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Graham Crackers

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  1. Two decades of indy dream matches may have diluted this but Northeastern indies were heavily influenced by/had a good deal of overlap with Puerto Rican wrestling culture thanks to the concentration of Caribbean diaspora in the area. Lucha libre on the other hand does not have the same kind of drawing power in NY or NJ that it does in Chicago or the Southwest.
  2. They need to book Mankiewicz vs Joe Bob Briggs for All In.
  3. I'd go with Yuki Ishikawa. The match with Greco and the 7/26 elimination are MOTDCs for me. He elevated inexperienced guys like Super Tiger II and as a bonus he showed up in Real Japan a few times and would have these fun small scale matches. I haven't revisited it since the time but Blue Panther did some really compelling work leading up to and in the aftermath of losing his mask.
  4. Do we have the Ray Mendoza footage to justify that assertion or is that based on reputation? Only Mendoza match I've seen is the great Fujinami one.
  5. The news about Dean really hurt, in large part because of the huge expressions of love and support that have been shared on various boards and on Twitter in the last few days. It's so rare that we actually tell people how much we appreciate them when they are still with us. I had hoped that Dean might get to see these with his own mortal eyes. I'd been lurking on DVDVR starting in 2005 or 2006 and was a relatively active poster during a few of the 80s sets. The various boards in this orbit have been an active part of my media consumption throughout my entire adult life. I've made a few real life friends via these boards and I 've been lucky to meet a few others and simply say hi at shows over the years (that was easier when I lived in NY). That's all to say that this is making me realize I'll miss a lot of you when you're gone. Take care.
  6. Best at swinging a weapon: Bull Pain Best at taking a back body drop: Gran Hamada (also best back body drop counter) Best at being cornered by multiple enemies: Mitsuharu Misawa Best at bumping into a post: La Fiera Best kneelift: Yoshihiro Takayama Best triple teams: Los Bucaneros Best at breaking up pins/submissions during tag matches: Daisuke Ikeda Best backbreakers: Atlantis
  7. My dad talks about Dick Hutton a lot but I wonder if age has lead to Hutton being confused with some other wrestlers he remembers from his childhood. He's a mark for Hutton's shoot credentials but also tells stories about his character that don't match his rep as a dry champion who didn't draw. Still, my dad was eleven when Hutton was NWA Champ and there is something about nostalgia for that age that does a number on all of us.
  8. She released a new graphic novel last year, Time Zone J.
  9. Huge missed opportunity: Cody should have pinned Roman but then they could overturn the result for a Dusty finish.
  10. The one bit of nuance about these Saudi shows that I feel gets flattened is that the evils of the Saudi royal family are an extension of American imperialism. The sources of deeply entrenched Saudi power are the deals the house of Saud made with the British Empire, the Rockefellers, and the USA to secure the oil trade during the early twentieth century. Even now in the twenty first century Saudi Arabia in many ways represents a strategic beachhead for western power in the Middle East. The Saudi bombing campaigns in Yemen are executed with American manufactured weapons shipped to Saudi Arabia with explicit approval of the legislative and executive branches. It's got bipartisan support! The western press barely devotes any time to covering these bombing which have been going on for the last decade and it's hard to not view this silence as tacit approval by the American businesses that provide the advertising revenue for our press (and that's not to mention networks like NBC whose parent company also sells many products to the Saudi government). What I'm trying to get across is that it's good that many here are weary of the Saudi government, but the tail doesn't wag the dog. I know that many here were comfortable criticizing the McMahon family's relationship with the Trump family/administration, but this is bigger than which administration is in the White House at a given time. It has to be about those Tribute to the Troops shows. I know they were alluded to earlier in reference to discussions of patriotism vs jingoism but it's also hard to see them as healthy and normal in the context of what happened to Ashley Massaro. It has to be about Fox, not only because of it's right wing stance but also because of Raytheon's position as one of Fox News' most consistent sponsors. It has to be about how GE owns NBC while also collaborating with the Saudi royal family. And ultimately it should be bigger than just your pro wrestling viewing habit. Without organized boycotts, with real lists of demands, we're all just blowing smoke here. If it's WWE you're concerned with changing then the current Wendy's and Nestle boycotts could be a model. If it's Saudi Arabia then you can start by modeling it after the old Sun City boycotts or BDS but if you're really willing to interrogate that concern, it should probably alter the way you interact with western media in general.
