Category Archives: Other Media
Fire And Ice
I try to keep Longbox Graveyard laser-focused on Silver and Bronze Age superhero comics, but I do take the occasional detour, whether I’m looking at the latest in digital comics technology, reviewing a popular comic series of the present century, or lauding a contemporary animated series for emulating the kinds of comics I loved in the 1970s.
I also have an affection for Conan the Barbarian — in both his literary and Marvel Comics forms — and this week’s subject at Longbox Graveyard owes an obvious debt to Robert E. Howard‘s immortal fantasy hero, which is reason enough to depart a bit from my normal purview.
The year was 1983, a year after Arnold Schwarzenegger cemented his international celebrity by playing Conan on the big screen, and the public was hungry for sword & sorcery action. Nowadays, it seems like every Christmas brings us a Lord of the Rings or a Hobbit or some other fantasy epic, but thirty years ago — before the advent of computer-generated special effects — bringing fantasy properties to the silver screen was a dicey proposition.
A pioneer in adult filmic fantasy was Ralph Bakshi, who (along with Don Bluth) was about the only American film producer of the era trying to make a go of feature animation outside of Walt Disney Studios. Sensing that the time was right for a big screen sword & sorcery epic, Bakshi partnered with his longtime friend, the legendary artist Frank Frazetta, to make Fire And Ice. No stranger to fantasy, Bakshi had already created Wizards (1977) and an incomplete version of Lord of the Rings (1978) using the same rotoscoping process that would drive Fire And Ice, where live-action footage was traced over by artists to create the final animated product.
Fire And Ice had an impressive comic book and fantasy pedigree — thanks to a script by Marvel Comics scribes Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway — and of course Frank Frazetta’s DNA is thoroughly entwined with fantasy art and comic books. But despite lofty ambitions, Fire And Ice is never more than an average movie, mostly owing to a predictable story and on-the-nose characterizations. The plot is a straight-ahead battle to the death between kingdoms of fire and … uh … ice (bet you didn’t see that coming) with a loin-clouted hero and a princess in peril caught in between. Our cast never surprises — they are Noble Savage, Evil Wizard, Mysterious Warrior, and Kidnapped Princess for the entirety of the film’s 81-minute run time. The on-screen action is sometimes diverting, but the score is forgettable, and the voice work merely adequate (with Steve Sandor’s anachronistic Darkwolf somehow the best of the bunch).
In today’s era of plentiful, big-budget fantasy movies, there’s little to recommend Fire And Ice. Even the Frank Frazetta connection is misleading, as the film’s budget didn’t permit Frazetta’s gorgeous, painterly visions to come to life. While rotoscoping conveys convincing motion, the action is mostly confined to a few lesser brawls and running (endless running!) through fantasy backgrounds painted by getting-their-start artists like Dinotopia’s James Gurney and “Painting With Light” artist Thomas Kinkade.
No, the main reason to watch Fire And Ice all these decades later — and the reason I’m covering it here at Longbox Graveyard — is that is is fun for fans to play “Spot-The-Frazetta.” The film’s quality doesn’t approach Frazetta’s painting and illustration work, but Frazetta was a full and committed collaborator in this film, and it’s fun to see his compositions, set pieces, and favorite visual concepts peek out from behind the film’s curtains.
The movie opens with some Frazetta pencil art that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else (and could well be concept art for the film).
Princess Teegra is a classic Frazetta girl come to life, and watching her roll around is pretty much the main event of Fire And Ice.
Much of the film’s suspense comes from hoping Teegra will bounce out of the six-square-inches-of-silk that passes for her wardrobe. (Sadly, the costume’s functional quality proves as unlikely as Teegra’s anatomy).
I think I spot Teegra’s origins in Frazetta’s “At The Earth’s Core.”
There have to be sub-human savages to threaten our girl. There. Have. To. Be.
Frazetta, of course, painted exceptional savages.
There are a couple monsters, the best of which is this swamp dragon.
John Carter encountered a similar beastie in Frazetta’s spectacular pen-and-ink work on “A Fighting Man of Mars.”
Our noble savage faces down some wolves, which really isn’t much …
… but it’s interesting to see how even that scene’s palett was likely translated from Frazetta’s “Wolfmoon.”
Darkwolf is the prototypical Frazetta barbarian.
