davemerrill

Went out yesterday to a Lions Club antiques & crafts thing out in the sticks that was 60% crafts and 30% antiques and 10% people selling food. Bought a screenprinted glass sign from some sort of classy dining room at a casino or something; meant to be backlit. Maybe I'll build a case for it someday when I have proper woodworking tools. Lots and lots of ticky tacky crafts. One vendor was making and selling their own Raggedy Ann dolls. Another dealer was just selling pillows with Dora The Explorer or Disney characters or Spiderman on them. Yeah, that's "crafts".

Weather was overcast and about 4pm it started raining and just didn't quit. We went out to Freelton and hit that antique place and cleaned out a bin of cheap old comics (Richie Rich #13 for $3) and a crazy musical whiskey decanter in the shape of a sad old hound dog about to shoot himself in the head. No, you can't make this stuff up.

Saturday we were in the shops on Queen East looking at potential Christmas gifts. Went to a basement record store I never noticed when I lived over on that side of town. Most of the prices were absolutely insane, but I did pick up an LP of Alison Arngrim - you know her as Nellie Oleson on "Little House On The Prairie" - performing comedy on an Amy Carter-themed album. A more pure artifact of the 1970s would be hard to find. Earlier in the day I took the car in for its regular maintenance, in the course of which they did in fact wash it. So you can blame all the rain on me.

As usual your regular installment of ZERO FIGHTER is up for your entertainment! I'm up to page 40 already! I need to get back to work, I got behind a few weeks ago and haven't caught up yet. We'll probably take a couple weeks off Mister Kitty during Christmas and I should be able to bat a few pages out then.

Here's an inspiring romance story about overbearing moms, and gals that go crazy for $25 worth of kisses. And I'm sure it's a story we can all relate to, whether we have moms, or gals, or kids, or pets, or neither.



Remember, choosy mothers choose Stupid Comics!

I know we've run tracks from this album before, but it was either this or songs from the Christian rock LP based on "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe", and that didn't turn 40 recently. And this did.



Yessir, it's Sesame Street, disco style, complete with Robin Gibb. Perfect accompaniment for all your turkey-frying chores today, if you happen to live in the States and really want gallons of boiling oil placed in a position almost guaranteeing somebody will trip over it.

Another thing to be thankful for is your regular update of Shain's Element Of Surprise! This is one Thanksgiving tradition that won't make you sleepy or involve cooking, football or giant balloons.

Interesting article in the Philadelphia Examiner about Philcon via Mike Pinto's Twitter - this is what I've been saying for years, after watching the literary cons vanish and after spending an eye-opening weekend at a DeepSouthCon almost a decade ago (!!) where the panels were obscure, the guests were nonentities, the entry fee was prohibitive, and the con organizers lost thousands. Where the consuite, full of donuts and salty snacks, was where I met an old friend, whom I'd last seen eight years and three hundred pounds ago. He was having trouble sitting up on his personal couch. Never did see him stand.

Personally I like literary science-fiction just fine; but the idea of spending $45 for the privilege of panels about Lost or the great Filk-Off Of 2009 or the thrill of an elevator ride with the Fan Guest of Honor (known for his delicious puns!); not so much.

It's a cautionary tale for those of us in a slightly younger fandom. I don't suggest implementing the article's solution - but if we must get older and grayer, perhaps we can do it with fewer heart attacks and Rascal scooters, with less chainsmoking type rants about how evil forces threaten us all. Lay off the Twinkies, do some push-ups, walk around the block once in a while. Communicate regularly with those outside your particular circle of obsessives. You'll thank me later.

Make your day a little more Prince Planet focussed with a trip over to Let's Anime to check out the winners of the fan art contest! Some really talented people will be walking around wearing exclusive American Apparel Prince Planet T-shirts thanks to MGM Digital Media and the boy from Radion. Full disclosure: T-shirts do not actually contain power cells recharged by a guy in a funny hat who takes a lot of coffee breaks.

I see from Mr. Calendar that American Thanksgiving is next week. Hope everybody has a good turkey day and eats too much.

We did indeed go out to Ottawa; the weather report said it was going to be sunny but it was overcast all weekend. Sunny NOW, of course. I got off on 15 instead of 16 and we did some overland driving through the Rideau River area which is very pretty, and made it into Ottawa via a roundabout way. Had some dinner in the Glebe neighborhood, stayed in a Travelodge downtown, wandered around downtown a bit, drove to Gatineau/Hull for a late night beer run and marvelled at the signage for all the chains we don't get here. Sunday we got up and went over to the comic book show, which was half hockey cards and hockey memorabilia and Soviet hockey magazines from the 1960s. The comic book half had some good deals. Dollar bins, fifty cent bins, twenty five cent bins (been a long time since I saw one of those). Light on the Harveys, some fairly cheap Archies, and every big event bad girl foil cover hologram special collectors edition ever printed going for fractions of the cover price. It's like watching mortages or college tuitions converted into colorful waste paper, thinking of how all these comics were purchased on a non returnable basis by store owners who could barely keep the lights on, and are now reduced to driving crosscountry with boxes and boxes of "Double Impact" and "Lady Death Lingerie Special #2" hoping to make gas money back selling them to the gullible. We pawed through boxes for a while and then hit the road back to home. Did some more crosscountry driving and wound up in Perth which has an antique mall and we, yes, bought some more comic books. Hey, when issues of "Thirteen" are going for two bucks, I am not going to pass 'em up.

Made it home in time for dinner and for me to finish this week's Zero Fighter and vegetated the rest of the evening. And now it's back to work! Kind of a busy weekend, but at least I got a weekend this weekend unlike last weekend.

We're heading out in a little bit to go up to Ottawa and submit our petition in person to Parliament. No wait, we're going to a comic book show.

http://www.comicbookconventions.com/ottawa.htm

Since they didn't see fit to give us a show in Toronto this year, we are forced to battle our way up the 401 and visit the capital to satisfy our unholy longing for coverless Archies and horror comics featuring skeletons driving busses and operating day care centers. Looking forward to a little car trip, and the weather seems to be cooperating too. It's a free show, so if you're in the area you have no excuse not to go!

It's one of those things that you think about years later and you start to try and convince yourself that it's all your imagination, that it really didn't happen. It COULDN'T have happened. But, sadly, happen it did.



We're really terribly sorry. Okay. Trying to be positive. Snappy Don Heck inks. Okay?

Thanks to M.E. for being brave enough to part with this deeply meaningful object and send it to us. Also everybody needs to send good vibrations and a really loud home alarm system out to footyfoot and tohoscope for their recent losses.

Everybody; if you don't have theft insurance, get it. If you don't have renter's insurance, get it. Lock your cash, guns, drugs, and valuables up so thieves can't get them. If it hasn't happened to you yet, just wait, because it will. Be ready.

Interested in expanding your aural horizons? Well, Mister Kitty's Found Sound is the place for you, this week providing you with a one-two punch of Firesign Theatery goodness with tracks from David Ossman's "How Time Flys" -yes it's supposed to be spelled that way- and by special request some ads from "Eat Or Be Eaten", including Bob Dylan At The Met and "All Weather Art." Relax and enjoy the ride. In the meantime check out Shain's ELEMENT OF SURPRISE, every Wednesday like clockwork!!

Now I'm off to sneeze. My cold has migrated, in defiance of gravity, from the chest to the head. If only this power could be harnessed for good instead of evil! Speaking of evil I had better go do "Stupid Comics" for the week. Boy, is it.

I'm on Facebook, but I'm not ON Facebook, if you know what I mean.



I have it set to automatically feed my LJ updates to my Facebook page so you here are not missing anything there. I might friend you there, I might not. I probably won't join your club or sign your petition or play your game or take your quiz or send you a flower or a tree or a cake or a jewel or a pound of hash brownies or the complete Edison Lighthouse collection. I have it set to hide all the apps and games, and it will not email me in notification of anything whatsoever. If you desperately need to get in touch with me in a big hurry, Facebook is probably not the best way to do it. This has been a public service announcement.

I don't read a whole lot of anime blogs, but the ones I do read get a little meta in their discussions of fandom and how irate fans get when you dis their favorite shows or when Anime World Order fails to address The Greatest Work Of Art Ever Made. Just a lot of deep hurting out there when pet obsessions aren't gettin' the love. And that's the big question I have for the anime watching world and the world in general. Why do you care what other people think about your favorite cartoons? Does it affect your life in any way whatsoever? Are gangs of people standing outside your house at night pointing at you and laughing, saying "There's the guy, that's the guy who actually likes "Witch Hunter 29 U.S.A.!"

I dunno, maybe there are places were you are judged by the TV shows you watch. Those aren't places I generally frequent, because hanging out with idiots is usually a waste of time. Here's a news flash, fanboys. Nobody actually cares what TV cartoons you watch or what comic books you read. What they DO care about is pushing your buttons. Until you cry. Like a big baby. I realize that, for some, human contact is so limited that this button-pushing has become the only interaction they have on an emotional level with other people, and that's sad, but for the most part people can only push your buttons if you let 'em. Stop wasting time talking about people talking about the cartoons you watch; you're already wasting enough time just watching the darn cartoons to begin with.

