Journey to the dark, dank heart of my 1980s sticker collection

"The mummy's ready for his mystical journey!"

Where were you during the sticker craze of 1982-83? Me, I was attending Springview Elementary School in Flushing, MI. And, yes, like a lot of kids my age, I got caught up in the fad. There was even a store called Happyland at the local mall that sold pretty much nothing but stickers. For a few months there, that store was the center of the kid universe. Then it went away and no one even noticed.

Recently, I discovered my old sticker album from those days. Well, to call it an "album" is being generous. As you'll see, it's just a bunch of loose pages of typing paper crudely stapled together. But it's an excellent indicator of my tastes during the early Reagan years. I was obsessed with cartoons, comics, video games, and movies. Other than my near-total lack of interest in video games other than Tetris these days, very little has changed in the last 35 years.

Anyway, out of some misplaced nostalgia, I've decided to scan the entire thing so that we can all peruse it together. I think it provides valuable insight into who I was back then and what pop culture was like. Page 1, for instance, is dominated by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), but there's a little Pac-Man thrown in there, too. I guess that ghost is supposed to be Inky, but he's the wrong shade of blue. Or maybe he's just a pixelated Fry Guy from McDonald's.

E.T. and Pac-Man stickers

I don't claim to have had great taste as a kid. My love of cartoons and comics knew no bounds, as evidenced by these stickers representing Ziggy and The Smurfs. Hey, I wish I could say I was a 7-year-old hipster, browsing through record store shelves for the latest Plasmatics and Husker Du albums. But it's not true. I read Ziggy and watched The Smurfs. Come at me, bro. It should be noted that all the stickers on this page are puffy stickers. Those were the best kind for some reason.

Ziggy and Smurfs stickers

If cartoons and video games were great on their own, then surely the combination of the two was doubly intoxicating. Which brings me to my utter fascination with Nintendo's Popeye arcade game from 1983. Oh, did I love this game, but I only got to play it at the local roller skating rink. And I was lousy at it, which meant my quarters were soon gone. You have to understand that Popeye himself was my favorite cartoon character, and I consumed as much Popeye media as I could back then. Bonus: these stickers are made from some kind of felt-like material. They're still soft and fuzzy all these decades later.

Also on this page: the wizard mascot from Mystiks, which were these weird, animal-shaped stickers filled with some kind of color-changing oil. If I remember correctly, these were sold only one at a time rather than on pages. It was kind of a big deal to get one of these. The flat, unchanging wizard stickers just came free with the sticker you were actually buying. Sadly, this album does not contain any of the oil-filled Mystiks. Just this lone wizard. "I'm a sticker too!" he pleads. Yeah, right. Go to bed, old man.

Popeye video game stickers.

Did I tell you my love of Popeye was intense back in 1982? I have at least three pages of these stickers, featuring Popeye, Wimpy, Olive Oyl, Swee'Pea, and Bluto. I only scanned one page, though, because the other two are just copies of these same designs. I must have gotten a pack of these.

Popeye stickers

And it's right back to the video games. These are some awesome Donkey Kong puffy stickers. The main sticker even has googly eyes. Who knew Mario was on his way to one of the mightiest franchises in video game history? And who's that woman he's rescuing? Peach? Daisy? Nope. It's Pauline. And this wasn't her last game by a long shot. But, sticker people, she was a brunette, not a blonde.

Donkey Kong stickers

This sticker album also shows how I was growing and maturing in those days. It may be a stretch to call Masters of the Universe more "grown-up" fare, but remember that just a few pages back, we were dealing with Ziggy and The Smurfs. This is a fairly lame representation of the franchise: the logo, Man-At-Arms, He-Man, Skeletor, Beast Man, and two crummy weapons. Barely enough to fill up a page. Ultimately, though, it's stuff like Masters of the Universe that would lure me away from stickers.

Masters of the Universe stickers

Would you believe it? More puffy stickers based on a video game. Go figure. Bet you didn't see that twist coming. These are from Q*bert, another game I only played at the local roller rink. (The joint had a real catchy name, too: Roller Skating. That was the name.) But how often did I get there? A couple of class trips per year? Maybe a birthday party?

