22 November 2017

Goat? Yak!

As we saw in yesterday's promotional post, Old Doc Yak holds the Guinness World Record for being the First Animal Cartoon. (They leave subjective judgements like "funny" to others)

The man featured on the poster is Sidney Smith, the cartoonist famous for The Gumps - which is credited as the first continuity based comic strip, as opposed to unchanging gag-a-day comics. It's not entirely accurate, but the Gumps are the ones who made it popular and triggered the wave of continuity comics that followed.

Today, however, we're not really interested in them We're here for he who came before - Old Doc Yak and his family. While successful enough to spawn those ground-breaking animated shorts, Yak was only around for 5 years in his own strip. He returned as a Topper for The Gumps for another 5 year stint, from 1930-1934. Old Doc Yak was definitely an Odd Duck at times, but it was also wildly creative when the mood struck. Before we get to the end in 1917, let's jump back to the beginning in 1912.

In the February 5th edition of The Chicago Tribune, he made his 'smashing' debut. Keep in mind that this is 1912 - the comic is still a very young art form, and experimenting with the physical boundaries of comics is a pretty novel idea.


The final introductory strip there ran on 10 February 1912.
And Old Doc Yak's final daily comic ran on 10 February 1917. Just one more odd bit with Old Doc Yak.
It continued to mirror the beginning by having a multi-strip closing to the daily with the Landlord threatening to throw him off the comic page if he can't scratch up some cash:


That was Saturday. On Monday, the new family moved into the House that Yak Built:


We spoke briefly of them last time, and we'll do so again. For now, just note that Sidney Smith had his new strip move into both the vacated newspaper real estate and the home of the previous strip's cast. A most odd, likely even unique, beginning to a highly successful run lasting over 40 years.

Back at Yak -
Here's a half dozen Sundays, the first from 1912, the rest from 1917. They touch on three popular topics for the series:
1) Old Doc Yak trying to get paid...


2) Old Doc Yak trying to cope with his son, Yutch-



and 3) Old Doc Yak loves his #348-




He's a crusty old Goat. That's a common theme, too.
We'll not speculate on what sort of empathetic predisposition that might give me for the strip. I'm going to just presume i like it because this is one Odd critter, start to finish.

Sadly, i do not believe that any of his cartoon survive:

Old Doc Yak (1913)
Old Doc Yak and the Artist's Dream (1913)
Doc Yak's Christmas (1913)
Doc Yak, Moving Picture Artist (1914)
Doc Yak, the Cartoonist (1914)
Doc Yak, the Poultryman (1914)
Doc Yak's Temperance Lecture (1914)
Doc Yak, the Marksman (1914)
Doc Yak Bowling (1914)
Doc Yak's Zoo (1914)
Doc Yak and the Limited Train (1914)
Doc Yak's Wishes (1914)
Doc Yak's Bottle (1914)
Doc Yak's Cats (1914)
Doc Yak Plays Golf (1914)
Doc Yak and Santa Claus (1914)

Note:
Old Doc Yak is unrelated to Old Doc "Yak Yak" Yancy (played by Joseph Kearns) from the old Harold Peary Show radio program. I believe he has no connection to Louie L'Amour's Old Doc Yak, from the story of the same name, but Yondering is not in my collection, so i have yet to be able to ascertain for certain. With a character this old, one can never be sure who might have been a fan.

21 November 2017

Digging The Funny Animals

Quick Quiz:

Who holds the Guinness World Record for the First Animal Cartoon?

You want hints?

He was a goat.
And his newspaper comic strip ended 100 years ago - the dailies in February of 1917, the Sunday strips a few months later.
(But he did return as a Topper for another comic with his final appearance being over 15 years later)
He starred in at least 15 cartoons produced in 1913 & 1914 by Selig Polyscope, the people who brought you Tom Mix, Harold Lloyd (who brought you Jackie Chan), the 1910 Wonderful Wizard Of Oz film, Fatty Arbuckle, and Bomba, The Jungle Boy Wamba, Child Of The Jungle. (But Wamba came first, by over a dozen years)

Worked it out?

