A STREETCAR NAMED DEZYRE

STUNLEY: "STALLA! STALL-LAHHHHHH!!!!!"

STUNLEY: "Where's the scissors!? I'll bet your hoity-toity sister Blunche has them!"

STALLA: "Here, Dear. They're right here on the table where you left them.

STUNLEY: "Oh.....well anyway, your sister's always runnin' me down...sayin' I'm stupid and stuff. Well, I ain't stupid!"

AAAAGGGHHHH!!!!!


STUNLEY: "Slut! It's YOUR fault!"

STUNLEY (VO): "Oh, I'm sorry, Stalla. Come 'ere, Baby...Daddy'll kiss it and make it better!"

Blunche re-acts.


STELLA (VO): "Here I am, Daddy! Mommy needs those kisses! (Sloppy kisses and groans)."

STALLA (VO): "Careful, Stunley! Blunche is here, remember?"

STUNLEY: "Oh, right...stupid old Blunche is here! Hmmmm...."



STUNLEY: "Hey, a man gets hungry and there's nothin' around ta eat!"

STUNLEY: "STAAAAALLLAAAA!!!!!!"

STUNLEY: The refrigerator's all the way across the room! How am I gonna get my celerey!?"

STALLA: "Here, Dear. Celerey. Right here."

STUNLEY: "Huh? Celerey? Oh, thanks."

STUNLEY: "Yessir, when you're really hungry, there's nothing like a good...."

STUNLEY: "AAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!!!"

STUNLEY: "Ooooh, my eye!!!!!"

STUNLEY: "Slut! It's your fault again!"

STUNLEY (VO): "Oh, did I do that? Come over here, I want my baby over here!"

Blunche re-acts.

STALLA (VO): "Daddy was mean to his Poopsey-Woopsey!"

STUNLEY (VO): "Never again, Poopsey! Two lips'll fix it!"

STALLA (VO): "Careful, Stunley! Blunche is still here, remember?"

STANLEY (VO): "Oh, right...Blunche."



STUNLEY: (Sniff! Sniff!).

STUNLEY: (Blows nose).

STALLAH: "Sigh! That's my man!"

STUNLEY (VO): "Stalla, quick, get my shotgun! There's a fly on the ceiling!"

DELETED COMMENTS

Uncle Eddie: "I very seldom deliberately delete a comment. When I do, I feel really guilty about it. I mean the person who wrote it had to have gone to some trouble, even if it was just a death threat, and that should be acknowledged. In recognition of that, here's a few unpublished comments from the past three years.

"Uncle Eddie, you stud muffin...how's about you and me...steppin'?"

"Haw Haw (Snick! Harnk!)! Just kidding, Silly!! That was me! Hey, what did you think of 'Assassin's Creed?' Isn't that a way cool game? It takes a while to get a mission, though."


"Eddie, can I have the address of the girl on top?"

"Hi Eddie! Greetings from the 'Anonymous' community. Thanks for letting us comment here!"

"I'm sorry, but I find your practice of doing photo stories with a girl's wig on to be disgusting!"

"Uncle Eddie, I like your site but why do you persist in posting so many pictures of normal-looking women? What men want to see is babes...you know what I mean!"

"Um, Eddie...can I have the address of that handsome man above?"

"Here's a kiss for you Eddie...from a fan in Philadelphia!"

"Ditto from a fan in Wisconsin!"

"Another to you is kissing from fan we are being in Khazkstan!"

"Don't worry about putting stuff up that's bad for kids. We can take it!"

"Uncle Eddie, is it true that your male assets are...well, formidable?"

PAUL COLINS: GENIUS LITHO ARTIST

Parisian artist Paul Colins was arguably the best jazz poster artist ever, and this (above) is his most famous poster.

Like everybody else in Paris in 1925 he was bowled over by the Revue Negre, which featured Josephine Baker dancing in a banana outfit. The revue also introduced 'The Charleston" to France. Audiences went nuts!

The famous bananas (above).

Baker dancing to "Hot Hot Hottentot!"



Colin couldn't fit all his impressions into posters so he did a series of lithographs for a book called "Le Tumulte Noir," which is where most of these pictures are from. Baker sat for him several times.

The odd angles of the poses struck by the dancers wowed everybody...

...as did the frank sexuality.

In Colin's words, Baker was "part boxer kangaroo, part rubber woman, part female Tarzan." Baker was one of the all-time great free-form dancers.

Here's (above) the kind of thing Colins did when he wasn't drawing jazz artists.

Are some of these pictures racist? I honestly don't know. When they're done as well as these are, the whole question gets hard to focus on. You could argue that the red minstrel lips are a racial stereotype, on the other hand the artist clearly admires many of the people he depicts, even when he makes fun of them.

