John Dolmayan‘s personal comic collection.
He has started a comic-shop called Torpedo comics.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Comic art update!
I uploaded some new art into my gallery.
An unpublished cover design for Powers vol 2 #1. Powers, if you don’t know already, is a police procedural set in a world populated with superheroes. Written by Brian Michael Bendis and illustrated in a beautiful cartoony style by Michael Avon Oeming, this series attained cult status while being published by Image comics, and then went on to be published by Marvel. Bendis’s Snap-crackle-pop dialogues have never been utilised better – this is where his ear for streetspeak, honed by the indie Goldfish and Jinx, has attained a balance with his super-hero writing. There are numerous detractors to Bendis who might think otherwise, but the man has oodles of talent. And what can I say about Oeming’s artwork? He’s from the less-is-more school, relying on a minimalist style to bring out every aspect of superhero glitz and cop grittiness. Highly recommended!
A Cameron Stewart/Guy Davis Catwoman page. For most of the nineties, the character of Catwoman was a confused criminal who would apparently be anybody – right from a CIA agent to a dominatrix to a cat burglar, and all of this while sporting an impossible, exploitative cheesecake look. It took a writer named Ed Brubaker to take the character back to basics. Along with artist Darwyn Cooke, Catwoman was relaunched with a new costume and a coherent motivation. While Cooke left, a number of artists like Cameron Stewart, Scott Morse and Brad Rader took over – all of them excellent storytellers and bearing unique cartoony styles that in no way focussed on making the character bootylicious just to add to fanboy appeal. Of these, I have a special affection for Cameron Stewart’s style. His inks on Guy Davis’s layouts have an inherent simplicity to them, and yet there is this unique level of dynamism to the sequences that leaps out of the pages.
An Akira colour page. This is an airbrushed page from Akira, the seminal manga by Katsuhiro Otomo, painted by Steve Oliff on xeroxes of Otomo’s art. The Epic reprints of Akira in the eighties had some of the most vibrant colour schemes ever seen in American comics at that time. ( Lynn Varley’s colours on Ronin might be the only ones that could match up to them). I bought this from Steve personally at Super-con 2007. I was one of the first to reach his table, and nearly crapped my pants seeing the stack of Akira pages by him. I must have pored through about 30-odd pages before I saw this one, and immediately took it out. Because I was tremendously short of money, this was the only one I got, and Steve, while autographing it, said “that’s one of my favourites.” I thought he was saying that just for the heck of it. The next day, I was hanging around near his table again, and there was a bigger crowd near him. Steve saw me, and told the people around him, “That guy got a good one.” Then he said he wanted to see the piece once again for the last time. *grin* I hung around with Steve for some more time, and he talked to me about Tony Salmons art, apparently he was a big fan of Salmons and was looking around for the Marvel Fanfare that had the only DD story that Tony did. I plan to buy some more Akira art from Steve the next time around.
An X-men page by Alan Davis and Paul Neary that features one of the earliest appearances of the character X-23 into the Marvel universe, and a page from Another Nail, an Elseworlds story by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer. I love the first page because of the beautifully designed page – Alan Davis is a genius, in case you didn’t know, and some of my earliest memories of reading Batman is associated with Davis’s art from Batman and the Outsiders and Detective Comics. You will notice that the panel design on the X-men page kind of resonates with the chaotic image of broken glass from the first panel. Simply amazing! The page from Another Nail is special because it has Davis drawing almost all of the JLA ( except for Batman and Green Arrow). Note the panel where Phantom Stranger is fading away – when i saw the scans on the site where I got it from, I thought the inker had used stipple to come up with that effect. ( Stipple being the art term wherein the artist uses dots to introduce depth and shade into a piece ) To my surprise, it turned out to be a different method altogether – some of the nice little techniques one picks up from watching a virtuoso inker’s work first-hand.
And oh, these pages were the ones that got me a new friend, so they are even more special!
Coming soon, “Mammoth Book” anthologies of Crime comics, horror comics, and new manga.
I was reading the Kaiju Shakedown blog right now, Grady Hendrix’s neat blog on Asian movies ( which I found thanks to adgy‘s recommendation), and I found news about the US release of Yoji Yamada’s Love and Honor.
The first Yoji Yamada movie I saw was Twilight Samurai, and it’s brilliant, kind of an antithesis to the swordplay-heavy, heroic-samurai flicks that one is normally familiar with. It’s more of a look at the Japanese society, which had its own caste system during the late Edo period, primarily divided into the high-born, arrogant Samurai class and the lower, poverty-ridden peasants . Tasogare Seibei, the “twilight samurai” in the film deals with his everyday life as a grain-store clerk in the employ of the clan-head, deflecting sarcasm from his fellow samurai because of his poverty and his lack of interest in socializing. The only link he has to his status is the katana he owns and the *knowledge* of the fact that he is a samurai. He has to bear the responsibility of rearing two children provide medicine for his senile mother, a herculean task considering his 50-koku salary. The re-appearance of his childhood friend Tomoe who’s been recently divorced from her abusive but rich husband foresees a change in his life, but Seibei’s sense of honour and responsibility is put to the test by the series of events that follow.
After finishing Twilight Samurai, I tried very hard to find out more of Yoji Yamada’s movies. Apparently Twlight Samurai is the first of a thematic trilogy dealing with Samurai life, the second being The Hidden Blade and the third Love and Honor. Saw the latter in my flight to San Francisco from Singapore. Haven’t found The Hidden Blade yet. According to the Kaiju Shakedown blog, Love and Honor is being released in only ONE THEATER in the US, the ImaginAsian in NY City. Sasi, I think you will miss it, but if you are still coming to India, you can borrow the DVD from me. Please, please watch it. It’s a fantastic piece of work and is more of a love story set in a samurai setting. And while you’re at it, add the Kaiju Shakedown blog to your feeds.