No?

Want me to shut up and stop trying to make a spoiler gap of words here and just get on with it?

Very well. Ladies, Gentlemen, and those still working it out, or who have come to a different destination, may we present-


Old Doc Yak is one of the latest finds excavated in my Comic Archeology digging expeditions.
Join us tomorrow for a trip back 100 years (and 105 years) for the beginning and end of this uniquely creative early comic. (And learn the Answer to who replaced him successfully for the next 42 years.)


2sday? Not 3sday?

Did my routine trek down the hill to let the med techs poke & prod, and i'm knackered. So not much in the way of graphics getting prepped or thoughts being organized. I'm just going to ramble on for a while and see how much trouble that gets me into this time...

***

The Miracles Of 3!

You may or may not be familiar with Bucky Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller, who was also, of course, one third of those legendary science heroes, The Trichotomy*) and his pioneering work with 3, but you're likely familiar with the geodesic dome/sphere. His work developing those big round things made out of triangles carried on into modern 3D modeling on computers. But why build with 3 sided objects?

Because of the inherent strength and stability of 3, that's why. As Bucky liked to use for an example, take your basic stool. With 3 legs, it sits flat and steady on most surfaces, level or otherwise. As soon as you add that fourth leg, they all must be carefully measured to equal length and precision mounted to accomplish the same inherent stability with 3.

But, consider 3's mathematical anomalies. Here's one - when determining whether or not a number is divisible by 3 (with a whole integer outcome), the order of the digits is irrelevant. Go ahead - dig out as big a number as you like, then order the digits any way you please - reverse order, numeric sequence, randomized....  whatever.
The outcome will always be the same: Divisible by 3, One Too Many, or One Too Few.

You can try. I'll wait.

...

You've returned?
Well, that was almost fun, wasn't it?

Here's another anomalous bit about determining if a number is divisible by 3 - you don't need to divide, you can just add instead. Add the digits together. Keep adding them together until you get it down to a single digit number. If you get 3, 6, or 9, the number is divisible by 3. Of course, this means you can toss out any 3, 6, 9, or 0 straight away, reducing your mental calculations. Show off to impress your friends or win bets by quick calculating whether 15 digit numbers are divisible by 3. Ooh. Aah.
Yes, this skill is rarely useful unless one tends to shop for large quantities that must be divided 3 ways.

But it is Odd.

* * *

Hey!
Let's talk about Inspiration. Artists use that term a lot - we were inspired by such&so to create this&that, but how often are specifics really shown or discussed? How nebulous is that notion of inspiration, and when does it cross over into re-interpreting or into just copying? There's a large area for debate there based on how the concept of inspiration has been used at times.
I was thinking on this because i found the painting i did for Halloween 2016 sitting with the painting that inspired it. So let's drag those on over here.
My painting, which i think we might have shown this past Halloween...


...and the painting that inspired it, Robh Ruppel's Death:


When i say that this painting inspired the one above, i mean i started working on it directly after gazing at this one for a while. I pulled the skeletal hands & skull in the black void, and a dayglow version of the general colour scheme for the mood (and holiday). Also, the circular focus of the ring of souls somewhat carried over in the circular focus of the eye. Those elements were used to build a new image with very little direct relation to the original.
No matter how one might rate the final execution, this is an example of what i would consider Artistic Inspiration. When we see just the same thing being directly redone, we need a different word for it.

* * *

Signs of playing too much Skyrim:

Realizing your top showers songs are all bard tavern songs.

Working out your recipe for Apple Cabbage Stew (I find it's best to add onion, and remember that Nord Mead is made with honey when working your substitution)

Understanding that "Took an arrow to the knee" is old slang for 'got married' (hence, the groom goes down on one knee)

Bonus Skyrim Education Factor: I now recognize that lavender growing up the road for what it is.

(And apparently that was a horker tusk i found in my aunt's bedroom way back when i was a lad.)


