HALLOWEEN PICTURES

Who are these people??? The masks look old but the shoes look more modern. I''m guessing that these are amusement park workers posing in the 40s or 50s. 

Here's another picture I can't identify. It looks like it's from an anime film.

A few of my own rubber masks are torn and brittle now. I have to cover them up with props to disguise the flaws.

Here's an old, brittle half mask that I accidentally crushed in storage. The lips bonded to the cheek but...surprise, surprise...it looks great this way!

This has been a great year for neighborhood Halloween stores. For one thing, it marks the introduction of the adult muscle suit. Finally we adult men can have muscles without all that tedious exercize.

Above, an upscale version.

There's some new masks this year, too! This one (above) would have looked better minus the snot and with a smaller head behind the nose.

Something like this (above, drawn by a cartoonist friend) would have worked better. The mask industry really needs to take in more cartoonists. Non cartoonists tend to be too literal. 

Latex masks are also limited by the necessity to fit over the head. That's why girls make good mask subjects. You can make the mask broad and disguise the width with the hair.

Who's this? It looks like a 90 year-old version of "Bill Nye, the Science Guy" from TV.

Hmmmmmm....masks for twins. Yeah, sure, why not?

 I'm happy to report that dog costumes continue to improve with every passing year.

Wow! What a great T-Rex mask! 

I'm still curious to see if someone can come up with a good Jessica Rabbit mask. The face above is from a figurine. It fits the movie perfectly, but could still be a bit more sultry and cartoony.

Here's (above) a reconstruction of the young Steve Buscemi, proving that he'd make a great mask. 

Geez, Buscemi and Peter Lorre could have been brothers.

Come to think of it, why haven't we seen a Peter Lorre mask?

The world desperately needs a good Rondo Hatton mask (above)...

...and maybe a cool hat to go with it.

  

This picture (above) shows how a decent mask might be made of Tippi Hedren.

Some of the best masks used to be free on cereal boxes.  Why are the cereal people so resistant to Halloween now?

This time of year Disneyland should sell cheap reproductions of their Haunted House paintings, don't you think?

Here's a great gorilla mask...or is it a caveman?...used by Ernie Kovacs in his famous "Nairobi Trio" sketch. It's very funny and may still be in print, but if it is a caveman, how accurate is it? Cavemen are always portrayed as ugly, but were they?

So far as I can tell cavemen would have been exceptionally handsome. Assuming they were polygamous, the handsomest cavemen would have had many wives and children, and ugly, mateless cavemen wouldn't have had any.  That means most cavemen would have looked like Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp...only with bigger browridges.

I searched the net for a better picture of the Kovacs mask and came up with nothing. In desperation I typed "Ubangi Mask" and to my surprise I came up with.....ME (above)! Yes, ME! My Photoshopped ears have earned me a place on the Ubangi sites!

For comparison (above), my unretouched ears.

Recently I wondered out loud if my buck teeth would look good on a mask. A friend suggested that I already have a mask (above). Maybe he's right. I shouldn't be greedy.

Here's an example of the starched cheesecloth masks that were all over the place when my dad was a kid. 'Kinda nice, huh? I like the transparent hat.

Last but not least, here's a frame from The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror XXVI." Wow and double Wow! John K continues to amaze!

BTW: my costume this year: Mr. Meek (above).

SUPERGURL VS. THE EVIL UNCLE EDDIE

THE EVIL UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "Boy this house is a mess! Greasy pizza boxes, beer cans...but I have no time to clean. I gotta finish this book on hypnotism! Wait a minute...somebody's at the door."

GLADIOLA: "Hi, Evil Uncle Eddie! I just happened to be passing, but if you're busy..."

EVIL UNCLE EDDIE: "No, no! I'm not busy at all, but Gladiola....you look tired. VERY tired. As a matter of fact (HE GESTURES), your eyelids are growing heeeeavy. VEEEERY HEAVY."

GLADIOLA ( SLEEPY MONOTONE): "Yes, heavy. Very heavy.

UNCLE EDDIE: "Here, take this baseball bat, and make those eyelids close."

BONK! BONK! BONK!

GLDIOLA (MONOTONE ): "Make them close. Make them close."

CLUNK!!! SHE FALLS ON THE FLOOR.

EVIL UNCLE EDDIE: "Well whaddaya know? That hypnotism stuff really works! Hmmmm...I think I just figured out how to get the house cleaned up. Get up, Gladiola! We gotta find you a maid's costume!"

LATER: INT. EVIL UNCLE EDDIE'S HOUSE: SUPERGURL LETS HERSELF IN:

SUPERGURL: "Youhoooo! Anybody home? Supergurl here! We need to talk, Buster! I've heard some things about you!!!!!

SUPERGURL: "Huh? What's that? It looks like one of those stupid hypnosis machines."

SUPERGURL: "Haw! You can't hypnotise someone from Krypton. Everybody knows that!"

SUPERGIRL: "That's funny...I have an overwhelming urge...to....to CLEAN!!!!!"

WHOMP!!! SHE FALLS ON THE FLOOR!

