Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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WHO

FILM & TV

COMICS & BOOKS

30.11.04 R.I.P. The Betas, 1996-2004

By the end of this week, one of the most original, wonderful and just plain fun rock bands will be no more. The Beta Band played their antepenultimate gig last night at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, about 200 yards from where the band started out. It was Gig Of The Year. The Betas are always magnificent live, and last night the entire Empire - four levels of Victorian music hall - was packed to say goodbye to our lads. The band played until they turned the lights on, closing with an absolutely mental two drum kit jam.

The guy in front of me spent the entire gig taking photos with his digital camera - I wonder whether he actually experienced any of the gig, or was too busy communicating it.

The Betas never rose beyond being cult heroes (check the pretty Kaare Andrews cover on that one), and although it meant in the end they couldn't continue, I was always happy they damned the torpedos and just made the music they wanted. And the films they wanted: their last Brixton gig opened with a short film that I can only describe as LONE WOLF & CUB meets TRAINSPOTTING, with the band as duelling, kilt-wearing samurai. The scene where the hero confronts the Shogun in a pebbledash house outside Crieff, with "you killed my family, prepare to die"-style dialogue in subtitled Gaelic, was utter genius. The dry-fly rod duel was also memorable... Sigh. Life will be poorer without these guys around. Hopefully we'll get some more from Beta offshoots King Biscuit Time and Lone Pigeon.

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27.11.04 A Mystery Girl

Here's a sneak peek from the very talented Federica Manfredi for a project we have in development together. This cutie is the main character. That's all I can say for now. Stay tuned.

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26.11.04 Ho Ho Ho's Your Daddy

Today is traditionally the biggest shopping day in America, as people use the Friday Thanksgiving holiday to spend, spend, spend for Christmas. My thoughts on this gruesome orgy of consumerism are neatly summed up by this cartoon. (Warning: not work safe, and requires sound.)

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24.11.04 About Ed Traquino

A few weeks ago I told you about JJ Dzialowski, a very talented French artist who I met at the October convention in London. That day I also met Ed Traquino, who has done quite a lot of work in the UK indie scene. He's got real talent, as you can see here, or here, and is looking for UK and US writers to collaborate with. His details are at the bottom of his sample pages. And, if you're ever at a UK convention, pick up a copy of his "Coke-Fuelled P.I." comics. They are... exactly what they sound like. And lots of fun. That's her, below.

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23.11.04 Exhaustigirl.

I've been burning the candle at both ends, and also trying to light it in the middle: six days, five gigs, some major writing work... and the day job. Yet the chance to see The Earlies, Flogging Molly (and their ace support act Street Dogs), Jill Scott, Camper van Beethoven and Tom Waits was too much to resist. All the gigs were wonderful. I am now deaf, exhausted, and I never want to see another pint of Carling so long as I live. Tomorrow: sleep.

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22.11.04 New Smoke Pages

Igor sent me another bunch of inked pages from Issue 1 of SMOKE. They are unbelievably gorgeous. Click below to see Page 15 bigger, or click here to see Page 23.

SMOKE comes out starting in May, from IDW.

Also, there is supposedly an interview with me and Igor in this week's Comics International. However the journalist hasn't responded to my email checking to see if he got the answers I sent in, or one asking if he could send me the interview text electronically, so who knows what's going on. Le sigh.

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21.11.04 Sweet Zombie Jesus

I must own this fine periodical. Now.

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19.11.04 Peasgood's Nonesuch, Bastard Rough Coat, & Co.

English apples have some of the most wonderful names on earth. When such lyricism and imagination can go into the simple naming of fruit, no wonder that we should be annoyed at deliberate mediocrity in greater creative endeavours.

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How Many Earlies Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?

Ade Brown is the pied piper of alt-country. Sometimes he gives me a CD; often he just hands me a gig ticket and says, "They're like Neutral Milk Hotel crossed with Menlo Park. You'll love them." To date, Ade has never been wrong. And this is how last night I found myself in the lower ground floor of a Covent Garden shopping mall, three feet away from the combined 10-person might of The Earlies, who were giving a free, secret concert on the world's smallest stage to celebrate the opening of... something. Oh, you think, rolling your eyes, It's Alex, going on about how great the Earlies are. No, I say! Today I also go on about how good their opening act and co-conspirator Micah P Hinson is, and also what a damn fine album M. Ward's End of Amnesia is. So much variation, in what is basically a one-horse blog! (I will bow to the lit-fu of anyone who can identify that reference...).

