There are a lot of amazing Kickstarter and Indiegogo fundraisers out there.  I really try not to spend too much time looking at projects because the things I want to fund far outnumber my hobby budget.  Even on the projects I do support, there are usually cool rewards levels that are out of my reach.  What I’m trying to say is that I understand when someone misses out on backing an incredible project like Pariah, Missouri.  There are just too many things out there to back every one you like. Last December we talked about the Supernatural Western comic and how excited I was for it.




If you missed out on Pariah the first time you are in luck.  A brand new Kickstarter has been put up that tells even more of the story.  Book 1 of Pariah, Missouri collects 5 issues and runs over 110 pages.  If you’re already hooked on the project there is a hard cover special edition of the book that includes things like script pages, commentary, and a 5 page prelude.  There are also other add-ons available; things like prints, shirts, and additional copies of the trade.  The project is already fully funded and it's only been up a couple of days, that should tell you something about the quality of this book.


Pariah, Missouri is written and colored by Andres Salazar and the art is provided by Jose Pescador.  I don’t want to downplay the story, because the story is awesome, but this is a beautiful book.  The muted color pallet fits the art perfectly.  If you like westerns or period supernatural stories this is a book you want to read.  I went into the first auction blind, I knew it sounded cool but I wasn’t sure if I’d actually like the book.  I can tell you that after getting the first comic I’m a fan.  I want this first collection to be successful because I’m greedy and I want more.  Check out the Kickstarter for yourself by clicking here.

There are a lot of things that worry me about the new Lone Ranger movie.  I dislike Depp as Tonto, I’m worried that Tonot is going to be the main character and the Ranger becomes the sidekick, and I’m very worried that the movie is going to be a live action Bugs Bunny cartoon like Pirates of the Caribbean.  I take my Lone Ranger pretty seriously; I really don’t want it to involve him in tons of slapstick wackiness. 


What I am excited for is the Lego Lone Ranger.  Lego has done Western themed sets in the past, but it has been a long time since any of them were on the shelves.  Four or five years ago I was running the Western roleplaying game Deadlands.  We used Lego for all the miniatures.  I was all over Lego bit sellers and third party sites when putting together mini-figs for the party and their adversaries.  The picture above is of the Deadland's characters.  At the time I was just dying for more Western sets.  It took a while but it finally happened.



The real star of the lineup is the train set.  But trains and tracks take up a lot of space.  They set also costs about 100 dollars.  What really excited me was a much cheaper set, the stagecoach.  During that Deadlands game I was planning out what pieces I’d need for stagecoach, this one looks perfect.  30 bucks gets you the coach, an extra horse, and 5 mini-figures.  I let myself get one Lego set a year.  If I didn’t restrict myself I’d be broke and drowning in Lego bricks.  So expect to see better pictures of this set in a month or two when I finally break down and buy it.

I don’t think it was surprise anyone that reads That F’ing Monkey that I love westerns. There is a reason I keep a working Colt Navy revolver on my book shelf. Yesterday I received an email about a Kickstarter project that I was immediately excited about. It’s a supernatural/western comic book called Pariah, Missouri. I was excited before I even saw the art.


The Kickstarter sets up the story like this:
1857. Pariah, Missouri is a riverboat boom-town and a haven for the unscrupulous. The charismatic Hy Buchanan works undercover as a foppish cheat, and creates a rag-tag team to ferret out evil, both the corruption of man and the supernatural. His first challenge is the arrival of a duo of thespians, whose intentions are not to entertain.


Pariah, Missouri was created by Andres Salazar with art by Jose Pescador. The art is flat out gorgeous. Me talking about this isn’t enough though. Go to the Kickstarter. There is a 20 page preview pdf that you can download. I honestly don’t know how anyone could read that and not want to see more. I want to see more. I’m sorry I can’t pledge at the higher levels, because I want to see this project succeed so bad it hurts.

We’re skipping Hangover Thursday today because I wanted to give you some heads up on what is happening on Turner Classic Movies tomorrow night. Starting at 8pm Friday night TCM is showing A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name trilogy reenergized the Western genre in American cinemas and made Clint Eastwood a superstar.