Q*bert stickers

Pac-Man, on the other hand, was everywhere. Grocery stores and pizza parlors had Pac-Man cabinets. There was a Pac-Man TV show in 1982-83. We even had a miniature Pac-Man home version. He had a level of ubiquity that Q*bert couldn't touch. These stickers specifically say "Pac-Family." There was no game with that title, but Pac was a family man on his show. (These designs are a little different, though.) And what have we here? More googly eyes!

There are a few randos in here as well: a hockey player, a rocket ship, plus a couple of stray Muppets. The Fozzie sticker makes no sense. It's Halloween, obviously, and he's dressed as a clown. Which tracks, I guess. But he's talking to a pumpkin-headed ghost who looks just like him. And he's saying, "Halloween sure is fun!" like it's some kind of secret. Shrug. (By the way, that "HOT SHOT" scratch 'n' sniff sticker used to smell like cinnamon. Now it just smells like paper. Time, time, time. See what's become of me.)

Pac-Man and Muppets stickers

This next page is sparse but very indicative of its time. It contains three large stickers depicting video games of the era (from top to bottom): Centipede, Frogger, and Defender. I never played Defender even once, and Centipede hurt my hand. You played that one with a track ball, and your skin would always get trapped between the ball and the arcade cabinet. Ouch! Maybe that's why I stuck this one to the page upside-down. Frogger, on the other hand, I played a lot. It's a game I still think about because I live near a very busy street, and crossing it on foot is tricky. My strategy is to make it to the center island and from there to the other side. I don't just play Frogger now; I live it.

Centipede, Frogger, and Defender stickers.

Not much to say about this next page. It's mostly just more randos, including your standard-issue Terrifying Clown from the Depths of Hell™. The one licensed character on this page is Snoopy. The only thing really remarkable about these stickers is that they're (mostly) the shiny, reflective kind. Those were sort of neat, I guess. Not as neat as Masters of the Universe or Popeye, but still kind of eye-catching. I honestly don't get the stickers down at the bottom. They're a bunch of strange props: an old-timey phone, a boiling cauldron, a piggy bank. Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better.

Random shiny stickers

More of the dregs here, I'm afraid. Fairly generic-looking aliens and spaceships. Snoozers. I do like the idea of giving a child a "Pretty Bright!" sticker, though. "Hey, kid, you're fairly intelligent! Not a genius by any means but certainly adequate!" At the bottom of the page are these strange "Penny Power" stickers. I have no idea what these are or where they came from. Google didn't tell me jack squat.

Aliens and Penny Power stickers

Oh, but things turn around in a big way here! Even by the age of 7 or 8, I was already a nerd for old-timey, long-dead comedians like Abbott & Costello and W.C. Fields. So I can remember being ecstatic with happiness at finding these Laurel & Hardy puffy stickers at a drug store one afternoon. Curiously, these designs are based on a 1966 animated series from Hanna Barbera. I can't say as I ever saw that show, but I do remember Stan and Ollie turning up on Scooby-Doo. Also on this page: more Penny Power nonsense, plus Felix the Cat, a panda bear, "I Love My Dog" (we always had dogs in my family), and a now-dormant peppermint scratch 'n' sniff.

Laurel & Hardy stickers, plus Felix the Cat and more!

And now, the end is near, and so I face... Hello Kitty. Look, back then, I was a sticker junkie. I'd take whatever I could get. Even Sanrio stuff. Remember Happyland? That place was like Sanrio Heaven. It's only natural that some of that stuff would filter into my collection. Maybe the American flag helps balance it out. There's some more interesting stuff on this, the final page of my little sticker album. See that Smurfs sticker down there, for instance? It's another scratch 'n' sniff, but this one actually still smells like peanut butter. I'm not kidding. Don't believe me? Smell your screen.

You might notice some Hi-C/Return of the Jedi stickers, too. Turns out this was part of a whole promotion. I somehow wound up with arguably two of the lamer stickers in this collection. Wonder what happened to the rest? Anyway, thank you for taking this voyage with me down Memory Lane. You have a real nice rest of your day.

Hello Kitty and Return of the Jedi stickers

Once a year, a new 'Zomby'

That's the deal.

The book that inspired 'Taxi Driver' is actually a lot closer to 'Ziggy'

Arthur Bremer in 1972: This man thinks he's about to become famous.

