A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 1: I've Been Here, I've Been Working on Something, and There Is No Problem

The title above holds the answers to the questions most often asked of me over the past couple of months, during which time it seems I have taken some form of hiatus, purposeful or otherwise, from the Cinema 4 Pylon: "Where have you been?" "What the hell are you up to? You haven't been writing lately." "What's the problem now? Are you in another one of your funks?" Emails, phone calls, up close and personal... this is what I have heard, and not just from the usual suspects.

It's funny how you can write and write and write your ass off, and only a couple of committed, caring friends (and the odd stranger or two) will comment here and there, and you will begin to feel as if you were just another voice lost in the uncaring wilderness of the internet.

But, take an uncharacteristic amount of time away from something that people have locked you into their minds as being the sum of your being, and they begin to notice. Lately, I have received batches of concerned emails relating to this topic, along with a few comments on old posts to which I didn't bother to respond, and even Twitter messages from people with whom I am only lightly acquainted who have at least wondered where all the movie review tweets have gone.

This is all very nice, and I appreciate that some people have noticed my disappearance from the online world. But, here's what I thought was the truth: as of early September, I had grown sick of the internet.

After a few short months of testing, I came to believe that Twitter was essentially useless as a real communication tool, and rather just the latest and possibly worst form of networking pollution -- chiefly mindless blather trying to out-shriek the rest of the chiefly mindless blather, much of it scrubbed of context and therefore lacking any real impact. Facebook had become unmanageable to me once I reconnected with dozens of people from the past that I never really knew anyway. A precious few are grand old friends with whom I am glad to refresh our acquaintance, but then they throw their friends from the old days at you, and they don't realize (and often get hurt when they find out) that you really have no wish to know those other "old friends" anymore. Largely, this is because you never liked them in the first place (and most likely, they never liked you either). Worst of all, for weeks I dreaded opening my email accounts for fear of actually having to communicate with anyone. And when I did answer, I found, because I had not been paying very close attention to the run of things on the internet, that it would most likely would have been better had I not ever replied to anything at all. I had taken myself out of the loop, and even considering playing the slightest bit of catch-up had become both loathsome and monumentally difficult for me.

And so, for the most part, I disappeared online. A couple of email replies here and there kept the dread going; a mere handful of tweets throughout September and October showed that I was fighting whatever this creeping malaise happened to be. There were even brief moments where I tried to push back at it, and announced boldly m return to online life. (Well, if you can call saying anything in the cavernous depths of either Twitter or Facebook saying being truly bold -- which neither action is.) And while it is fun to think that perhaps this mood is merely just another syndrome amongst the thousands either identified or created to help us inch our way through the modern world -- let's throw a charming acronym or a smartly dressed abbreviation at it! -- the fact is that my attention has been diverted, and interacting online with the electronic world of faceless others has simply not been shown to be important enough to wash away the impression that I have disappeared.

But I have been around, and I have been busy, quite busy. Indeed, I have been quite deeply engaged for two to three months now. While I have been writing to some small degree, that activity has not been on anything to which this website directly relates, and it has not been the center of my attention. Writing is still the most important thing to me, and will prove to be the ultimate beneficiary of what I have been up to over the last two months. In fact, you could call my efforts "research" to the largest degree, or rather, a preparatory indulgence. What I have been doing will likely seem idiotic to some and markedly obsessive to all, but those who have similar addictions to the world of the cinema, those who feel lost within their own personal realms, and even anyone even the tiniest bit OCD will fully understand. (Yea, modern syndromes!)

To fully impart the madness into which I locked myself through the lateness of summer, though, I should divulge what led me to this point...

(To be continued in A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 2...)

Where could Rik Tod be? Why isn't he at the Cinema 4 Pylon?

Hmmm... sorry I can't be here at the Pylon on my birthday, or even at my normally scheduled appointment with corporate slavery.

I have a date with a certain exposition called D23 at the Anaheim Convention Center. Might even be seeing an exclusive preview of the new Tron movie, along with watching the original film. Might even get to see a screening of the new Walt and El Grupo documentary, or sift through 85-plus years of Disney-related ephemera and original drawings and the like.

