Webizens, give me your votes!

My Watching the Detectives blog got nominated for an award, but in the present voting round it is being spanked harder than Eddie Murphy at a transvestite convention.

If you haven't voted for an Action Movie Blog in Movie411.com Blog Awards, how about you vote for my blog? I promise I'll talk Steven Seagal out of his current plan to sing power ballads under your bedroom window at 0300 hours every morning.

(Or you can consider my reviews of movies featuring the likes of Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Clint Eastwood, Jason Statham, Bruce Willis, Jackie Chan, and even Sandra Bullock!)

Vote for Watching the Detectives! The polls close December 15!

Will Eisner and the "Graphic Novel"

Here's a nice article discussing the truth about the long-held idea that pioneering comic book creator Will Eisner invented the "graphic novel."

Dr. K's 100-Page Super Spectacular: Will Eisner and the "Graphic Novel"

Alleged dirt-bag sues blogger for linking

There's a character in Canada who allegedly likes to use their somewhat wacky libel and anti-discrimination laws as a)a lottery, and b)a way to silence anyone whose views he doesn't agree with.

It seems this person is inadvertently revealing the so-called Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) as a vile bunch of speech-code enforcing thought police. The CHRC are willing participants in his outrageous lawsuits, to the point where he is suing bloggers for linking to articles about him and allowing readers to comment.

Blazingcatfur--a Candadian blogger I have no personal connection to, but who was a fellow traveler for "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"--is the target of one of this alleged dirt-bag's lawsuits. You can read about the situation here:

Blazing Cat Fur: Richard Warman Sues Blazingcatfur For Linking To "Far Right" Mark Steyn

Blazingcatfur is seeking donations to help him with his mounting legal bills. I encourage you to lend a hand.

I'm grateful for living in the United States of America where, unlike in Canada, legally sanctioned bodies can't work toward this:

I know there are some dimwits out there who think that America needs to limit free speech and impose laws like they have in Canada. But if you actually use your brains for a moment, do you REALLY want it to be this easy for alleged dirt-bags to go after and silence anyone they don't like while pretending they are doing it to further human rights?

I hope not. But if you do, I hope you'll join Randy Quaid north of the border.

Win "The Dead Path" at Terror Titans!

In celebration of Halloween (and thanks to the kind folks at Random House, who want to make sure EVERYONE is properly frightened this Fall), I'm giving away a copy of Stephen Irwin's debut novel "The Dead Path" over at my Terror Titans blog.

Click here for all the details. Good luck to all those who enter the drawing.

A pattern of criminality or business incompetence?

Over on his blog, artist and writer F. Lennox Campello is posting a series of reports on an art dealer who at best appears to be very, very incompetent and who at worst may be the con artist and thief that she is alleged to be.

Campello's most recent post involves an artist who is owed over $5,000 in commissions from the dealer. Her name is Isabelle du Toit, and she paints cute pictures of babies and birds. Here's a sample of her work (and you can see more of her paintings at her website):

I seems to me that one case--the Bowland matter, described earlier--could be explained by a series of unfortunate events and misunderstandings that converged and ended up with a dealer selling a painting she had no license to sell. But the addition of a second artist to the mix, as well as the possible timeline that Campello presents in his recent post, seems to demonstrate a pattern of intentional criminality. Even the most generous interpretation leads one to view the art dealer's skills as a business person approaching criminal incompetence. (That said, there are things in the quoted emails that remind me of the smoke blown up the skirts of freelancers by any number of publishers I have known over the years as they were going out of business. Including myself.)

Another little part of the mystery-loving child in me has died. If what is alleged is true, then Campello's coverage is yet more proof that there is no such thing as a criminal mastermind. Even art thieves are pathetic little scavengers.

A true-life story of an art theft from the National Portrait Gallery in D.C.

Here's a painting with a very cool Halloween vibe:

I spotted it on F. Lennox Campello's blog, and it's by an artist named Margaret Bowland. You can see many more of Bowland's equally spooky illustrations by clicking here and here. I hope Ms. Bowland doesn't take offense at my referring to her artwork as spooky, because I mean it as a compliment. I find her art very interesting, and so do others, as demonstrated by the fact the painting at the top of this post won the People's Choice Award Winner for the 2009 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.