Arthur Bremer's book.

Arthur Bremer, now 65, barely qualifies as famous in 2016. Start typing his name into Google, and the search engine will come up with about a dozen other, more popular autocomplete suggestions first: Arthur Bowen, Arthur Blank, Arthur Berzinsh, Arthur Brown, Arthur Boorman, etc., etc.

There is a bitter irony in all of this, since few people have gone to such drastic lengths to become well-known as Bremer did. Way back in 1972, when he was just a 21-year-old ex-busboy from Milwaukee with a high school education, Arthur Bremer shot and permanently paralyzed George Wallace, the notorious segregationist Alabama governor who was then noisily campaigning for the White House. Bremer had originally wanted to assassinate incumbent president Richard Nixon but had settled for Wallace when his preferred target proved unreachable.

None of this was done out of political malice; the mildly conservative Bremer simply thought the act would gain him historical immortality. His thinking was not unlike that displayed in Jessica Delfino’s 2006 satirical song, “I Wanna Be Famous.” Like the deluded young lady in that song, Arthur Bremer thought his name would forever be attached to that of a famous person, the way John Wilkes Booth's is to Abraham Lincoln or Lee Harvey Oswald's is to John F. Kennedy. Bremer's writings show him to be fixated on famous assassins, including Sirhan Sirhan.

"Maybe I won't be a star," go the lyrics of Delfino's song, "but I'll at least be famous."

For a few years in the mid-to-late 1970s, it looked like Arthur Bremer's extreme gamble had sort of paid off. His handwritten journal, recovered from his car after his arrest, was published by Harper's Magazine Press in 1973 under the title An Assassin's Diary, complete with a heady, sympathetic introduction by writer Harding Lemay, who largely portrays the young would-be assassin as the redheaded stepchild of our empty American culture.

Pop culture referenced him, too. Bremer was name-checked by Divine in John Waters' Female Trouble in 1974, for instance. Divine's character, Dawn Davenport, claims that she "bought the gun that Bremer used to shoot Wallace." The actual revolver was auctioned off in late 2014. Peter Gabriel wrote a song about him called "Family Snapshot," which ended up on the same self-titled album as "Biko" and "Games Without Frontiers" in 1980. And most famously, in 1976, Arthur Bremer and his diary served as the partial inspiration for Taxi Driver, written by Paul Schrader and directed by Martin Scorsese.

But that was all decades ago. The Watergate break-in, which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency, proved to be the immortal, history-changing story to emerge from the 1972 election, not the Wallace assassination attempt.

Today, as George Wallace's own name ebbs further into the past, Arthur Bremer has been demoted to a historical footnote. By 1991, when the conversation on Mystery Science Theater 3000 briefly turned to the subject of political assassins during the Cave Dwellers episode, host Joel Hodgson had some genuine difficulty even recalling Bremer’s name, tentatively referring to him as “Arthur Bremmel.” After 35 nearly incident-free years in a Maryland prison, Arthur Herman Bremer was released to minimal fanfare and a near-total lack of outrage in 2007. An Assassin's Diary, once a hot item, has been out of print for years.

Much of this can be attributed to a total lack of charisma on Arthur Bremer's part. Scorsese nerds will be able to find numerous parallels between An Assassin's Diary and Taxi Driver, including some uncomfortable run-ins with Secret Service agents, but Arthur Bremer has very little in common with Travis Bickle, the cabbie-turned-vigilante played by Robert De Niro. Bickle is a dark, tortured anti-hero with strong, albeit misguided, principles. His stint in Vietnam gives him an intriguing backstory. And the diary he keeps during the movie has flashes of poetry within it.

Bremer, on the other hand, is just kind of a clueless, hapless dork, closer in spirit to De Niro’s fame-obsessed Rupert Pupkin character from The King of Comedy. He's an utter nobody trying to become a somebody in the worst way possible.

Arthur Bremer and Radar O'Reilly.

Today, despite its foreboding title, An Assassin's Diary does not provide chilling insight into the twisted mind of a would-be killer. Instead, it reads like a very, very dark comic novel about a guy who's in way over his head. The author's spelling, dialogue, grammar, and punctuation are all atrocious, making the diary seem like a kid's sloppy homework. In his mug shot from the period, Bremer strongly resembles actor Gary Burghoff as timid, mild-mannered "Radar" O'Reilly from M*A*S*H.

