THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

In Our Own Image, After Our Likeness

R. Crumb’s original pages for The Book of Genesis -- all of them, all 201 pages of comics plus the covers and other interior images -- were exhibited recently at UCLA’s Hammer Museum in west Los Angeles. On Saturday, February 7, the night before the exhibit’s final day, my wife Michele and I paid a visit and spent the better part of two hours among those pages (having already gone to the very well-attended Crumb/Françoise Mouly talk at UCLA’s Royce Hall back on Oct. 29).

Crumb’s Introduction to Genesis describes the project as “a straight illustration job,” as if to head off expectations that his treatment might be a radical adaptation or satirical hatchet job. Bear in mind that readers outside the orbit of comics may not know of Crumb’s reputation for dutiful adaptations of found texts (Boswell, Sartre, Kafka, etc.) and may expect comix hijinx served up with a subversive wink-nudge; I bet Crumb wanted to foreclose that kind of reading right off the bat. But saying that his Genesis is “straight illustration” is misleading. It’s right insofar as Crumb faithfully sought to subserve the text, observe its details, and bring it to life, but it’s wrong because it soft-pedals the role that Crumb’s own tics, preoccupations, and imaginative graphic input play in the project. It is still a R. Crumb comic, after all.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Hellboy 2

A bit of a departure for us Balloonists today:

The movie Hellboy 2: The Golden Army begins with a bedtime story told by John Hurt, accompanied by a CG animation montage that looks as if it were cast with Lego Bionicles and hand-carved wooden dolls. Later, the film takes in some vicious, piranha-like Tooth Fairies; an elephantine 8-foot troll named Mr. Wink; some drunken product placement, courtesy of Tecate Beer; a brash singalong, courtesy of Barry Manilow (Jesus H!); the most diverting menagerie of critters since early Star Wars; and not one but two love stories, one involving the demonic Hellboy and his pyrokinetic lady love and the other involving, well, a fish-man and an elf. Oh, and there's a faceless ectomorph in a diving suit who speaks with a comical German accent, a troll lady with a deathly fear of canaries, and an Angel of Death that is the most exhilarating take on that idea I've seen since Terry Gilliam et al.'s Baron Munchhausen. There's also a ton of fighting, a shameless baby-in-jeopardy scene, a cameo by Howdy Doody, and a bunch of bathetic guy talk about how girls are hard to understand (the more bathetic because the guys are the demon and the fish-man). Man, this movie is just plain weird.