Comix Talk

Oingo Boingo – my favorite band for a loong time.  I always liked the Mexican folk art influenced design around the Dead Man’s Party album and this video has bits of it too.  Oingo Boingo was pretty big in California — I was always unclear on why the rest of the world didn’t fully appreciate the genius of the Elfman.  In fact I guess to many people, I suppose Oingo Boingo is associated mainly with the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to Class (or maybe the song they wrote for the Anthony Michael Hall movie Weird Science). 

Very young Robert Downey Jr in this video (clipped from the Back to Class movie) – I just saw Iron Man on Vudu this week.  That guy is always interesting – what a good actor.  It’s kind of cool he didn’t kill himself with all of the drugs he took and we get to see some more work from him.

And hell might as well link to the Gong Show with an appearance by the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo – the precursor to the actual band Oingo Boingo.  The Mystic Knights were more of a cabaret think, led by Danny Elfman’s brother Richard.

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Holy crap – the video for RUN DMC’s It’s Tricky has Penn and Teller.  I don’t think I saw this at the time.

I liked RUN DMC a lot for awhile.  I’m not sure if it was the first rap I really heard and liked — I was 15 when their first album came out and that seems late to me but memory is a funny thing…  I’ll have to scan the memory cells a bit more..

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Funny I just saw in the site logs a link to the story noting the launch of Brad Guigar’s Phables comic about true stories from the residents of Philadelphia and now comes news that he’s decide to end it.  But it did earn him an Eisner nomination and he’s planning to bring out a print collection of it so it’s not all bad news.

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Joey Manley posts at his Talkaboutcomics blog on updates to the new Comicspace portal and other webcomic services his company is rolling out.

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Tom Tommorrow has a post with commentary from Max Cannon about the increasing number of alternative weekly papers simply dropping all of their comics.  I emphasize with Cannon as to not at all getting why papers are dropping one of the most popular parts of their paper but still grimace when I see that Cannon isn’t making anything from or via his web presence. 

I have no idea what Tom Tomorrow and Max Cannon have tried to do (well I do know Tom Tomorrow has used his site as a decent political blog for awhile and has sometimes pushed a book of his through it but I think that’s it…) but I’m sort of shocked that a popular cartoonist isn’t trying harder to push up the percentage of their revenue from new sources like a web strategy.  Even the sharply declining newspapers themselves now have a decent chunk of their revenue from online publication efforts (not enough to repleace what they’re losing but not 0% either).

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 AJAX 222

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It is in fact snowing in the greater Washington DC area this morning which will inevitably paralyze the entire town by sometime in the late morning.  A few links worth following this morning:

MILESTONES
Forbidden Planet notes the ending of David Rees’ Get Your War On and has the last comic (h/t Journalista!)  Back in 2003, Michael Whitney reviewed Get Your War On for ComixTalk and we had a community interview with David Rees.

SMALL SCREENS
CBR reports that Last Kiss will be distributed to mobile phones via GoComics.com.  Wednesday White reviewed Last Kiss for ComixTalk in 2004.

REVIEWS
Damn God Comics reviews the recent revival of Ryan Estrada’s Aki Alliance.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
The webcomic Curvy does in fact live up to its own tagline: A sexy sci-fi adventure comic for adults.  I stumbled onto this from it’s ad on another comic’s site — the art is kind of loopy and has nice use of contrasting black and white — it’s a very stylized approach to the visuals.  (it reminded me a touch of Tracy White’s TRACED).  Definitely NSFW even with the somewhat cartoony artwork.

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Reading about the wrenching changes in the music industry always reminds me of comics.  Not all of it is completely applicable to new ways to make a living making comics but I think a lot of it should inspire productive thinking.  So I offer some links accumulated this month:

• Monty Python’s new official Youtube channel increases DVD sales (okay this one isn’t music but still…)
• Corey Smith goes from highschool teacher to 4.2 million-in-revenue-musician this year
• The band Umphrey McGee rewards fans for promoting album by adding extras to it as the pre-orders came in
• Musician Andy Singer finds new audience after he gives his music away and licenses under Creative Commons

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