Although two Westerns were filmed in Italy before them, these are the movies most people think of when you mention Spaghetti Westerns. Ennio Morricone’s score is every bit as famous as the movies that featured them. Leone’s films are filled with tight close ups, barren landscapes, and violence. So much violence that a lot of critics were put off by the movies.


Fistful of Dollars is also one of those movies that reworks a classic Kurosawa tale by turning all the samurais into cowboys. Yojimbo, the film Fistful of Dollars is based on, is actually influenced by Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest. Eastwood’s iconic cigars were actually something he brought with him when he started filming the first movie. He didn’t want to smoke them in the others, but Leone insisted they were too important to the character.


For a character that is famous for not having a name, the Man with No Name seems to pick up nicknames easily. In Fistful of Dollars he’s Joe, in For a Few Dollars More he’s Manco, and in the final film he's Blondie. Friday night grab yourself a big bowl of popcorn or spaghetti and settle in for a night of squinting and shooting.

Ken O is currently away from the ship’s helm while he takes care of his wife and brand new son. During that time we are forgoing our normal updates for something special. Every month Turner Classic Movies has a Guest Programmer who chooses the films they show for that night. For 9 days we’ll be acting as we were the Guest Programmer. So you’ll get 3 movies from me, 3 from Brandon, and 3 from our guest writer Michael May! A huge thank you goes out to Michael May; please go check out his Adventure Blog.


Rustlers’ Rhapsody is a very different movie than my previous choices, so it probably requires some explanation. When Ken approached me about doing this, there were two things he said that made me want to chip in. The first was, “Do you want to chip in?” Because it’s Ken. Of course I wanted to help. But even if he’d been a stranger, allowing me to pretend that I’m a TCM guest host introducing my favorite movies is a stellar hook that I couldn’t say no to. So I tried to pick from three different eras: silent, Golden Age Hollywood (even though I chose a British film), and something produced in my lifetime.


My initial criterion was simply that I wanted to share movies that I’m already evangelistic about. Films that when I hear someone hasn’t seen them, I immediately schedule a time for us to watch them together. Rustlers’ Rhapsody is probably the first movie I ever got that way about. It was under-seen even in its day, but it still has the power to make me laugh every time I revisit it and I want to share that with as many people as possible.


Because it’s a comedy it’s going to be difficult to talk up without trying to retell a bunch of the jokes. That’s why I usually just tell people that they have to come over and watch it. I do always ask if they like Westerns though, because Rustlers’ Rhapsody assumes that you know some things about that genre as it’s been depicted in film. You can enjoy many of the gags without ever having seen a Western, but you’ll love it more if familiar with the genre.


It opens with a screen-within-the-screen showing what looks like an old Gene Autry or Roy Rogers movie. It’s like those trailers for 3D re-releases where they show you a tiny, tinny-sounding version of Phantom Menace or whatever (as if that’s the only way you’ve been able to experience it up to now) before blowing it up on the full screen with awesome sound. The little, black-and-white movie shows Rex O’Herlihan, the Singing Cowoy (Tom Berenger) chasing down a gang of bandits as GW Bailey (Captain Harris from the Police Academy movies) acknowledges the quaintness of these old films and then wonders what they’d be like if they were made today. On cue, the picture fills the screen, the color kicks in, and the gunshots are deafening.


At this point, virgin viewers are probably assuming that the film is going to be a Western spoof in which the hapless hero tries to adjust to the modern take on this genre. They’d only be half right. It is a spoof, but far from being miserable, Rex O’Herlihan benefits from modern sensibilities in some very cool ways, primarily by becoming self-aware.


A lot of the humor in Rustlers’ Rhapsody comes from the combination of two things: a) the knowledge that classic, B-Westerns all had pretty much the exact same plot, and b) that Rex understands this and uses it to his advantage. When you’ve spent your entire life traveling from town to town, helping the local underdogs defeat the rich and powerful land barons as the railroad’s coming through, you start to get confident that you always know what’s going to happen next and will be able to deal with it. That turns Rex into kind of a cowboy superhero. That could have been really annoying except that Berenger is so completely humble and charming about it and the movie is so darn funny. In addition to effectively giving him precog “super powers”, Rustlers’ Rhapsody also explains some “secret origin”-type stuff like: how does he afford this lifestyle, how does he recover so quickly from being wounded, and where does he keep all those different shirts?


