Category Archives: Comics and Graphic Novels

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July 1, 2008

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Inspiration Where You Can Find It

There have been a few more comic jams since the last one I wrote about, and I’m happy to say I’ve been at all of them. Well, relatively happy. I could have done without certain aspects of the one that accidentally took place during the NHL playoffs. Unless you’re a hockey fanatic, you really don’t want to be in a Montreal bar when the Habs are in the middle of a hotly contested series. Any bar. Because even the sparsely patronized dives (like the one we do our jams at these days) fill to the rafters with crazed, drunken hockey zealots who spend the entire evening screaming at the top of their lungs whenever their home team so much as touches the puck.

The Montreal Canadiens were eventually eliminated from the playoffs, ending the dire imperative for fans to torch police cruisers by the dozen. The city coffers were thankful, the automotive economy less so.

When the jam was reconvened last Thursday, I had my current raccoon woes in mind. Yes, the family is still living underfoot, but largely without incident. Despite the peace treaty that exists between us, I decided to lay out a disparaging raccoon page and pencil panels one, five and nine. The rest of the page was quickly filled by other contributors as the evening progressed. As usual, Rick Gagnon took all our work home and was already busy inking the results when I asked him to send me a scan of the page as it stands.

Simply because it amused the hell out of me, I present “Fucking Raccoon” as a work in progress. You’ll be able to see the final product in a future issue of What the F***?

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March 15, 2008

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Lost

If you know your comics, you’ll know who Steve Gerber was. And you’ll also know that he died last month. Back when mainstream comics were dominated by superheroes (which, unfortunately, they kinda still are) he was writing satire for Marvel. Yes, satire. For Marvel. I’m not exactly sure how he managed that, but one of the most interesting comic books to come out of the 1970s was Howard the Duck. Although this title was sadly tarnished forever by the George Lucas crapfest movie that came out in the 1980s, those who remember the original comic book remember it fondly as a skewed look at America (and American comics) with a whole bunch of bad attitude. Steve worked on many other comic series, but he’ll be forever remembered as the man behind the duck.

Another comic industry figure you may also be aware of is Rich Johnston, one of the top comic book columnists out there. He writes Lying in the Gutters, and I once had the pleasure of sitting through the Eisner Awards in San Diego with him back in the mid-1990s. Referring to Steve Gerber’s death in one of his columns, he continued with the thought:

“But one thing stuck out about Steve not being appreciated by the industry during his lifetime. Which sent me thinking. Who else are we ignoring right now, who has been rewriting the rules and setting the scene for many?”

Among the select list of notable names and projects he rattled off, there was this paragraph.

“Shane Simmons. Author of the two ‘Longshot Comics’ and the lesser ‘Money Talks’ series and one of the most inventive, creative and consistent creators. Imagine Chris Ware crossed with Groucho Marx. He writes television now. We lost this one, folks.”

I’ve been writing television for about twelve years now. And when I started to get enough screenwriting work to earn a living and keep me financially afloat, I quickly began to drift from the comic book scene. It’s been years since I’ve published anything new outside of my contributions to Rick Gagnon’s What the F***? comic jam compilations. Even my attendance at those events has become spotty. Not through disinterest, mind you, but thanks to frequent scheduling conflicts.

I was able to get to one of the jams just a couple of weeks back, however. Since the days of the massive Gallery Stornaway events that drew comics artists from all over the province, outside Quebec, and even outside Canada, the local Montreal jams have become smaller and more nomadic, drawing no more than a dozen artists at a time and often far fewer. This latest one was held in a dead little dive of a bar, selected not for its inspiring ambiance, but for its bright lighting and lack of loud music. There we sat, a mix of Francophone and Anglophone comic artists, and worked on the next batch of pages that would grace a future issue of What the F***? — now due for its eighth small-press volume. Among the attendees was Jack Ruttan, a frequent contributor to the scene. He snapped some photos and drew some portraits and wrote a blog about the event on his web page.

