CALVIN AND HOBBES
A little bit of puberty is a lot of dangerous thing for a little man. For years Calvin has been happy to indulge himself in the normative high-jinxery of young boys: playing pranks on his parents, tormenting the babysitter, refusing to eat his nutritional food. All of which he does with his best […]
ARCHIE
When he’s not exfoliating in the shower, and designing new tortures for those little cheerleading whores at Riverdale High, Archibald “Archie” Jones hangs with his friend, Jughead, at Pop Tate’s Chocklit Shoppe; where he and the guys compare business cards over malted shakes. When Jughead present him with a sans serif ivory on incandescent white […]
PEANUTS
The old neighborhood isn’t what it used to be. Twenty years past their wonder years, the cast of Peanuts are finding out that life ain’t a bed of roses.
Snoopy, the one character who binded them all together, has long since gone. After the book deal never materialized, Snoopy turned to Woodstock’s “bad brown stuff” and […]
POPEYE
Popeye was the union of a scurvy sea dog and an opium-smoking slattern in the Asian pirate-hole of Madriporno in the Golden Triangle. As a boy he was beaten so severely by his father - an embittered alcoholic with a leather belt he called “Mr.Wimpy” - that Popeye lost the use of one of […]
So who would have guessed it? “Dark” is the new black, folks! After years of gritty Hollywood scripts being recalibrated on the corporate anvil to make the hero “more likable” it would seem that the success of The Dark Knight has convinced certain executives that our cultural archetypes no longer have to have “pat the […]
A few years back I attended the annual screenwriting expo in Los Angeles, specifically to see veteran screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride) talk about his life and the state of screenwriting in general in front of about 5,000 people. When somebody in the audience […]
… the investment begins to falter. By the time he was reissuing digital manipulations of the original trilogy to bilk fans who needed to invest in every version of the movies, surely the curtain had been pulled back in the tent, and the Wizard of Oz was seen to be morphing into Elmer Gantry? Fans […]