Oh, Uh, I Mean…PANEL MADNESS WEEK BEGINS!!

Sorry about that.  It just occurred to me I shoulda made a bigger fuss.

Ahem, so…

HEAR YE, HEAR YE!  For your delectation, a week’s worth of brave blogging souls have lined up to do a post each day on some particular panel of comics art that grabs them, sways them, swings them around!  Plants a big sloppy one right on their kisser at the barn dance, when Pa ain’t lookin’.

Because we don’t talk about the art enough, damn it.

So follow along, link to link and page to page, and see what crazy lunatic panel-related thoughts my merry band has come up with!  My own humble beginning is located directly below this one…and I am Sunday, because I’m the man who made them all policemen.

David Allison is Monday.

But if you want to know who else is what Day, you’ll have to read along to find out!

Okay!

Christ, it’s almost Monday already!

See you all there.

The Edenic Fracture: Panel Madness Day One

Ah, the lowly panel. What with all our fantastic page layouts and meticulously-assembled stories in page-to-page transitions, we often seem to forget all about it, don’t we? And yet I will argue that all the fascination of comics storytelling begins in the pregnancy of the single panel, the single image: the time and space control that comics storytelling employs begins there, in (as this fellow notes, with a clarity that should shame those of us who talk about such things for…well, not a living, exactly…) the rising crescendo of deferred action, the world all foregrounded and all climactic, suspended and vibrating: the glimpse of the sublime that organizes our reading, and keeps us coming back for more. The moments of static motion and of sudden improbable silence, that give our reading many centres…many seedings.

And so welcome to the Panel Madness Week blogaround, of which this essay is the first installment. You can thank this exegesis of a single panel from V For Vendetta for the inspiration (hmm, and I do believe there were one or two more like it, as well…you might want to browse around)…

And go ahead, read that first one, if you haven’t already…

And so: the lowly panel.

But, what’s in a name? My fellow contributors have all selected panels, but single images of this “panel” storytelling type need not be looked for only inside the comic book: sometimes a cover is a story, too…

Hell, sometimes even a movie poster is a comics story!

Although at other times, quite plainly, it is not.

Pardon the links; this is not ordinarily a picture-oriented blog. I’m too lazy to get my shit together that way on a regular basis, I’m afraid; plus, I don’t have a scanner. But I’m about to make an exception to that usual method of posting, here, because I really do want you to see this one Steranko image (pilfered with gratitude from CSBG — thanks, Greg!), that’s been haunting me for a while, now. Probably because it’s a picture of where I grew up:

Too Many Notes

Okay, now this is getting ridiculous.  How long has it been this way?  Is it my imagination, or is it really, really, really getting worse?  I speak, of course, of Saturday Night Live’s creeping musical-break-ism…now I’m a mild-mannered fellow, honestly, and I understand that actors need time to change their wigs…but fucking seriously, this one was insane.

Like, just fill the extra time up with more commercials or something, PLEASE.  I’m begging you;  at least have the courtesy to give me NOT-SHOW, when you don’t have any show for me to watch.  This whole SNL interstitial music problem has been going on for decades now, but never before have I found myself wondering if…is it possible?

Am I primarily tuning in to watch that asshole with the saxophone?

I’m sure he’s a very nice guy.  Probably quite happy in his work.  But the G.E. Smith years were not as bad as this (!), simply put there is now FAR TOO MUCH BAND on this show.

Maybe for some reason tonight was exceptional?  Maybe they were just plain short on skit?  I don’t know, I could be wrong, but that was harsh.  Just harsh.  Those were all like thirty-second outros, that is a crazy amount of time to have to deal with someone “jamming” on my TV set.  Most unpleasant.

In other news, because of my pissed-off-ness with the horrific mental torture that listening to this crap is like for me, THE START OF PANEL MADNESS WEEK IS DELAYED UNTIL TOMORROW AFTERNOON, when hopefully I will not want to wrap that goddamn sax around Lorne Michael’s throat.  OUCH.

Too much.

There’s no way I can continue to work now, I need to lie down in a dark room with a damp cloth on my forehead.  I mean they could play some Debussy or something, that would be okay…

Hell, I could play some right now.

Ordinarily when I watch Saturday Night Live I’ve had a couple of beers.  Turns out you really need ‘em.

Ahhhh, “Claire De Lune”…I feel more relaxed already…