I started the evening with a single large panel I had dreamed up earlier in the day. I had the layout in my head, as well as all the words and balloon breakdown for the dialogue. I decided to spend an hour or so penciling and inking the entire thing, completing my first whole panel, start to finish, in far too long. It was labour intensive and felt like a long time to create something that people would read in the space of about five seconds. Yet I felt strangely satisfied in way I haven’t felt…well…also in far too long a time.Shane Simmons as cartoon

This isn’t the first sketch a comic artist has done of me during one of our gatherings, but it’s probably my favourite. Mostly because it’s in colour, I look sinister, and have hands that could crush men’s heads. Illustration by Jack Ruttan.

Shane Simmons as cartoonist

The reality is rather less fearsome. Photo by Jack Ruttan.

Recently, copies of the new Italian edition of Longshot Comics: The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers arrived on my doorstep. It’s been out since November, but I only got them now after the first batch went missing in the mail and the second batch was stopped, opened and inspected by Canada Customs before being allowed on its way. It’s a routine I grew used to early on in my self-publishing career when I was receiving packages of comics and videos from all over the world. Our dutiful authorities must open everything coming into the country just in case in contains child pornography. Good work guys! Glad to see you’re still trying to catch the one remaining pedophile who doesn’t have internet access yet. Keep at it, you’ll nail him one day.

As I’ve been informed by the publishers, the new translation is selling briskly in Italy. Reorders are building up and a lot of copies moved at the Lucca Convention. It’s also been nominated for a “Best Independent USA Comic” Comicus Prize. Shhh. Don’t tell them it’s actually a Canadian comic.

I’ve been exceptionally pleased with the care taken on the design and translation of the book. There’s even an index of notes to further illuminate some of the historical references and terms sprinkled throughout. It feels weird, after all these years of screenwriting and the associated ham-fisted butchery that goes along with it, to have my words so carefully handled and respected by others. And it also feels weird that such respect has become so alien in my career. It didn’t used to be like that.

The newest incarnation of Longshot Comics has arrived. The covers, although different from any previous edition, show a loving attention to detail in their successful recreation of my intentions, both artistic and comedic.

Longshot Comics, remains, I think, the most artistically successful, well known, and widely renowned project I’ve ever worked on. And there’s one simple reason for that. There’s not a word or a letter or a dot or a line I didn’t put in there myself. Editorial input was zero. I sent the artwork to the publisher, they sent it to the printer, they sent it to the distributor and they sent it to the comic shops. It was a pretty long route to get it into the hands of the consumers, but the end result was a direct unfiltered line between my brain and the readers’.

I don’t much care for the prospect of spending my days second guessing the decisions I made years ago. A successful screenwriting career is nothing to turn my nose up at, but I can’t help but wonder, almost on a daily basis, if I’m on the right track here. I think I am generally, but not all the wheels feel correctly aligned with the rails. Something’s grinding and kicking up a lot of sparks.

Maybe it’s this early-onset mid-life crisis I’ve had going on perpetually since the day I turned 30, but I’ve been wondering a lot lately. How lost have I become?

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April 5, 2007

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But Is It Art?

If you’re swinging by Vienna anytime soon, it’s not too late to catch “Shandyism – Authorship as Genre” at the Secession building. Wander through the displays and you might stumble across a familiar graphic novel. Several months ago, I was asked for permission to include Longshot Comics in this rather esoteric show. How does my infamous dot comic fit into the theme of what’s going on in a museum thousands of miles away? I’ll let the curators explain.

“The exhibition Shandyismus, Autorschaft als Genre attempts to focus on Shandyism as a phenomenon/position, taking into account the historical dimensions and a new contemporary strategy to be rediscovered here. Aspects of a thematic exhibition will thus be related to a contemporary group show. Here, a number of works will be shown in which the methodological idiom of Shandyism is expressed primarily as a construction of authorship and readership. These exhibits will be accompanied by several thematic blocks focusing on narration and diagrams of a more historical nature to be presented in glass show cases, addressing the media and the interface with art, literature, film, comics, philosophy and record covers. At the same time, a number of artists will be invited to “intervene Shandyesquely”, i.e. to conduct themselves in a particular manner towards the exhibition. Even the design of the exhibition is based on Shandyesque elements, referring to earlier exhibitions in the Secession, such as Joseph Kosuth’s 1989 Wittgenstein exhibition and more recent exhibitions, e.g., Michael Krebber, Christopher Williams and Constanze Ruhm’s Fate of Alien Modes.“

Got all that? There will be a pop quiz later.

