excellent fun home parody
August 19th, 2011 | Uncategorized
I keep meaning to post a link to this funny sci-fi takeoff on Fun Home, Space Home. One of the artists, Laurel Leake, alerted me to it last month. It’s an episode of Wilson Parker’s webcomic, Unwinder’s Tall Comics. As Laurel puts it, “We shamelessly gave your memoir’s authorship to the son of a recurring character, Gary P. Rastov, a C-grade sci-fi novelist from the 70s who ground out volume upon volume of stories that managed to turn impossibly vast interstellar conflicts into painfully mundane lists of statistics.”
It’s pretty funny. I got confused though about all the layers of fiction and reality. Is Gary P. Rastov a real person or a fictional one? I can’t keep track of much of anything lately except the pen nib moving before my eyes.
Jerome, thanks for the link to this in your comment on the last post—that nudged me to finally put this up.
45 Responses to “excellent fun home parody”
What a fun parody! I also like the dialogue of the space creatures discussing the comic as it unfolds. What is that, some sort of meta thing? It looked so good, too, like this person really studied you and learned how to draw like you. The photo of your “Father” was very evocative. Congrats!
I was actually referring to this parody:
http://jollityfarm.tumblr.com/post/9070362361/someone-on-sa-drew-this-and-i-wish-i-could-give
So that makes a total of two parodies.
This means you have definitely arrived.
oh jeez!
My RAM is so bogged down with this book I can’t run any other operations. How could I have confused those two parodies?
They’re both very funny…the Liefeld spoof is fuckin hilarious.
I wish I had a bra like that with those little ammo pockets.
I never meta FUN HOME that I didn’t like (boom BOOM!), but, that said, the SPACE HOME space homage space confuses space me. Full stop.
Alex — Me too. For me, weird-for-weird sake, self-referential, meta-beta lacks heart. Or maybe, it’s just too out-of-this-work for the Earthling.
Alex K, Ellen Orleans… Me, too. Lambo confused. 🙁 I guess that I don’t know a warp field from a self-sealing stem bolt!
I’ll have to wait until I get home to view the parodies. I’m about to attend the Harvey Awards!
But did you know there’s a Tintin movie coming out in December?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ua_4ajpP58
^^^ pretty exciting!
I think I don’t get Space Home.
I’m loving Liefeld tho
We were talking about the Tintin movie at work yesterday, specifically about the type of animation used (it’s the “realistic” kind used in The Polar Express, which a lot of people, including myself, find kind of creepy). Of course, I plan on seeing this anyway. Can not wait. How do you feel about that animation style, Dr. E? My apologies for not knowing its correct name.
I do love a comment after that Tintin preview on YouTube (thanks Vicious!): “Please don’t mess this up Please don’t mess this up Please don’t mess this up Please don’t mess this up Please don’t mess this up….”
Unwinder is awesome. Rastov is an author they made up, in the tradition of Kilgore Trout, I guess.
@ Ginjoint (10) the realistic animation IS really creepy, kinda like a zombie mannequin sitcom :S
I think the term is “motion-capture”, Ginjoint, and I find the effect disconcertingly souless. No matter what the characters say, it’s never reflected in their blank, staring eyes.
I was ten feet from Stan Lee last night, but I didn’t talk to him. He was having dinner.
…Here’s an update on Rocko the Dog, who I saved from the 100+ F (39 C)heat the other day. Yesterday, I was walking my dog when I saw Rocko being put into a car by two women who drove off with him. Rocko seemed happy and well-fed, and seemed to know the women. He also seemed to recognize me.
I just don’t get Space Home. Maybe I would if I went back and read the rest of the series, which I’m not going to do. I’m a Bechdel fan, not a Parker fan.
The thing that bothered me about both of these takeoffs is that neither of them seemed to pay much attention to Fun Home. For instance, it ought to matter that the Space Home folks changed the gender of the main character, a central theme of Fun Home. But as far as I can tell, they did that simply because their preexisting character was male.
