I spent most of the NYC ComicCon lurching in circles with my mouth half-open, hunting for a copy of Detective Comics # 587 and spending way too much money on plastic bullshit that reminds me of my childhood. The experience was spectacular.
I haven’t been to a comic book convention since 1991, in Virginia Beach — the whole enterprise was dusty, pasty and pungent. Not now, baby. Now that comics, computers and sci-fi are billion dollar businesses, nerds are out of the basement and blinking in the klieg lights. Pop culture’s always been a byproduct of marketing campaigns, but we are now in a golden age of hype and shiny bullshit.
Today’s thirtysomethings were the target audience back in the ’70s and ’80s when Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other pop mythologies did the first Triple Lindy into the collective consciousness. Now we’re just old enough to have kids who get just as pumped about Star Wars as we did, and fetishizing fictional universes is a family affair.
Whenever alien archaeologists unearth whatever temples we leave behind, they’re gonna think that Spiderman was our God and stormtroopers were some kind of high priests. Frankly, I’m thrilled. Digging through comic boxes and buckets of chipped action figures gets me all stoked and unstuck in time and I get the same sense of wow, cool wonder that I got when my dad took me to see Star Wars for the first time.
But this thing was for everybody. Really, it was just like the Mermaid Parade except indoors and marginally less sexualized. The people-watching and the costumes were spectacular and totally worth the admission price.
This is my favorite photo from this weekend’s NYC ComicCon, but there’s a lot more after the jump:
Jesus’ teats blasting eight solid sunbeams, I am SO in love with this video. It’s got everything all together — lurching grinding trippy catchy electronic sounds and a montage of seriously strange video clips from the ’80s. There’s industrial instructional stuff here, infomercial clips, vintage exercise videos, people stepping in sticky stuff and sandwiches and just a little bit of cheesy porn.
That’s just a dildo, though, not an actual cock.
So yeah, this is probably NSFW, but I mean, really. The dongs in this thing are obviously phonies, and they’re just kind of waving around. Any boss with half a brain would see that they’re just comedy dongs, not used with any sort of intent here.
I can never tell what’s safe for work and what’s not, because I just can’t get my head around the fact that a disembodied rubber dildo could be at all offensive in anyone’s workplace, unless that workplace was like, an Amish barn-raising or something.
But somehow I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. Anyway.
This video is for the song “Truck Sweat,” directed by Tobacco, for music also by Tobacco from the album “Fucked Up Friends.” Tobacco, as some of you may know, is a member of the psychedelic super-group Black Moth Super Rainbow. On with the clip and let the dicks fall where they may:
Jeff sent me a link to an awesome, fun, faux-vintage sci-fi short film a while back, and I mean to share it with y’all, but it slipped my mind… until I was flipping through a sketchbook and found this hastily scrawled list of cultural references that I saw while watching it for the first time:
She-Ra, Princess of Power. Lord of the Rings. American Apparel advertisements. The Neverending Story. Mario Bros. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. “The Clapper”. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Space Invaders. Silverhawks. Batman. Thundercats. Tron.
These things, in no particular order, sprung to mind immediately for me. Some of them are obviously intentional, others perhaps unintentional but likely to be seen by anyone who grew up when I did and watched the same stuff. Still others were triggered by a small detail or action in the video that other folks might not notice or associate in the same way. Anyway, here it is!
Folks with extra weight on them have always had it rough. Whether they were called “husky,” “stocky,” or today’s “33 percent of the population,” everyone knew the truth behind the euphemism. A little respect, no matter how flimsy and transparent, is better than this old ad:
I love how they kindly tell concerned parents that “everything is priced the same as regular sizes,” because, you know, they’re using SO much extra cloth to make these darling little mini-tents.
God, I wonder how much they spent on shampoo and conditioner as a household. Probably at least as much as this guy spent on mousse and hairspray.
That photo up there comes from a fantastic post (via Metafilter) of spectacularly crappy vintage portraits from Olan Mills Studios. Like one of the comments says, “hilarious in an oddly painful way.”