One reviewer singled out my contribution for special mention. Translated from German, it read:

“More than the curatorial compositions there are some single contributions that have the capacity to charm the viewer. Works from artists like Marcel Duchamp, David Jourdan or Ad Reinhardt, one could mention Shane Simmons here. His comic book “The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers” comprises 89 years in the history of the British Empire and, accordingly, has a huge number of protagonists. All of them, the accompanying text on the comic books claims, have been portrayed in full detail and then drastically scaled down – an obvious lie – at the same time praising the craftiness of each of the indistinguishable black character dots.”

It was, of course, inevitable that my artwork end up in a highly-regarded European museum. It was just a matter of me flying over to one and scribbling something in the public toilets. But now that I’ve been beaten to the punch, I guess I can be satisfied with a few months lying under glass as part of an official display. It should hold me until I can fulfill my dream of etching an illustrated dirty limerick onto a stall wall of the Louvre.

The Shandyism show runs until April 15.

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December 28, 2006

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Longshotini Italiano

The contracts have been signed, so it’s fair game to announce that another foreign translation of Longshot Comics: The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers is scheduled for publication sometime in 2007.

The German edition won awards and accolades several years ago and remains listed on Amazon.de. A Spanish translation was also in the works around the same time, but that one petered out before the deal was finalized with the publishing house that pitched the project to me.

Now we have an Italian edition in the works that will follow the square-bound design of the German edition fairly closely. This marks the first time I’ve signed a contract that specifically lists Vatican City as one of the territories covered by the terms to the agreement. I’ll keep you posted as we get closer to a print date and we have a brand new version of my epic graphic dot-novel that you can share with all your friends in your local Little Italy.

On an unrelated note, astute web heads may have noticed that my battered and beleaguered forum page is down. Down for the count, in fact. Mercilessly bombarded by spammers, there seems to be no point keeping it afloat. Any and all worthwhile information contained on those pages will eventually be salvaged and moved to a more permanent, unassailable section of the website. There are a number of other fixes and additions planned for the new year, including some never-seen-before content from deep in the Eyestrain archives. Stay tuned.

For those of you who still feel the need to post something to the site, the blog comment feature remains ready, willing and able. The spammer shock troops still haven’t figured a way around the new security options there. Yet.

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June 30, 2006

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Real Canadians Hate Summer

Thank my pathological need to publish at least one update a month for this sad little entry on the last day of June. Although I have a list of topics I’d like to discuss in great and tedious detail, I simply haven’t had the time or the will power to get to it. Such content will have to wait for the blistering month of July, when all that sun and heat will burn away my energy and leave me sitting in a darkened room in my underwear, sweating and cursing the entire summer season, as I stare blankly at my computer screen, hoping something more interesting than internet depravity will magically appear. Only then will sheer boredom force my hands to start typing up all those blog entries this dreadfully blog-deprived world has been yearning for.

Until that moment comes, there is one update to the site worth checking out. Ten new Movies in Longshot have been added to the marquee for the first time in damn near forever. Technically, they’ve been up for several weeks, but it took about that long to work some of the kinks out of the new material. It’s been so long since any Longshot strips have been posted here, the technical details of how exactly that was to be accomplished proved elusive.

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March 31, 2006

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Political In-Fighting

The comics industry is a tiny, incestuous little biz. At any given moment it can be riddled with a dozen different tempest-in-a-teapot battles fought in any number of letters pages and editorials. One of the favourite battlegrounds, where dirty laundry is aired, no holds are barred, and grown men fight like teenage girls — all teeth and fingernails — is The Comics Journal.

As the leading magazine about comic books in North America, The Comics Journal has long been published by Fantagraphics which is, itself, a well-known mill for alternative (and sometimes pornographic) comic books. How can a comic book publisher maintain its journalistic objectivity when covering an industry that includes dozens of rival publishers, you ask? Well, that’s easy. It can’t. But a conflict of interest is the least of our worries in a medium that disappears up its own ass more and more as each year passes.

“Blood and Thunder” is what the headline declares, “The Quebecois cartooning scene dukes it out in our pages. Yes, all of them.”

It sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not far off the mark. Late last year, I was asked to sign my name “in support of” a letter to The Comics Journal refuting a recent article about the Quebec comics scene that appeared in their pages. Like so many articles that have run in the Journal over its long history, it smacked of one guy plugging his buddies and ignoring the big picture — the big picture being everyone else in the world who wasn’t his personal friend. I’ve seen this sort of thing many times before in many different publications (The CBJ is hardly alone in this “I’ll scratch your back if you suck my balls” approaching to covering what’s hot and what’s not down at your local comic shop). It didn’t particularly faze me, but it sure got up the nose of the authors of the letter. Being one of the ignored parties, I was among dozens of Montreal artists approached to put my name on what amounted to a petition demanding, “Hey, what about us?”

So I agreed. Not because I felt slighted by the article, angered by its narrow view, or insulted by not being mentioned. I signed because so many other notables had refused to. Why did they refuse? It wasn’t because they didn’t give a shit (which would have been a perfectly valid reason not to participate). It was because they were scared to.

In this aforementioned tiny and incestuous biz, they were worried about saying anything that might burn bridges, sever ties, or otherwise piss off somebody somewhere. And that’s what really irritated the hell out of me. Because, seriously, who cares? It’s comics. The vast majority of people involved in this latest silly tiff are self-publishers anyway. In that sort of situation, you can burn every bridge you cross, run over pet dogs with your economy car, and kick the walkers out from under grandmothers, and it won’t affect you, your business, or your income one iota. When you’re your own boss and nobody is your potential employer (and even if they were, they’d be offering you peanuts anyway) what’s to stop you from speaking your mind? Theoretically nothing. But in practice…

It’s times like this when I’m glad I’ve moved forward to much larger, wider-reaching mediums like film and television. Here, at least, with so much more money and exposure at stake, I have a valid excuse to maintain a cowardly silence about what I really think.

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February 28, 2006

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Spambots Declare Jihad On Eyestrain

The forum has been pulled down for the second time this month. Spambots have been targeting it lately, and much as I’d love to turn this entire website into a shameless shill for online gambling, former-communist-block porno, and hot junk-bond investment tips, I’m afraid I must stand firm on one ethical stipulation. Spammers must PAY ME to be their whore. Otherwise I’d just feel cheap.

Measures are being taken to make the forum more secure. And by secure, I mean it will be SLIGHTLY annoying for the spammers to get their text onto the site. The extra ten seconds it will take them to flood every discussion thread will cut deeply into their busy day, and reduce their total spam output by as much as 0.0000000001%. We here at Eyestrain Productions stand proudly at the vanguard of internet security. The dam may have burst, but we’re still plugging holes with our fingers, never fear.

Until the forum is back up, you’ll just have to take my word for it that I’ve updated nearly an entire year’s worth of Movie Night Minutes. No, seriously. I’m not even lying.

Thankfully, I don’t feel alone. I’m not the only cartoonist under siege these days. Remember the good old days of The Satanic Verses, when you had to write A WHOLE BOOK to get a jihad slapped on you? Now you can earn one with a lousy single-panel comic strip.

Although the offending political cartoons first saw print in September, the Muslim world continues to work diligently on a body count that will get the world media to sit up, take notice, and debate whether they should reprint the catalyst strips yet again. Keep putting out those oil fires with gasoline, guys. It’s funnier than anything on the funnies page.

