Vaguely humanoid little green
creatures, interchangeably called
lizards, toads or frogs—various odd and
whimsical monsters, of all conceivable
sizes and shapes—four-foot high
“Broads.” bedecked with barbaric
body paints, and stacked like an
adolescent’s daydream—all moving in
a complex drama atop Dead bone
Mountain, four miles high and a billion
years ago . . .
Vaughn Bode is a genuine prodigy.
In the last five years, he has developed
from an obscure illustrator of college
magazines and underground comics to
the sole exponent of his own peculiar
blend of illustration and text. Recently
unknown, he is now surrounded by an
increasingly large circle of fans.
His imagination is amazingly
prolific. He has, so far, created over 200
different series, with over 15000 in
dividual characters—and all this by the
age of 29. Bode insists that he is not a
cartoonist, but rather a “pic
tographer"—and that Pictography will
become a literary form of the future.
But before it does, his fans believe,
other artists like Bode will have to
appear
Bode s work is somewhat like that
of W C. Fields, in that the viewer
remains untouched or else is
fascinated There doesn’t appear to be
much middle ground between these
extremes.
The interested reader will quickly
begin to ignore the many errors in
grammar or spelling in the captions,
attracted as he is by the weird
Deadbone
Erotica:
on collecting
Vaughn Bode’s
comic strips
by Walter Wentz
situations of subtle pathos or humorous
tragedy—yes, I said humorous
tragedy—through which Bode’s
creatures move, speaking an uncouth
dialect somewhat like Brooklynese:
“Why for does youse paint all da
time, Jones? Why you doesn’t come
outside to play in da’ warm sunshine? ..
Tired old movie schticks are
reworked into gloriously plausible
conclusions; for instance, the case of
the beautiful girl adrift on a stream,
heading for the waterfall. In “Going
Down the Janely Jane,” we see the
beautiful young Broad caught by the
current, helplessly drifting toward Ice
Fall Falls; two young “frogs” on a
natural bridge over the Falls plan to
form a living chain, and catch her
upstretched hands as she goes over the
brink ... so they catch her—and then
they all hang, tautly suspended over
the abyss, wonder what next? It is here
that Bode s mastery of expression
becomes obvious.
Other strips in the book concern
death (“Morning Mourning’’), the
transcience of fame (“Jones Goes to
Bones”), loneliness (“Harry in the
Amber Block”), religious fanaticism
(“Brother Victory”). A good many
concern sex, and yet others concern
things no human is likely to encounter.
“YARGH!”, for instance, concerns the
thoughts of an unpopular reptile falling
down a cliff:
“an who I screamin’ for anyway? ..
. There’s nobody about to hear me
pathetic cortelings ... An I doesn’t
zactly groove on auto-screamin’ either .
. . Of course, it do kinda’ ease da’
‘tensions of da plunge,’ so to speak ...”
It is surprising to find that the
cartoon—pardon, the pictography
strips collected in this oddly-shaped
paperback first appeared in a skin
magazine, Cavalier.
Bode’s strip, DEADBONE, has run
in the magazine for over three years
now, and the first two years are
represented in this book. Since April of
1970 (the cutoff date of this collection)
DEADBONE has been appearing in
color, but seems to lack a little of the
whacky spontaneity of the old black
and-white strips. Perhaps success is
affecting Bode, but that may be only
my opinion. At any rate, I’ll enjoy
checking it out for the next few years.
The individual who becomes a
Bodephile, or even a Bodemaniac, will
be pleased to find his scarce, early
work now becoming available in an
underground comic series—The Print
Mint is now publishing a six-volume set
entitled JUNKWAFFEL.
Subject-matter runs from the
frivolous to the cynical; from the ad
ventures of an experimental rat with
glandular deficiencies to Bode’s
nightmare vision of a postwar World.
This latter series, “The Machines,”
depicts an Earth overrun by robot
fighting machines, speaking an uncouth
Brooklynese accent, who have already
obliterated human civilization and are
now busily obliterating each other. It
would seem hard to find humor in such
a theme, but Bode manages to do so.
Heavy stuff, but vastly entertaining.