Spent the weekend working and trying not to get sick. I had to go in really early Saturday morning and that for me means I have trouble getting to sleep the night before because I'm all like, GOTTA GET UP EARLY and so I just toss and turn and the cat tries to get on top of my legs which doesn't help things. So I was a zombie on Saturday. I've been coughing like a grizzled homeless man lately and am trying to not let the cough get any worse, and lack of sleep does not help things. Sunday I didn't have to go in as early, which is nice, but still, you go into the same place for seven days straight and you are going to be walking around like a zombie anyway. Had dinner last night at a Japanese restaurant on Bloor named after Joe Yabuki's opponent Rikishi. Or at least that's what we like to think. We did go out on Saturday and have BBQ and hit Dragon Lady's 50% off sale on back issues, I got a couple of Harveys and Shain got a bunch of scary comics including the one she posted about yesterday with the nearsighted guy in the wrinkly 70s suit who doesn't know his girlfriend is a vampire. And that is the exciting life we lead!!

A few weeks ago I picked up a quasi-Firesign Theater record, HOW TIME FLYS, written by David Ossman and with all of the Firesign guys as cast, as well as a bunch of others including Wolfman Jack and Harry Shearer. Not as strong as their strongest work (but then again, not much is) but there are some good laughs and as usual they're ahead of the curve on a lot of stuff, including public disinterest in the space program, ubiquitous fake "news", etc. I guess the LPs weakest point is the lack of a real ending; the material seems to be building up to some kind of a climax, but instead just sort of peters out. Like most Firesign stuff, however, it bears repeated listening and I'll have to throw this one on the turntable a few more times before making any kind of official judgement. At some point when I assemble my thoughts and a more complete Firesign collection (still missing "Fightin' Clowns") I will present my findings to the world.

If we're both reasonably healthy this upcoming weekend we're going to to go Ottawa and visit the War Museum, maybe, and hit the comic book show on Sunday. Probably take 7 back if we leave early enough, a long car ride through backwoods Ontario is just the thing to soothe those jangled big city nerves. In the meantime here is another page of my "gekanada" epic Zero Fighter!

"Gekanada", it's like "Amerimanga", except it's a combination of "gekiga" and "Canada" and... never mind.

It's NERDLAND, the stop-motion exegesis that rips the lid off of GROWN MEN who spend good money on children's toys, watch nothing but genre nonsense, and whose powerful mental blocks keep out any semblance of the real world! If you don't see part of yourself in this show then you simply aren't looking hard enough. Yes, this is the show dudemungus created, based in part on a script he and dwinghy wrote.

http://www.thedetour.ca/

Go, watch, comment, tell your friends!

As we learn in an educational fact-filled comic from the good folks at Charlton. FUN FACT: Wally Wood once had to execute a commando-style moonlight rappelling extreme cartoonists raid on the Charlton offices to get some of his artwork back. Or so the story goes.

Anyway, cavemen. Really talkative, eloquent cavemen.



It's all part of the hot caveman on caveman action today at Stupid Comics!

In other news, four of the five prize slots for the free Prince Planet T-shirt have been filled and I've gotten some really fun artwork! I believe in future all my Let's Anime contests will involve fan art. You still have until Monday to get that artwork in, lasty!

I thought it was going to be a slow week and instead, it's been super busy. I have to work all weekend and it's likely to be super busy too, so I'm trying to pace myself. So if you need me I'll be over there workin' that lever that puts the lids on the jars, gettin' that pile driver over there quick, because the overlords have got me workin' overtime, as Stan Ridgway would say, only he would say it in that exaggerated 40's style drawl. I used to think about what a meeting between Stan Ridgway and Fred "B-52's" Schneider would sound like. "Hello Fred!" "Hello Stan!" Lots of keyboard in the background, that's for sure.

Prince Planet Week continues as an entire population rises up to celebrate the return of Prince Planet to our collective conciousness! And as part of these celebrations Mister Kitty brings you Prince Planet mp3s of the American theme song, the original Japanese theme song, and a mixup mashup of music, dialog, and sound FX from the show to spark your latent toddler memories. And yesterday being Wednesday Shain has another page of ELEMENT OF SURPRISE to surprise you with. Gettin' kind of serious here!

Tonight - Stupid Comics! And dinner. But you knew that.

Recently unearthed: thirty year old Dave comics!



Undeniable proof of both my feverish desire to draw comic books AND my hunger for anything to occupy my brain that wasn't schoolwork. (I love that cover with Super Soldier holding onto the spaceship that's fleeing the destroyed space station. "If Death Be My Destiny!" Nothing says "10-year old reading too many Stan Lee comics" like this drawing.)