The Liefeld parody just uses Fun Home for the incongruity. They could have gotten the same effect with a couple of panels from Rex Morgan or Family Circus. Alison has already done basically the same parody herself (albeit not mentioning Liefeld specifically) in a drawing she did of herself and Harvey Pekar with superhero bodies.
Well, grumble grumble groan. Fun Home is good enough and idiosyncratic enough to deserve a satire that takes account of its style and meaning. It certainly offers some targets to an attentive satirist.
But hey? If you look at the picture on Liefeld’s Wikipedia page, he appears to have copied Lois’s haircut. Liefeld is a DTWOF fan! Who’d’a thunk it?
Andrew B. (#15) Alison with a superhero body? And you didn’t post a link?!!! 🙂
I guess a lot of us find the motion capture animation falls in that uncanny valley of creepiness. I loved reading Tintin when I was a kid (favorite character: Captain Haddock, of course!), but not sure if I’ll go see this one at the theater…
Kate L, 16, here.
Moderately connected to the world of cartooning, I wanted to tell people about a blog that I’m guest moderating: Connecting Children to Nature Through American Literature. http://childnatureamericanlit.blogspot.com/
I think some of us AB would like my post there because it is about Flotsam, an amazing, wordless picture book by David Wiesner. It takes place on Long Beach Island, in my home state of New Jersey(!)
Like Alison, David W. does an incredible job with accurate detail. And has a vivid imagination.
If you have time to read my essay, and if you feel motivated, please leave a note in the website’s Comments section. (That blog, not this one…) Thanks!
Andrew B (#18) Thanks! Oh, My Gosh! It’s just as I always imagined them both to be!
I don’t mean to be taking up so many electrons in A.B.’s DTWOF blog, but I’ve got to ask… was there a whole lot of shaking going on for anyone on the North American east coast in yesterday’s earthquake? Or, for anyone near Trinadad, Colorado, where an earthquake nearly as powerful also happened yesterday? Women geologists want to know!
Hi everyone,
Off-topic, but if there is anyone who might know the answer to my question it will be someone from this blog:
Someone just told me about a graphic novel that is not “Maus” about the Holocaust. This is supposedly a two-part graphic novel that was banned (where I don’t know) but is now available,
and it is about a girl. It was made into a movie
about 3 years ago. The ‘referer’ doesn’t remember the title of the book, but thinks that
it might be something like “Philocter…”
Nobody at Forbidden Planet or St. Marks Comics
or Million Year Picnic knows what this could be.
Any ideas, anyone?
Thanks.
Freyacat 22: Well, it isn’t about the Holocaust of course but could they maybe have meant Persepolis? It’s a graphic novel about a girl, that has been made into a film, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been banned.
(Sorry if this is an annoying suggestion, but I used to be a librarian and it was quite common for the author, title, subject, colour, size etc of the desired book to turn out to be quite different to that described!)
freyakat#22:
I don’t have an answer but after thumbing around Google, [HERE’S] a list of “movies made from graphic novels/comic”.
(It seems to be reasonably complete –although this is pretty far out of my range of expertise. Also, the vast majority in the list seem to be super-hero movies, plus Garfield, Peanuts, etc, so the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low.)
Anyway, I don’t immediately see anything that sounds like what you’re describing, but you might want to give it a once-over.
P.S. Here’s a comparable list from IMDB.
Freyakat, 22, how about this? Or…
(avoiding the spam filter) this?
If either of those has been made into a movie, it’s not easy to find. (I didn’t try hard.) And sorry about Medusa in the second link, but I couldn’t find it on indiebound. Each of those books appears to be available in one volume, so I don’t know about “two part”. Or about being banned, so, y’know, probably two false alarms. But what the heck.
Apparently The Search was created as a tool for teaching German schoolchildren about the Shoah and some controversy surrounds it. Mendel’s Daughter was created as a standalone work.
In case it’s not obvious, I’m not actually familiar with either of these.