That pose above reminds of Frazetta’s “Berserker” …
… and our last look at Darkwolf is even easier to recognize …
… as Frazetta’s iconic “Death Dealer”
All of which is fun, but only you can decide if this is enough to schedule your own viewing of Fire And Ice. The movie is readily available on home video, via Netflix streaming (where I recently re-watched it, for the first time since seeing it on it’s original run). The full movie is even on YouTube. There are worse excuses for revisiting Frank Frazetta’s art, and who knows … maybe I missed a frame where Teegra’s silk bikini failed to protect her virtue.
Maybe.
NEXT WEDNESDAY: #88 The Last Days of Superman
Related articles
- #83 Farewell To The King (longboxgraveyard.com)
- Frazetta (somecamerunning.typepad.com)
- #84 Top Ten Instagram Superheroes! (longboxgraveyard.com)
- Fire and Ice (trolldens.blogspot.com)
- #77 Longbox Graveyard Holiday Comic Book Gift Guide (longboxgraveyard.com)
- funny frazetta (gocomics.typepad.com)
- Friday Night Flix: Fire and Ice (modernborefare.com)
- The Cavalier Fantasies of Frank Frazetta (tor.com)
- #90 Red Sonja (longboxgraveyard.com)
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Freakout Friday!
There must be something in the water — or maybe Halloween and the U.S. election are driving people nuts. Either way, I’ve encountered three different freakouts in the last couple days. They’re nothing that rises to the level of a regular blog, but I’d like to share them anyway, in this first (and probably last) Longbox Graveyard Freakout Friday!
Freakout The First — Twitter Freak!
I had a spirited exchange on Twitter yesterday:
Yes, friends, it is true — I am guilty of the unpardonable sin of Twitter unfollowing. Call a cop. I went back and read ToxicStormComic’s stream and he was indeed a dullard, which is why I unfollowed him. That he also proved to be a knucklehead was an unanticipated bonus.
Toxie’s insult doesn’t upset me at all — it’s kind of funny, which is why I RT’d it to my stream yesterday. It’s also a milestone of a sort because it’s the first time in the eighteen months I’ve been online as Longbox Graveyard that I’ve gotten flamed, which means I am doing something right (or maybe very, very wrong).
I’ve been flamed! Oh no!
I suppose this is a chance for me to lay out the Longbox Graveyard Twitter policy.
I am quick to hire and quick to fire on Twitter. I’ll follow most anyone, but I’ll also bounce you if you’re boring, or needy, or posting about stuff that might be very important but isn’t interesting to me. It’s not personal. I get followed and unfollowed all the time and that’s the way it goes. My rules are pretty much as I outlined to Mr. Toxic above — if you’re boring, or a knucklehead, or not following back, you get plonked.
It’s the “not following back” part that requires more explanation, because in this I am (gasp! horror!) hypocritical. There are plenty of people who follow me that I don’t follow back, but there isn’t a single person I follow who is itself not a follower. No exceptions.
The reason for this is twofold. First, the primary reason I’m on Twitter in the first place is to drive traffic to Longbox Graveyard. If you aren’t listening to my feed, I can’t do that. Second, I’m also here to actively engage with people … and anyone who has tweeted at me knows that I always make an effort to tweet back. Again, if you aren’t following me, you aren’t engaging with me. I completely understand that there are pros and celebrities who can’t possibly follow back everyone who follows them and that’s fine. I just don’t follow those people. I need you to follow me and (hopefully) engage with me or I’m not interested in your Twitter stream. So if you want me to follow you, do one of those two things.
(And Toxic, baby, if you are reading this, I am taking my “kiss and make up” offer off the table. I reviewed your stream and you’re still boring).
Freakout The Second — Dark Iron Man!
I expect you’ve seen the trailer for Iron Man 3 by now:
It didn’t do a lot for me, but these first trailers for effects pictures are usually cobbled together from whatever footage is ready to show, and it is a rare first trailer that really blows my doors off. Half the time I don’t look at trailers at all. Iron Man 3? Sold. I will be there first weekend. Why spoil it with a trailer?
Anyway.
A favorite sport is tormenting the Ulm, my day job partner-in-crime, and a comics guy from way back (you may remember him from our Deathlok review, or our Top Ten Manliest Superheroes list, or maybe you were there when I moderated Ulm’s Malibu Comics panel at San Diego Comic-Con).