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17.11.04 About Tom Phillips

My research for the film takes me to Dante's Inferno on a regular basis. I am lucky enough to own a copy of Tom Phillips' illustrated Inferno, bought from the remainder table of my university bookstore more moons ago than I care to admit. It can't have cost very much. I was broke then. Still am now. But over the passing years, the book has grown expensive. With the 138 illustrations and their text samples creating a discourse with the cantos they oppose, Phillips' Inferno is one of the loveliest books I possess (and I own a lot of books). I can only imagine how magnificent the original livre d'artiste was.

Phillips' far-ranging, always unexpected illustrations and text cover-ups (best known from his ongoing Humument project) have, in a quiet way, become a profound part of my graphic sensibility. Mind you, what a slipshod, crazy-quilt beast that sensibility is: tacked-together bits of Franz Kline, Mouse & Kelley, Hieronymous Bosch and the blue of Maine summer days. Mix thoroughly and cook at 350 until a fork inserted comes out clean. Still: Tom Phillips. His Inferno is two decades young next year. Huzzah. More please, Mr Phillips.

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16.11.04 The Queen Of The Golden Mines

This November I have been spending my nights working on the film and my days researching fairy tales for an illustrated book I'm writing (on which, more later). So far, this is my favourite story. I don't know quite which of its many fine parts pushed it definitively into first place. Maybe it was the army of virgins running out of the castle yelling, "Is it me you want?".

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12.11.04 Banksy: A Gentleman and a Scholar

I just got an email from Banksy about this covers brouhaha. The man himself says:

alex- everything will be cool if the comic is good. if the comic is bad we fight friday night in the car park of wetherspoons, crouch end 8pm no weapons -b

So: as you were, everyone. Props to the Wooster Collective for making a stand for artist rights, though. And I hope the street art community will accept my apology for the mis-steps I made in handling all this. I genuinely love the wit and design sensibility of street art, and really the last thing I wanted to do was piss all of you off. If SMOKE lasts beyond the initial 3-issue season, I'd love to see if we could commission some of the incredibly talented artists whose work I've discovered via Marc and the Wooster site to officially do covers for us. But I warn you all: indie comics is a bit like street art, really. Nobody does it for money (because there isn't any).

Meanwhile, I gotta go work on Issue 3 of SMOKE and make sure it's really f*cking good. That, or start taking kung fu lessons...

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10.11.04 Say Hello To Greenborg

The very kind and talented John Charles has just sent me the cover for Variance 2 (an image he calls "Greenborg"), and a better-scaled version of the cover for Variance 1 ("Techhead"). I love Greenborg; John always has such a fresh take on sci-fi, you never know what he's going to come up with next. John has also just published a book on CafePress: Tiger J. Jackson & The School For Weird Kids. He's written it using his real name: John Mould. Hm, must ask him if he's related to the very awesome Bob Mould.

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9.11.04 The World Is Full of Angry People

The Wooster Collective is mad at me. Igor Kordey and I are both big fans of the British street artist Banksy, and we were inspired by two of his graffiti images for the covers of Issues 1 and 3 of SMOKE. These covers are currently in solicit form only, so without the series logo, publisher logo, or credits to anyone. We never tried to claim the images were not inspired by Banksy. We were going to credit the images on the cover as "After Banksy", and include a line on the first page of the comic where to go to check out Banksy's art. The folks at Wooster say we're stealing, and want us to drop or change the covers.

All we wanted to do was share our Banksy love, and do a credited homage. But apparently that's not on. Wooster seem quite determined that our intention was to do Banksy harm, but it most assuredly was not. We've emailed Banksy anyway, to ask his permission, and we'll see what he says.

Also, elsewhere on Wooster's site, they have works of art for sale at prices of $300 and up from their collective artists. These artists use well-known photos of Bruce Lee and James Dean, and images from the Spider-Man and Catwoman films. Whereas we changed Banksy's images significantly when we created the covers for SMOKE 1 and 3 (like I said, we used them for inspiration), the Spider-Man and Catwoman images are not changed in the slightest. They're simply direct copies. None of this use is credited, and I somehow don't think they got permission from the copyright holders. Photographers are artists too, folks. While I appreciate Wooster's efforts on Banksy's behalf, they do come across as a little bit hypocritical.

( 8:54 PM ) (12) comments

You'll Never Believe...

Friend and co-conspirator Lee Barnett's novella, You'll Never Believe A Man Can Fly, is being serialised at Silver Bullet Comics. Please read it. It has lovely illustrations, by comics artists new and old.

At Ninth Art last week I reviewed Dave Gibbons' The Originals and Joe Casey's The Intimates. This week I write up Ellis/Granov's Iron Man.

Some of you have asked about my new day job. Three really impressive guys, and... uh... me.

