The Return of Stickman #1396

This is the last of my "Heavy Metal Fatherhood" series. For the story that inspired this exercise in dead horse flogging click here.

The Comic Critic Reviews The Hunger Games

The Return of Stickman #1395

I meant to post this strip yesterday. Sorry about forgetting. I was a bit busy finishing off some deadlines to make room for an upcoming project. There is one more strip in this sequence coming. I'd wanted it to cap out the week. Maybe I'll post it over the weekend. Mu wa ha ha ha. Don't count on it though.

The Return of Stickman #1394

Yes, this is a continuation of a couple of strips I did last week. I meant to post them all last week, but I got wonderfully busy with immediate-turn-around paying projects.

The Comic Critic Reviews Forbidden Planet

If you’ve ever read my system for rating movies, you’d know that I give extra points for robots. Other sci-fi robots and I might have necked in the backseat at the drive-in, but I confess—I lost my geek cherry to Robby the Robot. Yes, he was in amazing color, but his charisma goes far beyond that. Far from looking like he was designed by socially awkward engineers in a garage (like so many robots before him), Robby looks like a Madison Avenue marketing group designed him. Visually, Robby set the bar a lot higher for what might be expected. (Vast improvements followed soon after.) And Robby was just one of the ingredients that made this movie great. What truly thrilled me as a young boy was the invisible monster. When his footprints appeared in the flattened earth, I held my breath. And I was riveted when he, caught in the energy beams, could be seen. With a little humor, a little romance, a lot of great visuals and action, Forbidden Planet captured my imagination then. It still grabs me now.

The Return of Stickman #1393

My apologies for the delay in this sequence of strips. I had a series of immediate turn-around deadline requests this week that consumed my time. Here is one that will hold you over until Monday.

The Comic Critic Reviews Alien

I saw Alien in 1979 when I was a foreign exchange student in Japan. Because we attended school six days a week, the only time I went to the movies was Sunday afternoons. You’d think that the theater would be crowded, but such was not the case because our hamlet got only one new movie a month. By the time I had a Sunday afternoon to myself, Alien had been in town for a while, and I was one of half a dozen people there. Some might describe Alien as a “horror” film, but I classify it as a “terror” film. I remember walking out into the bright sun, my skin still buzzing from the chills and thrills of the movie, feeling very disassociated from the warmth of the day, oddly enhanced by feeling out of my element in a foreign country. I’d felt this way once before. I was eight or nine and had just seen an afternoon television broadcast of The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price. As the blue skies tried to warm the deep chill in my bones both times, I thought, “So this is what it means to have the friggin’ daylights scared out of you.”