Ulm even loved Iron Man when he had a NOSE!
The Ulm loves Iron Man. He loved Iron Man even back in the bad old George Tuska days, and he loves Iron Man even more in his eponymous movie and The Avengers, too (we don’t often speak of Iron Man 2). After reading mainstream press reaction to this “dark and grim” Iron Man I thought it was a chance to give Ulm the needle, as I know he loves the lighter tone of the big Marvel pictures, and is worn out by the sometimes dour tone of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films.
I sent Ulm a link to the trailer and Vulture’s article about it, and I was not disappointed in the Ulm’s epic and sarcastic return rant:
Whew. Just saw the new Iron Man trailer. I’m really glad they got rid of that “snarky humor action adventure” trope. No AC/DC, no quips, no fast cars, no stripping stewardesses. Finally, the pointless debris of “entertainment” has been discarded in favor of the grim truth that lies beneath the surface of every comic book character.
Now we see the Iron Man we have all been waiting for – a serious man nursing his regrets. Now is the time to rip the veil from Tony’s destructive alcoholism and make him pay for his errant and violent ways.
Think how interesting it will be to have a bed-ridden Tony Stark. Personally, I’d like to see maybe 2/3 of the running time with Tony in a coma because of the Mandarin. While he slumbers, ill of heart and mind, let us penetrate Tony’s conscience; his dark dreams and secret torments. Let us see strippers morph into Tony’s mother while he shrieks into the uncaring void. Let us see the living embodiment of Tony’s father through the metaphoric transformation of a bottle of Jack Daniels. Is the disembodied voice coming from the whisky really Howard Stark — or is it the Mandarin — or could it be … Tony himself?
In the course of Iron Man 3, I am eagerly anticipating that Mr. Stark will let down those closest to him, but ultimately learn respect for others (especially women) and, more importantly, for himself. He will learn that his rich and famous lifestyle has actually been a waste of his human potential to love – and be loved.
As the audience, we will travel this dark road with him. We too shall feel our sanity slipping away beneath the many hued rings and accusatory dialogue of the Mandarin. We shall emerge not just entertained, not just captivated, but also that much wiser about ourselves.
Now is the time to transform a so-called “enjoyable” popcorn matinee into a darkly tinged tone poem that transforms the withered trope of “superheroism” into a penetrating view of the subconscious “Iron Man” within us all.
Can’t wait.
– Chris Ulm
Awesome, Ulmster. Pure awesome.
Freakout The Third — By Crom!
About the only thing I thought less likely than a John Carter sequel was another Conan movie, but today comes news that a new Conan picture may be coming in 2014, with Arnold Schwarzenegger returning to the role that made him a star.
Now, I’m not crazy about Arnold as my favorite barbarian, which I made clear in one of my first columns here at Longbox Graveyard … but if Arnold is what it takes to get Conan back on the big screen, then I’m ready to make peace with him. Besides, in a twisted sort of way, “Old Arnold” may be better than “Young Arnold” for this role.
Hear me out.
First, there is some indication that Arnold is ready to start acting his age (while still being superhuman), as evinced by this trailer for The Last Stand.
It won’t make anyone forget Terminator, but it doesn’t look terrible. The Last Stand might even be fun.
Further, there is precedent for “Old Conan.” The very first Robert E. Howard Conan story — The Phoenix on the Sword — is about an older Conan, now king of Aquilonia, coming to realize that it is an uneasy head that wears the crown. There was even a fifty-five issue run of King Conan from Marvel Comics back in the 1980s, looking at Conan’s adventures at the end of his life (and now I find myself interested in completing that run).
Arnold has also been slapped around a bit lately, losing his marriage after a sordid sex scandal (in a career that seen quite a few of them), and also proving to have been a failure as Governor of California. Maybe he’s ready to play a world-weary barbarian king. In any case, I’m going to be optimistic about this one, and enjoy my little freakout that Conan may be back, despite the recent big screen failure of the franchise.
Who knows? If the producers listen to the foolproof advice I offered for making a good Conan picture we may finally get the barbarian movie we deserve!
Here endeth the freakouts.
Be good to each other.
(And feel free to admonish me for my TwitterCrimes in comments, below)
Related articles
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Guide To Comic Books On Instagram
Instagram isn’t the exclusive domain of hipsters who want to share digital photos that look like they were snapped in 1967.