More than anything, the deluded young man's diary is highly reminiscent of Tom Wilson's Ziggy, a comic strip that debuted in June 1971, less than a year before the bungled assassination attempt. To put it frankly, Arthur Bremer is the Ziggy of political assassins: a luckless, ineffectual doofus who receives nothing but shabby treatment from the world. That is, when the world bothers to notice him at all.

Like Ziggy, An Assassin's Diary is largely devoted to the title character's poor customer service experiences at various sub-par businesses: hotels, restaurants, and auto mechanics. Because this is a young man's journal and not a family-oriented comic strip, Bremer's misadventures also include an unsatisfying trip to a massage parlor, which he visits after seeing an ad in Screw magazine.

Bremer followed Nixon and Wallace on the campaign trail in the unhappy spring of '72, waiting for his perfect opportunity to strike, and the miserable road trip proved to be a protracted comedy of errors. In his diary entry for April 21, 1972, for instance, Bremer talks about what happened one night when he pulled into one service station and then another to get a tire patched:

A high school kid and his girl were there talking quietly. Kid seemed disturbed that someone would pull into his station, a big name place like the first, and disburbe his romance. He didn't have the patches! 

"If a service station doesn't have the patches who does?" 

"I don't know". 

"Maybe I should try a negligy store". 

He walked back to his girl in silence.

Previously, on April 19, Bremer had written of his unmistakably Ziggy­-esque experience aboard an overcrowded airplane.

A fat boring sheltered slob of a theology student talked non-stop with an equally sheltered & fasinated (always smiling) high school student. I waited 30 minutes for dinner & when I got it, last in the whole plane, we had turbilence & the "fasten seat belts" sign went on. Impossible to do with the dinner table down. I hurreyed & drank down half my coffee before it spilled over my pants. Got away with only a tie stain and an everlasting preduice against theology students & capacity plane trips.

Like Tom Wilson's bald-headed cartoon everyman, the aspiring assassin is plenty incompetent all on his own, without any assistance from others. In those pre-Google Maps, pre-GPS days of the early 1970s, Bremer had to find campaign rallies and whistle stops by himself, and An Assassin's Diary shows him to be perhaps the world's crummiest navigator. He spends a lot of his time hopelessly lost, sometimes even having to ask his hated foes, policemen and Secret Service agents (whom he refers to as "the SS"), for help.

And the guy is all thumbs when handling firearms. Once, in preparation for a border crossing into Canada, he secrets a gun so deeply within the bowels of his car that it cannot be retrieved again. And the book's arguable comic high point occurs when, while holed up in his depressing little apartment, he accidentally fires a very noisy shot he then pathetically tries to cover by turning the television to a war movie. Only the apathy of the landlady saves him.

That's one of the great, unintentional lessons of An Assassin's Diary: Arthur Bremer, hopeless though he is, catches America napping on the job. The young man's strange, jittery behavior should have set off alarm bells and possibly gotten him arrested at any number of points along his journey, way before he got close enough to George Wallace to fire a shot. But it seems that nobody was paying this schmuck the least bit of interest.

The book's pathetic postscript reveals that virtually no one had bothered to get to know him. What did Arthur Bremer's few acquaintances recall of the suddenly famous man? "Somebody else remembered," reports the epilogue, "that his mother had refused to let him try out for the high school football team." Apparently, the only way people had to define him was by negation. He was the guy who didn't play football in high school. Some legacy.

Had anyone actually taken a few minutes to get to know Arthur Bremer, they'd have met a young fellow who, while no Rhodes scholar, was capable of some piquant commentary about the emptiness of our culture. At one point in An Assassin's Diary, apropos of nothing, he criticizes Diana Ross for selling out to please white audiences. Elsewhere, he rants about the unfairness of American vending machines not taking Canadian coins. He routinely mocks hippies for the uselessness of their protests and demonstrations. He gives politicians, policemen, and other authority figures no respect either, casually referring to Nixon as "Nixy-boy."

 

Poster for ZPG.