(SuperNova's little grin here is appealing for some strange reason.) I started off drawing comics with my brother, but he faded early in the game while I kept on going right into middle school and beyond. Me and friends started our own "manga circle" and drew our own super hero and adventure comics. Preferred media was pencil on blue-lined notebook paper folded over and stapled on the spine.



Apart from the barely legible artwork this could be the cover of any Marvel or DC comic from that time period. In fact since it doesn't star a gangster's brain that's been put into a giant ape, taken out and put into Batman, and used to rob Earth of colors, it probably makes more sense.



It's interesting to see how the characters progress from faceless blobs with barely distinguishable arms and legs to the more realized individuals with actual eyes and mouths and hair. Fingers became four little bumps instead of one little bump. An effort was made to portray backgrounds.



Fun fact; I actually dressed as this character for Halloween one year. No, not last year. When I was 10.

Had I been a little more ambitious I might have started, you know, drawing from life, or at least swiping poses and things from actual comics. But no, things like photo reference are cheating! Also there was the whole "lazy" thing. And up against that brick wall, I gave up on drawing for about a year when I entered high school. When I returned to comics, the quaint folded-over notebook paper comic book industry was gone forever, replaced with fumbling attempts at using real tools like bristol board and crow-quill pens. The obsession with super hero comics was gone, replaced by obsessions with Love & Rockets and those Japanese comics in a language nobody could read. The art was kept on the down-low because it's high school and a class of high school sophomores is not impressed with your homemade comics the same way a class of 6th graders is. Luckily, it turns out that if you wear a Black Flag T-shirt people leave you alone. Still true today, but for different reasons.

Anyway: ZERO FIGHTER. Some things haven't changed much in thirty years.

Find out how to watch Prince Planet on Hulu and Youtube starting tomorrow by reading my latest Let's Anime blog post!
Well, to be honest, if you don't quite grasp the concept of going to hulu.com and searching for "Prince Planet", I honestly don't know how much any blog post is going to help you, but there are some funny cartoons and phots of me in a Prince Planet t-shirt, and photos of the Prince Planet stuff I got in Japan. So you should go check it out. There is also a contest where you can win your very own Prince Planet T-shirt!

Yesterday I went to the library to tell them that the book they said was overdue so badly that I had to go ahead and pay for it, well I turned that book in, darn it, and darned if I was going to pay any darn overdue fee. So I marched right in there and went right to the stacks, and there was the exact book that they said I hadn't turned in. Hah! So they cleared my account and now I am no longer in trouble with the library. Don't mess with Dave, library! I used to work in one of you and I KNOW ALL YOUR TRICKS!

Today we went out to St. Jacobs and did a little antique shopping at a place completely ruled by Crazy Grandma, in that RCA Capacitance Electronic Discs of, say, SUPERMAN III were on sale for the bargain price of $25 each. No, not $2.50, or the more reasonable price of $0.25, but twenty-five smackeroos each. Instead, sir, let me counter with an offer of $25 for WHATEVER DRUGS YOU ARE ON, YOU CRAZY MAN.

My latest ZERO FIGHTER strip will be up later tonight, too. And now I am going to watch old children's TV toy ads and relax.

Through the medium of comic books various non-existent Asian nations rise up to conquer the British Isles, but are repulsed by Welshmen, schoolteachers, and THE HARDEST MAN IN BRITAIN. Don't miss entertainment that wants the thrills of foreign invasion but hasn't the guts to come right out and say which country would be doing the invading today at STUPID COMICS!!



In America we just come right out and admit it's the Russians who would be doing most of the invading, as in RED DAWN, or the Chinese, as in the remake of RED DAWN that is likely to ease international tensions and make everybody friendly. Or, in the Gold Key comic MARS PATROL, the entire world was invaded by a military force that came out of nowhere and later turned out to be from outer space but for some reason was attacking us with regular guns and tanks instead of death rays and flying saucers. All these fine fictional works ignore the facts of the situation, which, as Dave Barry pointed out, are that the United States has the largest force of armed pickup trucks in the entire world. Invade at your peril. Maybe if England starts arming her pickup trucks these nonexistent Asian nations will leave her alone!

Drink enough of it and you'll start hallucinating stories about a bizarre vegetable/avian hybrid with ESP who loves...yes! Anita Bryant!



Hear the song of the Orange Bird as sung by America's leading proponent of citrus fruits, until her agressive campaign to deny rights to her fellow Americans led not only to the creation of a new cocktail, but to the end of her citrus-based endorsements. But don't let that discourage you from enjoying songs and stories about the Orange Bird! Starring Ronny Howard!