OK, that’s exactly what it is.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! I’ve found Instagram to be an effective platform for sharing comic book images, too, and here’s your guide to how I do it!
Instagram is a legitimate success story — an thirteen-person operation that sold to Facebook for a billion dollars, which means it’s more than a way for young people to lean into frame, glue their heads to each other, and make the duck face.
Duck Face (Common Version)
Instagram grew like crazy owing to its interface and ease of use, allowing anyone with a mobile connection to snap a photo, apply a nostalgic filter, and then share it to a stream of friends and semi-stranger internet acquaintances, who can then like it or comment on it as we have come to expect in this age of social media public posturing. With built-in connections to Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Flickr, and Tumblr, it’s small wonder the service quickly spread its tendrils into every corner of the social graph.
At it’s heart, Instragram is about snapping pictures of people and things and sharing them with friends, which means it works just fine if you want to send out photos of your latest visit to your friendly local comic shop with your pals. Cosplayers and comic bookish in-store displays are also perfect fodder for this service.
It’s when you want to share images from inside comic books themselves that the system gets a little tricky … and guess how I best like to use it?
That’s right, I most like using Instagram to share individual comic book panels and excerpted images of comic book covers.
And here is where you start to bump up against the limitations of Instagram. To be fair, these aren’t limitations so much as they are focus — remember, the success of Instagram is largely down to doing a few things, and doing them well. Their system doesn’t pretend to be an image excerpting or editing platform, so unless you just want to snap photos of comic book covers or page interiors, you will be working uphill against the system trying to frame images just the way you want.
This is because Instagram is a mobile service (although they have recently rolled out a website). I can’t edit or upload images directly to Instagram — it requires that I take a photo, or select something from my camera roll. Even though I’ve got a big collection of comic book screen shots on my computer, I can’t upload them directly to Instagram. So, how have I managed to share such precise comic book images via Instagram?
Step 1: Screen Shots!
Using the screen shot functionality on my iPhone, any image can be shared to the camera roll. Once there, it can be accessed by Instagram like any other image. Of course, this doesn’t solve the issue of finding images themselves, which brings us to …
Step 2: Google Image Search!
Online image searching will turn up a wealth of Instagram-worthy images, though it can be a bit of a crap shoot if you are looking for a specific subject. Broad terms like “Kirby Captain America” will yield good results but more specific searches — like “Kirby Cat Headed Dudes From Kamandi” — may not net so great a bounty.
For more precise images, there’s …
Step 3: Pinterest!
A couple weeks ago I extolled the virtues of Pinterest for comic book images, and thanks to the Pinterest iOS app, this service has become a way station for images bound for Instagram. I warehouse my images as pins over at Pinterest, and then repurpose them on Instagram. Browsing a comprehensive Pinterest gallery — such as good ol’ Longbox Graveyard’s boards — will turn up Instagram gold. Just find the image you like, and use the in-app option to save it to your camera roll.
Step 4: Editing in Instagram
Instagram is designed to make everything look like a Polaroid. That means it is always going to grab a square image, so right away, it is going to be the enemy of rectangular comic book covers (but more about that in a moment). It’s quite good for most comic book panels, though, and you can use the zoom and position controls to get slide things around and get those parts of a panel that you like. This might include word balloons, like with cranky Gwen Stacy …
… or maybe you’ll choose to cut out the word balloons entirely, as I did on Instagram with sinister Gwen Stacy.
Step 5: Excerpting
And now we get to the most interesting part of using Instagram for comic book images — excerpting.
Given the limited view space, Instagram isn’t an ideal form for sharing covers or full-page images. It is very good, however, at grabbing parts of a comic book page or a cover.
(And now a philosophical digression)
One of the things I haven’t done very often with Instagram is share complete images, such as portraiture or pin-ups. An Alex Ross portrait of Superman is already more perfect than I can make it — the artist has already selected his subject, his composition, and the color he wants in the completed image.
It doesn’t seem right for me to slap a Polaroid frame around an otherwise finished image, throw a filter on it, and claim it as my own expression. To me, the creativity of using Instagram for comic book images is all about finding an individual element of a larger work and affording it an altered meaning or focused attention by looking at the item outside the context of the original page.