And he even does a little amateur movie reviewing, too, making the decision to switch his target from Nixon to Wallace while watching Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, "fantasizing myself as the Alek on the screen come to real life." True to Bremer’s virginal nature, he’s more concerned with “the old ultra violence” in the film than he is with “the old in out.” He praises Michael Campus' now-forgotten sci-fi film Z.P.G. as a movie that "really hit home with people playing with dolls, paste-food, super-smog, etc." But he says that Otto Preminger's Such Good Friends is "probaly the worst picture he ever made" and "as bad as Vixen by Russ Mayer. Dog shit with a plastic flower in it."

In his humbler moments, Bremer sends a few zingers in his own direction, too. His tone throughout the book swings wildly from self-aggrandizement to self-abasement. Sometimes, he thinks he’s writing a book for the ages; other times, he seems to realize that he isn’t. He knows, for instance, that downgrading his target from Richard Nixon to George Wallace means that his story is much less newsworthy and may even be ignored by the foreign press entirely. And although he considers his diary to be an important historical document, he's often unsure what to put in it. "Funny," he writes at one such juncture, "I've got nothing to say. Have I ever said anything?" This from a man who, at an earlier point in his manuscript, expected his words to be as carefully scrutinized as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

History, as we now know, had other ideas about that. Now retirement age and basically forgotten by the country he tried so hard to impress, Arthur Bremer is out of prison and on probation until 2025. During that time, he is expressly forbidden from venturing anywhere near an elected official. That's probably for the best, even today. Back in 2005, when John Waters reprinted the Female Trouble script as part of a book, he gave his fans a little update on Bremer's condition: "According to a friend who was in jail with him for decades, 'he's still nutty as a fruitcake.'"

Zomby (briefly) Returns: This is what creative desperation looks like

The first new "Zomby" cartoon in nearly two years. So, um, enjoy, I guess.

Zomby, a zombified parody of Tom Wilson's long-running newspaper cartoon series Ziggy, used to be an important recurring feature at Dead 2 Rights. That was before Ed Wood more or less hijacked this blog and (posthumously) made it his own. The premise was exceedingly simple. I'd take that day's Ziggy panel, turn the title character gray in Microsoft Paint, and change the punchline so that it was about a reanimated corpse who feasted on the living rather than a sweet, bumbling loser who couldn't get decent customer service. The joke, I guess, was that even in this supposedly-terrifying form, Zomby was just as much as an ineffectual, put-upon loser as Ziggy was. It was a way of taking some then-trendy monsters who were dominating films, TV, and video games and removing everything that made them cool or threatening. I did dozens, maybe hundreds, of Zomby panels and then just sort of stopped. Apart from a few stray shamblers in Plan 9 from Outer Space and Orgy of the Dead, zombies are no longer the focal point of this blog, despite its George Romero-inspired name. So Zomby disappeared. He hasn't been seen around here since 2013.

But today, I was trying to think of something I could post to Dead 2 Rights and thought, "Hey, why don't I try to do another Zomby cartoon and see if I can still get back into that mindset." So I Googled today's Ziggy panel and found that it was one of the series' most familiar tropes: Ziggy going to a diner and getting predictably lousy treatment. (The uncouth chef tells Ziggy he's too late to get the "breakfast of champions" and will have to settle for the "brunch of also-rans." Get it? Because Ziggy fails at everything and should totally just kill himself. HA!) It reminded me of another reason I abandoned Zomby: monotony. Ziggy only does five or six basic things, over and over. He watches TV, he takes abuse from his pets (a dog, a cat, and a bird), he tries to obtain goods and services without success, etc. I was going to call him out on this, until I realized that Ziggy's life was actually more varied and interesting than mine. I mean, he has a parrot. I don't. He goes fishing (or golfing or mountain climbing) sometimes. I don't. He freely walks around in public without pants. I...  well, that's none of your business.

Anyway, I realized today that the part of my brain that could easily come up with Zomby jokes must have died a couple of years ago. And unlike Zomby himself, I don't think it can be revived.

You know what? I feel like doing a new "Zomby," so here's that.

Tell me this isn't more entertaining than the original "Ziggy"

Woodpeckers destroy Zomby's home!

For comparison's sake, here's the original Ziggy:

(today's zomby) In which Zomby is reunited with a relative

Isn't that sweet? Zomby has found his mother. In the previous cartoon, I revealed that Zomby's last name was Zombowsky, so I guess we should have figured his mother was... Polish. Get it? Ah, I think this occasion calls for a song. Hit it, Paul.