Or I might be banging Daisy Duck. She does have that tail action going...

Happy Birthday to Me!

Comics on the Road to Nowhere? Pt. 11 of 11: "Exquisite Corpse" Drawings 3 & 4

Here's the final post of this series, featuring the other pair of "Exquisite Corpse" drawings done by my brothers Mark and Chris:


I remember my brother Chris was quite amused by the fact that with the Monster Dance Party he had drawn his image going off the page rather than into it. As a result, the drawings are going in opposite directions. Usually the practice is to carry the action towards the next possible drawing.

You will note that this final picture is different from the rest in that, instead of the paper being halved and then drawn on each opposite side, this time it was folded twice, so that there are four separate drawings, two each by my brothers:


Again, I will leave it to Br'er Mark to add his notes in the comment section. All I know is that I love these.

Thanks for the very few comments we have received on these. I hope that while most of you were not reading these posts you were out having a shitty time. We had a ball playing these games, and we were only hoping to share in the experience, and perhaps even get a couple of people to pass the game on or play with us. At least a couple of you got it.

The Cinema 4 Pylon now returns to its regularly scheduled programming...

Comics on the Road to Nowhere? Pt. 10 of 11: "Exquisite Corpse" Drawings 1 & 2

For the last two posts of this series, I am going to say very little, and let these combined drawings by my brothers Mark and Chris do most of the talking:

Pretty sweet. I love the randomness of their imagery, and how the two separate pieces play off each other in unexpected ways. I am uncertain of the order in which my brothers created all four of these pieces, so please check the comments below. I am fairly certain Mark will provide some notes on their process, and his continued memories of the experience.

Also, if you want to do your own experimenting, please see my first post in this series for instructions on how to do it, or look up "Exquisite Corpse" on Wikipedia. (You can even learn why the game is called by that name, or even how there is a reference to the game in Hedwig and the Angry Inch...)

[The final post will appear in a couple of days, and then the Cinema 4 Pylon will close the art gallery and begin its regularly scheduled movie griping again...]

Comics on the Road to Nowhere? Pt. 9 of 11: "Bugs" Gone Awry, or References Only Brandon Lawrence Would Appreciate...

I suppose that having eight out of the nine comic pages we created in our road trip drawing experiment come out even halfway readable/enjoyable should be enough. That's a pretty good batting average (for the record, .889 rounded up, baseball card-style). This one, which I shall not even finish giving a complete (or even pun-filled) title out of my exhaustion and frustration with the page, just simply did not work.

Here's the strip, and then we shall discuss:


See? It's sad it didn't work out, because this was the other strip in which we involved my nephew Aerin at the beginning (see the last post). His drawings adorn the first couple of panels, and it starts off with a decent enough premise. But, things went awry with "Bugs" quickly. It just never gets any of that "oomph" going... and then I made the fatal mistake.

I slipped in one of my left-field references -- not so much arcane, but merely aged in variety -- this time to an old vaudeville routine that was popularized in different incarnations by The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello and many others, often called "Niagara Falls" or "Slowly I Turned, Inch by Inch" or other titles. Personally, I know it as "The Susquehanna Hat Company," being more up on one Bud & Lou movie version than Larry, Moe and Curly's famous one. (Bud and Lou did it several times, including a "Niagara Falls" version on TV.)

So, I worked the reference in, but there were no takers. My brother didn't pick up on it, and I couldn't help him with it, or really elaborate on it until he was done with the panels. Thus, the doom of the strip had been spelled out. I closed it desperately with another reference to the skit, and this was after about an hour or so of staring blankly at the final drawing in the last panel, longing for inspiration. But, none ever came. I resorted to a fall-back plan of little distinction, and so we had the first abject failure of our experiment.

And, since I cannot stop with the references sometimes, somewhere Chico Marx is saying "I abject!" Or, at least I wish he would...