MEAN GIRLS

Like a lot of men I find the idea of mean women to be completely contradictory. I mean women, almost by definition, are kind and nurturing, aren't they? Apparently not, in some cases.

Every girl I've talked to about it has horror stories of other girls who gave them grief in school. Sometimes the bullying is physical, sometimes it takes the form of a whispering campaign aimed at separating the victim from her friends.

A really evil girl will go even farther. She'll try to change her victim's perception of herself. If the aggressor succeeds, even when the target is grown up she'll be a wallflower with limited career possibilities and no self-esteem. It amazes me that evil girls will devote so much energy to damaging girls they hardly know.

I'm dying to know what happens to mean girls when they get to be say, 25 or 30. What percent of them mellow out?

If you have a daughter, and send her to school, then I offer you this picture (above) of the girl who'll greet her in the schoolyard every day. This photo gives me the creeps. It displays a combination of natural meanness stoked by teen aggression hormones. No wonder your daughter hates school.

Oddly enough, surly Goth girls usually aren't the biggest aggressors. Maybe my artist's bias is at work here, but I reason that if Goth girls have a sense of style, which is a form of art appreciation, that this implies a yearning for higher culture. Am I wrong?



Meanness in young girls is shocking and appalling, but in older women women it's sometimes tolerable, provided you don't have to come in frequent contact with it. Maybe that's because nature has already applied its penalty. Maybe because it's sort of funny. Women like this tend to establish little kingdoms where they rule over small, alcoholic husbands and rebellious teenagers.

But there's a serious side. Imagine what it must have been like a hundred years ago in third world countries like China. Older women were sometimes merciless slave drivers who had no pity for the poor girls who worked for them.

You see it in some men, but it's more unexpected and therefore more disconcerting in women...that restless energy, that hungry need to go for the jugular of people they scarcely know.

I love this picture (above). I've used it in two blog posts. When this kid grows up...man, just walk on the other side of the street and never, ever give her the wrong change!

FRAZETTA VS. WOOD

It isn't often that you get to compare the work of your favorite artists in some way that can lay claim to being objective. Maybe the closest you could get to a fair contest would be one in which both artists attempted to illustrate the same story, without being able to reference each other's work. Well, that's what we have here: Frazetta and Wood illustrating the same story. There's no stylistic similarity, so I'm guessing that neither saw how the other handled the story.

Hold your hats, it's going to be a battle royal!

I can't put up every page of the story, so I'll just put up highlights of what each artist did with the beginning, middle and end. The finished, inked page way at the very top is by Wood. The pencil page immediately above is by Frazetta. Frazetta's pages only exist in pencil because the magazine folded before he could start on the inking.

That's one of Wood's middle pages above. The story goes something like this: a lonely bachelor is staying at his hunting lodge in the woods. A beautiful girl knocks on the door requesting help. Her car broke down, and she was pursued through the woods by someone or something intent on capturing her. The bachelor takes her in and offers her his protection. They start chatting and discover that each is the other's ideal mate. They fall deeply in love.



That's one of Frazetta's middle pages above.

Here's (above) the next Frazetta page. As their love deepens an announcement is heard on the radio.

Above, the next Frazetta page.

The radio announcer says a beautiful blonde mad woman has escaped from the local asylum. The announcer warns that she's very beguiling, but is not to be trusted. She's a homicidal maniac who slowly cuts up and horribly mutilates her victims. Under no circumstances should anyone let her into their home.

The bachelor is horrified. He kicks the girl out, locks the door, and spends the night upright in a chair, holding a rifle. Outside the girl begs to be let in.

She says they both found the true love of their lives in the cabin. She says he needs to trust that, and not the radio. She says the maniac is approaching. How, she asks, could he leave the girl he loves defenseless, in the hands of a fiend? With great difficulty the bachelor listens to blood-curdling screams all night. Finally the screams stop and the sun comes up. With gun in hand he opens the door to the porch.

That's Wood's page above.

The bachelor opens the door and discovers....the hacked, mutilated body of the girl he loved, and who he kicked out of the cabin. The girl, the love of his life who had pleaded for help, had been telling the truth all along.

That's Frazetta's final page, above. So who do you think won the competition? Who did the superior version of the story?

BTW, the format of the second version is different because it was undertaken later when the Congressional hearing on comics forced EC to recast their comics stories in magazine form. The reasoning was that magazines are assumed to be for adults and are therefore less vulnerable to censorship. The public didn't go for it. Sales of the magazine format declined (Mad excepted) and the horror titles fizzled out. Poor Frazetta was ordered to seize work on the magazine story before he could finish it.

I assume that he never saw the earlier Wood version because there's no similarity in the approach.

Also BTW: Thanks to Milt for bringing this to my attention and providing the artwork.