It has also been stolen.

Campello posted an interesting account of how the painting fell into the hands of a crooked art dealer. Click here to read the story.

As I was preparing this post, I noticed that Campello published a follow-up to his original article, in which the National Gallery offers a response.

I think I'm going to keeping an eye on this case, just to see how it all turns out.

Forgotten Comics: Destroyer Duck

One of the greatest writers to ever work in comic books was Steve Gerber. I will eventually be posting reviews of the bulk of his output for Marvel Comics here at companion blog Shades of Gray, but I will be covering some of his more recent contributions to the artform in this space.

I was torn between making the first Gerber review on this page one of his grossly underappreciated "Nevada" mini-series (arguably his last great comics work), his obscure (yet important) "Omega: The Unknown", or the wildly rebellious and anti-establishment and anti-corporate greed "Destroyer Duck." All three are Vintage Gerber, with strong doses of social commentary, rampant and hilarious absurdity and bone-chilling moments of terror (the latter being perhaps the most remarkable part about Gerber's output, because he has stated he didn't like doing horror and monster stories, yet his superhero tales often contain more horrific elements that those written by others who are expressly trying to scare their readers.

I settled on leading with "Destroyer Duck," because not only is it one of Gerber's greatest, darkest satirical series, but it was pencilled by the equally brilliant artist Jack Kirby and inked primarly by the monstrously talented Alfredo Alcala, but the series also featured a back-up strip, "The Star Child", a horror-tinged superhero tale that ranks among some of the best work from Jerry Seigel and Val Mayerik. Finally, it certainly it firmly belongs in my "Forgotten Comics" series, as it's one of Gerber's works that are unlikely to be reprinted, because the original films were destroyed during a flood of publisher Eclipse's offices and the original art pages are either likewise destroyed and/or scattered among who-knows how many collectors.


However, as I did a little fact-checking, I came upon a webpage that contains a article that was pretty much what I had already planned on writing... and which did it better than I probably would have. Click here to visit the article about Gerber's "Destroyer Duck" at Comics Should Be Good.


As you will read on that page, "Destroyer Duck" had its origins in an effort to raise funds to help Gerber in a creator's rights dispute against Marvel Comics involving Gerber's most famous creation, Howard the Duck. To say the references to the real-world players are thinly veiled is an understatement. However, like most of Gerber's work--and all good literature--"Destroyer Duck" is both a product of its time and relevant to this very day, because the roughly three decades that have gone by between the publication of "Destroyer Duck" and now have not seen the targets of Gerber's ire become any weaker, nor has the big picture in regards to the problems he was calling attention to gotten any smaller. With the exception of some Pacman-based humor, the bad actors of "Destroyer Duck" and the reasons for its hero's rampage against the corporate power structure could just as easily been written today. (Heck, the same excuse that one of the villains use is even still being used by Middle Eastern terrorists and their apologists/supporters to justify their monstrous actions. Like all of Gerber's best work, "Destroyer Duck" highlights more than anything the depressing fact that the more things change, the more they stay exactly as crappy as they've always been.

The eight issues of "Destroyer Duck" may not be easy to find, but they are worth tracking down, if you are interested in reading some of the best work Steve Gerber had to offer, as well as seeing some of the greatest late-career artwork by the legendary Jack Kirby.

Why HE Draws

A column from Marlon Mohammed. He discusses, among other things, where repeated capitulation to Muslim histronics can lead.

Muslims who feel like they’re being “discriminated” against by the campaign to draw Mohammed are wrong. They’re merely being held to the same standards as all other religious groups in America.

Why I Will Draw Mohammed

A cool post series at Carfax Abbey

Matthew Coniam has been posting some very interesting and informative material about long-defunct movie studio Monogram. Some of their movies from the 1930s and 1940s helped rekindle my love for film, after suffering burn-out following my stint as a paid reviewer in the early 1990s, and Comiam's postings during his "Monogram Month" have given me all sorts of information about this long gone entity I never knew.

Click here to read this informative series.