* * *

Here's a loaded question:

Where do you stand on Marijuana?
With God & The Bible, or with (pseudo)Christian Politics?
(Yes, the phrasing is every bit as loaded as the typical modern political poll, but No, your personal preference has no effect on my opinion of you.)

Genesis 1:29 - "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth,..."


A gift from God, up until being demonized for political power, racist beliefs, and personal profit in the 20th century. Bible vs. power grabbing Politicians and finance protecting Media Mogul - that's an easy equation for me.

(Full disclosure - I worked on A Drug War Carol. But the book is deeply annotated from official records - Susan Wells did a fab research job before writing the book (and during/after - we had to add a page to later editions)) (More disclosure - the Hermit Cave is in a legal pot state. I travel about an hour and a half each way, past a good number of other retailers, to patronize the Green Nugget.)

Some other time i'll get into why Linus Van Pelt and i disagree vehemently on favorite Apostles.

* * *

This week is Thanksgiving week in the USA. You know what that means.
Next week is the annual Arrowverse crossover! And this year it's being aired over only two nights with two shows back to back each night. Crisis On Earth X is a title i heard, even though i work very hard to stay spoiler free. How many of you remember the comic with that title?  Does this story have any link to that Nazi dominated world from the old JLA/JSA crossovers? Will we see the Freedom Fighters? I have no clue. In fact, i'm still a couple episodes behind on the four series, so if they've given any indications, i have yet to see them. I'll be catching up on all the shows between now and a week from today. I prefer to wait until all four parts have aired and watch them all together, so i've got a bit of time.

Bingewatching may be a new word, but i've been doing it since the 80s. I maintained a fairly massive video tape library, archiving all shows that interested me. That often led to watching full seasons before new seasons began, or entire runs of shows when the mood struck. When working from my home studio, that was ideal. The amount of time that the computers spent rendering each frame in those days meant that during animation renders there was a lot of free time to fill. (Well, no... It wasn't "free" time. Usually there were 3 machines working simultaneously with each billing by render hours, so it was triple-not-free time)
Many, many comic books were read during those times. The pattern of watching shows in bulk runs like that may actually have stemmed from doing the same with comics. I may collect them, but i'm a Reader, not a Collector. I'd leave stacks out for visitors to read in the days back before going into hermitage.

***

Here are a couple more images that don't require prep work. One of my side projects has been trying to dig out and recover some of my old works. I think i've mentioned previously that it's almost 20 years since i achieved Galactic Villain status, yes?

I blew up the Enterprise, killing Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and crew back in 1998. Well, not directly. It was my hand orchestrating events, but i used the renegade Klingon, Commander Kruge (portrayed by Christopher Lloyd), to do my dirty work.

This was for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) to showcase the upcoming Star Trek: Starfleet Command game. While i did some design work for non-federation ships & symbols and whatever else i may have done for the game, my primary work was in promoting the game. Part of it was creating the above mentioned video, mixing footage from the episodes and original cast movies with footage of a game that didn't yet exist.

So that was the other big part of the promotional work done. Creating still and animated projections of what the game would look like after the engine was built and tuned. I was given the 3D models used in the game, so it's not like i was doing major design-from-scratch kind of work. Just designing needed effects and then rendering simulations of how things looked in the design docs.

The magazine shown above is, i believe, the last time my work appeared in newsstand magazines, not counting the same images used elsewhere during the game promotional period. And "newsstand magazine" doesn't count comics/graphic novels, that came later. This was my last project in gaming. That was kind of a peak experience for an old school Trekker, and with other changes in life at that point, it was time for a new road.

 Inside the issue was a two page preview leading off the Star Trek games feature using screens i created for the article.


What do you do after killing the legendary Star Trek crew?
Disneyland wouldn't let me in. 

Maybe now that they own Star Wars...