It’s been a long time since this many people died over a comic strip. Millions of Americans continue to drop dead each year by going on the Garfield diet, but cartoon historians will point to more specific examples of attributable fatalities. Spousal-abuse homicides peaked in 1976 during a particularly brutal two-week Andy Capp drinking binge. At least a dozen deaths among young professional women were blamed on the Cathy strip that featured a detailed, but highly hazardous homemade abortion guide. And, of course, there are the three slayings confirmed as being a direct result of the controversial Ziggy “Kill your parents” panel.

Only one conclusion can be drawn from the continuation of violent protests among radical Muslims so many months after the fact. We need some new offensive cartoons. People have been too pissed off for too long over old material. In this spirit, I have come forward and offered the world media outlets publication rights to my greeting card line of the prophet Mohammed in a Santa Claus suit wishing everyone a Happy Hanukkah. I believe this will serve to refocus everyone’s rage in a new and exponentially more violent way, and really light a fire under the Molotov-cocktail and burning-effigy economies.

So far no takers.

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December 13, 2004

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Trapped At Home For The Holidays

The television miniseries I’m co-writing progresses, a first draft has been delivered, and my long absence from this site is over. At least for this weekend. I might be back at it by tomorrow, and then all through the holidays. Joy to the world. Oh well, at least it beats writing for children’s television.

It seems like this one project is all I’ve been doing, but that’s not accurate. It’s merely been occupying my every waking thought. The problem with being a writer — as opposed to being a plumber, brick-layer, or barkeep — is that you never get to go home after work and turn the job off. It’s always with you, eating at your brain. The only job I can think of that might compare is a gynecologist. A male heterosexual gynecologist. It’s female genitalia all day at work and then, like the rest of the heterosexual male population out there, it’s female genitalia on the brain all night.

This is why so many writers drink. Not to forget, but to stop thinking entirely. Being a novice drinker myself, I mostly have to rely on video games to numb me. At least until I develop a serious substance abuse problem.

And speaking of drunks and junkies…

This week in world news, Bush finally found Canada on a map and decided to pay us a visit for the first time since he became president a million years ago. He dropped by Ottawa (the capital) and Halifax (the capital of drinking) in a whirlwind tour that went by so quickly, the army of protesters didn’t even have time to catch a chill in their designated civil disobedience zones. With Canada-U.S. relations at their lowest ebb since the War of 1812, this first state visit by the Bush White House poses a serious question for our two nations in these times of crisis. Namely, why can’t Halifax ever blow itself up when it might actually do some good?

If you’re wondering why it’s been so long since there’s been any new Movies in Longshot, it’s because I wanted to revamp that section so it would be a little easier to navigate. The newest entries now all appear on the top, with an archive below that arranges the previous strips alphabetically. I know that’s not much of an excuse for the lack of new material, but now that things are all orderly, I feel comfortable rolling out my latest cinema adaptations. Once again, there will be a new one each week, starting today and ending whenever I run out — which probably won’t be next week, or even the week after that. So drop by regularly.

And as I get back into the swing of things here, one of my priorities was to update the month’s worth of Wednesday Movie Night screenings I’ve fallen behind on. My one social indulgence each week, this has at least kept me in practice when it comes to watching movies. Otherwise I’m woefully behind in my viewing habits, despite the deluge of eBay imports that keep showing up on my doorstep, beckoning, “Shane, stop working for a living and come watch us. Watch us. Watch us…” I’d really feel better about the DVD backlog around here if I could only take off a month and watch five movies a day, every day. That would truly make my holiday special.

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August 23, 2004

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No Speaky The English

Longshot Comics: The Failed Promise of Bradley Gethers has sold out. You can blame a fan in Iqaluit who snatched up the final remaining copies, apparently in a bid to preserve this piece of Canadian culture by burying it in the permafrost up there. Future generations of Arctic explorers may one day unearth my contribution to minimalist comic art and, like the invaluable discovery of a frozen woolly mammoth corpse some decades earlier, eat it to stay alive.