The Last
Picture Show:
'the garden
reverts
to desert’
When Peter Bogdanovich was 12 in 1952 he
must have realized that he was into
something. From then through 1971 he kept an
index card file on every movie he saw, and he
claims to have 6,000 of them. Figure 300 films
a year or a steady 6 films a week and you
begin to get a sense of what it would be like to
be a dedicated and disciplined film freak.
Bogdanovich certified himself as a fan by
doing lots of interview-type books and articles
on great American movie du'ectors and stars,
and along with Andrew Sarris is probably one
of the few American film critics who really
thinks American movies are good. So when
Sarris calls Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture
Show neo-classic, or rather the work of a new
classicist, we know immediately that the
classical antecedents are Orson Welles,
Howard Hawks, and John Ford.
There’s nothing obviously flashy or far-out
about The Last Picture Show (unlike, for
example a Kubrick film) except some fan
tastic 360-degree pans, a few almost im
possible long interior dolly shots, a dedication
to deep focus, and total abstinence from the
artificial motion of the zoom lens.
Bogdanovich believes along with Welles that
movies are the greatest narrative form that’s
ever been invented and the best toy any kid
could get. He doesn’t wow us with obtrusive
technique, but rather creates a straight
forward, highly crafted, traditional American
narrative film that happily avoids all the
preciousness and sentimentality of, say, The
Summer of *42 by among other things being in
black and white (“I thought everything would
look too pretty in color”).
by Linda Blackaby
The moving story of growing up in tiny
Anarene, Texas 1951-52 thus has the gritty
grubbiness of pictures in a high school
yearbook. We learn what it feels like to live in
that claustrophobic emptiness which makes
life in a dying small town positively non-epic.
But Bogdanovich doesn’t parody or put down
the town and its inhabitants, indeed he treats
them with the greatest respect. It’s not
because Sonny, the main character, is less of
a person than his heroic Texan predecessors
that he gets stuck; his world simply does not
provide any more opportunities for heroic
action. The problem with his consistently
losing high school football team, that they
don’t know how to tackle, is Sonny’s problem
also (if football is an allegory of life). He’s
never learned to make those defensive moves
you need to keep the world from just rolling
on over you, to keep your side from just
falling apart. Getting out of town like Duane
and Jacy do doesn’t make for much freedom
either. Duane signs up with the Army to go
fight in Korea, and Jacy flees to the big city
university to catch a rich husband (after all,
she’s the prettiest girl in town and her father
owns all the oil wells).
Range lands have become oil fields, and the
only real cowboy in town, Sam the Lion (i.e.
Sam Goldwyn) maintains the only institutions
of community fun—the cafe, the pool hall, and
the Royal movie theatre. If it weren't for
Sam’s wise, kindly fatherliness, the town
would be utterly desolate. The magical
dreams shown in his films, we learn, are no
longer possibilities in Anarene. At the
Saturday night movie. Sonny and Duane neck
with their girl friends in the back rows. “Sure
did like your movie, Sam” they say about The
Father of the Bride as they leave to go neck in
their cars. But the reality of marriage that we
see in Anarene belies the basic family values
reflected on the screen. The night before
Duane is to leave for Korea, he and Sonny go
to the last movie at the Royal. It is Howard
Hawks* Red River, an epic film where a cattle
drive functions to work out satisfactorily the
authority conflicts between father and son
and the town of Abilene is established at the
end of the trail. But neither Korea nor
Anarene is Abeline, there aren't any fathers
left, the romance has become an irony, and
Anarene is slowly closing down. The modem
day equivalent of that cattle drive is the small
cattle truck which kills Billy, the town’s
conscience, on that windswept main street.
Perhaps the key scene in The Last Picture
Show is where Sonny, sitting with Sam by the
side of a lake, is told that "this land sure has
changed." As the camera slowly pans the
barren landscape it is as though the great
Western myth of civilization changing the
desert into a garden has come full circle. The
garden has reverted back to desert.
The last shot is similar to the first, an ap
parently empty ghost town-like main street,
except that at the end the Royal theatre is
closed, everyone is isolated in front of their
TV sets. Sonny has invalidated his
relationships, and the dreams and
possibilities of the future are also closed. The
era that ends in The Last Picture Show was
the one represented in the great films of the
30’s through the 50’s, when we believed that
wars got won and over, and when the fabric of
society held together so that life as a grown
up provided something viable to look forward
to, when romantic quests and epic adventures
were possible. In the films of Hawks and Ford
the world works toward getting together, in
The Last Picture Show as in 1972, we regret
how things come apart.
