Photos: Bergen Street's Free Comic Book Day and Act-i-Vate Party

Did everyone have a happy Free Comic Book Day? I did! Being Brooklynites, Degan and I picked up our freebies at Bergen Street Comics and Rocketship bright and early on Saturday. But come the evening, I headed back to Bergen Street for their Act-i-Vate party and presentation.

I'm a fan of the Act-i-Vate Comix Collective from back when I produced a segment on the site for a now defunct web series. For those not familiar with Act-i-Vate, the short version is they're a group of working artists who produce professional-grade serialized comics for free online. The presentation at Bergen Street showcased examples of the great work being done for the site, and I was surprised to see how much more sleek and functional the interface has gotten since I last checked in.

The presentation also included an announcement of the Act-i-Vate Primer, a hardback collection of new comics by Act-i-Vators, available exclusively in print (well, at least until two years go by, at which point they'll be put online. These guys just can't stop themselves from giving their work away!). Considering the Act-i-Vate stable includes such indie luminaries as Dean Haspiel, Roger Landridge and Dan Goldman, I imagine this collection will get a lot of attention when it hits the shelves this fall.

More pictures after the jump...


Bergen Street always has some great original art up on the walls. For the Act-i-Vate party, they hung up original inks, pencils and prints of the Act-i-Vators work.

Graphic novels by the Act-i-Vators were laid out on the center table. I ended up buying 08, illustrated by Dan Goldman, who is responsible for my favorite Act-i-Vate comic, the insane and extremely NSFW Kelly.



Everyone likes balloons.

A slide from the presentation of some of the pre-launch teaser material.

So if after all this, you're thinking about going to check out the site, here are few notes from the presentation about some of the comics on Act-i-Vate, if you need a place to start:

Panorama: "Nauseating, in a good way."
Ultra Boy: "Grusome, macabre, and fun."
Underwire: "It's for chicks!"
Fut Miso: The mini-comic at the bottom of this page was described as "The best thing on the site".
The End is Here: "I started with a daily strip about penguins way before all those movies came out." Described as the saddest comic ever. I just read it, and yeah, it goes from cute to soul-crushingly bleak in about one page. Hardcore anti-war sentiment.
Pecan Sandy: "It's Nick's reaction to Drawn & Quarterly."

Fun Fact:
Warren Ellis paid the $25 activation fee for the original Act-i-Vate domain name. "The Act-i-Vators could only come up with nineteen."

For yet more FCBD and Act-i-Vate party photos, check out our Flickr.

OMG THERZ A FREE TOY HIDDEN IN UNION SQUARE RIGHT NOW!

Hey New Yorkers! If you go to Union Square RIGHT NOW, you can find a free custom Dunny by a local artist! There's only one, and I'll tell you right now exactly where it is!


There! That's it! Okay, you need more info? Click the pic for the artists website (UPDATE: The Link is fixed. Hell, just go to http://doodlechimp.blogspot.com/2009/01/free-custom-painted-dunny.html). He's promised to make this a monthly thing if anyone takes notice, and I can promise you, if that toy isn't gone by 6pm EST, it's mine!

That said, if any Gnerd readers get it, send us a pic, you lucky bastard.

PS: If you're unfamiliar with what a Dunny is, check our photos from last year's Spooky Halloween Custome Toy Show. One of the organizers of that show is the same artist who customized and hid the toy in Union Square.

UPDATE 3:45pm: This just in via our Facebook Friend Feed: Chris M. of Brooklyn just found it! Here's a picture of Mister Speedy McSmugface with his prize.

Comics So Good They Should Not Be Free: Steve Purcell's Toybox

Steve Purcell, best known as the creator of Sam & Max, is the man. I can't think of any comic writer with a more distinctive voice. His humor is dry and clean, yet anarchic. Like a pitchfork attached to a ceiling fan. As much as I love his work on Sam and Max, I never had the chance to read anything else by him; as far as I knew, there WAS nothing else by him (his Wiki page indeed has few other writing credits, except for a Batman Villains one shot).

But now! Thanks to Steve's art blog, which I should have been following MONTHS ago, fans can revel in the wit and wierdness of Toybox, a genuine 12-page comic starring two decidedly non Salmonax-characters. Well, the duo of Toybox is actually not so different from the Freelance Police; we've still got the combination of one detatched and deadpan character paired with a impulsive and slightly violent pal. The story was published in Fast Forward 3, a sci-fi/fantasy anthology to which Steve was asked to contribute "what you want". Given that prompt, this is one of the stranger things I could imagine a person coming up with.

The whole thing was posted around Halloween; eh, so sue me. Read it, it's upsetting and delightful.

First Look At Joss Whedon's New Web Series

I haven't even watched this thing yet, because the computer I'm currently working on is from like 1993 and doesn't want to run Vimeo. But here it is, courtesy of the official fan site, the teaser trailer for Dr. Horrible, Joss Whedon's new musical web series that he wrote with his close friends and relations during the writers strike. Because Joss Whedon CAN'T NOT write. It's like breathing for him.

It's kind of killing me that I can't watch this right now. Anyone want to tell me if the trailer is any good?

