Bradley James Weber

Startling Stories for All Ages

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Rango = HST?

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Every day I cruise the posts at Dark Horizons, one of the best movie news sites on the ‘net. There is the occasional item buzzing about non-events,  but Garth tends to keep the reports straight —- unlike the hyperbolic fanboy bullshit from AICN.

Today, I watched the extended clip of RANGO, the new Nickelodeon/Paramount Pictures cartoon starting the voice work of Johnny Depp, Ilsa Fisher, Bill Nighy, Alfred Molina, and Ned Beatty. Then I watched it again, just to make sure and, yep, looks like a less-than-sly nod to our good Dr. Thompson.

(The video is an MSNBC exclusive, so I can’t imbed it. Click here to watch the clip.)

Film School Rejects though the same thing back in June of last year. Guess I’m a little slow on this one.

Tardy or not, the connections are undeniable: Rango’s lurching gait, Acapulco shirt, speech patterns, and the outrageous detail of his story — along with his aggressive control-the-situation-before-it-takes-control-of-you approach to dealing with the mangy gang in the bar — all seem to add up to a good-timey Gonzhomage.  Add to that some voice work by longtime HST pal Harry Dean Stanton, the overall physiognomy of Rango’s face, and a room full of lizards(!) — and it’s hard to not to watch this clip with Gonzo eyes.

I’m trying to talk the wife into going to the show tomorrow night. She says maybe, but I might just smuggle the kid out of the house, anyway.

HST Bibliography

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If you’re looking for a complete bibliography of the good doctor’s works, there’s no better place to start than HSTbooks.org. (Make sure it’s .org ; .com belongs to a North Carolina college bookstore site — GO WOLFPACK!)

Marty Flynn, the site’s writer and editor, cops to being  ” a fan of Hunter Thompson, I’m also a proponent of keeping his memory alive . . . .” To be expected from someone who’s been posting Hunter-related news and reviews since June 2008. He’s compiled a mine of information. Go spend an hour clicking around the site. Marty’s conscientious, through and, detailed. He’s even got a buying guide for collecting HST books.

Well done, Marty. And thanks.

Steadman’s Children’s Book Art

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Both of these books are long overdue. Not from publishers, from the library. They were checked out three weeks ago, read within days and have been sitting on my desk since then. So instead of being paid to review these, I’m now paying twenty-five cents a day per book. It’s tough that gold, not irony, is coin of the realm otherwise I’d be able to afford that flying pony Kidzilla wants for xmas.

There is no reason to spend much time on the texts. The Big Red Squirrel and the Little Rhinoceros was written by a Swiss publisher and is, despite its hyperbolic jacket text, pure crap. The Mildenhall Treasure is some decent reporting by Roald Dahl about a plowman’s January 1942 discovery of ‘the greatest treasure ever found on the British Isles.” The dwelling point here is Steadman’s styles in children’s book illustration separated by 35 years of craft and the effects of his being the birthing partner of Gonzo Journalism.

Published in 1999, The Mildenhall Treasure’s two–dozen illustrations are typical of Steadman’s well known style: thoughtful composition balanced with loose, seemingly frenetic, brushwork. His art here is a meatier, amped-up and menacing version of the skewed whimsy Quentin Blake did for most of Dahl’s other children’s books. For this story, Steadman’s style, not Blake’s, is the better fit.  Steadman’s merciless portrayal of people reveales their deeper natures; his environmental palate is dark, muddy, and cold –– nicely mirroring the actual dirt of a winter farm and the moral grime of that greedy bastard, Sydney Ford.

The one thing Steadman’s style fails to showcase is the treasure’s true value — the fine craftsmanship of each of the recovered pieces. Images of the treasure seem to be cut outs from a museum catalog or enlarged photocopies gouached over to less-than-stellar effect. Random House targeted this book for kids. Younger readers will likely have a hard time figuring out what Steadman’s pictures of the treasure are supposed to depict.

Why Steadman didn’t use actual photos or execute clear and representative drawings, I don’t know. There is likely some bullshit copyright/intellectual property reason the British Museum wouldn’t clear images of the treasure for this book. Too bad. Those photos with Steadman’s paintings and Dahl’s text would have been a powerful combination.

The same cannot be said for The Big Red Squirrel. Steadman’s art is the only rationale this boring, hollow, let’s-all-get-along tale is back in print after 45 years.

This not so much a picture book –– where the words and images work together to create greater meaning –– as an illustrated story. The text spells everything out, leaving the artist to decorate the white space around the words. Ralph seems to have done the best he could with what he’d been given, managing to deliver better art than the story deserved.

Gouaches and inks were Ralph’s mediums for this book, too. And while there is a certain looseness, the paintings are still well-mannered. Few people familiar with his Gonzo and post-Gonzo styles would be able to pick these out of a line-up of his work.  The crocodile and frog are the most memorable and many of the background animals are fun and eye-catching. The rest of the animals and many of the environments are muddy, uninspired and forgettable. Combine that with the puerile narrative and The Big Red Squirrel becomes less a curiosity than a boring artifact.

Covering the story

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This whole Web site thing has gotten out of control. It was supposed to be simple — a place for people to read the story, comment, and toss a few shekels in the hat if they were so inclined. But now . . . .

It’s my own damn fault, as these things tend to be. A half-dozen long attempts have been made to finish this paragraph, but it all devolves into more personal info than would be wise to share here. And really, who cares? This isn’t about me, it’s about the work. Sometimes that’s the same thing, but not today.

In 1990, I paid a whole buck-fifty for this copy of the campaign book. The El Cajon bookshop I bought it from has since shut its doors, though they seem to have a thriving online store.  The cover was in a lot better shape back then and pages didn’t smell like stale cigarettes.

From the very beginning, the title for my story was going to be Fear and Loathing of the Undead ’78. It immediately sets the tone and nails the action to a specific — and, I believe, critical — time in Hunter’s life. So when faced with having to create visuals for this site, Thomas Benton‘s iconic cover seemed like a good place to start riffing. His imagery is elegant and powerful: death, politics, America, Nixon, fear and loathing. The pieces started falling into place and I knew I was heading in the right direction.

Work started in early October. The image below is, for the most part, first-draft stuff. Except for the hands. I suck at drawing hands, so they took the longest to get just right. Then it was a matter of tinkering with the text.

For those who can spot these things, and there are many of you, I had to use News Gothic. It doesn’t quite match — not thick enough — but it’s the closest thing in the system right now. News Gothic Black or News Gothic Black No. 2 should do it, though I’m open to suggestions.

Keeping the text as close as possible to that on the campaign book was important. As good as the “Author of . . .” line looked under Hunter’s name, I was advised to take it out — a worry over using someone else’s work to promote my own. If anybody would know about that kind of thing, it’s Agent Joe, so the line was yanked.

Aging the cover was a last-minute a fuck-around. I saw the bashed-to-hell copy laying on my desk, liked the look and asked the wife if she knew how to do that kind of thing. She said no, but would look into it. She’s good like that. Meanwhile, I started messing around and came up with something usable for now.

There are a few other ideas in the hopper: a grinning skull with a Tar-Guard clamped in its teeth and a pair of aviators over its eye sockets, Nixon Fingers reflected in the yellow lenses; a rotting hand punched out of Nixon’s grave to flash the victory sign; some kind of zombie riff on Steadman’s first edition cover art for the Vegas book — though that’s horrible enough (in a truly good way) to not be much of a stretch.