Now Playing: HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE
The great comic book artist Jim Aparo passed away this week at age 72. For many of us who grew up reading DC superhero comics during the 1970's, Aparo is the preeminent Batman artist. He spent most of that decade pencilling, inking and lettering THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, which was a fun title in which Batman teamed up each issue with another DC character--sometimes a Big Gun like the Flash or Green Lantern, sometimes a more unusual or obscure character such as Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter or The Demon. Aparo drew practically every character in DC's vast canon during his tenure there, beginning in the late 1960's when editor Dick Giordano brought him over from Charlton through the 1990's, when he was still drawing Batman every month. I can't say Aparo was my #1 Batman artist--Neal Adams was just too damn good--but he and Irv Novick are neck-and-neck for #2, and he's certainly ten times better than anyone else DC has hired to regularly draw the Caped Crusader over the last decade or so.
As incredible as Aparo was on Batman, I really love his tenure on THE PHANTOM STRANGER, which was a moody combination of superheroics and the horror/mystery titles like HOUSE OF MYSTERY that DC was beginning to churn out during that period. It has been said that DC's unheralded horror/mystery line edited by Joe Orlando often outsold the superhero comics. I believe it--some of the short stories in HOUSE OF SECRETS, THE WITCHING HOUR et al. are incredibly entertaining, and, as you can see from the PHANTOM STRANGER and ADVENTURE COMICS covers I've posted here, the art easily equalled--and more--the high level of the writing.
ADVENTURE was a very unusual--and even more notorious--title for DC in the mid-'70s. Orlando brought in Michael Fleisher to write stories containing the Spectre, a ghostly hero who had been bouncing around the company for almost four decades without really making much of a splash. Fleisher turned the Spectre into a vengeful wraith, an agent of God who punished criminals by causing them to die in various horrible ways. This is where Aparo's great art kicked in, picturing the Spectre slicing one baddie in two with a giant scissors or turning another into a lifelike block of wood and sending him into a lumberjack's saw. They were basic, simplistic morality tales punched up with grisly imagery and the Spectre's fascination characterization as a man-ghost on a vengeful mission.
I apologize to anyone who has been expecting email from me recently. My SBC Yahoo Internet connection is still not working the way it's supposed to be. I'm able to use the World Wide Web (and my connection is pretty fast), but I have not yet been able to officially register, which means I can't send any email. For some reason, their registration server has been down for at least six days and probably more. That seems like a long time for a server, especially one belonging to a big company with lots of customers, to be down, but there you go. I have called the toll-free number five or six times, and everyone has been very friendly and helpful; they are just not able to do anything for me at this time. I've done everything I can do. I just have to wait for them to get their shit together.
Cheeseburger made me watch HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE again tonight with SuperLar and Chicken. It's actually a surprisingly funny movie and a sometimes daring one, casting an Indian, a Korean and a Latina in the leads and dishing out a good deal of ethnic humor the likes of which hasn't been heard since Dean Martin stopped doing roasts. Dope humor, bare breasts, slapstick, racial and Jewish stereotypes...hey, what more could you ask for?
A recent thread on the Mobius board about the DVD release of DRAGNET 1967 spurred me to pick up the comic DRAGNET remake from Netflix. Universal's summer 1987 blockbuster stars Dan Aykroyd as an uncanny simulation of Jack Webb, right down to the corncob-up-the-ass walk and the Chesterfield wrapped in his paw. Tom Hanks, post-VOLUNTEERS and pre-TURNER & HOOCH, co-stars as Pep Streebeck, Aykroyd's free-spirited new partner, and Harry Morgan reprises his TV role as now-Captain Gannon, the irascible boss of Streebeck and Sgt. Joe Friday (the nephew of the late Webb's Friday). It's actually not a bad little picture, although it's a disposable one like so many other studio comedies of the mid-'80s (do you remember anything about ARMED AND DANGEROUS or TURNER & HOOCH?). Director Tom Mankiewicz (DELIRIOUS) made a mistake by not shooting the movie in the same simple setups and harsh lighting that were hallmarks of the TV series, even though he does keep Friday's narration, snippets of the score and the climactic lineup shot. It's instantly dated by Ira Newborn's disappointing score, which uses a proto-techno version of Walter Schumann's classic theme over the opening titles and closes with a Godawful DRAGNET rap performed by Aykroyd and Hanks. Dear Lord, make the deep hurting end.
You would think Lance Henriksen fighting Bigfoot would kick major ass, wouldn't you? Not so in 2003's SASQUATCH, a low-budget 12-day wonder with Henriksen playing Harlan Knowles, a rich bastard who organizes a search party in the Washington mountains for a crashed airplane containing his daughter. Unfortunately, director Jonas Questel is more interested in his cliched character than in the monster, and the body count is disappointingly low. He also relies on blurry cinematography, poor editing (count the number of jump cuts that were probably caused by Questel not shooting enough coverage), and a monster suit that looks different from shot to shot.
Questel probably can't be blamed for much of SASQUATCH's failure, as you'll learn from listening to the entertaining DVD commentary he carries along with his producer and two of the actors. First off, the four of them, who admit they are watching the final film for the first time, express shock and embarrassment at the title: SASQUATCH. It was shot as THE UNTOLD, and was still THE UNTOLD as far as any of them knew. Of course, the new title "tips the hat a little early" and definitely sets you up for a different kind of movie than THE UNTOLD would have. Some scenes were filmed later in Los Angeles by a different director and crew, including a ridiculously gratuitious topless scene and the climax of Henriksen hunting Sasquatch. The original makeup effects creator died after principal photography, and the new guy ended up building a different Sasquatch costume, which is why the monster looks different in some shots. There's another idiotic scene of a woman undressing and preparing for bed in which the editor has, for no reason and less sense, spun the image in a slow 360-degree turn, causing some laughter on the commentary.
I'll leave you with one more Jim Aparo cover. It's probably the only time Aparo ever appeared in person in a comic book as himself, and the story he drew illustrated an oddball script by Bob Haney that manages to be as entertaining as it is insane.