EVIL UNCLE EDDIE: "Haw!!! Even Supergurl can't resist the power of hypnotism!!!!"

ON SUPERGURL IN A MAID COSTUME, HAPPILY CLEANING THE HOUSE.

SUPERGURL: (Hums "Tip Toe Through the Tulips").

EVIL UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "Everybody thinks the danger that's coming in the future is from robots. Haw! That's not even close!!!!"

EVIL UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "No, the real danger is from zombie maids hypnotised by ME!!! There's no defence against them! They'll take over every household that lets them in...and they all will let them in!"

EVIL UNCLE EDDIE (VO): "Soon they'll be an army capable of taking over the world!!!!"

And when they do, THEORY CORNER will be the only blog allowed on the internet.!!! No more of those stupid cat videos! No more Faceybook!!!! BWA Hahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!  BWA  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!


TO BE CONTINUED.....

[Below, a teaser from the next episode...]

.

EVIL UNCLE EDDIE: "So you see, Supergurl, that was all a fabrication made up by people who are jealous of me.  I'm just a gentle soul who would never dream of...excuse me, a minute...Gladiola, would you come here a moment? Would you take care of that fly on Supergurl's head?

GLADIOLA (SLEEPY MONOTONE): "Fly...Supergurl...head..."

CARICATURES 10/2015

Haw! 'More John caricatures of me. Big earlobes, a bell on top, egg salad on the mouth, plenty of warts...check! They're all here!

Here's a caricature I did of Jim Reardon and his family. I had to stop when I discovered that Jim had two girls and not a son. Geez, I hadn't seen the guy for so long that I was completely out of touch!

Haw! A Mike caricature of me.

This is a really old one! That's John K drawing me going on and on about Carl Barks. There's John Dorman in his Charlie Brown gear.

BERYL COOK

I don't know what I think about Beryl Cook. She had talent and an interesting point of view, but her subject was post middle-aged British housewives, the kind that Monty Python used to make fun of, and I don't know if I'm ready for that.

Cook's women are a bundle of contradictions. On the one hand they're kind of uneducated and unexciting, and on the other hand they're immensely good-hearted and somehow imbued with the character that's been the spine of British culture for centuries.

Her earlier period is my favorite. Cook painted traditional women who are colliding with modern times.

No matter how many new ways they adapt there always seem to be more that they're expected to catch up to.

Cook managed to capture the kind of cozy, sentimental life that lots of older Britains have evolved.

Her housewives always have lots of friends. Nobody in her pictures suffers from loneliness.

Haw! She's famous for her "Ladies Night Out" pictures.

Cook is sometimes compared to Donald McGill (that's his work, above), the prolific creator of British seaside postcards in the 40s. About McGill, George Orwell wrote (click to enlarge):

There are obvious differences between Cook and McGill but there are similarities, too. Both had an obvious affection for their subjects and both saw themselves as popular entertainers in the music hall tradition.

BTW: I like what Orwell said about Shakespeare injecting that kind of music hall comedy into tragedies. It's a combination that works.

For comparison, here's how two other painters handled themes a bit similar to the ones that Cook tackled.  The first (above) is by a contemporary Australian painter and is called, appropriately, "Ladies Night Out."  Sorry, I don't know the artist's name.

The painter's very skilled but he's not as cartoony as Cook, and cartoons are a more efficient way of handling themes like this.

The second is by Cecil Bell, one of my favorite New York City painters. If Cook had handled a similar theme, with women on board a ferry on a windy day, she would surely have had one of the women face the wind like this (below).

That's because Cook was a cartoonist at heart. She wouldn't have been able to help herself.

A TERRIFIC FILM OPENING

I've a huge interest in film gambits, "gambits" being a chess term for the opening moves of a game. The term can apply to storytelling as well. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" was a gambit, as was "Call me Ishmael." Here's the the gambit for the terrific TV miniseries, "Olive Kitteridge."

The story is about a woman suffering from chronic depression in a small New England town.

It opens with silhouettes of buildings set against unsettling dawn skies. You get the feeling that something's wrong in this town, and has been for a long time.

The pounding surf intensifies the mood.

Now here's (above) where the really original part begins. A fishing boat is seen in an ominously tempestuous sea. One still frame can't do this image justice. A ship in a daytime shot usually symbolizes hope and escape. Not so here.

Far from being a symbol for escape, the boat may be seen as a sentry preventing escape and confining the townspeople to their prison.

The film trucks out of a porcelain image of the ship. The painted image is a happy one but the audience knows better. Seeing the creepy ship in this nice old-fashioned context firms up our conviction that whatever's wrong in this town has deep roots, and that the towns people might even have had a hand in covering it up. 

  

Smash cut to a street in the town where a woman is discovered lying dead on the ground. The music and art direction lead us to believe that she was somehow killed by a supernatural thing. It capriciously felled an innocent woman and left her limp as a rag doll on the ice.

This isn't a horror film, so the supernatural element I'm talking about isn't part of the plot. Even so, it's important. Sherlock Holmes stories are like that.  There always a supernatural subtext in them, and it makes the stories more interesting.

Fascinating, eh?