Today’s Recommended Podcast: 3rd DEGREE BYRNE Ep# 1 AVENGERS 164-166
I stumbled across this relatively recent podcast today. An entire podcast dedicated to the works, the oeuvre, of one of the most influential artists, and later writer/artist, of the 1970s and 1980s… John Byrne.
As a kid of the 70s and 80s, I very much grew up on the artwork and collaborations and stories of John Byrne, so I still hold that work as formative and really ground breaking. And really his body of work remains a large part of the cultural storyboards that power today’s billion dollar comic films.
So this podcast that discusses his work, rather than the politics or quirks or controversy of Byrne the man, I find of great interest.
This 1st episode covers a classic three part story by Jim Shooter (writer), John Byrne(artist) and George Perez (cover artist).
For my money this is, in addition to visuals being borrowed liberally for for the 2nd Marvel Studios AVENGERS film, it is one of the best Avengers stories.
I’ve sold most of my comics from yesteryear keeping only those that wowed me as a kid, and that still impress me as an adult, books that remain quintessentially the best examples of Superhero Blockbuster action. These 1970s AVENGERS books, 164, 165,166 remain the impetus and heart and idea space for what now 40 years later, have become multi-billion dollar cinematic mythologies… for new generations.
For my money nothing surpasses those three books, and it would be decades before Kurt Busiek in his wonderful 4 part Ultron Story-line in the AVENGERS (vol III from 1999 – 19,20,21,22) wrote anything as iconic as those three Shooter/Byrne images. The 90s Busiek/Perez run being very much a homage to those 70s Shooter/Byrne issues. Shooter and Byrne telling in 3 perfect packed issues, what lesser creators would have ruined by trying to stretch to 4, 5, or 6 issues.
It is no mistake that those two disparate stories were mashed together to make the plot for AVENGERS II AGE OF ULTRON. A movie I liked quite a bit, it is a solid B/B+, but it is not as successful as the two story-lines that inspired it. Whereas the beauty of most of the Marvel Studios output is they are actually superior to the story-lines that inspired them; the movies written to be more sophisticated, and appeal to a very savvy adult audience. The first AVENGERS movie is better than the books that inspired it, as is the 3 CAPTAIN AMERICA movies, as is the GUARDIAN OF THE GALAXY movies, and the IRON MAN movies (the first two Thor movies, not so much 🙂 ).
Jim Shooter was a boy genius who understood hyperbole and the dream of the mythic and heroic, and arguably there is no better example of that than in AVENGERS 164, 165, and 166. These issues are relatively still very affordable as 1st printings, and recently have been reprinted along with other essential issues in a very affordable collection.
You can get the issues here:
Avengers Epic Collection: The Final Threat
This collection is close to going out of print and covers issues #150 to #166, which is really the very best issues of the run. Pick them up at the link above while they are in stock.
Once you have read them, or if you have already read them, check out the podcast below. I disagree with them on some points but overall an interesting listen, and an interesting idea for a podcast. And I have to thank their podcast for spurring this blog post.
http://twotruefreaks.com/media/podcasts/byrne/rss.xml
Rating the Bigfoot Movies! Best and Worst!
BIGFOOT MOVIES TO SEEK OUT:
WILLOW CREEK – Suffers from annoying boyfriend syndrome, a failing too common to too many of these films with women being talked into dangerous situations, and worse being talked into remaining in the dangerous situations by boyfriends completely oblivious or making inane excuses for them remaining rather than rushing them to safety.
WILLOW CREEK for the majority is this annoying dynamic. So worth a watch if you are a Bigfoot movie fan/completest, but this due to how stupid the characters are written is far from satisfying. Grade: C-/D.
EXISTS is Big Foot movie done probably as well as it can be done. While you do have the obligatory idiot, you also have more well rounded and intriguing characters, and some sustained and exciting Bigfoot action. And a great and exciting if harrowing ending. Well worth owning on Blu-ray. Grade: B+
THE WOODSMAN- Is a horror takeoff on SURVIVOR MAN, as are many of these ‘Something in the woods’ films. Sporting only 2 actors, and only a brief glimpse of the rock thrower. Worth a look, but relatively forgettable and an abrupt unsatisfying end. Always a bad sign when the poster is far more interesting than the actual movie. Grade: C-/D-.
STOMPING GROUND – is up there with IT EXISTS with being a solid entertaining look of friends sharing their bonding time with something else. A great ending. B+.
LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK- This is the one that started the BigFoot hype and with its documentary meets DELIVERANCE style, continues to have a compelling vibe. Grade: C-.
SOMETHING IN THE WOODS – low budget 2016 film is convincingly done and engrossing tale of a man trying to protect his family and farm from something… unrelenting. Very good film. Grade: B/B-.
THE SIGHTING – For those looking for a twist on the standard BigFoot lore, this film fits the bill. Quite liked it. B/B+.
BIGFOOT (1969) – Speaking of twists. This forgotten 1969 film features buxom beauties falling into the clutches of a Bigfoot who wants attention paid to something besides his foot, and the biker boyfriends who must save them. The type of outlandish, trippy film that only the waning days of the swinging 60s could provide. Grade: C/C+. Worth a Look and several shakes of the head.
CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE (1976)
HUNTING GROUNDS (2017) – If you are sick of this off camera stuff most of these other films do, than this is the film for you. You will see the Bigfoot clearly and often, and doing things the other films would leave to your imagination. Where this one trips itself up is the human element. But unevenness aside, well worth a look. Grade: C/C+.
WILD MEN (2017) – Another Reality show goes hunting for BigFoot type movie. This one is quite good and fun. Grade: B.
-BIGFOOT THE LOST COAST TAPES rivals EXISTS as one of the best BIGFOOT movies. And it has one of the more unique and impressive endings. Strongly recommended. Grade: B+.
You can catch many of these films courtesy of AMAZON PRIME and/or HULU and the following are worthy of owning on DVD/Blu-Ray:
Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes BD/Combo [Blu-ray]
BIGFOOT MOVIES TO AVOID:
FIELD FREAK
BLACK WATER SASQUATCH
NIGHT WALKER
BIGFOOT VS DB COOPER
LOST WOODS
1313 BIGFOOT ISLAND
BOGGY CREEK (2010)
DOGMAN
HOLLER CREEK CANYON
PREDATORY INSTINCT
BIGFOOT HORROR CAMP
BIGFOOT WARS
BIGFOOT VS ZOMBIES
THE VOID Netflix StreaminG Movie of the Day!
THE VOID by director/writing team of Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kosanski is the calling card of filmmakers to watch.
I loved the trailer for this film, and it was one of the films I was most hyped to catch on Netflix this year. Finally watched it does deliver the goods, a throwback to the visceral, and gooey practical affects of the best of 80s Body Horror, films such as John Carpenter’s THE THING. THE VOID is a deeply off-center film, and an uncomfortable one, and while doing everything right, feels off-kilter enough not to be a home-run.
You couldn’t ask anything more of a horror movie than this film delivers, and yet it leaves you slightly unsatisfied. Again, it is everything you can want in a horror film, but there is something about it that feels, strange and cold and empty in the center. Maybe that’s an earned feeling, or something about how referential it is to well known films in the genre, whatever it is, I do like this film, and I think it deserves more than one viewing.
I hestitate to call it a great film the way I would unreservedly say of DEVOURED or IT FOLLOWS or A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT or III: RITUAL, but it is a solid very good film, and is worth owning on Blu-ray or DVD. Grade:B+.
My All Over the Place Rant… Beware, there be Dragons here
It’s 0330 dark of the morning and I’m listening to Disaster-Piece’s IT FOLLOWS film score on CD (not something I would particularly recommend if you are in the house by yourself at this time of night), and I’m thinking…we are all adrift in the fields of the Lord.
That’s what I’m thinking.
And I’m thinking of Carlos Castaneda and a Yaqui Indian called Don Juan and truths and fictions, and how the one becomes the other and the other the one.
I’m thinking of the quality of person that would have actually voted for Resident Trump and be not ashamed.
I think the clinical term would be somewhere between fool and sociopath.
I’m thinking of seas relatively unspoiled by man, and islands far from this benighted shore.
I think…
I think there are other worlds…
but this one is not quite done with me.
I think of duty and honor and truth and justice and loyalty, words co-opted by the venal to keep a nation of young men killing and dying and being mutilated and maimed for the 1%ers’ Dubai pleasure nations.
I’m listening to track 9 of IT FOLLOWS, the stereo panning in my Avanti Headphones, is working for me. Left, right… left, right. My brain relaxes, and formulates something beyond questions and answers.
It is a truly brilliant album, to accompany one of the standout horror films so far this 21st century.
