Joan Jett and Album

I Love Rock & Roll is great and gets all the glory, but Album is where it's at. It's Pop, it's Punk, it's Rock & Roll.

Buy it here.

And see what Joan's up to in more recent days.

Drive

It's still in theaters (for a little while, anyway) and the killer soundtrack is out today. Drive is the best movie I've seen this year. It delivers a tight story like a sock in the jaw and takes no easy ways out. Stylish at every turn, but substantive to boot, it will haunt you after it's over.

Preview the soundtrack here and read more about it here.

Also, a previous article on the thematically similar The Driver.

What's Jim Steranko Really Like?

I'll put it this way- If you were expecting Dan Pussey, you would be sorely mistaken.

A few of the things discussed by the man himself on the subject of his youth, from the panel at the Cincinnati Comic Expo:

*Crashing motorcycles

*Building weapons

*Battling biker gangs (Steranko had a car, guess who won)

*Picking locks(semi-professionally)

*Escaping from shackles and out of locked boxes (professionally)

*Playing in Rock & Roll bands

*Not working for Tower Comics

*Working for Marvel Comics

*The soon to be re-released Red Tide

I've got little context to base it on, but I don't think comic convention panels usually go that way.

Despite the fact that all of the above seems larger than life, Jim Steranko is absolutely for real and as down to Earth as anyone you will ever meet. If you have the chance to see him someplace, you would be a real dope not to go.

Steranko At The Cincinnati Comic Expo

Ah, Comic Conventions. Used to be very small time, Holiday Inn conference room affairs and the subject of great scorn and derision. It didn't help that comic fan stereotypes were sometimes pretty accurate.

Now, comic conventions are the biggest thing that happens in all of media. How did this happen? How did pop culture come to so thoroughly embrace this stuff, when before it was so completely disgusting to the mainstream? Easy. Movies! Movies based on comics went from embarassingly completely disrespecting the source material to adapting it in spirit to pretty much exactly translating from page to screen, to wild success. People used to dismiss comics offhand because they didn't get it- they had never read one. I wonder how many people who made fun of me as a kid bought tickets to the Spider-man movies and got into them.

Long before it was hip, I was hopelessly devoted to the damn things. For as long as I can remember the written word, it was printed in bubbles pointing at the heads of drawn characters. My dad would read the Sunday comics out loud with me on his lap when I was just a toddler, and it wasn't long before I had my own comic books. I was an obsessive kid with a fertile imagination, and as soon as I could read on my own I was absorbing sequential art in all of it's available forms, every comic I could get my hands on. Although there were periods that I tuned out because a lot of comics are shit and didn't follow anything new, at heart I always carried an affinity for the stuff that I dearly love.

One of those things is my oft mentioned affinity for the work of Jim Steranko. As such, I've decided to make The Cincinnati Comic Expo later this month my very first comic convention. It looks to be scaled about the right size, it's actually about comics and not a bunch of other shit, and to me, Mr.Steranko is pretty much the only comic creator worth going to any trouble to see. Because he is extremely cool. Steranko symbolizes in every facet of his work and public personality a kind of sleek and crisp artistry that is quite suave and sophisticated, and for that I consider him a personal hero.

If you're going, and you see me there, say hello. Look for my PAN AM messenger bag.

Freddie Mercury 65th Anniversary

Freddie would've been an extremely cool senior citizen.

Google honors the day (in the UK) with a doodle:


And I'm honoring the day with this in it's entirety: