Happy birthday to the late, great monster movie making genius Ray Harryhausen. I had the opportunity to interview him in 2005 when he was in Montreal for the Fantasia Film Festival. Among other things, we discussed animation model tie-down holes & how they dictated trajectories, Marcel (Mighty Joe Young) Delgado’s cotton & latex build-up technique for constructing puppets as opposed to foam rubber injection, Harryhausen’s 3D experiments & the 3D Viewmaster reels he worked on, & the problem of strobing during animation & the Go-Motion process to rectify it that led to CGI. The heading for this Motion Picture Purgatory strip which originally appeared in a 2005 issue of The Montreal Mirror was “‘God Complex,’ Hallowed Be Thy Name!” (To see image full-sized, & believe me, you will wanna see it large since it’s so crammed with text, click on it here to open in a new window & use whatever magnify function your browser provides).

Original art for sale for $100.00 CAD. Includes the pencil art preliminaries, the original finished B&W inks (signed & dated by author/artist Rick Trembles in pencil on the back), & a color newsprint tear-sheet (or B&W gray tones, depending on when it came out) from where it was originally published. Postage & framing not included. Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes One & Two available at FAB Press. For original art info, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com.

The Germs were & still are one of my all-time favorite bands. In the late seventies, when punk was getting tired after The Sex Pistols broke up & what was left started morphing into somewhat drearier “post-punk” and/or goofy “new wave,” I still wanted to hear really fast music fueled by outrage, & The Germs certainly fit the bill. They & many of the other LA bands from their milieu paved the future of “punk” for me after it was supposedly declared dead. In Montreal, I was such a fan that every time I’d see someone wearing a Germs blue circle logo it’d be an excuse to gab whether they liked it or not, even if they were complete strangers. That’s how I first met future Montreal music promoter Dan Webster when he was still a bike messenger. The only other person I remember wearing Germs insignia back then was the late Alex Soria of the Nils. When The Germs reunion band with the actor in the movie playing Darby Crash in the actual band with the actual surviving members was slated to play Montreal around 2008, my band The American Devices was going to open up, but the show was cancelled when one of the Germs wasn’t allowed across the border! The heading for this Motion Picture Purgatory, which originally appeared in a 2008 issue of The Montreal Mirror, was; “Homosexual! Up the ass! Homosexual! Darby Crash!” –Angry Samoans. The quote was from the lyrics to the song “Homo-Sexual” from the 1982 LP “Back from Samoa” by Angry Samoans. Can someone please explain to me what their intention actually was? (To see image full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

Original art for sale for $100.00 CAD. Includes three items total: The pencil art preliminaries, the original finished B&W inks (signed & dated by author/artist Rick Trembles in pencil on the back), & a color newsprint tear-sheet (or B&W gray tones, depending on when it came out) from where it was originally published. Postage & framing not included. Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes One & Two available at FAB Press. For original art info, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com.

One of my earliest Motion Picture Purgatory comic strip film reviews done for The Montreal Mirror back in 1985 when the free weekly was just starting. This image was taken directly from a tear-sheet of the published version, hence the yellowing. (To see image full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

Original art not for sale because it vanished long ago. Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes One & Two available at FAB Press. For original art info, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com.

Yeah, get back to me when “Star Wars Day” gets declared an actual paid legal work holiday & then maybe I’ll take notice. Here’s what I really think about your Star Wars franchise. “Crucially calculated to coddle the kiddies!” “Cloying coy ploy to plunder parents’ pocketbooks!” “Think, don’t feel!” Etc, ad nauseam… Image scanned from original 1999 B&W Montreal Mirror newsprint version (To see it full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

As always; original art for sale for $100.00 CAD. Includes three items total: The pencil art preliminaries, the original finished B&W inks (signed & dated by author/artist Rick Trembles in pencil on the back), & a color newsprint tear-sheet (or B&W gray tones, depending on when it came out) from where it was originally published. Postage & framing not included. Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes One & Two available at FAB Press. For original art info, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com.

I don’t laugh snidely at the films of Ed Wood. I find them encouraging. Unjustly renowned as the world’s worst filmmaker, he was a frustrated transvestite in real life & managed to put together & star in his own highly personalized, heroically frank semibiographical GLEN OR GLENDA about the hazards of cross-dressing, a potentially difficult enough proposal to embark on nowadays, never mind when it originally came out in 1953. In this review I explore the later part of Ed Wood’s career that Tim Burton’s biopic didn’t go into, culled from the highly recommended book Nightmare of Ecstasy (Rudolf Grey, Los Angeles, Feral House, 1992). This is probably my favorite Burton flick. The heading for this Motion Picture Purgatory which originally appeared in a 2005 issue of The Montreal Mirror was “Woody for Wood!” (To see image full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

Original art for sale for $100.00 CAD. Includes three items total: The pencil art preliminaries, the original finished B&W inks (signed & dated by author/artist Rick Trembles in pencil on the back), & a color newsprint tear-sheet (or B&W gray tones, depending on when it came out) from where it was originally published. Postage & framing not included. Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes One & Two available at FAB Press. For original art info, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com.