  11. Hell yes, I love Gerald Jablonski. I cherish my copy of Empty Skull which is like a Frances E. Dec letter as a comic book. There's something special about how each page makes you pause and remember your comics vocabulary. I've been reading the Dick Moores era of Gasoline Alley. I'm pretty well familiar with the Frank King era of that strip, which is a showcase for the most delicate and understated drawings from a member of that classic Chicago school of cartooning. I was hesitant to explore past King, as the number of non-superhero features to attain greatness after their original creator leaves is quite low (and successes in superheroes might be over emphasized). Well, I got one of the IDW collections of the Moores era and I was really impressed. Every object is solid, with a strong sense of weight. The lettering is beautiful and there's a clear track through the rather talking head heavy dailies. The stakes feel very low, even when the stories may call for more peril, but this is Gasoline Alley so I'm expecting comfort food.
  12. I'm not exactly prepared with a dissertation to back this up (especially because the only place I've put these thoughts into words is my old twitter account) but I don't consider Kirby's form of comic book composition to be "writing." First off, this has to do with my own rejection of applying labels of other media to cartooning. I know this doesn't bother other people the way it bothers me but I hate all "comics are literature" talk. Certainly elements of literature can be folded into the comics medium but I think literary analysis is lacking for the more abstract imagery and design heavy compositions of cartoonists like George Herriman, Yuichi Yokoyama, or Lale Westvind. Basically I'm trying to center the primary image making facets of the medium. There's actually a French word referring to the comic book-like nature of a work, similar to how we use literary or cinematic but I unfortunately can't remember it right now. It's on the the tip of my tongue! I do believe there are writers in the world of comics but they're usually the people who write scenarios or dialogue but someone like Kirby wasn't writing detailed scripts. The composition occurred on the page and I think the commonly accepted label of writer is a bit reductive for what he was doing. I'd even apply this thought to writers like Harvey Kurtzman, who rarely did the artwork for their own stories but image composition was so important to his contribution that he was drawing detailed layouts with loose drawings for his collaborators to build upon. I've also spent time on these thoughts because when compared to literature or even screen writing, comics have had maybe three writers whose work actually stacks up to the work in other media. Alan Moore, Hector Oesterheld, and.... maybe Kazuo Koike? Yet when lackluster writing is transformed into comics it can feel special because of the actual power of the cartooning. I really like John Wagner, Alan Grant, Chris Claremont, Anne Nocenti and Bob Haney but they needed their collaborators to make good work. So for Kirby, the stories are a part of the package but it's the raw cartooning power, the forward momentum, and rough yet dynamic drawings that make his best work. I do view his 70s output as the best of his career but I also agree that much of it fizzles out before an ending. I disagree on OMAC though because 8 issues is IMO the perfect Kirby length, I don't feel like he ended up bored with the concept, and the abrupt ending is a hilarious inversion of the way most "cancelled too soon" DC series are tied up so they can be dusted off in the future. I think the justification for these series fizzling out would be that Kirby as a creative person was similar to Philip K. Dick in the 60s. Kirby wasn't fueled by amphetamines but there's a lot of similarities between their prolific output. I think most people would turn into hacks to create the incredible number of novels/comics they were making but they broke the mold. They both produced brilliant works as well as works that were just okay. Yet the okay works still had unique concepts that nobody else could have put to paper. That power could overcome the more clumsy aspects of their composition.
  13. Great link, thanks! I follow Covert Book Report but I hadn't seen this story shared yet. The mix of unsavory Hollywood types and California conservative figures feels like the kind of thing that'd be mentioned in Rick Perlstein's Invisible Bridge but I don't remember it showing up in there.
  14. The murder of Robert Duke Hall is an extremely crazy story that involves Gene LeBell (he was charged with the murder, then as an accessory, and later aquitted) and I'd love to see it explored in greater detail. https://web.archive.org/web/20210822204255/https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/13/archives/los-angeles-stirred-by-detectives-mysterious-death.html
  15. I feel like people were complaining about Jericho blatantly calling spots during his 2008 comeback, so this has been one of his problems for a long long time.
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