AINTITCOOLNEWS.COM Reviews Motion Pictures Again!

Back in 2002-2004, I self-published Motion Pictures as a comic book. I only lasted four issues, but I got some great reviews from various on-line movie and comic-book related web-sites. Motion Pictures was the first self-published comic to be reviewed TWICE by the then-new INDIE JONES section of AINTITCOOLNEWS.COM, the well-known movie news and review web-site. The second review was the best review I have ever gotten for anything I’ve ever done in my whole life. Check it out:

From Aintitcoolnews.com on 4/1/03:

I’m not going to make a habit of repeat reviews, but this comic deserves a few more words. You see, I’ve been laughing my ass off at the last two issues of MOTION PICTURES, and that’s more than I can say for anything else I’ve picked up at the store lately. It’s been a consistent bright spot in the comics submissions throughout the Indie Jones project. And, you know… I’m kinda hoping that if I review it again, I’ll get Josh Edelglass to send me more stuff.

I mentioned MOTION PICTURES in the very first Indie Jones column last December, in my humor comics roundup. As I said then, MOTION PICTURES takes a very simple premise and runs the hell away with it – a boy and his robot are transported into Movieland, and wander through various pictures with their remote control. It’s a flimsy excuse to parody a string of flicks at a rapid clip, and I don’t care. This is funny stuff. Between the Sci-Fi extravaganza of Issue #2 and the James Bond theme of Issue #3, I’m getting the satiric laughs that Saturday Night Live gave up trying to give me. In short, this is movie-geek candy.

To do an effective parody comic, one needs the following skills: 1) the artistic skill to portray/imitate your targets recognizably 2) the ability to generate consistently fresh takes on a wide variety of targets 3) the wit to produce an extra-high volume of jokes 4) the sense to know when to quit. The Star Wars issue (#2) is a pretty good example of all of these. I personally could make fun of Episode II the whole live-long day, but Edelglass has the sense to move on before you can start to get sick of the subject. Not before he’s gotten in some pretty potent stabs, of course (“Dear George: Please Insert Natalie in Post”), and there’s a bonus rant in the back of the comic that pretty much summarizes my attitude. But in the same issue he also manages to hit up Star Trek: TMP, Minority Report, Road to Perdition, and even Austin Powers for laughs. The humor is vastly improved by the strong likenesses of the characters, an aspect of the book that continues to improve through Issue #3, where you can see what it would look like if the entire rogues’ gallery of the Bond series got together at a bar. I admit I’m a sucker for this sort of thing (it kills me when Frank Cho imitates fellow strip artists, for example), but with this effect I think anyone could get a chuckle out of the robot roundup in issue #3, with a lineup of precisely rendered robot characters from Bender to the Terminator to Data (“How is it that I am the most sophisticated android ever built, and yet I am unable to form contractions?”).

I think this guy’s got a real future in comics. Whether he continues with the movie parodies or moves on to other ideas, he’s got a nice flow, a confident style, visual flair, and great comedic timing. It seems he’s learned the right lessons from creators like Brian Michael Bendis as to the pacing of dialogue. He’s clearly put a lot of work into these comics, from the covers down to the little typy stuff and I hope it pays off for him. I’ll tell you this much: this comic is tailor-made for AICN TalkBackers, with all the little geeky details and inside jokes we come to this site looking for.