The record is a little scratchy; lord knows nobody listened to it all that much, but I imagine it got jostled around on its trip all the way from Walt Disney World to an antique show in Aberfoyle Ontario without benefit of the protective record sleeve technology of today. Anyway it's listenable, certainly not the scratchiest thing we've ever posted.

We went to Walt Disney World during the high point of the Orange Bird's usage as a corporate mascot, but I don't remember seeing it whatsoever. Of course what's one more cartoon character at WDW? One more corporate logo amidst the 3M Presents or Brought To You By Monsanto or GE Hall Of Presidents? I loved WDW in the 70s. It was jam packed with failed mid 1960s thinking about people-movers and missions to Mars and better living through chemistry, an aggressive yet quaint corporatism expressed in dated graphic design and architecture, which ignored the cracks in the foundation and the general shabbiness of things that had been last cleaned when the Country Bear Jamboree was installed. There weren't going to be any more Disney cartoons. Instead we would have Mickey and Donald shilling for Exxon and audioanimatronic fake animals hissing and clicking at us, festooned with corporate logos, pointing us towards Space Mountain or Tom Sawyer's Island or the Electrical Parade. Now, of course, everything I loved about Walt Disney World is gone, including the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea ride which was the best ride ever. You miss the old WDW in the same way you miss the Cold War, I think, having someplace you could go and look over the wall and see the homeland of evil in all its shabby glory.

Also I would like to point out that in the "Found Sound" text I mistakenly attribute "Scotchguard" to Monsanto, when in reality it was made by 3M. Monsanto made nerve gas, as seen in a famous sequence from Matt Feazell's "Cynicalman".

And now it's back to work on Stupid Comics and I totally have to get a Let's Anime done for this weekend in time for the big Prince Planet premiere!!

Sunday night is when Zero Fighter gets updated and Monday morning is when I tell you about it! Go right now and read all the pages of my Zero Fighter strip and I expect a detailed critique on my desk tomorrow morning. I did get two pages done this week, ahead of the clock for once.

We spent Sunday sort of tooling around buying another Expedit from our Home Away From Home, IKEA. It's now our TV stand and we get to fill the bottom part with books, enabling us to lose one or more of our smaller bookshelves which aren't really efficent in a place with 12 foot ceilings. Not going to miss that old TV stand, but we did get our money's worth out of the thing. Didn't go out much on Saturday, we were feeling kind of fragile and either downright sick or being a transmitter/reciever of sick. I did rent some crazy movies though, and I baked cookies. There's a lot of butter goes into making cookies. I burned out our cheap handheld mixer working that dough.

I did go out Saturday morning to that MeisterMarkt antique show in Markham. I bought a vintage 50s Xmas lighted choir angel house decoration and some cheap LPs and comics and a sign warning of "concealed protective explosive devices". Not a bad show but a little underattended (both in customers and in dealers), mostly because the weather was iffy and it was Halloween and it was a first year show. I did see a Patsy Walker annual from 1966 selling for $75. Rock on crazy grandma!

While the dentist chuckles with glee at your sugary Halloween madness, one other powerful being stands to benefit from your candy - SATAN!!!

Kimberly Daniels, who apparently got her Occult Research degree from reading Jack Chick tracts, has this to tell us in a column that was originally posted at Pat "Age Defying Protein Pancakes" Robertson's CBN site, but was taken down because it was too stupid, even for Pat "Accu-prayer Weather" Robertson.

During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.

Luckily "charismamag.org" is the only website with the SATAN DEFYING BALLS to post this amazing factual article which you can read here: http://www.charismamag.com/index.php/prophetic-insight/23723-the-danger-of-celebrating-halloween

Halloween is when actual demons go to Wal-Mart and lay curses upon the candy, and then actual kids eat the candy and are possessed by demons who can't tell the difference between buyin' candy at the store or getting it from the Johnsons down the block (so demons are stupider than, say, a 5 year old), who then conquer the world for evil in a vast storm of fire and blood, but nobody notices. Things seem to go on as normal every year. Except millions and millions of people are homeless, dying of disease, in despair and heartbreak, have children they cannot feed or clothe, and otherwise lead lives of misery and tragedy (that Satan has nothing to do with) because people who SHOULD be obeying their religion's precepts to help the helpless are instead wasting their time writing this absolute drivel about a children's holiday that is just as pagan as this other festival you may have heard of called "Christmas" and this AMAZING pagan fertility thing called "Easter".

This is why nobody takes you seriously any more, Christianity. No quality control. Get your act together. What happened man? You USED to be cool.