I’m thinking I can’t get down with media lynchings, especially by a notoriously untrustworthy and historically lynching obsessed nation as America. So the more they tell me to demonize anyone, whether a Cosby or Simpson or insert famous Black male target of the day, the more I have to question it. In a world full of evils to fight, it’s funny to me how the press never tackles the evil that really controls and infects their viewers lives.
Like the evil of Pharmaceutical companies that are getting rich selling you not ready for human use drugs that have more dangerous side-effects than the conditions they are created to combat. “Oh you have acne, oh use our product, but oh, it might sterilize or kill you. Heehee… but we told you up front so we’re not liable.”
No you pieces of offal, that’s not how it works, if someone buys a hamburger from me and it is laced with arsenic, that may make them very sick or kill them, that’s called attempted murder. Even if the burger was a good tasting burger, did its advertised job, side effects of food poisoning and possible death are not acceptable or allowable risks to eating a hamburger.
So that burger is not ready for human sale or consumption and is recalled, pulled from the market.
The pharmaceutical companies instead market you these not ready for human usage products, and lawyer up against their products being filled with arsenic.
The actions that would get an individual arrested for attempted murder, these companies are using to get rich on the sick and desperate . Now that is something the press should for 3 decades be raging against. Not a suspect celebrity murder case, and not an even more vacuous charge of sexual assault.
So when the press avoid the crimes of their rich corporate sponsors and overlords instead to pile on with, ‘what Black celebrity can we pull down today’, well that’s a train I’m not going to board, and that is a Dachau I’m not going to populate.
There are lots of racist cops walking around free that have committed worse crimes than either Simpson or Cosby have been accused of. There are lots of you judging them, Cosby, Simpson,… that should be wary of casting that first stone.
Simpson I don’t care about, except that the fact of a white owned media embroiled in demonizing him over 2 decades after his acquittal shows clearly the new face of lynch mobs. We have young men and women coming back from parts of the world we didn’t even know we were still fighting in… damaged, and having damaged, for reasons that stink of lies, and true evil, and rather than the press demonize the real monsters that fill our nightly news with blood, they want to waste energy on cases that in the scheme of things while significant to the families of the victim and the families of the accused, to the larger body of society, are not of import.
As far as Cosby, Cosby I was raised on, and in a world that would have you be less, he was one of the ones breaking barriers and opening doors so that a whole generation of young Black men and women could be more. There are very few people drawing breath on this planet that can claim to have done the good that Bill Cosby has done, and if you can not equal a man’s good, you are unfit to judge his evil.
If he committed a crime, that is to be determined in a court of law.
But a man’s falling down does not erase his standing up, including the many times he stood up for a castigated people. So to take arms against him now is beyond ungrateful, it is cowardice of the highest order.
To let yourself be so crudely used, in this war of Black and White.
Now transitioning to another rant…
Why is local autonomy in nearly every walk of life being replaced by autonomy of these very few companies and oligarchies and families.
Once a blockbuster movie meant not only the studios did well but the regional independent local theater did well. These days theaters are mostly studio owned, so we have this incestuous chain of the studios getting paid in every part of the process, and local economies are obliterated by it. Reduced to only the most minuscule piece of the proverbial pie.
AVENGERS makes a billion Dollars, I don’t really care.
I care that it is or isn’t a good movie, but do I care if a Billion dollar studio make more millions and billions? Not in the least.
As it stands now these studios such as Disney and Fox and Warner Brothers (pieces of larger snakes) should have been broken up years ago and their anti-competitive and local economy suppressing monopolies ended decades ago.
The best thing that could happen to America is a nation where all the Disney Properties, most of which are over 50 years old went into the public domain where they belong so everyone can legally make money off of them and be enriched by them.
An America without the endless shadow of Disney and its lie of family values would suit me fine.
The album is over, the clock has moved on, and my rant…
My all over the place rant… ended.
For now.
“Come back and throw stones later, Mother will be more receptive”
—LION IN WINTER
Currently Watching : POWER Season One on HULU!
POWER The acclaimed Curtis ’50 CENT’ Jackson produced STARZ series finally makes itself available on HULU, and man was it well worth the wait. Showrunner/Creator Courtney Kemp Agboh’s POWER is the very definition of binge worthy television.
From opening credits to final fade to black, the show is FANTASTIC!! Omari Hardwick helms a powerhouse cast, in an exquistely photographed, compulsively paced stunner of a show.