In this particular story, Rex has ridden into Oakwood Estates where the evil cattle baron, Colonel Ticonderoga (effeminately played by an hilariously out-of-his-usual-character Andy Griffith) and his men are terrorizing the local, awful smelling sheepherders. Rex teams up with the town drunk (Bailey) to stop them, also making friends with the town prostitute (Marilu Henner) and the Colonel’s daughter (Sela Ward), a girl who – like Rex – has named her horse Wildfire, because all awesome, free-spirited horses are named Wildfire.


After some initial encounters with Rex, the Colonel realizes that he’s going to need some help, so he forms an alliance with another Colonel (they’re always colonels; this one’s played by Fernando Rey) who owns the railroad. The railroad guys are right out of Spaghetti Westerns, allowing the B-movie cowboys to be envious of the cooler background music and long raincoats. Unfortunately for the Colonels, even this coalition isn’t enough to defeat Rex, because he’s the Good Guy and the Good Guy always wins.


I won’t spoil it, but the Colonels figure out a way around this, resulting not only in some more great gags, but also an examination of what it really means to be a Good Guy, both in the ‘30s and ’40 and in modern times. Rustlers’ Rhapsody is always about being funny first, but it manages to sneak some actual ideas in there too.


Come to think of it, Rustlers’ Rhapsody may not be that different from The Lodger and Night of the Demon after all. All three films play with the idea of Good Guys and Bad Guys in different ways. The Lodger offers a policeman who’s kind a jerk and a possible serial killer as the romantic lead. Night of the Demon pits an abrasively stubborn protagonist against a friendly Satan-worshipper who only wants to be left alone. Rustlers’ Rhapsody takes the ultimate, one-dimensionally Good Guy character, a singing cowboy, and makes him question that righteousness. I guess my picks have a unifying theme after all.

Ken O is currently away from the ship’s helm while he takes care of his wife and brand new son. During that time we are forgoing our normal updates for something special. Every month Turner Classic Movies has a Guest Programmer who chooses the films they show for that night. For 9 days we’ll be acting as we were the Guest Programmer. So you’ll get 3 movies from me, 3 from Brandon, and 3 from our guest writer Michael May! A huge thank you goes out to Michael May; please go check out his Adventure Blog.


My next movie pick is the second film in John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. John Wayne plays Captain Nathan Brittles, a career cavalry soldier whose retirement is quickly approaching. A Native American uprising complicates the impending change of command. As if there wasn’t enough going on in this movie; there is also a love triangle between Joanne Dru, John Agar, and Harry Carey Jr.


Wayne is particularly good in the role of Brittles. He was 41 at the time, so he is playing a character 20 years his senior. The good captain has lost his wife and his daughter, the army is truly the only family he has left. Now he is being forced to retire, he is losing the only family he has left. There are themes in this role that Wayne will revisit 27 years later when he plays J.B. Books in The Shootist. There is both a strength and a sadness in the character; combined they make him believable.


She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is also the only film in the Cavalry Trilogy to be filmed in Technicolor. John Ford wanted the film to resemble the works of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. Color is a very, very important part of capturing those styles. The scenery is so striking that it practically becomes yet another character in the already large cast of talent. Filmed in Monument Valley, there are times it is hard to believe those colors appear in nature. The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Color Cinematography.


My favorite character in the movie is Sgt. Tyree. Played by Ben Johnson, Tyree is an ex-Confederate and Brittle’s chief scout. Johnson steals every scene he is in. The running gag with the character is that he is incredibly knowledgeable, but when asked for his opinion he always replies that it isn’t his department. Johnson was part of Ford’s stock company but was also a championship rodeo performer, horse wrangler, and stuntman. He also starred in another of my favorite movies, Mighty Joe Young. Johnson would win an Oscar for his 1971 performance as Sam the Lion.


Another member of John Ford’s favorites is Victor McLaglen. The English McLaglen plays Top Sgt. Quincannon with a thick Irish accent. McLaglen had been a professional boxer in his past, and he has an extended, slap-stick bar room brawl that acts like a precursor to the one he and Wayne have a few years later in The Quiet Man. Quincannon is the main source of the films comedic relief. Playing the Irish stereotype to its fullest, the character is always looking for a drink. McLaglen won the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1936’s The Informer and was nominated for his supporting role in the Quiet Man 17 years later, although he didn’t win that one.