Comics on the Road to Nowhere? Pt. 8 of 11: Puppet Snarkiness

There was a certain inevitability to my nephew Aerin getting involved with our surrealist comic experiments. The kid may only be eight, but he draws up a storm. There are even times when it seems like he never stops drawing. Well, when he's not reading or playing with toys or building with Legos or all the other things that kids do. (These are also all things that, admittedly, his dad and uncles also continue to do despite, or because of, their ever-increasing dotage.)

We didn't even really need to persuade him much. All you have to do, in most cases, is draw anything, and Aerin will want to draw along with you. He was more than a little distracted, though, on our road trip with his own drawings to really get involved until we had already started over a half-dozen strips. But, soon enough, there was a lull in the overall activity, and so he and I were soon starting a strip. I took what he was probably thinking as a couple of mice atop a fence to be a pair of puppets and leaped off from there. However, the dear boy lost interest in the process soon enough, and the rest of the drawings past the first three panels were completed by his dad Mark and his Uncle Chris.

I think this one actually worked out rather well, and didn't go too far astride of what was set up in the beginning. This is not necessarily a good thing when the original point is for things to get as wacky as possible. But, sometimes I like it when things work out logically despite the scenario or the looming possibility of a complete trainwreck. (You will see an example of this form of failure when I post, in a couple of days, the final strip we completed on our trip.)

Personally, I love the stances of the mice in the fourth panel, but I truly adore the way the second mouse flashes the chocolate starfish at the puppeteer in Panel #7. I wasn't expecting it at all, and I laughed like mad. And I have, as a notoriously evil puppeteer myself, always enjoyed the notion of puppets rising up to critique their own "master." This might even reflect my overall views towards authority in general, perhaps even the way that I also have to keep myself riled, even just a bit, at whatever management holds the keys to my own employ, even if I actually like most of them and have respect for their overall practices.

While I don't wish to always be the puppet that I fully recognize that I am, I at least, while filling that role, wish to be the puppet that has just enough rebellion in him to poke his oppressors in the eye when they don't expect it, and to be able to summon up just enough voice of my own to tell them they suck. And they stink. And it is very likely that I will always remain just that...

Comics on the Road to Nowhere? Pt. 7 of 11: The Legion of Something-Heroes

[Edited 8/28/09, 10:00 pm]

Here we have yet another comic where things just went gonzo from panel one onward... what else will happen when you are confronted with a supposed superhero (or villain) wearing what appear to be oven mitts on his hands?

From brother Mark's opening panel, I went with the idea that this Hungryman guy (notice the trademarks on each hero name throughout) was sort of the spiritual counterpart to the real Legion of Super-Heroes' ridiculous but lovable Matter-Eater Lad. The idea is that he cooks constantly for the Legion rather eats everything in sight. I'm glad we didn't go with any true Legion members here, creating what could be another chapter of their Substitute Heroes wing (also a ridiculous concept -- why segregate potential, helpful heroes into a lesser subdivision? Seems like a breeding ground for villainy). We never learn the names of a couple of them... the crab guy -- who seems like a stand-in for Chameleon Boy -- and the weasel thing that constantly drools over Twin Zeppelins' breasts. I told my brothers that the weasel thing reminded me of the one that hounded Foghorn Leghorn ("Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah...!" SLURP!) My favorite memory of doing this one was hearing brother Chris bust up over the names "Pail Rider" and "Twin Zeppelins." That truly warmed my heart.

Yes, you can perhaps parse from the above paragraph that I did some time as a Legion of Super-Heroes fan in the past. In fact, I still consider myself a fan, though I haven't read them since the mid-Keith Giffen days. My main experience, as it is with my brothers, is from the early, early Legion stories from Superboy, reprints of which we had around the house as kids. The Dave Cockrum run was where I learned to love them (I was chiefly in love with Shadow Lass and Princess Projectra, or rather, their lack of costumes). The cleavage that ran rampant in the more revealing costumes in Cockrum's run was perhaps why I took to naming our Twin Zeppelins heroine as if she were a new version of Duo Damsel, who also became hotter in the '70s than she had been previously (even as Triplicate Girl, a male fantasy run amok right there). However, how we got her boobs to talk, I don't know...

Here is comic #7, titled "Legion of Something-Heroes." Sequel?