 Death by Robh Ruppel, Computer Gaming World cover by unknown, the rest by -3-


===

*(
(Dang! I bet some context would help here, huh?)}

20 November 2017

Goin' Nagai (Part the First)

Shonen Jump is likely the most famous manga publication on the planet.
In 1968, when Shueisha was preparing to launch the title, they convinced a young Go Nagai to develop his first long form series for them. Harenchi Gakuen (School Scandal) was not only a smashing success, leading the magazine to million copy sales, but it was also a breakthrough in conventions. He was the first to use an erotic undercurrent in manga. It wasn't overt at this point, just opening the door to peek through the crack. But the public loved that peek, and the editors urged him to continue and take things further. Nagai eagerly complied and nudity began to appear as things stepped up to the next level.
Today, this is considered the spawning point of Hentai.

And, today is also


As noted in the subject, this is the big one that got bumped back - and it's too big to fit in one posting. So let's get started...

Over his career, there are two big characters who have spawned many mangas, animes, movies, and tv shows - Kekko Kamen and Cutie Honey.
NOTE: I'm spelling her name Kekko, but you'll see Kekkou just as often. I recommend Kekko simply because searching for Kekko will find Kekkou, but the inverse isn't necessarily so. (With modern search AI, it well could be, but not necessarily)

If you're familiar with these two characters, you probably understand my struggle of how to explain them.
Cutie Honey is a girl who is a prototype android with the ability to Flash! (and she does when she does)
The specifics, hows & whys might vary a bit from telling to telling, as well as the number of those who can Flash!, but the essential bit is this: Flash!ing  causes a recoding - structurally and mentally - rewriting Honey to be what she needs to be in the current situation. A surgeon, a motorcycle stunt-racer, a combat specialist - Honey FLASH! - there she is.
Of course, the process destroys her clothing, leaving her briefly naked in transition - Honey FLASH! indeed.

NOTE: Most of the images for this post contain nudity and have been moved to our back room for adult content. The text remains that you may make a fair guess as to whether or not you wish to look at the pics.
Please follow this link to The Other Voice Of ODD! archive of the original post to view the artwork.


And we're not just talking comics here. (I know, really i do. But i'm gonna do it again)
Cutie Honey has also been cartoons...


...and had a TV series...


...and movies...


...she even got a dark & gritty reboot last year:


Okay - that's the normal one. She'll get her own post, but Cutie Honey hardly really qualifies for Blue Monday.

Then there's Kekko...

Let's see now.
Over at the Big Toenail Of Satan's Spartan Academy, the staff is very concerned about the student's grades. So concerned that there are special punishment rooms and teachers to ensure they keep those grades up:
 (The school's reputation for placing students in prime universities would suffer if the grade performance dropped, you see) 

 The punishment regimes might be considered a tad... Unorthodox?


Extreme?



Reprehensible?



All of the above?

Enter our hero - Kekko Kamen:



Hiding only her face, she bares all to protect the virtue of the students of the Spartan Academy from the depredations of the staff.
That may be the most normal part of the series.

Kekko loves to make an entrance, mocking cartoon/tv/movie conventions by blaring her theme song before she arrives on the scene to make sure everyone is watching her exhibition. In fact, sometimes making an entrance is all she needs to do...



(Okay. Forget what i said in the first panel above. By the time i got to that last page i realized what a mistake trying to keep the Japanese characters unreversed while reversing the page. Beyond the ridiculous amount of work some fixes require, it's just silly since anyone reading the Japanese is going to be annoyed by the inconsistent left/right structure. I'm calling it a bad idea and moving right along.)

Meanwhile...
Kekko's main weapon might seem to be her nunchaku, but her real weapon is her body, as you saw in that last sequence. And she has a signature move to take advantage of that power - the Pubic Hair Jump (which is really kind of odd since she doesn't have any)...