And now here's a haunting, unknowable cityscape courtesy of the original Ziggy:

Watch out, Zig. There are litterbugs afoot!

(today's zomby) In which we find out our hero's last name! Get excited for this!

And here's another before/after GIF for your amusement:

Had to lose that great "Pet Rock" joke. Sorry.

(today's zomby) Zomby *IS* Lindsay Lohan in "The Parrot Trap"

By far, my greatest challenge in creating this cartoon was establishing an even somewhat plausible horizon line from the artwork in the original Ziggy. Here's the unaltered cartoon, as it appeared in newspapers today:

And here's my attempt to graph the "equator" of this cartoon:

I have no idea how rooms work in Ziggy's universe. Apparently, space is warped quite badly. I mean, just check out the line going through the parrot's head. What the hell, Zig?

(today's zomby) Get it? Huh? Do ya? Huh?

You guessed right! This was a clandestine reference to that lovable alien ALF and his penchant for eating cats. Remember ALF and what innocent, carefree times we had with him?

Yeah, that was all a lie. When the camera wasn't rolling, Gordon Shumway was profane and racist, mocking people with Tourette's Syndrome and making extremely inappropriate advances to teen-aged cast mate Andrea Elson. (Warning: NSFW language ahead. And it's all coming from ALF!)


Yeah, Elson's obvious discomfort makes this especially cringe-worthy. I think we all need to go pray now.

P.S. - I think this is one of the many cartoons which works better if Ziggy/Zomby is removed entirely. Here, see for yourself..

(sort of today's zomby) AND SOME OTHER STUFF AS WELL!

Hello once again, dear readers.

Due to the Christmas holiday and a heavy work schedule, I've been taking most of this week off from the old blog-a-roo. But here are some cartoons to make up for it. Instead of doing a typical Zomby!!! adventure, I've decided to do another variation on Tom Wilson's venerable Ziggy. Namely, I've taken a few recent panels and transformed the unlucky protagonist from a miserable idiot into a blissful idiot. Here's how it turned out:

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I don't know about you, but I like this little guy. He's optimistic and he's clearly learned life's greatest lesson: take pleasure in the little things. Bweakfast, kitties, comprooders... they're all here for our enjoyment.

I'd like to close out this little post with a few songs which have taken up residence in my subconscious lately. Hell, I should be charging them rent! First up is comedienne Tracey Ullman and her 1983 smash hit, "They Don't Know." Yes, Ullman first reached our shores not as an actress but as a singer. Her remake of this lovely Kristy MacColl number reached as high as #8 on the Billboard charts. The video is great, too, with a surprise cameo near the end.

Almost 20 years earlier, The Newbeats reached #2 with their pop soul tune, "Bread and Butter," which I first heard as a jingle for Quaker Rice Cakes in the 1980s. I'd heard the Newbeats' record on the radio many times and always assumed that the lead vocal was by an African-American female singer. I can't tell you how surprised I was to see an actual performance clip of the Newbeats and discover that their leader was in fact a slim, blond-pompadoured man named Larry Henley. Rarely has the disparity between sight and sound been so drastic:

And finally, since this is the last day of the year, I thought it was time for a reflection on the events of the last twelve months. All in all, 2011 proved to be a tough year for power mad dictators. Let's face it: that's a stressful job. Sure, it has its rewards, but dictatorship is rarely the type of career which ends with a cake and a gold watch. So as 2011 draws to a close, I thought I'd leave you with the catchiest song ever written about a brutal dictator. Honestly, this song -- "Amazin' Man" by British satirist John Bird -- might well have you singing Idi Amin's name while you do laundry or run errands.

Idi, Idi, Idi Amin! Most amazing man there's ever been! He's the...

Damn it!

(today's zomby) AND A PHIL COLLINS PUPPET SINGS OF HEARTBREAK AND HAIR LOSS!

So now we know what Zomby watches on television, which as I argued previously may well be the truest, most accurate way of gauging one's soul.

But what kind of music does Zomby listen to? My best guess: Phil Collins. I think of Phil Collins as the patron saint of the lonely and heartbroken, mainly due to a 2007 radio story from This American Life called "Dr. Phil" by Starlee Kine.

