Joe Kubert's Comic Book Studio

Well crack my Crayolas! Once again, it is the hour of the Oddcube! …I’m sorry; I don’t know why I said that. So I guess I’d better try to cover it up by saying: Hi there! Everybody’s buddy, Oddcube, here saying hello and welcome to the column!

That’s right! So if you’ve been here before, welcome back! And if you’ve never been here before, what the heck took ya so long? Nevermind, tell me later. I gotta tell ya what you can expect to happen here.

You see, with a VERY complicated system (involving many small notes inside of a hat) I choose a subject for my monthly article. The subjects can be everything and anything I feel like talking about: movies, TV shows, books, music, and the ever-popular et cetera! Then, I try to give you a little pertinent information about it, so that you know why it’s cool enough to check out, or un-cool enough to avoid. Then I wrap the whole thing up with a phony rating system to make it seem like a serious review!

Now, when I was growing up, I wasn’t so very different from all the other square-headed kids. I rode my bike, played video games, read comic books, and had trouble finding a hat that fit. I also was the artistic sort, and liked to doodle instead of doing my schoolwork. So it was a wonderful revelation when it finally occurred to me that somebody somewhere actually got paid to draw comic books!

Of course, it was a major bummer to realize that I couldn’t draw as well as the guys who draw comic books, and that my stories were…well, really dumb! There’s a whole lot of stuff that goes into making a comic book, and you don’t really realize that until you’re dumb, I mean, ambitious enough to try it!

But the whole process has become a little easier to understand thanks to Joe Kubert! Now, if you don’t know who Joe Kubert is, then you’re not a real comic book fan. Cuz he’s a BIG NAME in the comic book industry. He’s probably best known for the work he’s done for DC Comics, first as an artist, then as director of publications. Then, in September of 1976 he and his wife Muriel founded the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, the ONLY accredited school to specialize in the art of cartooning.

But that’s not all, cuz he’s also written a “How To Draw Comics” instructional book, and developed the “Joe Kubert Comic Book Studio”, which is what I’m actually supposed to be talking about today.

Now, I’ll go ahead and admit that I’ve bought more than one of those “How To Draw Comics”-type books, by various authors. Basically, they are all the same, and I don’t really mean that in a bad way. They all basically say “this is how to draw a guy and THIS is how to draw a guy with super-muscles!” The example art is different in each book, of course, and I like to collect them for inspirational purposes.

So when I found the “Joe Kubert’s Comic Book Studio”, I rather assumed it was going to be the same sort of instruction book, but with some supplies included. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that’s NOT what it is at all!

Wait, first of all, let me tell you all the stuff for get with this thing. If you get it new, it looks like a book wrapped in plastic wrap. But when you open it up, you find out that it’s not a book, it’s a portfolio! You open up all these flaps and find that there are three different pockets to store your sketch papers in! One of the inside “pages” has all this nifty pockets to store all your vital art supplies: drawing pencil, colored pencils, eraser, pencil sharpener, outlining pen, and even a triangle! When you buy it brand new, it COMES with all these supplies, plus twenty sheets of sketch paper (suspiciously similar to the paper I put in my printer). It also comes with a blank comic book for you to draw in that has sixteen interior pages (not including the inside covers), and the instruction book!

Now, as I said, the instruction book is NOT simply “how to draw comic book guys”, as I expected. You are guided throughout the book by a little cartoon Joe Kubert, who sums up the entire process of creating a comic book! He starts off by telling you that you need an Idea, and a Story, Characters. There’s some helpful hints and advice on how to come up with these, and a suggested format on how to write the script for your comic, so you know exactly what happens in each panel!

He does NOT dwell on how to draw people, but he does point out that you have to draw more than just people to make a comic book! There are all sorts of props and settings, and if you don’t practice them, too, your book won’t look right! Funnily enough, I’ve seen many “how to draw” books that fail to mention this!

Then, you take your script and figure out the best way to arrange all your panels on the page! You don’t even touch the empty comic book until Chapter Five, and then the first thing you do is draw in the panels! You come back later and actually start drawing the story.