@ Diamond, NLC and Andrew: Thanks to all of you for your thoughtful ponderings and research.
Diamond: it is not at all impossible that
“Persepolis” will turn out to be the work in
question, bizarre as it may seem: for whatever
reason I started talking about graphic novels to the late teenage-early 20’s helper of the plasterer sent by the landlord to fix a wall in my apartment. After I showed him “American Born
Chinese” he mentioned this novel that he said
was German, about the Holocaust, and he said that
he had read it in a class along with “Maus”.
You used to be a librarian. And I deal with kids
as a teacher, and I know how right you might be
that the various details that I was given might
be WAY off. I’ll find out at the end of next
week when the workers come back to finish the job
(sigh). * And there was indeed a film made from
“Persepolis”…
NLB — On those lists I don’t see anything either
that clicks.
Andrew B. — Gee, I hadn’t heard of those 2 titles
either. I have just checked out “Mendel’s Daughter” from the library; and, from scanning it
quickly, it indeed looks like something that
could be studied alongside “Maus”. It is told
in first person by the cartoonist’s mother and
illustrated by her son. The text is from a videotape made by the son of his mother before her death. So in a way the setup of the telling of the story is similar to that of “Maus”.
Freyakat, another possibility: Miriam Katin, We Are On Our Own. In some ways sounds like the most interesting of the lot, although probably not the one you were told about. It was created by the survivor. She was a small child during the last year or so of the war and describes what she and her mother had to do to evade the Nazis.
This has reminded me how terrific Persepolis is, as both a book and a film. It’s a while since I saw it, but it must surely pass the Bechdel test by a mile?
Thanks for the query Freyakat, I don’t have any answers but am enjoying the reminders from other’s answers. If you all haven’t read Mendel’s Daughter by Martin Lemelman or We Are On Our Own by Miriam Katin, I recommend them both. It’s a been a couple years since I’ve read them both, but they stuck in my mind. I particularly liked the illustrations in Mendel’s Daughter – http://www.mendelsdaughter.com/samplePages.html – a combination of redrawn photographs and freehand illustrations. Good luck with your search!
Our Fall semester has already started at stately Moo U, and one of the courses that I am teaching is about natural disasters, including severe weather. The bad thing about teaching a course in natural disasters is that they keep on happening. I’m concerned that Hurricane Irene, now likely to zoom up the United States east coast like the Great Hurricane of 1938, will be one of those additions. I was very pleased, however, to see NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s press conference yesterday (via the television machine, from out here on the High Plains). New York’s evacuation plan is an infinite improvement over where it was just a few years ago, when some city officials were saying that there would be no evacuation in the event of a hurricane(!) I was able to find a pdf version of the NYC evacuation map. I was wondering, does anyone know the URL location of a jpg version of that map?
Just to let you all know, Marj (my sweetie) is partying it up in London this weekend because she turned 50 today. I am so happy you got born, darling.
On quite another note, I hope everyone is prepared for Irene.
And Kate L, I don’t know if an evacuation map is there, but Dr. Jeff’s Wunderblog is my final authority for all things weather-related and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a map there.
Kate L (#33)
Nope, there’s no .JPG of the map, it’s a .PDF that is impossible to read at 8.5″ x 11″. Good thing we have those humongous DesignJets at work, we printed up a really large version and posted it.
The map can be downloaded from http://www.nyc.gov/html/oem/downloads/pdf/hurricane_map_english.pdf
If you want .JPGs, you can easily make them yourself, to whatever level of detail you’d like.
(Windoze instructions follow for you and the masses, we haven’t yet managed to convert you to Linux.)
Open the .PDF with Acrobat or another PDF viewer, zoom in as desired on the area of interest (there’s lots of detail on the map), then hit [ALT][PRTSC]. That copies the contents of the active window to the clipboard. You can then paste directly into PowerPoint, Word, or whatever application suits your fancy. If you open Paint and paste into it, you can save the image as a .JPG.