Phil Collins was famous for turning his real-life romantic setbacks into popular songs,"In the Air Tonight" and "Against All Odds" chief among them. Back in the 1980s, a satirical British puppet show called Spitting Image took Mr. Collins to task for this and produced this scathing, dead-on parody:



Eerie, isn't it? "I'm So Lonely" may be the ultimate Phil Collins song, even though Phil didn't write it. It certainly works as a good theme song for both Ziggy and Zomby, both of whom can relate to the themes of loneliness and male pattern baldness.

Incidentally, one of the side effects of British comedy is that it occasionally forces you to look up some of the more obscure references. I'm sure we all know who Bob Hoskins is, but the other British celebs named in the song are not so well-known here in the States. For the record, Mel Smith is a British comedian and actor probably best known to American audiences as The Albino in The Princess Bride.

And Eddy Shah? Well, he's a rather infamous UK newspaper tycoon who very recently was arrested in connection with a sex scandal. At the time of the Spitting Image broadcast, though, he was just a famous businessman.

Now don't you feel better informed about the world? Incidentally, there was no bad blood between Phil Collins and Spitting Image. In fact, not long after this parody aired, the puppeteers were hired to do the deeply weird video for "Land of Confusion," a song by Phil's band Genesis.

(today's zomby) AND A PARTICULARLY ODD "THREE STOOGES" SHORT!

One of the nice side effects of the extreme repetition of Ziggy is that it occasionally allows me to do small-scale story arcs. If Tom Wilson II does jokes about the same topic or uses the same settings for several days in a row, I try to turn it into a miniature plot. Back in February, for instance, I did a little story about Zomby's romance with a generic female functionary. And more recently, I did several cartoons about the ominous birdpocalypse. If Tom Wilson does more cartoons with Ziggy hanging around his house in a bathrobe in the next few days, I will continue to explore Zomby's spiral into depression triggered by NBC's cancellation of The Playboy Club. Of course, though, I'm completely at the mercy of Tom Wilson in this regard. If he changes course, so do I.

(Incidentally, the mention of Ron Paul was triggered by the fact that several of the man's campaign ads have mysteriously appeared on my blog in the last few weeks. Why Ron Paul would advertise here is beyond me. As a leader of Dead 2 Rights, I do not and cannot endorse any candidates. But I can now admit that Michelle Bachman and I used to party together in the '90s. Hard. Oh, how that woman could party.)

But getting back to the topic of comedic repetition...

He Cooked His Goose (1952) is one of the oddest Three Stooges shorts I have ever seen. It's the 140th of the 190 films they made for Columbia, and it's interesting to see how eager the boys were to experiment with the tried-and-true Stooge formula at this (relatively) late stage. It's the product of two Stooge stalwarts, writer Felix Adler and director Jules White, though Adler's writing is more adventurous than White's workmanlike directing. He Cooked His Goose is one of the rare Stooge shorts in which the lead role goes to Larry Fine, a very gifted comedic performer normally relegated to the part of victim. Not only is Larry the star, he gets to be evil in this one! He plays a lying, scheming, womanizing pet food supplier and does a great job with the villainous role. For this part, Larry gets a few special accessories from the prop and wardrobe departments, like a giant cigar and an oversized bow tie. (For whatever reason, he also has a trained clam named Cedric.) He even gets his own little music cue that pops up every time he has an evil thought!

Moe and Shemp (yes, this short is from the Shemp era so don't expect to see Curly) are also brilliantly cast against type in He Cooked His Goose: Shemp as the film's romantic hero and Moe as a passive, gullible klutz who is actually being cuckolded by Larry! This is one of the few Stooge films in which the boys are not playing any kind of a team. They're not brothers, coworkers, partners, teammates, etc. in this short. The Stooges are playing completely separate roles for one of the only times in their career. Larry and Shemp are romantic rivals, while Moe is a stranger to both of them! Stooge regular Mary Ainslee is also quite good here as Moe's wife (and Larry's paramour) Belle.