I received confirmation that the Iqaluit package arrived safe and sound, which I was grateful to hear because that’s hardy a given these days when dealing with the bureaucratic oafs at Canada Post.

My displeasure with Canada Post seems to increase by the day. In an age of electronic mail, faxes, and couriers, they seem determined to usher themselves into obsolescence even faster than the market would dictate. Corruption scandals aside, they’ve been redirecting my packages all over the place lately. One big parcel on its way to stock Strange Adventures in Halifax bounced back with a note saying the address doesn’t even exist. Well, actually it does exist if you deliver it to the store as addressed clearly and legibly. It doesn’t exist if you try to deliver it to a completely unrelated library on the other end of town as some lost and confused civil servant attempted. Not only did I lose the postage I spent to send the package, my local mailman charged me an additional twenty bucks for returning it to my doorstep undelivered. Yeah, I didn’t know they could do that either. I briefly — very briefly — considered going another round of delivery interruptus with Canada Post, but decided that I, at least, should put customer service first. So when the package went off again later that day, it went with someone else. It was FedEx got that got that piece of business done in the end.

Oh? You think I should have put up more of a fuss? Fought the man? Demanded a refund and a proper, prompt delivery? Better to bang your head against a brick wall when it comes to those nimrods. Witness my more recent (but not only) fiasco involving a package coming in from Hong Kong. Through the miracle of tracking numbers, I can confirm it entered the Hong Kong postal system last month and arrived in Mississauga, Ontario a few days later. Of course, as soon as Canada Post laid their butter fingers on it, my mail dropped off the radar. Now I have three agencies pointing their fingers at each other, trying to pass the buck. Canada Post says Customs Canada must have it. Customs Canada says they either never got it or long-since released it to Purolator (who are in charge to delivering any packages coming in from Hong Kong). Purolator, for their part, has run two searches for me and says they never received it. Them I believe because they’re the only one of the three whose customer service branch seems interested in serving customers. And they know how a tracking number works. Not so Canada Post (who can’t confirm the package ever left their hands), nor Customs Canada (who don’t bother to swipe any shipping information on all those millions of packages they delay under the wise assumption that each and every one of them is brimming with kiddie porn and must therefore be picked over by bomb-sniffing dogs and trainees in charge of interpreting Canada’s obscenity laws). I continue to point my accusing finger at Canada Post, since all evidence says they were the last ones to touch my property. But their stubborn refusal to offer more help than to redirect my call to agencies that can help me even less urges me to offer my business to more couriers who, while often incompetent in their own right, at least charge so much that holding them accountable for a timely delivery is at least feasible. In the meantime, all I can do is carry a grudge against Canada Post, and think about all the horrible things I’d like to do to them. It’s not healthy, but it’s not legally actionable either, so I indulge myself.

So what’s in this missing package that has me all in a tizzy? More Asian DVDs, as you should well know by now. I could grow very old waiting for all the Japanese, Chinese and Korean films I want to see get a release here, so I have to import these discs and muddle my way through subtitles that are in an English so broken, they’re more like shattered English. Yet as bad and hilarious as some of the subtitles can get, the text on the back of the boxes can be far worse. Read, if you can, this word-for-word, punctuation-for-punctuation transcript of the copy on the back of the film Swallowtail if you don’t believe me. I’m not making this up. I couldn’t if I tried.

Quote:

The beautiful (love letter) go place.Circle that headquarter, that the skill figment that this however and completely changeses style, out with the frenzy a Tokyo outskirts is all, there that day this illegal mmigran resided to come from five lakes are the whole world black to help the member with wander about the, public can in order to cheat the secret magnetic tape of the ATM circuit for the sake of the digital data of an inside but your my. Whole slice form for control for diversification for intentionally then inside, Japanese dialogue leaving, with role body coming bring into reliefing the Japanese slice international intention of alignment, it is a pity thatting on the plot handle excessive concept, rhythm feeling as well lack the ability to do then to having much adopting many. The Hong Kong singer allows the ambition peaceful.

