Diamonds in the rough make life worth living (and comics worth reading)

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Milo (blogofthenorthstar.com)

(If you have any conception of Jonah Hex based on the 2010 film, try to forget it before considering this article.)

With a site that aims to cover exemplary hotbloodedness wherever it may lurk in pop culture, you’d think I would have written about Westerns by now, but I haven’t. Not for a lack of interest, mind you. Not at all.

DC Comics recently unveiled their new megacomic promotional event meant to drive sales with a mildly sad obsession over continuity, The New 52. The idea is to have 52 DC Comics titles restart at issue #1. You know, because renumbering comics grabs peoples’ attention. 52 times, even.

One DC relaunch that stands apart from the superhero fair is All Star Western, a Western comic anthology that hasn’t hit the presses since 1972. Western comics, in 2011?! They’re not as popular in the United States as they once were. But there is a 70 issue run of Jonah Hex ending this year, which is being retooled into the All Star Western revival.

Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti’s 7 year run on Jonah Hex is excellent. Just flipping through the first few volumes I’m reminded of how badly I need to catch up. Jonah Hex is a “hard Western,” sticking to the traditional elements of the genre without resorting to extremely quirky characters or the ham-fisted spinning of archetypes on their head in such a way to appear uniform with all other modern things that ham-fistedly spin archetypes on their head. It’s a comic that didn’t pull incredible sales numbers or get inundated with critical acclaim, but it was silently respected, a little engine that could chugging along and consistently delivering the goods. Face Full of Violence contains the first six issues of Jonah Hex. It’s a trade paperback I highly recommend.

You may be wondering: is the new All Star Western promising? I don’t know, not really. It retains the same writers who’ve dutifully stuck with Jonah Hex since 2005, but a lot of what made that comic great is now gone. Instead of having self-contained issues which subtly build up a larger story, the format has shifted to more traditional long-form storytelling. In addition, Jonah Hex goes to the 19th-century equivalent of Gotham City, future home of Batman, where he awkwardly “teams up” with the doctor who will be the founder of Arkham Asylum. One of the best things about Jonah Hex is how off the beaten path it was from everything else DC Comics was putting out at the time, and now it seems the game plan is to parlay its success into something that both feeds off of and feeds into DC Comics’ superhero IP. So far, I can’t see beyond the crass marketing behind that creative decision.

Blaxploitation and Black Cinema: Four Great Documentaries

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Milo (blogofthenorthstar.com)

For the totally uninitiated, blaxploitation is a film genre that emerged towards the end of the African-American civil rights movement. These movies featured black casts, were intended for black audiences, and considered somewhat controversial. The most recognized example of blaxploitation is also one of the first: Shaft, a 1971 movie starring Richard Roundtree and blessed with an unforgettable soundtrack by Isaac Hayes.

Blaxploitation’s influence on pop culture is vastly underappreciated, though most recently the 2009 comedic film Black Dynamite brought some well-deserved attention to it again. While the movie is great and most everyone involved in its creation is an educated connoisseur of blaxploitation, a lot of people who’ve seen it are not. When you take the genre as solely light entertainment, you lose valuable context.

Here are four excellent documentaries about black cinema I’d recommend to anyone. They’re entertaining, educational, and fair. As much as I love blaxploitation, there’s no denying it can be critiqued, and I appreciate hearing the wide spectrum of opinions about it. Between YouTube, Netflix and DVD, you should be able to watch these all. Please feel free to share your own recommendations. The history of blaxploitation is just as interesting to me as the films themselves!

Black Hollywood: Blaxploitation and Advancing An Independent Black Cinema (1984)

Is there a better way to begin an educational video than with Paul Mooney doing standup comedy? Probably not.

I really loved this documentary. It cuts a wide swath into the history of black cinema, including an excerpted performance by Sidney Poitier so powerful I had to go back and watch it twice. Now that man is a real bad motherfucker.

Black Hollywood features not only contemporary (for the time) actors, but a lot of frank discussion from other people in the moviemaking business, which I found refreshing given our current climate, which is more conducive to shallow press releases and “making-of” documentaries that are actually made after the fact. Also, Grandmaster Flash is played over the opening and ending credits. Need I say more?

Baadasssss Cinema – A Bold Look at 70′s Blaxploitation Films (2003)

This is the light and fluffy documentary of the bunch. It briskly runs under an hour and features a lot of familiar faces, including director Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson. As you might imagine, there’s a lot of discussion of Jackie Brown, Tarantino’s ode to blaxploitation and perhaps his greatest movie.

In this doc you also get to hear from blaxploitation luminaries such as Pam Grier (Jackie Brown, Coffy), Fred Williamson (Black Caesar), Gloria Hendry (Black Belt Jones), and even… Melvin Van Peebles. Which brings us to the next documentary:

How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Enjoy It) (2005)

Meet Melvin Van Peebles.

No really, you should. He’s AWESOME.

That’s the primary thing I took away from this excellent biography, which goes over his life as well as the circumstances of his movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), the most controversial blaxploitation film ever made.

Melvin Van Peebles is an artist first and foremost, and it’s a pleasure to hear about his insane, wildly productive life. This guy is an American treasure for sure.

Continuing the Van Peebles love, we finally arrive at:

Melvin Van Peebles’ Classified X (1998)

This doc gives special focus to the cultural landscape which led to blaxploitation, seen through the eyes of Melvin Van Peebles himself, the man who would eventually become so fed up that he’d write, direct, fund and star in one of the first blaxploitation movies ever made, and the most countercultural in vision.

He also traces the emergence of independent black cinema, which occurred long before the word “blaxploitation” even existed. These aren’t historical references compiled by diligent researchers, but a history of experience, related by the person who lived it, the same person who developed such a creative fire in his belly that he birthed the film deemed required viewing by the Black Panther Party.

If Van Peeble’s Sweetback is a political manifesto, then this doc serves as the preamble, providing his perspective on life and cinema before blaxploitation hit the scene, in case you weren’t around then. Or just weren’t paying attention.

His Talent has Talent: The Magnificence of Tetsuo Hara

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Milo (blogofthenorthstar.com)

Last Friday a great artist became a little older. Tetsuo Hara, best known for drawing the Fist of the North Star manga, turned 50.

Fist of the North Star was a Shonen Jump manga from the 80s, and Tetsuo Hara is only a part of what made it great. Buronson, the author of the series, and Shonen Jump editor Nobuhiko Horie generated the setting and unforgettable characters of the story. In a lot of ways, it can be considered a manufactured hit, with Nobuhiko Horie wanting to channel Tetsuo Hara’s incredible abilities towards something that would last more than a few weeks in Shonen Jump’s hellish cutthroat publishing environment. The partnership they forged lasts even to this day, as Hara followed Horie after his bitter split with Shonen Jump and drew manga for the seinen anthologies he’s managed since.

What makes Tetsuo Hara stand out? His ambitious style. There are a lot of mangaka you can refer to as “cartoonists,” but that’s too frivolous a term for someone who creates painstaking work such as this. Hara used hatching and crosshatching like many Western comic book artists of the time, though to much greater effect. Rather than adopting a pre-existing house style for drawing intense musculature, one gets the impression Hara closely studied anatomy books and bodybuilding magazines to represent his characters with maddening detail to match their otherworldly abilities.

The second part of Fist of the North Star, which takes place after Kenshiro’s final battle with Raoh, doesn’t stick out so well in most people’s memory. It’s frequently overlooked with good reason: the story is repetitive and exists purely because the success of the series created a demand for more. While Buronson and Horie’s ability to extend Fist of the North Star was far from perfect, Tetsuo Hara’s drawing got even better. When you keep in mind that he was on his sixth year of an exhausting weekly drawing schedule, his degree of improvement is downright haunting, and arguably unmatched under those circumstances.

Since then, Tetsuo Hara has continued his upward trajectory, using screentones and a greater understanding of light and shadow to cram even more detail into every page. Like a lot of artists, his pace has slowed down, but the man is still a powerhouse of awesome, having drawn nearly 100 volumes of manga and supervised many others.

Fist of the North Star was only the beginning of Hara’s commercial success. His other work is largely unknown in North America. It’s our loss, I assure you.

Blog of the North Star

For Pop Culture Thrillseekers

Monthly Archives: September 2011

Diamonds in the rough make life worth living (and comics worth reading)

Blaxploitation and Black Cinema: Four Great Documentaries

His Talent has Talent: The Magnificence of Tetsuo Hara