...often followed by the Muffocation Wring:


 

Most Westerners familiar with Kekko Kamen know her from the rather tamer anime series. Tamer, but still keeping her signature move:




Kekko hasn't had a live action TV series like Cutie Honey has. But she's had 11 films to date, released between 1991 and 2012:
Kekko Kamen
Kekko Kamen 2
Kekko Kamen 3 
Kekko Kamen: Mask Of Kekkou
Kekko Kamen: The MGF Strikes Back
Kekko Kamen Returns 
Kekko Kamen  Surprise
Kekko Kamen Royale
Kekko Kamen Premium
Kekko Kamen Forever
Kekko Kamen Reborn

As one might suspect, the adaptations vary considerably when dealing with this source material. But, yes, again - her signature move carries through all versions:


 

In fact, in one movie we've got a full-on "I Am Spartacus!" moment...




...followed by a mass flying wedge PHJ:




Of course, if this is our hero, one has to wonder what our villains are like, no?
We'll find out more next time as we look closer at Kekko Kamen, in all 3 formats-





Kekko Kamen created by Go Nagai (bless his hentai heart)

Yeah, that should keep 'em staring for a week!

Oh, frell - the mic's still liv-   

*Ahem*
That's our show for today. Take care, everyone, drive careful, and we'll see you next time on




19 November 2017

Sunday Matinee Premiere

Welcome, folks. Pull up a chair, lounge, bed, or pew - as suits you best - and settle in for our first weekend movie matinee. It will come as no great surprise to those who read the post for the 8th of this month that our star is Lam Ching-Ying in the movie that made him an international star. In fact, it almost made him a star in the USA, too. It was being remade with a couple of Hollywood actors brought over to join Lam Sifu in a Western edition. But they both turned out to be such whiny bitches, complaining about not getting the lavish Hollywood treatment and having to work with people who spoke Chinese instead of English (in China!) that the studio heads basically said, "Fuck this- kill it."*  So...   No Hopping Vampires For You!
That was 1989.

Meanwhile, back in 1985...


In this film, Lam Ching-Ying plays the iconic character type he developed with Sammo Hung Kam-Bo in Close Encounters Of The Spooky Kind II (AKA Spooky Encounters 2 AKA Spooky Encounters, and then it starts getting confusing). Uncle Kau is a Taoist running the local mortuary.
Now, one of the fun things about starting to watch Hong Kong Spooky Comedies, or other supernatural films from HK/China, is learning a whole new set of rules. Crosses against Vampires? Garlic? Running water? Throw all that stuff out. Add in Chinese legend & tradition, and you wind up with...


Man Choi (Man Chor), one of Sifu's assistants, is feeding incense smoke to the unburied dead.


Those yellow slips of paper are Talismans - prayers magically inscribed on the slips to keep the Kyonshi (Jiangshi) at rest. Without them, they might get hungry and start hopping around in search of living blood.
You might wonder about the way the dead are dressed. Rather than dressing as one did in life, they are buried garbed to meet their ancestors in clothing honoring them. So you'll see this type of outfit on most hopping vampires.

One thing similar between Eastern & Western vampires (beyond the obvious blood drinking) is the fact that they're pretty damn strong-


There's new sets of tools to use...


...as you might suspect, the first ingredients are for preparing talismans as seen above.
Another useful tool is the I-Ching Mirror, used to reflect evil spirits and capable of turning back the undead:


This movie doesn't get into the blood of black dogs or the urine of virgin boys, but we'll get some more lore as we go along. (But don't be fooled, we're not doing the whole movie here, only the opening and teases - go watch it!)

After some opening antics with Sifu's too playful assistants, we find Sifu heading to a meeting that sets up the events of the film. This sets up the semi-nebulous time frame of the movie, with the Colonial Tea Room giving something of an anchor to the rather timeless Chinese village life of much of the tale.


As it turns out, his father was buried in a manner designed to curse the family, and it was doing a pretty good job of it. At least the fortune teller who gave the advice told the family to rebury in 20 years so he only ruined one generation, eh? So, we're off to pull the (atypically vertical) coffin, but when opened, birds fly, a black cloud dissipates, and in the coffin...


