"The Incredible Hulk Meets the Ever Lovin' Blue Eyed Thing" 1980s fan film

Fan films based on comic book properties are nothing new, but I had quite a shock a few weeks ago when I found the above 8mm film featuring none other than the Hulk and the Thing.  At this point, it's almost 35 years old, so I'm surprised that a copy survived to be digitized, but I'm glad that one made it to YouTube.

Despite the technological limitations of the period, the film quality is decent, all things considering.  It's amusing to see all of the different costumed characters in this film, from Superman to Darth Vader (Star Wars was pretty new at this point) to the Thing himself.  The costume belongs to Gerry Giovinco, who relays the story behind this film here.  Joe Sinnott even drew what amounts to the flyer for the film, as can be seen above.

The film itself is fairly crude and, interestingly enough, it doesn't feature the Hulk and Thing fighting - they just hang out and drink for a bit.  Maybe the people behind the film were worried about messing up that great Thing costume.  As Giovinco explains, he created the costume to wear at a convention - and 35 years later, I still have yet to see a better Thing getup at any con I've been to.

The entire film has its audio dubbed, which is, of course, a sign of when it was filmed.  One of the directors listed in the credits is none other than Bob Schreck, who went on to be a top editor at DC for a time and is part of the Legendary line of comics (publisher of Holy Terror) today.

The film even has an IMDB page.  I can't figure out if the Thing only has one eye, as you can only see the right eye throughout the film, of if the other is just perpetually shadowed.

The date for this film is either 1982 or '83 (I found both dates listed), and the Hulk obviously takes its cues from the Ferrigno version.  What a strange find.  The film seems pretty random and madcap throughout - someone compared it to the Rocky Horror Picture Show - but it's fun to see.  I wonder what these guys are up to today.  I'd sure love to chat it up with Giovinco about his Thing costume.

The post-DC, post-conference, post-March wrap-up

Time flies and so does Superman.  My time in Washington DC for the Pop Culture Association conference is done, but the pictures and the memories remain.  Oh, the memories.

I arrived in DC on Wednesday evening and spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday bouncing between conference-related events and tourist attractions, and I had a nice time overall.  When I parked my car on Wednesday night, I saw this advertised in a nearby storefront window:

I've heard that the Superman musical is pretty bad, but still, I'd like to give it a try as hey, it's Superman, and I hear that he sings a song about beef at some point in the show.  What a shame that it's not showing for another few weeks and that it's not a bit closer.  For $15, I'd watch the heck out of it.

My presentation was scheduled for the bleary-eyed time of 8:00 in the morning, which, if you know anything at all about me, was a challenge, one compounded by the fact that I got up at 5:00 so I could drive into the city and find the hotel with enough time to register and find the conference room.  It was a long day.

The presentation itself went off without incident, I'm happy to say.  Mine was one of three presentations going on for this 90-minute session, and at the very least I didn't embarrass myself.  As I mentioned in my last post, my presentation was on Frank Miller's Holy Terror - the picture at the very top is a slide from the accompanying PowerPoint - and the possibility that the whole book was satirical in its intent.  Someone even asked me a question this time around, which was a first for me, and I even half answered it in a round about fashion.

I sat in on a few other panels over the weekend, including one that discussed using comics as teaching tools and another that looked at the nature of fandom in properties such as Firefly.  On Thursday night, the comics group hosted a dinner where I got to chat about comics with a number of other like-minded folk.

On Friday, I took the Metro into DC and saw some sights, including the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where I'm pleased to say that they had on display crystals from the Fortress of Solitude.

They also had a Beast Wars display, interestingly enough.

Afterwards, I walked up Pennsylvania Avenue only to come across a line of stopped traffic on an adjacent street.  Curiosity got the best of me and I stuck around, and in a few minutes the motorcade for President Obama came rolling by.  You can't, of course, see inside any of the presidential limos, but it was a pretty fun experience nonetheless.  So I took a picture outside of the White House, along with about a hundred other people.  No sign of Biden on a dog sled.

academic conferences: like blogging with fewer followers

There's been a lack of posts here over the past few weeks, but fear not, blog readers, it's not because I don't still love you.  I do, I do, deep in the cockles of my heart.  But I've had a few projects that have come up to take away a lot of my free time, two of which are at least semi-academic in nature.  But don't worry; like most things in life, I do my best to take a shortcut around actual work and research and just talk or write about comics.

CASE IN POINT!  Next week I'll be speaking at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association's national conference in Washington, DC.  As far as academic conferences go, it's pretty unpretentious, which is good, because I'll be keeping a straight face as I give my presentation on Frank Miller's awful "Holy Terror", talking about the potential unintentional satire contained within the book's pages.  Here's kind of proof!