And then you’re still not done! Cuz ya have to put in all your word balloons, caption boxes, and sound effects! Then you ink it, and color it in! There are a few hints and tidbits on inking techniques, and how to mix the colors of these six colored pencils to get even more colors. But that’s basically it. And now that I know how to make a comic book, I feel inspired to re-invent one of the heroes I designed in my misspent youth. Like maybe a modern and gritty update of this guy here:
There are, of course, other techniques than the ones presented in the book, but this was the first book I’d ever seen that took you step-by-step through the entire process, so I was plenty impressed! Plus, I think the whole portfolio-thing is a really neat idea to try and keep all your stuff together. Although, if you’re not careful, the colored pencils WILL fall out!

Now, I found mine at my local Michael’s craft store for $16, so it really wasn’t too bad of a deal. I have seen them cheaper on Amazon, but they may have been used and missing stuff. But they should be available online from places like Michael’s, or Jo-Ann Fabrics, or Dick Blick, and probably other art supply stores as well.

I’ll admit that a serious art student may not be as impressed with it as a tween-aged comic book enthusiast. But it does tell you the basics from start to finish, and comes with all the physical equipment necessary to make your own book. You only have to supply the idea and the talent! All in all, I thought it was pretty neat!

But, I can’t just say that! That’s not how we do things around here! We have to go by the numbers, and around here we determine numbers fairly and randomly with a pair of D&D percentage dice! So, in case ya don’t know, percentage dice are a pair of ten-sided dice used to randomly determine a number between 01 (think of the most terrible, horrible thing and multiply it by six!) and double-zero, which actually means 100 (if don’t get no better than this!). So I’ll give my handy-dandy dice a nice and un-biased roll just like that…

…and end up with an eighty-four! Well, hey! I can live with that!

But that’s just one idiot’s opinion, and you don’t have to take it! You can form your very own opinion! You can even share it with the world by leaving a comment below! Go ahead, it won’t hurt! At least, I’m pretty sure it won’t!

But that does bring us to the end of another invigorating, stimulating Odd Review! So be sure to tune in again next time to find out what I talk about next! I have not idea what it may be, so we can both be surprised! And if you're after additional oddness, you are accordingly invited to investigate my other blog, the link is in the right-hand side-bar! So be there and be square!

-----Your Buddy, Oddcube


Buy books. Mention this post when ordering any book from a Cyberwizard Productions imprint, and receive 10% off your next order.

SOAP

Hello, hey there, hiya, howdy, and how ya doin’! This is everybody’s buddy, Oddcube, saying hello and welcome to the column! I’ve some good news and some bad news about it, too. See, on account of April Fool’s Day, I thought it would be appropriately pompous and preposterous to prepare a paper about the Internet itself! Why? Cuz I thought it would be a good laugh for me to be pretentious enough to assign a rating to the Internet! Unfortunately, to do that I had to peruse a little bit of the history so that I could relay some actual facts to You, my loyal readers (cuz you deserve it)! It was a great idea, but the history of the Internet according to Wikipedia is so god-awful BORING that I stopped reading WAY before I got to anything interesting like Rick-rolling, “It’s a trap!” and other Internet memes, or the infamous “Two Girls, One Cup” video. So I’m sad to say that I’ve scrapped that scheme in selection of some other subject. But for those who simply MUST know: I give it a seventy-two.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today! Today I am here to offer you an Odd Review, and that’s just what I’m gonna do! In the unthinkable instance that this is your initial attendance, I shall impart a little introductory information so you have an optimum understanding of our everyday ongoings.

I pick a subject, any subject, usually with the help of a dart board, conduct some minimal research, then write up a brief-but-entertaining essay that is light on facts and heavy on unabashed bias, then present it to You, the loyal reader. Then I sit back and bask in your assumed amazement, imagining the utterance of lines like: “Wow! That Oddcube is a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!” These utterances would be uttered, of course, with the utmost of admiration and esteem, which I, of course, appreciate utterly.

So you can see that there’s nothing wrong with my imagination!

But I digress, and I’m awfully good at it! Because I’m supposed to be informing you that the subject of this Odd Review is Soap, a brilliant American sitcom that spoofed soap operas! Why is it so good? Read on, Grasshopper!