End quote.

I’m sure when you’re browsing the video boxes at Blockbuster, this is the sort of descriptive text that would ensure a rental. Frankly, however, I find it does a better job of pitching the movie than most trailers and ads for Canadian movies. At least this piques my curiosity. The promotional material for Canadian films — when they even get some — fails to do anything of the sort. It was with abject disgust that I noted Vincenzo Natali’s new film, Nothing, opened and closed in Montreal inside of a week. I’d been waiting for this movie to come out for over a year, and had I not been paying strict attention to the Cinema Montreal site, I would have missed out on it like everyone else in town. How hard is it to say somewhere, in big letters, “From the director of Cube“? Sure, they did a worthless job of promoting Cube as well, and the average joe has no clue what that movie is either, but at least it’s built up a cult reputation that warrants a mention despite the best efforts to ban it to complete obscurity.

I’ll stop there with a promise. One of these days I swear I’ll write an entire blog entry that contains no bitching about the state of the Canadian film industry. Or Canadian crown corporations.

Continue reading →

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June 27, 2004

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That’s A Wrap

I’ve been so concerned with finishing off my Irish epic, which turned out to be longer and more tedious than Ulysses, that I missed commenting on some of the hottest issues facing us today.

In late breaking news, Ronald Reagan is still dead. Despite round-the-clock coverage while he lay in state, his state never actually changed. With Ronald safely filed away in the ground, the American news networks have finally, reluctantly, ended their three hundred consecutive hours of tributes during which the whole country joined together as one to pretend that Reagan was a competent president.

In entertainment news, it was revealed that the Olsens were, in fact, conjoined twins after all. Over the course of their profitable years together, Ashley had been absorbing all the nutrients, leaving sister Mary-Kate to wither. The operation to separate them into distinct eating-disorder clinic patients proved successful. Doctors hope to also separate them from their billions of dollars once the invoice is delivered.

But I know the real news you tune in for when you come here is MY news. So to that end…

A couple of weeks ago I went down to the Fries With That? studio for the second-season crew photo. The crew photo always provides a valuable opportunity for the writers to touch base with the people who shoot the show, assuming the writers are actually invited and actually bother to show up. The fraction of a second when we’re all together in front of a high-speed camera shutter is not to be missed. Just don’t blink. My first full-colour photo of this sort, it will join the other crew photos on my office wall so I can remember all the people I don’t know who I never worked with directly.

I'm the white guy

A week later I metroed over to a Mont-Royal Street club for the wrap party. There, I was again reunited with the cast and crew so I could watch, from a safe distance, the ritualistic white-people dance that breaks out at these things somewhere after the third round of drinks. The music, typical of most bars, begins at a perfectly reasonable level that encourages social human discourse. The volume is then raised, in fifteen-minute increments, all the way to eleven, where conversation becomes flatly impossible and only drink and dance remain viable options.

The writers, as writers do, formed a phalanx at one table to assure that no one would intrude on our self-perpetuating feeling of isolation. Occasionally one of us would make a run to the buffet table to hunt and gather valuable nutrients that would sustain us through our next stretch at the keyboard, when we would see neither proper food nor daylight for weeks at a time. Despite our efforts to keep everyone at bay with our transparent attempt at a clique, the actors, gregarious creatures that they are, each stopped by in turn as they made the rounds. As writers, it’s our job to put these poor victimized extroverts under the microscope in an effort to generate material for the show. Even as we exchanged greetings and well-wishes, I clinically took note of who was dirty dancing with who in the name of potential third season pairings.

