Screaming Females: Ugly

Screaming Females, UGLY (Don Giovanni Records)
New Brunswick’s pride continues to build its reputation as one of the most exciting bands of its time. No mere pastiche of punk past, the Albini-produced UGLY artfully twists Marissa Paternoster’s infectious squawks into the band’s meaty riffs. It’s a huge record befitting a fully-realized rock band. Do not miss.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON
The inherent silliness of Transformers is darkened to a disturbingly serious tone at points in Michael Bay’s 3D assault on the senses. And yet Chicago’s destruction adds a weight to the cosmic threat that’s missing from most genre films. Awful music and Averyesque acting aside, I kinda liked it. Sorry.

Drawing Power

DRAWING POWER: A COMPENDIUM OF CARTOON ADVERTISING, 1800s-1940s edited by Rick Marschall & Warren Bernard (Fantagraphics / Marschall Books)
While I normally prefer actual scans of printed comics to digitally-cleaned artwork, this otherwise beautiful and informative tome suffers from some eye-strainingly tiny reproductions of yellowed newsprint. It’s fascinating to see cartoon kids hawk cigarettes and imagine a time when cartoonists themselves were celebrity pitchmen. I was born too late.

The Sincerest Form of Parody

THE SINCEREST FORM OF PARODY: THE BEST 1950s MAD-INSPIRED SATIRICAL COMICS edited by John Benson (Fantagraphics Books)
It speaks volumes that the story behind MAD’s many imitators is more entertaining than the strained parodies themselves. While some of the art is nice, most of these stories merely ape Kurtzman & Elder’s style without coming anywhere near their level of comic genius. Still, it’s an amusing historical sampler.