...it's Yuen Wah! He's one of the Seven Little Fortunes, like Sammo and Jackie Chan, and he's always great. He's been all over, often as a villain, but might most likely be familiar from Stephen Chow Sing-Chi's 2004 film, Kung Fu Hustle. He was the lecherous husband of the legendary kung fu couple hiding out as apartment managers.

Sifu's assistants hustle the body back to the mortuary, but even they are bothered by it...


Those are stabbing nails. Definitely not a good sign.

Mr. Vampire is also an educational film in more than just lore. For instance, how to extract a poison gland from a snake when needed as an ingredient:


Another lesson is how to make an inkpot with (very) fresh chicken blood. This ink is painfully repellent to the undead, and Sifu has his boys seal the coffin with an inked grid. But, being young, foolish, and eager to go play, they didn't seal the bottom...


Of course, the first thing a kyonshi is likely to go for is family. I'm guessing especially family that had him buried in a cursed manner. The next morning...


Which leads us to seeing just what a sleazebag his nephew, the local police chief and luster of cousins, can be...


He's being played by Billy Lau, a very funny actor generally typed as playing sleazebags, dickheads, and assholes, and he does it with gleeful abandon. Of course, he's not the cop you want when you need one...


Unsurprisingly, he winds up arresting the only person who has a clue what's going on. Before he's taken away, he has a few quick words of warning for his assistants...


There's another bit of important lore. If a kyonshi is hunting you, Hold Your Breath! It's almost like a Doctor Who creature gimmick, eh?
But, you see, the undead don't typically have fully functional  eyes and so they detect the living by their breathing. I mentioned in a previous post how they like to dance around the line between horror and comedy in the Spooky Comedy genre, and this tradition can be the source of a great deal of such skipping back & forth. Like when Sifu accidentally gets his head stuck between the bars of his cell while a fresh corpse is stalking his first prey...


How will Lam Sifu deal with the Vampires?
With style, by the gods!

I mentioned previously that Lam Ching-Ying was a Wing Chun master, and that gave him an incredible precision of movement for his spells and rituals. Just being able to casually, with fluidly smooth movements, just stick his finger into a bowl of rice, pull up a single grain, run his finger through a candle to catch it on fire and flick it into the chicken blood ink mix to catalyze the potion...


...that precision gave him an almost unEarthly quality, especially combined with his bottomless font of wisdom in matters arcane. And this was a large part of why he was my #1 choice to play Doctor Strange while he yet lived.

And Sifu's assistants? Well, Chin Siu-Ho is one of my favorite assistants for Lam Sifu (and brother to Chin Kar-Lok, whom we saw as the Green Hornet in the Video Whozit quiz).
His character, Sang, is clever...


...and Ricky Hui's Choi is brave...


Yeah, it's gonna be a mess...


Besides having to deal with Mr. Vampire and any corpses he sets to walking, Sifu's got to cope with his own assistants and we've got a Lovely Ghost story going on. (That's a tradition we'll get to at another time, because entire movies are wrapped around that concept, going back to Pu Song-Ling's writings in his Liao Zhai Zhi yi.)

Moon Lee and Pauline Wong Siu-Fung, our lovely leading ladies, are barely seen here but both delights in their roles.

Mixing martial arts, Taoist magicks, and arcane knowledge to combat undead, ghostly and demonic menaces, Lam Ching-Ying creates a fun movie, sparks a genre and makes himself a star. Not a bad way to introduce yourself to his films. Mr. Vampire launched a host of sequels, including Mr. Vampire 2, Mr. Vampire3, Mr. Vampire 4, Magic Cop (My favorite), Mr. Vampire 1992, New Mr. Vampire, etc.,...

But, don't make the common mistake of thinking that's all there is to his works. They may have been his most popular characters ( He was about to start the third season of his Vampire Priest tv series when he died) but he's also played everything from chain-swinging supercop to maniacal military officer to tragic pedicab driver.

Here's the DVD cover, and the original Hong Kong movie poster for your bonus enjoyments-




frames from Mr. Vampire (1985)

===

*(The actual quote is more akin to "We've barely begun. There's no reason to finish.")