. Basically, he's a character, seemingly indivisible from the actor/director who created and plays him, at the center of a series of weird transgressive cult horror films starting way back in 1964 and with a new installment supposedly coming out this year (after a nearly twenty-year gap). The overarching plot, as I understand it, is that our buddy Coffin Joe is out to find the perfect woman who can bear him a perfect child. Which he seemingly pursues through all manner of torture, weirdness, psychadelia, and other exploitation/cult film standbys.

But none of that is relevant to what I'm here to talk about. I've not seen the movies, and they'd probably be a little too transgressive for my tastes if I did, though some of the stills I've seen have been pretty iconic looking. No, I'm here to talk about something else entirely: titles. The Coffin Joe movies have the best collection of titles (as culled from the wikipedia entry linked above) that I have ever seen.

Hold your breath, because there's a lot of them:

• At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul


• This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse


• Strange World of Coffin Joe


• Awakening of the Beast


• The End of Man


• Sex and Blood in the Trail of the Treasure


• When the Gods Fall Asleep (my personal favorite)


• The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe


• Women of the Violent Sex


• The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures


• Hellish Flesh


• The Woman Who Makes Doves Fly


• Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind


• Perversion


• The Secret of the Mummy


• Fifth Dimension of Sex


• Fatal Hours


• 48 Hours of Hallucinatory Sex


• The Embodiment of Evil

(Note that those titles actually constitute a partial filmography of actor/director Jose Mojica Marins, and he doesn't seem to play Coffin Joe in all of them. In fact, in one of them he seems to play the tituler End of Man. Nevertheless and all other things notwithstanding, that list of titles as presented is some of the best reading I've ever come across.)

If I Ran the Movies, Part I

Today, I’m going to talk about what I would do with the sequels to a couple of very different franchises: Final Destination and Gremlins. They go together because both of my suggestions deal with the set-ups of the movies, and both of them screw with audience expectations.

Final Destination 4
We all know the formula for a Final Destination movie by now, right? We’re introduced to a group of young people who are going to be our protagonists, and then we watch them all perish in some elaborate and deadly accident. Once the last of them dies, it is revealed that what we just watched was, in fact, a psychic vision of impending disaster, which is then prevented. The rest of the movie occupies itself with the abstract force of “death” picking off the kids one by one, etc.

My version differs from this framework only in one important way. For illustrating my example I’ll use a rollercoaster, since I was watching the third Final Destination movie when I came up with this idea. (I hear that in the actual fourth Final Destination they’re going to be at NASCAR.)

Anyway, in my version, we’re introduced to a group of young people, given just enough time to get to know each one a little bit, maybe a total of fifteen minutes or so for the entire introduction montage thing. Then we watch them all die horrible deaths. Here’s where the change comes, though. Rather than a fade out or jump cut that reveals that it was all just a premonition, the camera pans from the last death over to the other group of young people who are actually our protagonists and whose psychic vision already prompted them to get off the rollercoaster just before the spectacular crash that we just witnessed. From there, the movie spools out as usual.

Gremlins 3
This one came about after the advent of the recent Gremlins-themed TV commercial, when a friend and I were discussing how you could possibly make a third Gremlins movie.

The problem is that Gremlins 2 effectively destroyed the franchise. Not by being bad, but by being so ridiculously over the top that the top was no longer visible anymore. In modern Internet parlance, the movie would’ve probably been referred to as jumping the shark, only in this case it jumped so far that it actually wound up in another dimension. A more awesome dimension than the one it had just left.

So the trick with Gremlins 3 would be, how would you one-up that?

My version of Gremlins 3 would open with a small town, not unlike Kingston Falls. You would have your usual opening credits montage of the small town (possibly in autumn, when small towns are at their most picturesque), you’d meet a group of people who could very easily be the stars, music would play, and then somehow Gremlins would get involved. Maybe a kid brings home a bad mogwai and feeds it after midnight. Something like that. The specifics of the spark of the Gremlin infestation are moot. Anyway, in short order, the Gremlins are overrunning the town, people are dying, cars are on fire, that sort of thing. Nothing here that we didn’t get at the end of the first movie. The trick is, this is maybe the first twenty minutes.

Then, once the infestation is clearly established, a rainstorm comes up, and the Gremlins flood the streets and begin multiplying as they are wont to do. That’s when a government plane flies overhead and drops some sort of experimental sunlight-y bomb on the town, ostensibly wiping all the Gremlins out. The credits roll.

Here’s where the big trick comes in. When I say the credits roll, I mean all of them, clear up to the MPAA logo that’s at the end of every credit sequence. These literally are the movie’s closing credits, and they’re the only ones it’ll ever get.

Once the credits have rolled all the way through, cut to a shot of the rubble that’s left of the town. In a normal movie, this would be the after-credit Easter egg, a couple-minute shot setting up a potential sequel or a gag. In this case, it plays out just like one. The camera pans in on the rubble, and a Gremlin hand suddenly thrusts out of it!