In the days of my misspent youth I was subjected to all the usual forms of childhood torture: being sent to bed without supper, the long-lasting affects brought on by the misinformation of Disney-film realities, and most insidious of all: the afternoon soaps!

I am proud to say that even at that young age, I knew they were totally dumb. I mean, seriously, how many of you have two or three identical twin siblings that you didn’t know about that conveniently showed up out of nowhere to die in the plane crash in your place? It’s never happened to me! How many people do you know have contracted a never-before-encountered disease and/or an inoperable brain tumor and magically got over it? How many people survive an explosion and leave the hospital with a brand new face that does NOT look like Darkman unmasked? Now how many people do you know that have done all three? More than once? Man, I tell ya, if you buy into this stuff it’ll warp your mind worse than those Disney films! No lie!

But then came Susan Harris! Susan Harris was a TV scriptwriter who won the Humanitas Prize (whatever that is) for writing the abortion episode for Bea Arthur’s 70’s sitcom Maude. She was the co-founder of Witt/Thomas/Harris productions, and the creator of several shows including Soap, its spinoff Benson, The Golden Girls, Empty Nest, and others. Anyway she created, wrote, and produced the super-campy, slapstick, definitive soap opera parody, Soap.

Soap is the story of two sisters, Jessica Tate and Mary Campbell, who are totally devoted to one another, and their respective families of super-eccentric oddballs, who do not get along at all.

Now, the Tates have money, and live in the mansion that belonged to Jessica and Mary’s parents. Jessica’s husband, Chester is an embezzler, but his main hobby is having a string of affairs behind Jessica’s back. They have three children, two adult daughters and one teenage son. Their oldest daughter, Eunice, is apparently some sort of journalist who is having an affair with a married Congressman. Meanwhile, the younger daughter, Corinne, is very promiscuous, but I think this is a form of compensation because she can’t have her high-school crush who became a priest. Their only boy, Billy, ends up getting kidnapped by a wacky cult and eventually has a brief affair with his teacher. Also in the household is the Major, who is Jessica and Mary’s father, who believes that he’s still fighting World War Two. And last but not least, the dry-witted and long-suffering Benson, easily the most well-grounded character on the entire show.

The Campbells are a middle-class family. Mary is married to her second husband, Burt, who owns his own construction company and suffers impotency brought on by guilt because he believes he is responsible for the death of Mary’s first husband, a mobster who was trying to extort money from Burt with a protection racket. When a situation becomes too complicated for him to handle, he snaps his fingers and believes that he has turned invisible. Mary has two sons from her first marriage, Danny, who is part of the mob, but will be allowed to leave if he kills the man who killed his own father…who, of course, turns out to be his stepfather, Burt; and Jodie who is gay. Burt also had two sons from his previous marriage, first off there was Peter, a tennis instructor who usually held his lessons in the bedroom, and Chuck, a schizophrenic ventriloquist who believed his dummy, Bob, was real and insisted that everyone treat him as though he were.

And that’s just how it starts! Then they proceed to skewer all manner of tried-and-true soap opera clichés and gimmicks, some of them before they got to happen in real soaps! Like, the primary storyline of Season One is finding out who shot, stabbed, and pummeled Peter Campbell to death, YEARS before anyone wondered who shot J.R.! One of the weirder storylines centers on the baby Corinne had with her ex-priest boyfriend…the baby was possessed by the Devil! I mean, how many soaps would use a storyline like that? Perhaps the most appropriate one is Dark Shadows (but they had more class than that). But it happened to Marlena on Days of Our Lives some years later. And I do love it when Burt gets kidnapped by aliens and replaced with an alien double.

Of course, there weren’t any long-lost identical twins, and there was no baby-switching. But there was a case of “I’m not your real Mom”, and a case of “Your Dad isn’t this guy, its that guy!” Actually, most of it was pretty typical soap opera crap, only much funnier.

However, that did not stop all sorts of protest groups from writing letters of complaint to the station and the studio before the show even aired! See, there were some reviews and reports about the upcoming show. Unfortunately (or fortunately) some of these reports were written by people who had NOT seen the show, and were working off of notes, or outlines, or something. Some people were calling it a sex farce, unsuitable for prime time, filled with more sex per minute than any other show ever, and included the seduction of a Catholic priest while in the confessional! …This, by the way, is not exactly true.