The Pinetop Perkins/Deborah Coleman version of "Meanest Woman" is so far the best thing about my week. And it's been a damn good week so far: I've had a breakthrough on a story that, for a very long time, had refused to play ball. I now have that glorious feeling of knowing exactly where I'm going with it. What is this strange tale? Well, it's not a screenplay, and not a comic. Yes, I have even more tricks up my sleeve than you could imagine.

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6.11.04 High & Lonesome Preview

Click on the picture to download a pdf (150k) of the first page of my 16-page sci-fi/horror story, HIGH & LONESOME, coming in January in the second VARIANCE anthology. Want to read the rest? Buy the book. Art by Len O'Grady, lettering by Patrick Foster.

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5.11.04 Kaos Theory

Oh, it's been one of those days.

But two things have cheered me up: first is that artist Sam Hart and his friends have launched their Revista Kaos website, a Brazilian comics site. And its first two entrevistas (interviews) are with me and with John Higgins. (One of these things is not like the other.) Most interviews ask variations on the same few questions. But not Sam! He asked questions like, "what is your favourite crime?" and "who would you like to have killed?". Believe me, a lot more fun to answer than, "what challenges did you face in writing this series?". The interview is available in English and Portuguese; click on Entrevistas and then on my name.

The second Cheerful Thing is that I have nothing to do all weekend except write. This fills me with glee. In a moment, I will open a new document in Microsoft Word, and happily begin.

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Newsarama Loves Kordey

Newsarama posts IDW's press release on SMOKE. Fans post back, giving my artist some massive love and support. Unfortunately, Newsarama won't let my account post, so I'm unable to say thank-you to them. Aargh.

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4.11.04 Scars and Murmurs

There's a new addition to the Amphigory section: Identifying Marks. This would have been Dispatch 29 of the old Life During Wartimes, if I were still writing them. But I ain't.

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3.11.04 Yagira-san Sums It Up

12-year-old actor Yagira Yuuya introduces the film he stars in, Kore-eda Hirokazu's NOBODY KNOWS: "I tried my best. So please stay 'til the end."

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2.11.04 Finally I Can Talk About Smoke

Jonah Weiland, CBR's Insomniac-In-Chief, interviews Igor Kordey and myself about our creator owned series SMOKE, coming out from the fine folks at IDW Publishing starting May 2005. Igor is working full time drawing the series now, and I get pages every couple of days in my inbox. It's like Christmas.

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Normal Service Resumes, All Too Quickly

Yesterday I signed my film contract. There was five minutes of celebration, and then I had to stay up until midnight to revise a story outline for a publisher. Where are the dancing girls?

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1.11.04 The Know-Nothings

Just had a conversation with a friend about how the increasingly ready availability of information will mean that people won't actually bother to know anything - know as in have committed to memory. Know as in being able to recite at a drunken country dinner party out of range of broadband or mobiles. I find this very depressing.

Go memorise a poem. Do it now. Everyone should have at least one poem committed to memory. May I recommend Theodore Roethke's I Knew A Woman? Shakespeare's Sonnet 98 is also a good choice.

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"Retirement Can Kill You..."

I am often sentimental of a Sunday afternoon. And yesterday, I came over all misty in a screening of THE LAST OF THE FIRST. This documentary covers five years in the turbulent life of the Harlem Blues & Jazz Band, a group composed of the last living sidemen and singers from the great jazz bands of Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, and others. All of these gentlemen and ladies are in their 80s, or older, and still sound just fine. The band quite literally keeps them alive. I can't find any CDs by them, which is criminal, as anyone who has heard the playing of Al Casey or the singing of the late Laurel Watson will attest.

LAST OF THE FIRST was one of three London Film Festival screenings I was seeing at the NFT that afternoon (the third of which was the truly wonderful Japanese film TONY TAKITANI). In the half hour before my next film began, I bought a pint of beer and wandered around the used-book tables on the South Bank, as the corrugated-steel waters of the Thames rattled by and the cold night air dried my eyes. I bought a book on how to murder people, and thought again how much I love my job.

Do you love the Blues? Of course you do. Then you will enjoy the fine blues and boogie products of a 91-year-old man named Pinetop Perkins. Do you love film? Then you may want to consider the recent BFI release of a new print of Jean Cocteau's ORPHEE. One of the most amazing films ever made, and very hard to find on DVD, Cocteau's retelling of the Orpheus and Euridice myth manages to say more about the nature of fame, creativity, and aging, than anything else I've seen. Plus, Maria Casares as Death in a black limousine! If that sounds too Neil Gaiman for you, can I suggest Jean-Pierre Melville's CERCLE ROUGE, which is a stripped-down, gripping heist film with moments of acting so good they literally take your breath away.

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