* * *
Another thing that came to mind today was a snippet of an interview I caught with Govinda, just before Partner was being released sometime in the middle of this year. We were playing the Maahi-Sona- game on TV – you switch channels and place bets on which channel you will come across a Yash Chopra-Karan Johan blockbuster song, eight times out of ten, it would turn out to be the Zoom channel that would be playing Where’s the Party tonight or Rock and Roll Soniye or That’s the way Maahi ve at any given point of time in the day. But this one time, there was an interview going on. Salman Khan was interviewing Govinda, both of them being co-stars in the then-to-be-released Partner, and there was much back-slapping and bonhomie being radiated from the screen. Apparently the two actors got along famously, and the interview was more of a conversation and an mutual ass-kissing experience at the same time.
And then it started getting interesting.
Salman Khan asked Govinda, “Ok, tell me, who’s your favourite Khan in the industry?” No prizes for guessing who he thought the answer would be.
Govinda: “My favourite Khan would have to be Yusuf Khan.”
“Yusuf Khan? You mean Dilip Kumar?”
“Yes, the greatest actor this industry has ever known. The best actor I’ve seen on screen.”
“Ok, who’s your second-most favourite Khan?”
“That would be Mehboob Khan, Mother India is a landmark film in Indian history, and his contribution to films cannot be ignored by any director.”
“Right. Your third favourite Khan?”
“Kader Khan, without whom ninety percent of the films of the eighties wouldn’t have such magnificent dialogues. And I cannot even start counting how many actors owe their career to Kader Khan’s dialogues, including myself.”
At this point, I was feeling very warm and fuzzy. I could hug Govinda, regardless of whether he had deliberately made up the answers on the spot just to show his knowledge of film history or something. Hmmm, why did I remember this today, of all days? And why am I writing about it? Hmmm.
Weekend update
Been a long while since I did one of these.
- Udatta-da landed up in Hyderabad on Thursday and stayed over at my place Friday night, chilling out ( I think! ) to pseudo-Assamese food, BT’s This Binary Universe and Craig Thompson’s Blankets. Try and make it here a little more frequently, U.
- Watched Sekhar Kammula’s Godavari on Sunday afternoon. I did not enjoy Anand, his earlier film all that much. It was pretty tackily editted ( Kammula himself admits that) and the storyline did not feel complete in some way. Godavari on the other hand is much more well-developed in terms of production values and scriptwriting. The cribs – a slightly zonked-out narrative towards the end, where the director ( who’s also the writer, btw ) while trying to have a proper ending to the story, introduces a lot of subplots and does not end up resolving them properly.
- I also watched Mahesh Babu’s Atithi in the middle of the week. What a mess of a movie! It’s almost as if somebody made a parody of a Mahesh Babu film starring Mahesh Babu. Methinks the guy needs to rethink his image-oriented approach to his films, which even the director admits was part of his approach to making Atithi.
- Played the first two chapters of this old, old, OLD game called The Longest Journey. Now while I suck at adventure games, I was eager to play this one because I had played the demo when in college. Repeated attempts to find this had resulted in failure, until The Serious One passed me a copy of his original box-set ( apparently, he had picked it up at a Rediff.com sale, of all places). Now the aforementioned copy had steadfastly refused to play when I did a full install, but this weekend, I tried a partial install and whaddyaknow, it worked! Really enjoyable game, this, and is more like reading a fantasy novel than playing a game. The only grouse I have ( and this is against all adventure games, in general) is, why the eff can’t I solve the puzzles? Gah!
- Also finished the first volume of Spirou yesterday. Very very entertaining stuff. There are four stories in all in the first volume, each with a different bent. Starts off with ‘The Robot Blueprint’, which is standard fare, with Spirou and Fantasio pursuing and being pursued by a bunch of crooks who are after a blueprint of a deadly weapon developed by Professor Samovar. Some hilarious Herge-ian moments ensue in course of a car chase, where Spirou’s car runs into a bullock cart carrying a bale of hay. Just when I thought that the other stories would also be about capers and foil-a-wicked-plan-type story, there’s Spirou in the ring, where our intrepid hero has to tackle a boxing challenge from Big Bert, the neighbourhood bully. ( I found out that the names of the supporting characters have been changed in the translation. Poildur is the name of the bully in the French version.) ‘Spirou Rides a Horse’ is a short, howlarious story of, well, Spirou riding a spirited horse, one that takes lessons in jumping from a frog. The last of the lot ‘Spirou meets the Pygmies’ is much longer tale, that starts with a stray leopard taking up lodgings with our hero, which leads to a trip to the island of Rungapunga, a place where two pygmy tribes have a war going on. The resolution to this particular war is something that’s completely bowled me over! can’t wait to start on the Count of Cul-de-Sac, the next volume in the series.
- A friend offered to sell me his copies of Jordi Bernet’s Torpedo reprints at cost price. Considering that Catalan Communications, the company that reprinted part of the Torpedo series is now bankrupt, with the books long out of print, this offer makes me want to do a war-dance. Woo hoo!
- Once can hardly thank Moser-Baer enough for coming up with The Complete Mind Your Language and selling DVDs for 99 Rs each. Am glad I didn’t put in too much effort into buying MYL after the first set I got off National Market refused to work…
Some questions from Infinite Rampage
Some non-googleable questions from Infinite Rampage – The comics quiz. You might have to click on the images to see them full-size.