The only solid factoid to emerge from our brief flirtation with meaningful interaction was that it was Morgan Kelly’s birthday – though it’s anyone’s guess which one. He plays a teenager on television, so that could place him anywhere between the ages of twenty and fifty-eight in real life. Actors get a lot of cosmetic work done, and without a valid birth certificate it can be difficult to guess how many years they have under their tightening skin grafts. The more successful amongst them actually sustain themselves on the spare parts of lesser actors, like some stitchwork Frankenstein monster. Jack Nicholson, for example, is responsible for an entire lost generation of thespians who, their hand forced by a string of failed auditions, sold their internal organs to him just to make rent on their one-room apartments. The subsequent manpower loss to the table-bussing industry is incalculable. Christopher Walken, for another, is well known to subsist on the blood of drama school students. And Shelly Winters is rumoured to have eaten Emmanuel Lewis on a single saltine cracker within six months of Webster going off the air.

The highlight of any wrap party as far as someone like me (who spends most of their time watching people in movies and television as opposed to speaking to them in real life) is the blooper reel. With little ceremony and no announcement, the edited highlights of this season’s goofs, gaffes and fuckups appeared at the head of the dance floor through the miracle of video projection. It’s the same sort of material you might have seen Dick Clark and Ed McMahon broadcast back in the day, only without all those annoying bleeps to make it suitable family entertainment. The fine, sheltered folks down at Standards and Practices would blush to hear some of the naughty words that come out of people during the production of a show that’s supposed to be aimed at our unblemished youth. However, more effort was put into this blooper reel than merely assembling a collection of actors blowing their lines. I particularly enjoyed a juxtaposed clip from one of my Radio Active episodes that predicted, quite accurately it seems, that Giancarlo Caltabiano’s future lay in flipping burgers.

Among the writers-table topics of conversation for the evening was the emergence of the first Fries With That? superfan. I’ve heard of one or two fan sites related to shows I’ve written for in the past, but this is the first one I’ve seen myself. With an almost Trekkie-like fervor, Matt Plante has created a tribute page that quotes my own webpage several times. As a primary source of insider information, how could I not feel flattered? Matt has been in touch with The Vestibules and myself via email, sniffing around for some hot tips. I’ve been resisting the urge to pass on all sorts of tawdry stories about substance abuse and sexual misadventures but, sadly, I’m not privy to anything like that. Working at home, alone in a room, the most exciting gossip I can offer concerns that way-cool box of felt tip pens I bought the other day.

Aside from keeping you abreast of my latest news, I’ve been derelict in some of my other duties as well. Having fallen behind online while I play catch-up in the office, I owe you an extra couple of weeks’ worth of Movies in Longshot. Three new ones should keep you entertained for as much a ten or eleven seconds. I also need to give a public acknowledgement to Rich Johnston for mentioning Longshot Comics in his column, Lying in the Gutters. I’ve experienced a modest deluge of orders since then and he has my thanks.

And I wanted to link you to this article, which I think speaks volumes about the Canadian film industry and why hardly anyone bothers to watch our home-grown movies. It’s good that Canadian funding is moving towards backing more commercial projects (as opposed to some of the navel-gazing shit that only a director and his mother could love), but it’s bad that there seems to be little concept of how to develop these commercial projects, or which ones are worthwhile. There have been several fiascos of late, with some very strange choices as to what films deserve wide distribution and massive ad campaigns. While terrific genre fare like Cube and the Ginger Snaps trilogy are banished to rep houses and video shelves with hardly a word, millions are earmarked to push a curling comedy (fun, amusing, yes – but seriously, it’s about curling, and nobody pays to see a curling movie) and yet another heist movie (amusing and fun again, yes – but the ubiquitous trailer couldn’t even pitch the hook that made this one different). Somehow, I don’t think a Chevy Chase yuk-yuk fest about a talking barnyard animal is going to make Porky’s money no matter how much they audience-test it. There’s a mint to be made by our film industry if they can only accept that our unique, government-funded Canadian sensibility can be marketed to a much wider audience than micro demographics like curlers and unemployed Maritime cod fishermen.

If you can’t find any worthwhile Canadian films to rent down at your local mom and pop video store, let me encourage you to sample the offerings from the boutique film industries of other nations that also can’t hope to compete with Hollywood. There’s a myriad of interesting material from around the world to sample. Like…um… German industrial safety films, for instance.