Special Supplement! Free Comic Book Day! Ron English! ZFW: Volume One!

Note: I was going to post this on Saturday, then it dawned on me that doing so may be a rather poor idea as who gets up early to read a blog on Saturdays? So here it is a couple days early to insure you folks get a chance to plan your Saturday accordingly. Enjoy!
 
Okay so, first things first, Saturday, May 7th is Free Comic Book Day! FCBD is the one day when you can bop down to your LCS (Local Comic Shop) and get free comics! That's right! It's a great way to find out about upcoming comics, find out about announcements regarding new titles or changes to existing titles, and sample something that you wouldn't usually pick up because it's free.

Comic Evolution storefront

So, this year I strongly recommend checking out Comic Evolution in Puyallup on the corner of Meridian and Pioneer, downtown by the US Bank.  This year Chuck Messinger owner/operator will have a special edition flip book available featuring Zombies Vs. Cheerleaders,  and as a special Comic Evolution bonus Steve Franks and Mark Rahner will be on hand to sign it! For those of you unable to attend feel free to go here to pick up the Comic Evolution exclusive cover of the flipbook and if you order before Monday Mark and Steve will sign it for you!

Chuck has some great deals going on for variants and back issues right now as well so feel free to pick up an armload or two while you're there!

Now if you can't make it to Comic Evolution but are in Southern Washington or Oregon check out Odyssey Comics and Coffee in Vancouver, Washington. Josh 'Bile' Cantrell will be there to sign comics and hang out with all our fans :D. Odyssey comics is located at 1503 NE 78th STE 10 in Vancouver and will be open from 9am to 7pm on Saturday. Come on by! They're also having a huge sale and special deals.

Also worth noting is that most libraries will also have some free comic books available, so why not bop on down, purchase your very own signed copy of the Rotten/Zombies Vs. Cheerleaders flipbook, a whole passel of free comics, get some good eats at the farmer's market and then swing by the library for a few more comics?

And while you're at CE or your local shop don't forget to order the newest and best offerings from Creator's Edge Press.

The amazingtastic cover!

MC's Secret Circus - A circus clown becomes a corporate powerhouse with the aid of a helpful alien.Ron English puts a contemporary twist on the pre-code comic aesthetic with the secret history of MC Supersized, the man who would be Ronald McDonald… if he hadn’t eaten the food. Also introducing MC’s obese alien sidekick Francis, who came to serve man… but got served. The comic, featuring parodies of comic book advertising, wacky packs, and introducing the Kursed Kids, offers a second chance at corruption for the generation of post-code consumers who were not sufficiently damaged by the comics of their youth. Pre-Order Now at your Local Comic Book Shop through Diamond Distribution, Order Code MAY110972. 

Unfamiliar with Ron English (odds are you know him but don't know that you know him)? Check out his page for more examples of his work and awesomeness. Here's an excerpt  "One of the most prolific and recognizable artists alive today, Ron English has bombed the global landscape with unforgettable images, on the street, in museums, in movies, books and television. English coined the term POPaganda to describe his signature mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones, from superhero mythology to totems of art history, populated with his vast and constantly growing arsenal of original characters, including MC Supersized, the obese fast-food mascot featured in the hit movie “Supersize Me,” and Abraham Obama, the fusion of America’s 16th and 44th Presidents, an image widely discussed in the media as directly impacting the 2008 election. Other characters carousing through English’s art, in paintings, billboards, and sculpture include three-eyed rabbits, udderly delicious cowgirls and grinning skulls, blending stunning visuals with the bitingly humorous undertones of America’s Premier Pop Iconoclast. "

Take a stand for great art and subversive thinking, help keep indie comics indie and celebrate the culture of freedom of expression we're so fortunate to have and order Ron English's MC's Secret Circus by Creator's Edge Press today! Diamond order code: MAY110972



The second offering CEP has for all the fine discerning readers out there is ZFW:Volume One.

Cover for issue #1 / Primer

We proudly announce that the full finished first graphic novel of Josh 'Bile' Cantrell's Zombies of Foreign Wars is complete and available for pre-order via Diamond! Featuring the art of Hopscotch Sunday a local Portland, Oregon artist ZFW details the exploits and adventures of a band of irascible vets that battle their way with booze, bullets, bullshit and camaraderie through a zombie infested United States.

A group of emo-teens perform a dark ceremony in a small town cemetery only something goes terribly wrong unleashing hoards of the undead from their graves. The teens panic and flee but only one survives and manages to reach relative safety in the local VFW hall. Once inside the teen pleads for help from a steely band of over the hill, hard drinking, hard cussing, and hard fighting vets. The zombies follow the teen to the hall and all hell breaks loose.

Will the heroic vets kick ass? Hell yes! Will they find the real source of the zombie plague? Will they take names and kick ass across the U.S. in a quest for answers and more booze? Order ZFW: Volume One to find out! Diamond order code: MAY110973

As always thanks for reading and feel free to comment! Remember, only you can keep independent comics independent!

Update: Holy crap I just found out that the Pioneer bakery down the street from Comic Evolution is going to be celebrating their 85th anniversary on Saturday. They're advertising $.25 coffee and donut and $1.00 loaves of bread! You can get an armload of comics, coffee and a donut, for only $.25 on Saturday! Get on down there folks! This is the link for more information on the anniversary celebration!

Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth

I'm going back to the old standby of movie/television show reviews for Thursday and Friday's posts. I've tried to choose some somewhat obscure favorites to tantalize you fine readers. I say tried because the weather here is finally becoming downright nice, never mind pleasant, and I really don't expect anything I post to really be able to vie with anyone's attention span when lovely weather beckons. Still, the sun goes down at some point and a good movie or show can be just the ticket. 

