Dall'Italia con amore

So, recently my two sisters went on a trip to Italy. I guess there were some postings on Bookface (whoch I am not on), but I did get one text, from Norma Jean, and it was goodie.

They visited a Murano glass workshop in Venice, and apparently that particular artisan was a comics fan. Norma Jean didn't tell me which specific place it was they went to, but she did send these pictures:

 Crazy, innit?

Then, today I got a flat in the mail from my sister Linda - it was an autographed print of this:

I was confused at first, becasue I thought it was something from the Murano glass place, but no -- it is from Galleria La Nuova Forma in Lanciano, yet another bed of superhero amore in Italy.

The catalog that accompanied it says this is Serigrafia a 37 passaggi di colore interventi in glitter, foglia oro, foglia argento, floccaggi e passaggio calcografico a secco which Google awkwardly translates to "Screen printing with 37 color passages interventions in glitter, gold leaf, silver leaf, flocking and dry chalcographic passage".

So, to sum up: there are fine art superheroes in Italy and I have great sisters.

 

Your moon asplodes!

A quiet moment of intense drama...

In the grand tradition of Exploding Sun and Ring of Fire and CAT. 8, the other night Wonder Wife and I dipped into the well of truly awful disaster movies, this time a big-budget version from a master of big, dumb movies, Roland Emmerich: Moonfall. And I gotta tell ya, it was big, and it was dumb. Mind-numbingly stupid. So bad I have returned to bad-movie reviewing, which I generally try to avoid.

So, the premise is that the moon is actually a mega-structure, a fact which the government has at least suspected, if not known, since 1969. It is also the site of an ongoing battle between an evil AI entity (that looks like a swarm of metal shavings) and and a good AI that is a the last remaining artifact of the alien race that actually created Earth and seeded it with what became human life. (It's a long story and not very interesting.) And for some reason it's falling out of orbit, too.

Anyhow, an intrepid disgraced ex-astronaut (who had a close encounter with the metal shavings on a mission years before), a plucky NASA ex-astronaut administrator (who was on the same mission but missed the encounter), and a wacky conspiracy theorist who seems to know more than all government scientists combined must team up to intervene in the AI battle and keep the moon from crashing into the earth as its orbit decays, although it causes a lot of trouble on the way down anyway.

There all are sorts of hijinks, including gravity doing things it doesn't do, the atmosphere doing things it doesn't do, NASA getting a space shuttle out of a museum and somehow making it spaceworthy in hours, and panicky people running and hiding and shooting at each other as things explode and crash and burn. Apparently the real astronaut serving as technical advisor would occasionally tell them "that's not really possible" but they would roll with it anyway because Movies. It's a total mess.

There was only one bright spot: Halle Berry actually tries her best to breathe life into a cardboard character speaking insipid dialog, She is working so hard I actually felt sorry for her, but she's really the only in the whole film who is acting.

Actually talking about D&D...

So,I am not going to repeat my recent lament about blogging, but I will note that although Epicurus and Talent have been pretty healthy of late, this little geeky blog has been pretty neglected. I don't know if that's because my comics/cartooning pursuits have become a bigger part of my normie life (I have an Instagram, for cryin' out loud), or because D&D and similar geeky pursuits have become more mainstream (viz: this), or what, but let's correct it with something that made my little nerdy heart sing:

So maybe you have to have had more exposure to D&D than just watching Stranger Things, but seeing an owlbear, a  treasure-chest mimic, and a gelatinous cube in a big-budget production (it's even got a Chris!) - well, I am not sure if have been this nerdily excited since the Michael Keaton Batman movie.

Unfortunately, we won't see it for another 14 months, so let's stave off creeping fascism and environmental doom at least until then, okay?

More stupid money

So, a few months back I mentioned on Epicurus that I had spent entirely too much money to acquire a musical instrument that I cannot play and that in all likelihood I will never learn to play. This tale is about spending some more stupid money, but at least this time it was on something that I am certainly well equipped to appreciate. 

This is a DC Comics house ad by the great Ira Schnapp announcing the launch of the Justice League of America in their very own comic. After three successful outings in The Brave and The Bold (numbers 28-30) in early 1960, the seminal silver age super-group got its eponymous magazine later that year.

The B&B adventures of the JLA and the earliest issues of their own comic predate the start of my reading days; I was a 12-cent silver ager and missed the "all in color for dime" era by just few years. In fact, I read most of these early stories for the first time as reprints collected in "80 pg. Giant" specials.

Nonetheless, the Justice League itself, and this ad as well, loom large in my memory of those early, heady days of discovering comics. The sensibility of the great Schnapp lettering on display here, which abounded in DC house ads and logos for many years, forms the background fabric for my visual recreation of that era. Schnapp also designed the title of the Justice League of America comic itself, something I liked so much I had it reproduced for my arm tattoos.

The cool action-figure chess game in the ad caught my fancy and the Just Imagine! headline resonated with me and has stayed with me over the years - so much so that I have even used this ad as the conceit for a speech to honors students when I was a dean. (I must not have been the only one to love it - DC used the phrase as the name of a line of early 2000s comics in which Stan Lee re-envisioned DC heroes.)

In any case, this ad, and the Justice League, have always meant a lot to me. And a couple months ago, having a little extra folding green, I did something for the first time ever: I bought a comic as a collectible artifact and not as reading material.

Through the good offices of Heritage Online Auctions, I successfully obtained a copy of  Justice League of America #1. It's in pretty poor shape - you can see the corner wear, water spot, and creases even in the picture above - but frankly, that's the shape most of my comics were in most of the time. (As a friend of mine observed after having some comics slabbed, the highest-graded comics are those that were loved the least.) Because it was in such sorry condition, I got for just relatively stupid money - chump change, really - and not the $10,000 or more that a near-mint copy would go for. (That would be totally nuts.) But I am really happy for it, and it holds pride of place in the living room.

I don't think this purchase will send me down the road of acquisition - I like my life a lighter than that - but having this one item gives me a great deal of pleasure.