I'm actually not a stranger to Dr. Wandtke, as he hosted panels at which I spoke in 2005 and 2006.  It'll be fun to catch up and talk comics with a few like-minded individuals.  And getting back to Holy Terror hasn't been as painful as I imagined it would be...if you squint real hard, there does seem to be at least the possibility that the book is just one big satirical look at American culture as opposed to the racist, hate-filled tome that it, in all likelihood, probably is.

The next opportunity came out of the blue, and it also fits into the professional/semi-professional category of writing.  I came across somebody's reference to the Journal of Venture Studies, an online publication that takes an academic approach to analysis of The Venture Bros. show that I love so very very much.  According to the editors of the book, the first volume (which you can read in its entirety online) caught the eyes of some folks at Adult Swim, who agreed to sponsor a second volume of the journal as a way to promote the upcoming fifth season.

I learned about this call for papers about 36 hours before the deadline, but I was able to get a proposal in that was accepted and, as long as I sit down and do the work (which I will), and that work is good work (which I hope and pray it will be), will have an entry in this sure to be prestigious volume in the storied annals of Venture analysis.

My topic this time around?  Ben Edlund and the Tick's influence on the Venture Bros. show and an analysis of "¡Viva los Muertos!", which is the only episode of the series not at least co-written by Jackson Public or Doc Hammer.  So I'm not straying too far from familiar ground, but I'm looking forward to it in any case.  And for all of you who enjoy instant gratification, this should be published in April, before the new season airs.

Maybe I'll get an honorary degree in comics for these.  Or something.

"Holy Terror" is probably the worst comic I've ever read.

Like many fans of the medium, some of my favorite comics are by Frank Miller - a giant in the industry if there ever was one.  Here's a guy who had created - mostly on his own - entertaining, sprawling, seminal epics like 300 and Sin City.  Heck, Batman has been around for 70 years and I don't think I've ever read a better story featuring the character than Batman: Year One.  When The Dark Knight Returns is second on a list of favorite Batman stories by one author, you know that there's some serious, prodigious, even, talent going around.

Because of this, and even though Miller has had a few flops to go along with his big hits, I was excited when I heard that DC Comics was publishing Batman: Holy Terror!, an original graphic novel by Miller.  My interest turned into curiosity once I learned that DC rejected Miller's proposal, at which point he took the concept to Legendary Comics (which seems to have been created for the sole purpose of publishing the book), removed the references to Batman from the story and truncated the title to, simply, Holy Terror.

My curiosity, in turn, became more of the morbid variety when the book was finally released and the reviews started to trickle in.  It seemed to me that, despite the interest surrounding the book, most of the reviews were overwhelmingly negative.  I saw the book stocked in a few local comic book shops, but didn't bother to flip through to check it out.

I probably would have forgotten all about the book if it hadn't been for my spring semester English classes.  The theme for the course centered around arguments - understanding them, making them effectively - and since I'm, well, a comic book fan, I started thinking about this book, the firestorm of criticism it caused for a while, and how something so apparently opinionated might work in a class that is set up to evaluate such forms of literature.  When I started putting my syllabus for the class together, I decided to take a chance and I ordered a copy of Holy Terror to read.

AND I HATED IT.  Seriously, every negative review of this book that I read was spot on.  It was, in a word, frightening to see how far Miller had slipped from "crime noir with its harsh view of reality" to "blatant, unrepentant racism", how a man so obviously talented could find himself so overcome by apparent hate as to put out a book such as Holy Terror.

The main characters are simply placeholders for Batman, Catwoman, Jim Gordon and other Gotham mainstays; some have even said that Miller took finished pages from his DC pitch and changed only a few details, presumably to avoid any legal issues with DC.  When I first heard that DC rejected Miller's pitch, I was surprised and thought that perhaps the company was overreacting.  Now that I've read the finished product, it's obvious that DC did the only thing it could have done, because allowing Miller to publish this as a Batman story would have, in my opinion, caused irreparable harm to the character and the overall concept.

The book, which simply deals with one night of violence, torture, ethnic stereotyping and misogyny to the worst degree, comes off as vapid in its content and disturbing in its message.  It can be difficult, sometimes, to separate an artist from his or her works, but in this case you almost have to to justify keeping anything of Miller's in your library.  It really is that shameful a piece of work.

I wrote a short review of the excellent anthology set 9/11: Artists Respond a while ago.  In one of the two volumes released, Miller had a short, simple story that read something like "I'm sick of flags; I'm sick of God; I've seen the power of faith" with an image of wreckage from the Trade Center attacks.  Miller seems to be playing again on this feeling of outrage, of indignation, but while the 9/11 short showcased the raw emotion that many felt that day, Holy Terror seems more venomous, more cruel and more bigoted.

I think that freedoms of speech and expression should be inalienable human rights, and thus I think that Miller should be able to print something like this, inflammatory as it is.  But I also can't strongly enough recommend that we all use a bit of common sense, don't get caught up in Miller's understandable level of fame, and put this book back on the shelf instead of buying it.