The difference is, this Gremlin hand is enormous. It seems that some unknown quantity in the sunlight-y bomb made it not destroy the Gremlins, but fuse them all into one giant (and I’m talking kaiju-size here) Gremlin, who also happens to be immune to sunlight (hence why the bomb needs to be sunlight-y, to give a half-assed movie explanation for this plot device). The rest of the movie (which runs a full and normal length) deals with people fighting the giant Gremlin, who should also probably mutate (sprout lots of arms, maybe) or pop off smaller Gremlins to keep things interesting.

Return to the House of Mystery

Some days I feel like I'm almost too well-informed, like there are no pleasant suprises left for me. On those days the universe generally tends to show me my folly by springing something like this new House of Mystery series that I'd completely never heard of. Let's do a quick list of why this is the most exciting new comic I've heard about in a long time, without me having read a single issue:

• Relaunched House of Mystery. 'Nuff said (to quote the wrong company).
• A regular semi-anthology horror title with a cool central conceit.
• Bernie Wrightson (hisownself) is involved, albeit only tangentially.
• A great regular artist who looks to be perfect for the material and who I had, heretofore, never heard of.
• Bill Willingham, who is maybe my favorite writer working in comics right now.

Matango Picnic

I've talked about it before, and I probably will again, but Matango (aka Attack of the Mushroom People, aka Fungus of Terror) is a surprisingly effective adaptation of William Hope Hodgson's seminal fungus-person story "The Voice in the Night" by Toho (best known for being the company that made all those Godzilla movies). Like most of the Toho movies with which we're familiar, it involves rubber suit monsters, though in this case the monsters are a) mushroom people and b) only about the size of regular people. They're also wonderful, though I caution you that seeing pictures will never do them justice. You have to see them move, and hear the delightful noises they make.

Anyway, during the heyday of Toho, Matango had quite a lot of awesome marketing, including mushroom people riding tricycles and the wonderful diorama that I have dubbed the Matango picnic scene, images of which are produced below.

Very sadly, I don't own any of these great tie-ins, though hopefully I will someday. In the meantime, Matango is available in a very nice DVD edition and also (apparently) to download for free off the Internet. So check it out, and you won't be disappointed.

McFarlane Monsters [Repost]

[Originally posted here.]

My favorite toy line ever is the first series of "monster" toys ever produced by Todd McFarlane's then-burgeoning toy arm. They were 4-inch reimaginings of classic Universal monsters (reimagined, in no small part, because McFarlane didn't have the license to produce Universal monster toys and so had to change them enough to make them fall under the public domain). Released in 1997-98 there were two lines, each of which contained four sets. Each set was themed around one of the classic monsters and came with a monster figure, a victim or antagonist figure (generally), and an elaborate diorama base.

Naysayers of the line and Universal monster purists tend to decry the revisions as being typical of McFarlane's dark and sadistic design philosophy. I, clearly, disagree. If you want to see what would happen if McFarlane's typical design philosophy were applied to several of the same monsters, you need look no further than his dip back into the "monster" line, released in 2002, which is far too grotesque for my personal taste.

Which is not to say that the earlier lines weren't grotesque in their way. Certainly they were much "darker" than the traditional portrayals of their Universal counterparts, but they showed an influence more along the lines of the great Bernie Wrightson who, rumor has it, was working on a project for McFarlane Toys about this same time, though I've never seen substantiation that he had any hand in designing the figures. (They also, upon closer consideration, bear a more than passing resemblance to the designs from Monster Squad in several places.)

Regardless, I loved the figures precisely because of their design. That slightly more deformed style made them a little more monstrous than their (by now fairly familiar) Universal versions, while not delving into the off-putting depravity of McFarlane's later toy output. I also liked them because they were an appealing size (I seem to prefer 4-inch toys to the more usual 6-inch varieties) and because they were still at least making a token effort to be toys. While the figures themselves aren't particularly articulated, their fun diorama bases tended to have various odd action features, like a falling chandelier or a working catapult.

When I was younger and the toys were (relatively) new, I picked up the Dr. Frankenstein, Phantom of the Opera, and Sea Creature playsets, which are still my favorites, but I always wanted to get the rest. Now I'm a fair bit closer to that goal, since I just received the entire first line in the mail. I'm especially fond of the Frankenstein's Monster and Hunchback sets, but I like them all. Except for Dracula. He looks pretty terrible. About the only thing he has going for him is that he's got a hole in his chest where you can stick a wooden stake that comes with him. Also his diorama is pretty neat. The only one of all the monsters that I'm missing at this point is the Mummy. And he too will be mine one day. (One of the benefits of liking stuff that nobody else seems to care about is that after awhile if it doesn't disappear entirely it tends to become rather cheap.)

I'm just sad that the series couldn't have continued for just one more line so we could have gotten the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (talk about perfect for a two-figure playset), Bride of Frankenstein, and... I dunno, Mole People. Or an ape one, like a King Kong knock-off, or maybe a Murders in the Rue Morgue playset.