* Recently on Robot 6:
* Lady Gaga goes to Michael DeForge and company’s Prison for Bitches;
* If you read only one obituary for Frank Frazetta, make it Tom Spurgeon’s. (Well, make it two and read Zak Smith’s too. But definitely read Tom’s.) The piece contextualizes Frazetta for me in a way I clearly, sorely needed: I had no idea he started doing fantasy illustrations as late in his career as he did, and assumed he was around doing pulp stuff in pulp’s late glory days.
* Frazetta is an artist whose work never really clicked for me. I think that given my interests and enthusiasms, most people would be shocked to learn how little fantasy, particularly fantasy of the guys-with-swords variety, I’ve actually read aside from Tolkien. That aesthetic of shirtless men and topless women meatily coiling around one another while fighting giant crocodile-ape-bats was always alien to me. It didn’t help that (I’m guessing; I don’t recall for sure) my first exposure to Frazetta probably came right alongside my first exposure to his imitators, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell and Olivia and suchlike, all of whom I’m pretty sure I encountered for the first time in a comic shop in my mid-teens. Though now I see how his trailblazing and chops and personal interests elevate his work above theirs, it wasn’t possible for me then, nor was it something I would have been interested in trying.
* Moreover, having now read every actual Robert E. Howard Conan story and totally loved them, I feel as though Frazetta’s take on the character is akin to what the Rolling Stones’ ubiquitous radio staples are to the Rolling Stones’ overall oeuvre: An immediately appealing but ultimately distorting and misleading lens through which to gauge the reality of the whole, and one past which few people are ever interested in looking, to the long-term detriment of the work’s hidden strengths. In much the same way that it took a trusted friend’s enthusiastic and specific endorsement of that four-album run from Beggars Banquet to Exile on Main Street to get me to stop going “Sure, ‘Start Me Up’ is fun, but that’s as much of that as I need” and expose myself to songs like “Jigsaw Puzzle” or “I Just Want to See His Face” or “Midnight Mile,” I came to Conan in spite of Frazetta’s horn-helmed bodybuilders, weird-in-the-Weird-Tales-sense rainbow-in-an-oil-slick colors, and action-in-a-void compositions, not because of them.
* That said, I could always intuitively understand what Tom describes about Frazetta’s role in nascent nerd culture, how his work provided a look at a world that promised, well, promise–a world of danger and excitement, where being a grown-up seemed potentially worth it, where even the horror and death was still head and shoulders above the dreary apocalypse that this world’s button-pushers in suits and uniforms were prepared to unleash on us all. Plus, that slippy mishmash of fantasy and science fiction and horror and heroics in which Frazetta specialized was to become hugely influential on things that did mean something to me, from the He-Man cartoons and action figures of my childhood to the “new action” artcomics of today.
* Frank Quitely Joker? Sure, I’ll eat it.
* Wow, this is an exceedingly lovely new style of art from Dave Kiersh.
* In the third Ghostbusters movie, the gang will reunite to do battle with Bill Murray’s cosmic-level disinterest in the third Ghostbusters movie.
* Jeez: George A. Romero wants to continue spinning new zombie movies out of Diary of the Dead, his worst zombie movie. Except for perhaps Survival of the Dead, which itself spins out of Diary itself and am told is even worse.
* Matthew Yglesias’s take on Barack Obama’s recent anti-iPod/iPad/XBox/PlayStation applause line strikes me as basically correct in terms of the racial messaging at play. I confess I never paid much attention to his “put away the XBox” bits in the past because they so weren’t directed at me, since I have neither an XBox nor kids from which it would distract me.
* Cloverfield prequel! Doomsday is coming! Here’s the trailer for the J.J. Abrams alien-rampage movie Super 8. (Via Jason Adams.)
* Finally, please don’t forget to check out last week’s Lost thoughts before joining me and the gang again after tonight’s episode!