Tuesday, August 11, 2009 It's Called "Coveting"

I'm bored, so I'm thinking about stuff I would buy if I was still employed. That is, in addition to all the DVD's I've already mentioned. (I did manage to pick up Venture Bros. Season 3 used for a great price, though not on Blu-ray - I had to "acquire" the soundtrack in mp3 format through *cough cough* other means.)



There's a lot of geek t-shirt sites around, but Last Exit to Nowhere offers, IMHO, the best movie-related designs. Their shirts feature logos for places, products, and corporations that only exist in cult films. For the most part, the weathered prints are subtle enough that their geekish origins are only recognizable to fellow cognoscenti, making them perfect for those occasions when you don't feel like shouting your nerdosity from the rooftops. I'm in love with the WGON TV t-shirt inspired by the original Dawn of the Dead, though the Enter the Dragon shirt and The Thing hoodie are making serious plays for my affection as well.

The downside is the price. £18 each for the shirts, £30 for the hoodie, plus postage from the UK. Yikes.



Warner Brothers has been experimenting with "burn on demand" DVD's for titles deemed not popular enough for regular production. One of their latest offerings is Urgh! A Music War, a classic punk & New Wave concert film featuring the likes of Echo & the Bunnymen, XTC, Dead Kennedys, the Cramps, Pere Ubu, the Police, and Klaus Nomi. According to reports, this is the full-length version with the Gary Numan performance intact (it's been missing from all recnt broadcasts of the film). With Warner Archive's current 5-for-$50 deal, it's hard for me to resist picking up Urgh! and a few other titles (such as Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, a made-for-tv horror movie that traumatized my brother as a kid). If they ever offer Dark of the Sun or Hickey & Boggs, I'm succumbing regardless of my employment situation.



In a previous post on movies that are still MIA on DVD, I mentioned my love for the old Saint films. Well, it turns out that all eight of the 30's and 40's Saint programmers are available as two Spanish box sets and a single French collection. The prices aren't too bad, but postage to the US is killer. Shipping from Amazon.fr is about ten bucks cheaper than that from the Spanish site, but I understand that French DVD's of English-language films routinely have forced subtitles. Ah, well. Maybe these films are working their way through Europe and will come out in the UK soon.



I'm a huge fan of the "illustrator" style of comic art, pioneered by giants like Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, maintained by the likes of Frank Frazetta and John Severin, and carried on today by creators such as Mark Schultz and Frank "Bosoms" Cho. I love the realistic figures, carefully rendered backgrounds, and cinematic compositions. Exaggerated cartoony styles work great for superhero books, but to my mind nothing suits adventure strips better than the old school.

Al Williamson is one of my favorites in this field. His work greatly inspired George Lucas in the creation of Star Wars, and Lucas repaid the favor by tapping Williamson to do the Star Wars comic strip. Aside from his work for LucasFilm, Williamson is probably best known for his long association with Flash Gordon. A new volume, Al Williamson's Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic, collects all of Williamson's work on the space opera saga. Included are the comics he drew for King Features in the 1960's, his adaptation of the 1980 film, and a mini-series done for Marvel in the 90's. I have the original movie adaptation volume; it was printed in color, and I'm told the art looks even better in black-and-white.

Hopefully, Williamson's work with the late Archie Goodwin on Secret Agent X-9 will also be collected in affordable volumes sometime soon.



I suppose I can just add these items to my Xmas list, assuming that my loved ones will still have their jobs come the holidays. Otherwise, I'm gonna have to start selling blood or something.