This is similar to what I’ve been doing here at Longbox Graveyard with my Panel Galleries — tracking a comic book visual cliche from book to book, or focusing on the genius of someone like Steve Ditko in rendering faces and expressions. Excerpting images in this way is every bit as much an unauthorized repurposing of the original art, so in terms of retaining the original intent of the artist, it isn’t much of an improvement over framing a complete work and pushing it out via Instagram. But in excerpting only a portion of the work, you are exercising a kind of editorial control over what you are framing, and are hopefully making an intellectual, artistic, or emotional point by showing just that image.
Instagram’s filters also let you warm up the image, cool it down, or convert it to black and white, and here we have another interesting philosophical issue. What is the true color of a comic book image? Nearly all comic book art is created in black and white, and colored by a separate artist, of varying degrees of skill, who may or may not pay attention to the desires of the pencil and ink team. Those colors are then reproduced with varying degrees of fidelity, depending on whether the image is being reproduced on newsprint, glossy paper, digitally, or otherwise.
When I reviewed Barry Windsor-Smith’s run on Conan, I felt I was seeing his artwork for the very first time, because the original run of the art in Conan didn’t permit clear reproduction of Windsor-Smith’s maniacally detailed work. It was only thanks to the better paper and more sophisticated printing processes of the Dark Horse reprints that I was able to fully appreciate Windsor-Smith’s genius … but was I really seeing the art as the artist intended? These books were digitally recolored, and in a sense they aren’t the same as the work they reprinted … but I love them, and appreciate them more than I do the same stories in their original printing.
So which is the real work?
I don’t know … but I find it interesting how this question interfaces with Instagram, which invites users to alter the look, feel, and even the intent of source art by changing the composition and coloring or original images. I prefer to think of this as practicing my editorial eye to create a not quite derivative work — a new way of looking at something that celebrates and reengages us with the original.
In this way, Instagramers aren’t so far removed from Andy Warhol …
… or more to the point, Roy Lichenstein, who was doing this kind of thing generations before we had Instagram, the internet, Longbox Graveyard, or running water!
All of which was a deeper dive than I intended, so back to the duck faces.
Duck Face (Longbox Graveyard Version)
Obviously I’m overthinking this stuff … but if I didn’t overthink stuff, there wouldn’t be a Longbox Graveyard!
But for all my overthinking, this exhausts my knowledge of using Instagram for comic book images. Except for one thing.
Step 6: Focus
This isn’t a step so much as a raison d’être. If Instagram is designed to help people share moments in their lives, then what am I sharing by pushing out hipster polaroids of Thanos?
Well … I am sharing moments in my life! Not everything on my Instagram feed is a repurposed screenshot of a comic book image. That image above of Mr. and Mrs. Thanos was snapped at my desk, after positioning my new-to-me Thanos action figure with his lady love. I don’t know about you, but it cracks me up. Look at them — so happy! She can’t stop grinning!
Or here’s a snap of my visit to my favorite comics shop, the House of Secrets in Burbank, CA.
And here’s a shot of Tom Mason, Chris Ulm, Dave Olbrich, and Scott Rosenberg just before I moderated their Malibu Comics Retrospective panel at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con.
Instagram does share the moments of my life, but I’ve chosen to focus it on the Longbox Graveyard moments of my life, like the time Batman and Batwoman got married …
… or the time I found Batman, Spock, and the Alien, together again for the first time at Phat Collectables in Anaheim.
As such, the focus of my Longbox Graveyard Instagram feed dovetails with the focus of this blog — looking at those things about comic books that continue to intrigue and delight me. Coupled with the geolocation of select images I’m also using Instagram to chronicle my travels through the (real) comic book world, when visiting shops or midnight movie debuts. I could clog it up with pictures of my family or roadside attractions or headless strippers but that would be sharing too much!
And so you’ll continue to get a lot of Spider-Man, and Master of Kung Fu, and Tomb of Dracula, and whatever else strikes my fancy, within the domain of artistic expression as I’ve set out at Longbox Graveyard!
I invite you to follow my images on Instagram by searching for Longbox_Graveyard, and let me know your own feeds in the comments, below!
NEXT WEDNESDAY: #72 The Walking Dead
Other Longbox Graveyard Comic Book Social Media Guides
- Guide To Comic Books On Pinterest
- Guide To Comics Bargains On eBay
- Top Ten Superheroes On Instagram!
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- How to Use Instagram to Promote Your Business (blogs.constantcontact.com)
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