Really everything that came out in the seventies or eighties and has some appeal to thirty and fortysomething grownup nerds is being made into movies or tv series these days, isn’t it? Gatchaman is no exception and while the hardcore fan might find anything but the original anime suspect, I suspect this is really aimed at those of us who got to know it under another guise, as Battle of the Planets, bowlderised and chopped to bits as it was. Gatchaman was my first fandom, playing in the sandlot at kindergarten in the very early eighties and fighting over who got to be Mark, Jason, Tiny though not so much the princess or Keyop. Yet back then we didn’t have the slick version shown above; rather we had something like this:
video
Linda Smith: five years ago today
Five years ago Linda Smith died. She’s missed still. Here’s a collection of the best bits of her from the News Quiz. As Jeremy Hardy said five years ago: “She sort of flirted with the listener in a way”. Here you can hear how she did that.
Every little thing…
I don’t know why it popped in my head sometime last year, when it went really bad for S. and we were seriously worrying about, you know, that which you do not want to prepare for. Suddenly it just was there … “Don’t you worry about a thing … Every little thing is gonna be alright”. I don’t even like or know much Bob Marley but that was stuck in my head for most of the rest of the year.
Back then it was cynical as much as comforting, but today I can actually start to believe in it, as S. will be coming home on Saturday as a trial, spending a day at home after having been in hospital for well over six months. She’s not quite home yet, but it’s going in the right direction: getting stronger, slightly less vulnerable to infection, better prepared. It can still go wrong, but we’re much more optimistic than we were even a month ago…
Also. We’ve been married for six months today.
For S.
“Holland lacks a tradition of realistic comics”
Daily Webhead: Hal Foster Award 2011 from Michael Minneboo on Vimeo.
I don’t think I’d ever heard of the Hal Foster Award before Michael Minneboo posted about it last Tuesday, but it turns out to have been established in 1982, to honour people working in the margins of the comics industry. Last year’s winner was Klaas Knol, for his work with Lambiek comics shop, who is seen in the video above handing over the award to Mat Schifferstein, this year’s winner. Schifferstein is the co-owner and founder of Sherpa, a small press high quality publisher founded in 1985 which has both encouraged local talents like Bert van der Meij and Lian Ong, as well as translated new work from creators like Muñoz and Sampayo, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Sherpa has also been important as a reprint publisher, e.g. reprinting the newspaper science fiction strip Arman & Ilva (Thé Tjong-Khing & Lo Hartog van Banda), in my opinion one of the best sf strips ever created. Sherpa’s catalogue tends to lean towards a traditional sort of comic: well crafted, realistic art, proper storytelling.
Other than you might expect, this sort of comic is not very commercial in the Netherlands. Most people think of comics as, well, comic: the three panel gag strip from the newspaper, the weekly Donald Duck magazine or even series like Asterix being what most people will encouter as comics. There is a market for action-adventure comics here, but it’s dominated by translations, usually from France, with titles like Largo Winch, XIII or Thorgal.
In his acceptance speech Mat Schifferstein decries this lack of a naturalist tradition in Dutch comics. He argues that the Dutch always went more for humouristic strips than for the sort of realistic adventure strips Hal Foster is a good example of, that while even twenty years ago there were still artists like Hans Kresse or Thé Tjong-Khing creating this sort of work and finding an audience for it, this is no longer the case today. He hopes therefore that his win, with the help of “the well-oiled Lambiek P.R. machine”, will be a clarion call for attention within the Netherlands for the realistic adventure comic.
I would hope so too, as I do like that sort of comic, but I can’t really think of any current Dutch artist working in this tradition. The people he mentioned came out of the world of the newspaper strip where, just like elsewhere in the world, there’s no little room for adventure strips. As far as I know the only Dutch creators still doing this sort of strip are Minck Oosterveer and Willem Ritsier, on Nikki Saxx and Zodiak, both for De Telegraaf and both having to make do with the usual three panel space alloted any comic. They work wonders in this limited space, but it hardly compares to a Hal Foster…