CAMERON HARPER’S CELBRITY PUTT PUTT
MULEY THE MULE HITS THE GREENS

April 9, Eyewitness News Celebrity Putt-Putt Golf Tournament, Golf and Games Family Park (5484 Summer Avenue). Description: ABC 24 anchor Cameron Harper will host this great family event. Come join local celebrities for a wonderful morning of golf, great prizes, and food to benefit the Ronald McDonald House. Muley the Mule, the Official SpokesMule of the RMH, will make an appearance to play a round of Putt-Putt in this event! Also on hand will be members of the Memphis RiverKings, Rock 103′s Wake Up Crew, and Ronald McDonald. So, ya’ll come out, get photos with the Mule, and have fun with Eyewitness News and the Ronald McDonald House. Photos are now online if you click the logo below.


Click logo to see photo gallery; Bev Hart, Muley the Mule, Bad Dog, and Tim Spencer

Putt Putt winners line up. Excuse the Mule, who helped some ‘cheat.’

MIDSOUTHCON 23, EPILOGUE

Well, it was a big weekend for members of the MSCA at MidsouthCon 23! Hitting the panel discussions and educating guests about the world of cartooning were Martheus Antone and Janet Wade promoting “Jetta,” Adam Shaw and Penny Register promoting “BloodStream,” and David Beaty and Lin Workman promoting “BushiTales,” each group informing us about events and future plans in foreign countries (including Hollywood) and had a booth as well. Greg Cravens taught a class on Saturday (See Below). Saturday Night found Lin and Dave performing as Silent Bob and George Lucas discussing the next Star Wars film (and won the Best SciFi Recreation award), and Kevin L. Williams performed the plant from Little Shop of Horrors, Audrey II, singing “Feed Me“ (click the link and scroll 2/3 down page to see video) with Tim Brown, who played Seymour that night and is President of the local Star Wars Fan Force group (and won the Best Group Presentation award). Earlier in the day, both Muley the Mule and Audrey II had made walk-around appearances at the Con.

Adam Shaw/Penny Register and Antone/Janet Stone on a panel discussing Publishing Comics.


Steve “The Dude” Rude teaches a painting class to Dave Beaty and Adam Shaw among others.



Kevin L. Williams with the walk-around version of Audrey II/Dave Beaty as “George Lucas” and Lin Workman as “Silent Bob”/For the performance Tim Brown as “Seymour” and Kevin Williams as “Audrey II.”

For an hour on Saturday morning, Greg Cravens (Current creator of the comic strip ‘The Buckets’) taught a children’s cartooning class. The class worked well, more for the older students than some of the younger ones, for whom the ball pit (also in the room) was a larger draw. (Draw, get it?) Class focus was on ‘the secrets of cartooning’. Specifically, the unsecret secrets were: ‘Not every piece of paper is a masterpiece, it’s okay to doodle’, ‘Don’t draw so dark with your pencil that you can’t erase it’, ‘Never say you can’t draw something, because it’s not nice to lie to yourself or others’, and ‘Stick figures are good things to draw details onto.’ Some of the above subjects are good study for older cartoonists, too. A good time was had by all, even the girl who had to have her mom called back to the Con Children’s room.

After the Sunday Con events were over, we went to see:

If you’ve read the book and seen the film Sin City, you’ll agree with my own endorsement of this film, and that of writer Penny Register (Bloodstream):

First of all, lest there be a doubt from my two qualifications-the amount of violence and the editing, I loved this movie and encourage anyone over the age of 18 to see it twice. As you have probably read ad naseum elsewhere, the film is “highly stylized”-meaning it is shot in stark blacks and stark whites, with the odd splash of color to emphasis the eyes, the lips, the hair, the car of its characters. I recommend reading or re-reading the comics before going to the movie because 1. it enhances the visual pleasure when you recognize a favorite drawing come to life exactly as Frank Miller drew it and 2. it makes the almost relentless violence of several scenes easier to take. I found it odd that blood shown as pure white or cab yellow was much more disturbing and
sickening than the red stuff.

One of the clever hooks in “Sin City” comics was seeing a glimpse of a character in the background of one book who emerges as a main character in the next or subsequent book. Because of the order in which “Sin City” was presented/edited, with “A Hard Goodbye” coming
first and “That Yellow Bastard” last, I was a little disappointed that some of those hints and suggestions are lost in the movie. Sin City is crowded with “A-list” actors. As a woman viewer, the stand-outs for me were the men-Bruce Willis turns in another quiet, moving (and likely underrated) performance as a man who is morally constant and strong in the face of the shifting values around him. The make-up Mickey Rourke wears to play Marv allows one to forget all the really bad plastic surgery he has had over the years and focus on what a great actor he could have been-remember the “Diner” and “Body Heat” years. Elijah Wood, who speaks not a word, is the stuff of reoccurring nightmares as the killer with the Charlie Brown shirt, Kevin. As for the women, last year at the San Diego Comic Convention, Adam and I saw the women of Sin City-Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba, and Jaime King. In person, I was surprised to find that Rosario Dawson is by far the beauty of the group, but you will never know that from this movie. Without a doubt, Jessica Alba is perfect, and lit from within, as
Nancy. Brittany Murphy, who usually annoys me on the screen, was an
adorable Shellie. And, as Adam said, he will never watch “Spy Kids” in
quite the same way now that he has seen the Mom from those movies as Lucille, the parole officer.

In Friday’s “USA Today” the reviewer listed the seven cardinal rules of directing that Robert Rodriquez, the director of “Sin City” had violated-no black and white films, no guaranteed happy ending, using voice-over narration. That alone has me rooting that this movie will be a success with critics and audiences. It was with me.

Dave Beaty, Muley the Mule, Eddie Zeno, Kevin Williams, Penny Register, Adam Shaw, and Lin Workman go to see “Sin City.”