Suggestion for Acrobat… select the ‘View Full Screen’ option before hitting [ALT][PRTSC], there will be more meat and less crap (such as menubars) in the resulting image. That might be good enough for your purposes, or you can do some basic cropping and cleanup in Paint.
Of course, if you have SnagIt installed, this is all much easier, you can set your bounding box and copy directly to your application or save to .JPG. But I’m guessing your setup is low-budget with only the standard MS crap installed.
Such a weird week of natural disasters… earthquakes and hurricanes are each extremely rare in NYC, what are the odds of both occurring in the same week? I’d have better odds at winning the lottery. Good thing I already bought my ticket.
The city has issued a mandatory evacuation order for residents in Zone A, the most prone to flooding (it’s the orange zone on the map). I live and work in Zone C (the green zone), and I’m working this weekend. I will be carting my sleeping bag, clothes, weather radio, flashlights, batteries, and food to work tomorrow night, and I expect to be camping out in my office when I’m not tending the server farm.
In a touch of dark humor, I will be wearing my National Severe Storms Laboratory golf shirt.
(… goes back to packing her “Go-Bag” and Goretex …)
I don’t know if this helps, but here’s a .jpg copy of the NYC map:
[Click Here]
It’s not ideally large, but it’s directly viewable and (just barely) of readable size.
(For those interested, the link is to a page on my home site, pointing to the original image. By doing it this way it avoids the issue of the image auto-sizing to your browser; that is, it automatically shows at full size.)
Hope this is of any help.
Good luck all. (Waiting for the Irene in southern Vermont.)
@33 Kate L: Well,at least you don’t have to worry about keeping the class *relevant.* On one trip my late husband and I took back in the early 90s,he kept pointing out clear cuts and nature-damaged places. I commented: “are you preparing a slideshow on natural disasters of the Pacific Northwest?” He replied and grinned,”Why yes, I am.” Thus the source of one of our standing jokes.
(And yes,folks,I know clear cuts are human-made.)
#36 HoH: Yikes,it’s worse than I thought. Take care.
Thanks, all! Thanks to your advice, I’ve already got a PowerPoint slide of the evacuation zones ready to go!
I called my Delaware friends last night. Irene should be striking there right about… now. They were planning to be elsewhere.
OK, folks may find this helpful as well:
[Google Crisis Response Map]
In short, it shows the “forecast track cone” for Irene overlayed on a Google-maps-ish interface.
Note in particular, if you click on the “NYC Evacuation Zones” option on the right-hand window, you can zoom into NYC and see the relevant details at almost street-level.
See the right-hand menu for other useful features.
(If Irene stays on its most probably course, the eye may pass over us tomorrow about 2pm.
Cool.)
I have a dry basement, and not too many branches thicker than a pencil down in the yard.
I hope everyone here gets through Irene as unscathed as I.
We are just wet and rainy here in the mountains of Pa. Hope all got out who needed to.
Dr Empirical, you got to see Stan Lee?! I probably wouldn’t have talked to him, either.
@NLC
Hope you’re safe and dry, I see that Southern VT is flooding. Minor damage here in Manhattan, the seawall held, so no power outages in lower Manhattan. There was strong wind on the backside of the storm after the eye passed, which did more damage to trees than I expected. Mass transit = MESS transit. I hear there are cabs on the streets making bigbuck$.
(… goes back to tending the server farm while dreaming of hailing a taxi to paradise, or at least back home …)
Are all commenters safe after the hurricane? The D.C. area was not banged up as badly as we feared it would be from our SECOND natural disaster of the week (following a 5.9 earthquake near a nuclear power plant in Virginia). Michele Bachman said that God was punishing Washington. I’m sure my neighbors who got hurt, had property damage, or lost income appreciate the joke, Michele. Oh, by the way, Michele, that earthquake actually originated in Eric Cantor’s district, which also got walloped by Irene.
hey everyone. just thought I’d pop in. that is all.