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MOVIES OF THE WEEK
The Last Picture Show
"The Last Picture Show," A BBS Production for
Columbia Pictures directed by Peter Bogdanovich,
based on the novel by Larry McMurtry and staring
Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Ben Johnson, Cloris
Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, Clu Gulager
and introducing Cybill Shepherd, is about a time and a
place just twenty years gone but seemingly light-years
away. It's about growing up in a town running down,
where being free means getting out. And it's about the
nineteen-fifties.
The fifties. You'll remember what you've tried to
forget: romances beginning and ending in the front seats
of pick up trucks, rusting Hudsons and gleaming Ford
convertibles. Hands that could take apart motors
becoming useless when confronted by brassiere hooks,
hands getting slapped down an inch above the knee. Guys
wandering through Saturday nights burdened by
virginity until the surprising and peculiar moment when
somebody, maybe their girl friend, maybe their girl
friend's mother, says yes.
It's 1951 in Anarene, Texas, when boredom sits so
heavy that boys like Sonny Crawford and Duane Jackson
talk about leaving for good, even for Korea (and those
yellow-skinned girls!), while girls spend their days
growing plump and linesome, leaning anxiously toward
their mirrors. There was a time when people still went to
the picture show, to meet, laugh and cry in the darkness,
but television is making its inroads and now only a few
couples kiss in the back rows. Their parents sit home,
getting drunk or just getting old, watching "Strike It
Rich." And so even the picture show closes up.
For BBS Productions, which has produced a series of
poignant contemporary probes—"Easy Rider," "Five
Easy Pieces and'Drive, He Said"fj|m<ngtheway itwas
meant capturing the way it looked and the way it felt to
be young and vulnerable in a northern Texas town in 1951
and 1952.
Mark of the Devil
Austria 1700. A time of superstition and religious
persecution. Albino (Reggie Nalder)—a peasant turned
witchf inder is terrorising one of the many towns—raping
and burning innocent men and women. He returns from
(Paid Advertisement)
one of the many executions which earn him money, to
find two strangers in the town. One is Christian von Meru
(Udo Kier) a young Baron, the other is Jeff Wilkins
(Herbert Fux), official executioner to Count Cum
berland, one of the national witchfinders. Christian
announces the forthcoming arrival of Cumberland, to
whom he is apprenticed. Albino is enraged when he
realises that his days of power are over, but he dares not
oppose the new authority which has arrived. Drunk and
confused he attacks and tries to rape Vanessa (Olivera
Vuco), a rebellious and fiery girl who works in the inn.
Defending herself she stabs him in the face, only to be
seized and accused by Albino of being a witch in front of
the townspeople present in the inn.
Albino, feeling powerful once more, sticks her body
with a pin to find the devil's mark, but is interrupted by
the entrance of Christian and Jeff. Christian's reaction to
this injustice amazes everyone. He orders Albino to be
whipped in public and that evening, invites Vanessa o
dine with him at the castle.
The two are attracted to each other and for Vanessa,
Christian is the first person she has ever seen oppose the
feared Albino. She begs Christian if she can stay the
night. Although she senses a certain coldness in his rep y,
he agrees. ..
The following morning, soldiers arrive at the castle
in readiness for Cumberlands arrival. Vanessa, falling in
love with Christian, talks him into spending a day with
her tn the country-side. It is only when Christian leaves
her abruptly upon seeing Cumberland s coach arriving,
that she realises why he is so distant from her“~ e as
been indoctrinated into Cumberland s way of in ing
and Cumberland is a religious fanatic.
On the way back to the town, she is seized by
Albino—now having officially drawn up an ,n ,c
against her in revenge for his beating. Cum er an
arrived. A man with a strict moral code condemning aM
earthly pleasures. Christian sits beside urn er a
(Herbert Lorn) as the various suspects are br°u9
forward accused and condemned to the torture, u
denly, to his horror, Vanessa is brought forwar *
Albino Christian pretends that there is no in ic
and Cumberland orders her to be thrown into prison until
her case can be examined
GEORGE C.SCOTT
‘‘THE HOSPITAL’’
GP United Artists
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with Woody Allen
BRAVO. BRANDO'S
GODFATHER
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