But little things like facts are unimportant when you just want to complain about things. And that’s what various religious groups did, because that’s what various religious groups love to do the most. They complained about extra-marital affairs! They complained about impotence! They complained about the gay guy! And they weren’t the only ones, various gay groups also complained about the gay guy for fear that he would be nothing but bad stereotype! Thanks to the supporters of all these various groups, it is estimated that the station and studio received anywhere from 20,000 to 32,000 letters of complaint BEFORE the show even went on the air!

Of course, once it finally debuted, everyone was like “Hey, what’s the big deal?” Only about 26% of the people who watched it claimed to be offended in some way, and half of them said they would watch again next week!

Regardless of these troublemakers, Soap lasted for four seasons, a grand total of 85 episodes. Although the last few episodes were one hour long instead of the usual half-hour, and were chopped up into two episodes for syndication, making a total of 93 episodes.

On the down side, the over-all story arc was planned out for five seasons. But the ratings had dropped low enough that the stupid idiots who ran the network did not renew that final season, and the internet was not yet mainstream enough to run an online petition to save the show. Hey, it worked for Babylon 5! Because of this premature cancellation, there were a collection of unresolved plots, creating what might have been the most excruciating cliffhanger EVER!

See, Jodie was the victim of a bad hypnotherapy session and was stuck in a past life incarnation—that of a 90-year old Jewish man in the Bronx! Chester, who expected to die in a duel to a South American freedom fighter, was threatening to shoot Danny Campbell when he found him in bed with Chester’s new wife, Annie! Mary had a baby that she believes was sired by Burt’s alien duplicate! Burt, who became Sherriff, was about to walk into an ambush set up by a crooked politician! And Jessica was about to be shot by a South American Communist firing squad! And that’s where it ends!

These were all supposed to be wrapped up in the next season, and creator Susan Harris later told fans that if she had known the show was not going to be renewed, it would not have ended that way. She did not divulge any details that I am aware of, except for a promise that “Jessica would have lived”, which I assume means that Jessica would have specifically survived the firing squad, although I would expect both her and Mary to live through the entirety of the series since it is “a story of two sisters”. The only official closure we get is, like, two years later on the spinoff Benson we learn that Jessica is alive but in a coma somewhere in South America.

Soap was truly great, and there’s never been anything quite like it since. It was exceptionally written, and the outrageous plots were expertly enacted by an amazing ensemble which included Katherine Helmond, Cathryn Damon, Richard Mulligan, Robert Mandan, Billy Crystal, and Robert Guillaume, to name only a few.

Should you see it? Yes you should! How? Where? Good questions! If you’re lucky, some local or cable channel will show reruns. I know Nick-At-Nite and Comedy Central have both run marathons, but that was some time ago. The entire run, all four seasons, are available on DVD and can be bought or rented from discerning sources, like Amazon or Netflix. Also, the first two seasons can be watched online for free at places like Crackle or Hulu. The entire show is available for streaming through Netflix.

And now, the time you’ve all been waiting for, time to pull out the good ol’ D&D percentage dice and fairly and randomly determine a rating! For those of you who don’t know, percentage dice are a pair of ten-sided dice used to determine a number between zero-one (almost as bad as Manos: the Hands of Fate) to double-zero, which actually means one hundred (it does not GET any better than this)! So we’ll just give the ol’ dice a roll like so…

…and end up with a enviable ninety-six! Meanwhile the network that failed to renew season five gets a spiteful sixteen, take that, you tasteless twits!

Well folks, I’m afraid we’ve found the finish of our Word file. So be sure to check back next time to find out what I’m gonna talk about next! And just before I leave, I’d like to leave you this bit of advice: if you find a link that’s supposed to lead to the “Two Girls, One Cup” video, be very careful. Because you could get Rickroll’d, and then you’ll know “It’s a trap!” And this is everybody’s buddy, Oddcube, saying be there and be square!

-----Everybody’s Buddy, Oddcube

Buy books. Mention this post when ordering any book from a Cyberwizard Productions imprint, and receive 10% off your next order.