So please enjoy He Cooked His Goose. Along with the plot details described above, you also get a glimpse into American life circa 1952, back when door-to-door salesmen still existed and telephones were of the rotary type. You also get to see what Christmas trees and Christmas lights of that era looked like. Even some of the film's expository dialogue has a lost-era charm, as when Shemp gushes to Larry, "Oh, this'll make my Christmas dandy!"

(today's zomby) AT LAST, ZOMBY'S ORIGIN STORY!

(today's zomby) AND MY FIRST EVER WEB POLL!

I don't know if I've ever told you this, readers, but I have one very specific goal with each day's Zomby! cartoon: to improve upon the original Ziggy. Some days I make it, some days I don't. Ziggy can be maddening as source material, since it's very repetitive and recycles the same few scenarios over and over. Worse yet, the strip often gets in ruts, doing jokes about the same thing several times during the course of a week. Lately, for instance, there have been lots of jokes about Ziggy's parrot.

Like this one from today, Friday, October 7, 2011:

When I saw this cartoon, all I could think about was Samuel Beckett's famous and oft-repeated quote: "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." The only way I could see to salvage this scene was to take Ziggy and his parrot out of it.

Like so:

Was I right? Was I wrong? I have decided to let you, the readers, decide. Use the poll below to tell me whether this cartoon is better with or without Ziggy.



If this gimmick succeeds, I may incorporate it into Zomby! as a regular feature. With each cartoon, I'd give you the opportunity to tell me if I succeeded or failed in my quest to improve upon the original.

(today's zomby) AND THE CHILLING WORDS OF A MADMAN

With today's Zomby, I wanted to try an experiment: what if this cartoon were written by notorious would-be assassin Arthur Bremer?

Bremer's diary

A little history for those not in the know: In 1972, the emotionally-troubled Arthur Bremer (b. 1950) made an attempt on the life of controversial segregationist politician George Wallace. The former Alabama governor was not killed by Bremer's four shots at close range, but he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life before dying in 1998 at the age of 79. Bremer spent the next few decades in prison but was ultimately released in 2007. Besides the assassination attempt, Bremer is most famous for his bizarre, error-filled journals which were published under the title An Assassin's Diary in 1973. (Note: The dialogue in the cartoon above comes directly from that book.) So what's the connection to this feature? Well, to me, Arthur Bremer is very much the Ziggy of assassins -- not just because he failed but also because of his almost touchingly pathetic motives. Bremer was not a political extremist but instead was a nonentity, a nobody who thought that the assassination of a famous politician like George Wallace or Richard Nixon would give his life meaning or purpose. The poor schmuck even kind of looked like Ziggy, with his bland, rounded, nonthreatening features.

Harmless-looking Arthur Bremer

Personally, I think Ziggy is a very dangerous little man. The world treats him terribly, and yet he just stands there passively absorbing it all. But each mishap, each insult, each slight pushes him closer to being the next Arthur Bremer. May god have mercy on the snotty waiters, pushy salesman, and grouchy cashiers of the Ziggyverse when that happens. Incidentally, Bremer's diary was the partial inspiration for Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver and for Peter Gabriel's song "Family Snapshot."



Perhaps someday, I will do a long-form mashup of Ziggy and An Assassin's Diary. For now, this cartoon will have to serve as the pilot. I wish it were Ziggy himself speaking the punchline and not that goddamned parrot of his, but I have to work with the cartoons I'm given.

RIP Tom Wilson, creator of "Ziggy" (1931-2011)

Tom Wilson and his world-famous creation, Ziggy.

I'd like to take a moment to pay tribute to Tom Wilson, creator of Ziggy, who passed away last Friday at the age of 80. Wilson's son, Tom Wilson II, has been drawing the strip since 1987, but it was the elder Wilson who created the feature back in 1971.

There's a nice obituary for Tom Wilson here, for those who are interested in the man and his career.

One thing the obituary doesn't mention, though, is that when Tom Wilson was an executive at American Greetings, he was among the first to note the talent of a young, up-and-coming cartoonist named... Robert Crumb! Crumb worked for American Greetings back in the old days as an artist before he was able to support himself with his comic book work, and it was Wilson who promoted Crumb from lowly assistant to a more creative position as a lead artist for a line of cards.

Strange but true.

(today's zomby) FEATURING A GUEST APPEARANCE BY ZIGGY!

ZOMBY: Ziggy-haters of the world, your day has arrived!