Aaaanyway, to kick off I'm going to babble a bit about one of my new favorite flicks that's a bit obscure though it was released in '07. It's an interesting film partly because it's main method of distribution prior to its appearance on Netflix instant and on DVD (I think its even on BD now but I really don't see why) on Amazon etc. was via peer to peer torrent based file sharing. That's right, the movie was basically pirated and passed around but get this, instead of getting upset the creators and producers thanked fans for sharing it and solicited donations. It's fair to say it was a successful distribution method since, as noted, it's now reached a much wider and more profitable audience. There is an interesting entry for it on Tv tropes beware that it's spoilery although they do hide major spoilers.

John likes it by the fire

This film is, as the title of this blog states, Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth, or The Man from Earth. 

The film opens with a man loading goods into a pickup truck. Soon other characters arrive and tease him about leaving a party and so on. Turns out the man loading the truck is named John Oldman and is a professor that is retiring/quitting his job to pursue other interests but with very little notice to his colleagues and no real explanation of his flight or where he's going. His companions tease and cajole and finally call him out on the mystery. This is where it gets interesting.

DETOUR

I'll digress for a moment to warn the potential viewer about the quality of the film stock. For whatever reason they opted to use film or cameras or something that rendered the picture extremely grainy. The soundtrack is crisp and clear, the dialogue likewise and the set and location (yes just one of each really this is more like a play than a movie) are quite nice and yet...so, so grainy. So, if you can't stand poor picture quality (can't blame you if you do I despise bad audio or poorly leveled audio, y'know where the action is five billion times louder than the dialogue?) you may want to go in cautiously. 

END DETOUR

John admits that the reason he's leaving (now don't laugh this actually works quite well in the movie) is that he's a 14,000 year old Magdalanian caveman and people  around him are now beginning to notice that he isn't aging. Now he doesn't just blurt that out, he leads into it via the whole, 'what would you say if' schtick and presents it as more of a thought experiment than a reality before he launches into a spiel about how he had a chance to sail with Columbus but was still a little concerned about falling off the world. Yeah.

John being moody while his companions discuss him in the background

What follows is his autobiography while his friends (anthropologists, biologist, etc) try to reason out the logic of the claim, they even call in another character, a psychiatrist/psychologist (he states he's one but another characters refers to him as the other) to see if John has completely lost it. They discuss historical events he was part of, people he knew, and people he was.

The logic is pretty decent though the bit about the flat Earth bothered me as the Greeks were fully aware that the Earth was round. Still, as John says, "One man, one perspective" when asked about great historical events he was nowhere near when they occurred, meaning, he may've had a pulse at the time but wasn't necessarily on the scene. So I'll take that to mean he missed out on that bit of ancient Greek wisdom, or hell might've forgotten it, after all presumably he only has a normal human being's memory banks to work with. They do a good job of touching on and elaborating on the practicalities and questions most people who've pondered literal human immortality have likely wondered about.

The gang arrives spoiling John's plans

Now, about the writing. D'yeah know who Jerome Bixby is? No? Well then. This is his wikipedia entry but to save you the trouble of clicking I present a tasty excerpt (unfortunately he passed away 1998 The Man from Earth was his last work finished on his deathbed): 

"His best-known television works include two Star Trek: The Original Series episodes: 1967's "Mirror, Mirror", which introduced the series' concept of the "Mirror Universe"; and 1969's "Requiem for Methuselah", about "Flint", a 6,000-year-old man. But his short story "It's a Good Life" (1953), adapted as a teleplay for The Twilight Zone by Rod Serling, is arguably his most generally known work to reach the small screen. It was popular enough to be revisited in the 1983 Twilight Zone film, and famous enough to be parodied in the Simpsons Halloween 1991 episode "Treehouse of Horror II". His 1968 Star Trek episode "Day of the Dove" is also much respected by fans of science fiction. Bixby also conceived and co-wrote the story for the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, Bantam Books obtained the rights for a paperback novelization based on the screenplay and approached Isaac Asimov to write it.


Bixby wrote the original screenplay for 1958's It! The Terror from Beyond Space, which was the inspiration for 1979's Alien. The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seventh season (1999) Mirror Universe episode, "The Emperor's New Cloak", is dedicated to Bixby's memory.


Jerome Bixby's last work, a screenplay The Man From Earth, was conceived in the early 1960s and completed on his deathbed in April 1998. In 2007, Jerome Bixby's The Man From Earth (as it is now called) was turned into an independent motion picture executively produced by his son Emerson Bixby, directed by Richard Schenkman and starring David Lee Smith, William Katt, Richard Riehle, Tony Todd, Annika Peterson, Alexis Thorpe, Ellen Crawford and John Billingsley."

So, really now, with talent, skill, and experience like that to back it up it's small wonder the darn thing is so well written and compelling. Remember it's basically a half dozen or so academics drinking whiskey and pondering shit in a cabin. Seriously, that's it, and it's still a great movie, a real brain twister that leaves you (me) kind of wondering/hoping if there might not be a John or Jane Oldman out there somewhere. The performances as well are decent though the fella playing John comes across as a hair over actory in one or two bits.

Behold, the trailer:

 And apparently at least one performance of the film-as-a-play has been done which makes me giddy, I'd love to see a local group perform it, I think the story and such would be fascinating to see live. Here's a trailer for a play production of it, thus proving such productions exist: