The Return of Stickman #1575

If you have can locate it, the slide show some of the museum offerings are pretty interesting. Some of the wax figures are still recognizable. Others will puzzle you for a while. I like wax museums and dioramas. But I'm not sure I'd have the courage to walk through this one.

The Return of Stickman #1574

I drew this strip a few weeks ago back when the news story first broke. It's been sitting on my desk waiting its turn. Good luck finding the news story that inspired it. Tonight will be the second gather of an online drawing group: Epic Sketch Time.

The Return of Stickman #1573

Yikes! It's been over a month since I did my last Stickman strip. I've been wicked busy doing paperwork this last month. It's been a bit of a drag because I've not had time to draw things like this. Hopefully I will get a chance to draw tonight at a new online drawing group: Epic Sketch Time.

The Comic Critic Reviews "They Live"

On Saturday, August 1, 2015 I woke to the very sad news that “Rowdy” Roddy Piper died in his sleep of a heart attack at the age of 61. While I was never a huge fan of Wrestlemania, its presence made itself well known in my generation. John Carpenter was greatly impressed by “Rowdy’s” performances and sought him out as the leading man for They Live. The film was not a weekend blockbuster. But it did survive its immediate negative reviews to go on to be an American Science-Fiction standard. Its iconic sunglasses came to represent a populace discovering the truth of its oligarchy. And its fight scene has become one of the great movie fight scenes receiving homage in both television and film.  “Rowdy” would continue his acting career in a playful manner. Shameless as the lead in Hell goes to Frogtown, or as himself in Man on the Moon, he enjoyed himself in any role. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper embodied life, which makes his untimely death a true loss to the entertainment industry and a hard blow for his now-grieving fans. R.I.P. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, thanks for the show.

The Comic Critic review "The Manitou"

The unquestionably absurd premise of The Manitou is that lump on the back of a woman’s neck turns out to be the growing fetus of a four-hundred-year-old shaman going through the process of reincarnation. But the folks who made The Manitou picked it up and ran with it. While this film may not be one of Tony Curtis’s finest or rate a “Classic” status, it does show a lot more creativity and inventiveness than the current derivative spewing of horror movies. The Manitou captured my imagination when I saw it as a high-school teenager. In contemplating how I would review The Manitou, I groped for a way to show my enthusiasm while still commenting on the outlandish premise. I looked at how different my life is now than when I was a teenager. Showing a couple in-the-bathroom-grooming comes from a married man’s perspective. Once I had that angle, the strip basically wrote itself.

The Return of Stickman #1572

The tragic truth is that you can't take it with you. Most of my house is filled with stuff that has meaning for me, yet have little or no real value to others. Some items might be looked upon as kitschy. I have a large Tunaki piggy bank I brought home from Japan. I associate it with all the good memories of the months I lived there in 1979 & 1980. With age the fake fuzz is peeling off. I also have various gifts that people have given me that hold no value other than they are a gift from a friend. If my wife and I died tomorrow I'm pretty sure that nearly everything we own would either end up in a landfill or would be on a thrift store shelf. I know stuff in my office closet I will never need again. Why do I hang onto it?

 One year I made a New Year Resolution that each week I would fill up a cardboard box (a standard filing box) with stuff that I would either donate or toss. This was a lot harder to do than I thought. I managed to fill up the box only 48 times out of those 52 weeks. It was like pulling teeth. And now I can't even tell you what was inside those boxes. On top of that I noticed a something terrible: I got new stuff to replace the old stuff. So, I didn't end up cleaning out anything at all. The new crap stuff just meant more to me than the old crap stuff.

The Comic Critic's Review of "The Flight of the Phoenix"

The 1965 release of The Flight of the Phoenix is my favorite. I wished I’d seen it on the big screen. I could only imagine how much more captivated I would have been than seeing it on television. As it was, any time it came on, I was instantly lured into watching it again. The story of these men trying to survive in the desert while they worked together with the trust that one of them just might be smart enough to save all their lives was enthralling. When I heard about the remake, I hurried to the theater in the hopes that I would re-experience that thrilling adventure through a new crafting of the story. What I got was–not the same thrill. Apparently, the powers-that-be thought the story could use a few more explosions, obvious testosterone, and a hammy chase scene. Each addition was overly garish. I felt I was looking at a waitress’s overly flared apron instead of a movie. Until I saw the second one, I had not realized what restraint had been enforced in the first movie to make it work for the better.  The second is a fun film. The first is a thriller. In drawing this review, I showed elements that exist in both that I liked so much.