There is a lot going on in this movie. In fact there may be almost too much. At times it feels more like three episodes of a television show were combined together to make one movie. There are minor characters that you see two or three times during the movie, but the way they are handled makes it feel like there is a back story to them. If the movie is three episodes from a show, I want to see the rest of the episodes. I want to know more about the blacksmith or why everyone makes fun of Hochbauer.


John Wayne movies are very important to me, because I was introduced to them by my grandfather. Watching them makes me feel like he is still around, watching them with me.  My favorite has changed many, many times since I was introduced to them. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon has been my favorite for probably the longest amount of time. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Earlier this week I made the statement that I like all things considered geeky. An exaggeration to be sure and now I have to come clean about one of the larger things in geekdom that I just don’t get. I don’t like Harry Potter. My wife is a huge Pot Head (Potter not weed) so I’ve tried the book and I’ve sat through all the movies multiple times. In fact with Universal opening the Wizarding World, I can’t really escape it right now. Not to mention last weekend all my wife had on the TV was the Potter Marathon.


I’ve tried to get into it. It is a highly detailed fantasy setting, I like those. But wow do I really dislike Harry, Ron too. Ron could get shot in the face for all I care (the character, not the actor, I’ve got nothing against him). A long time ago when discussing the Never Ending Story I made the statement; “Even as a kid I liked my fantasy with tits and swords.” I had seen Conan and the Beastmaster at an early age; maybe that is working against me in accepting other things.

But I have come to enjoy a few Potter related things. What are they? Check it out after the jump.

So the Jonah Hex movie came out Friday and made an underwhelming 5.38 Million. Rotten Tomatoes has it listed at 14%. Not a very good percentage. I had made a promise to myself to give the movie a chance; to go into the theater and not expect to see a direct translation of one of my favorite characters. I had two surprises Monday morning when I walked into the theater at 11:45. First, there were actually other people there. Not a lot sure, but I was expecting an empty theater. The second surprise; despite all its flaws, I enjoyed the movie.



I’m not saying it is a masterpiece. Maybe my expectations were so low it would be hard to make a movie as bad as I was expecting. But as I watched there were moments in the film that had me grinning widely; even cheering. There were things that made me roll my eyes too. A few times I even received a sympathetic pat on the arm from my wife. Bottom line though, I left the theater and enjoyed most of what I had just seen.

Spoilers after the jump.

The Jonah Hex movie opens today, well I suppose some places did midnight releases so technically it opened this morning. In case the movie gets you interested in the books the character came from I’ve been going over some easy jumping on points. Yesterday I talked about the earliest Jonah Hex stories collected in the Showcase format. Today I’m going to cover two more current stories. Face Full of Violence and the just released No Way Back.



Face Full of Violence, besides having an awesome name is the first trade paperback collecting the new Jonah Hex series. Written by Justin Grey and Jimmy Palmiotti the comics are usually self-contained one and done stories. The fantastic part is at almost any time you could grab one issue and read it without feeling lost in a sea of continuity. They also have no permanent artist, so the style is constantly changing. Phil Noto has been one of my favorites, but the series artist list is full of big names.

More Violence after the jump.

More leather slapping after the break.

I think one of the things that gives geeks a bad name is that nerd rage when one of the properties that we love is brought into another medium. We hold so tightly onto continuity that any changes send comic fans running to forums and screaming how the film adaption raped their childhood. We need to learn to loosen up a little bit. No movie is so bad that it ruins the memory of something you love. It doesn’t go into your room and burn all your old comics so that you can’t read them anymore.

I haven’t gone to Vegas. I didn’t even wander down to the reservations to hit the casino. Instead I’m spending all my time gambling in Thieves Landing and Chuparosa. Both are towns in the new game Red Dead Redemption a fantastic new game from Rockstar. Rockstar games are always full of mini-games but for some reason I’m hooked. I’ve never been a big poker player, but I’d say I’ve put in at least 3 hours into just poker alone. I had finally pulled myself away from the cards when I played my first game of Liar’s Dice.


So I realize that there is about to be an in-game revolution down in Mexico, but if you need me I’ll be over in the bar. I just want to play one more hand before going on.