Update: Oh wow. I just watched it. It's really good. This might be Neil Patrick Harris' finest work, although I could just be saying that because he's rocking my favorite outfit of labcoat and goggles. Odd that there's no singing, maybe they're concerned about scaring away geeks who think themselves too manly to associate themselves with anything all-singing, all-dancing. Or maybe the mixes just aren't in yet.

Name That Tune, Music Geeks

Q: How is Girl Talk's new album like the Guggenheim after 6pm on Friday?

A: It's pay what you wish!

I could get used to this. As was the case with Radiohead's In Rainbows, the only time I pay for music anymore is when I can name my own price. O, what a spoiled generation to inherit this dying world. Download the Feed The Animals LP in it's entirety at Illegal-Art.

For those wondering who or what Girl Talk is, he's a mash-up artist and everyone just loves him. The gimmick is he samples equally from current commercial hip hop (o_O) and the history of rock, which for him runs from cheeseball 7os anthems to alternative radio one hit wonders. As one who came of age on alternative rock, I have to say GT has pretty impeccable taste in this arena. Only two songs into the new album I was recognizing personal all-time faves like Hunger Strike by Temple of the Dog and Boy/Girl by Aphex Twin, so my theoretical issues with him aside, I'm hooked.

The aforementioned issues and the racial politics of meaningless dance music, after the jump....


Alright, so this is what happens when you grow up in Berkeley. You can't not see racial politics in literally anything that you spend more than 30 seconds thinking about. GT's previous album, Night Ripper, is on frequent rotation on my iPod, and from my first listen I've been distracted by the implications of pulling sexually crude/aggressive lyrics from songs uniformly by black artists (and those creating music in one of the most derided genres today, commercial hip-hop) and presenting them in a sort of sideshow, laughably-flamboyant context by grouping these clips together in such high concentration. They're even further decontextualized when positioned against comparatively quaint musical and lyrical excerpts from uniformly white artists, which are taken from a much broader spectrum of decades and genres.

But to bring this critique into reality a little, I don't doubt that Girl Talk loves the rap samples he mixes in. Quote from a Nerve.com interview from the Night Ripper era:

"I've always been into juxtapositions of really different elements. Things like really overtly sexual rap mixed with clean-cut '70s pop music, stuff like that. You hear a guy rapping about having sex, and it's set over James Taylor. I think it's what makes the music fun."

So subjectively, I'm not trying to accuse Girl Talk of anything. Am I saying it's somehow not right to juxtapose sexy stuff from modern rap and precious stuff from the history of rock? That's a no. But any time you have a piece of work that pulls from the cultural ether of two distinct racial groups, I think it's fair to reflect on the significance of what's being extracted.

BUT: this new album actually bucks that critique by drawing from a much broader scope of black artists, and without the same pointed scope of subject matter. The music taken from white artists is also generally less precious, with some metal and trashy modern pop making appearances. In closing, let me remind the reader it is not the job of artists to impose meaning on their work, it's the job of critics. I don't know how I went from being an artist to a critic, but I think I have to go kill myself now.

Weekanerd NYC: Battlestar Classic, Film Geek Treasure, and The Best Movie Ever

Friday, May 30

• Battlestar Galactica
  
• $11.50, Midnight @ The IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave, Manhattan
  

Folks, we got a mystery on our hands here. MovieTickets.com says this is Battlestar Galactica (2004), but the girl at the IFC box office said all she knows is that it's a reel-to-reel copy from 1978, and it's two hours long. Soo, all signs point to the feature-length edit of Saga of a Star World, the original 1978 Battlestar pilot. So don't go if you're expecting Razor, but serious fans will probably want to brush up on their classics.

Bring me everyone. What do you mean, everyone? EVVVRRRYYYYYONNNNE!

Saturday, May 30

• The Central Park TV & Movie Locations Scavenger Hunt
  
• $26, 2pm @ Central Park, Manhattan (exact location comes with ticket purchase)
  

So Watson Adventures puts on these big relatively expensive scavenger hunts for adult nerds, and this is the most interesting one I've heard of so far. I'm not sure how much scavenging competition is involved, but at the very least you'll get indulge your film nerdism by visiting tons of film locations, including spots from Ghostbusters, Six Degrees of Separation, Fisher King, The Producers, and many other movies that unlike me, you probably like even more than those four (hit the link for a list). Photo ops, anyone?

Sunday, June 1

• Moviehouse Presents: Leon (The Professional) and Snatch
  
• $7/day, FREE!, 8pm @ Galapagos, 70 N. Sixth Street, Brooklyn
  

This screening series gives you a choice between two films, but HONESTLY, who is going to waste their time on an inferior Guy Ritchie film (and aren't they all?) when you could be watching Gary Oldman hamming it the fuck up as a psychotic, pill-popping DEA agent?! GIVE ME A BREAK. Plus you get free popcorn and locally produced shorts before the feature. So bring "EVERYONE" you know and enjoy.

*Animated Standfield GIF is the work of genius Jim Miles

Weekanerd NYC: Michel Gondry, Airbender, and College Classics

Friday, May 9

• An Evening with Michel Gondry
• $27, 7pm @ The Times Center, 242 West 41st Street, Manhattan
  

Is Michel Gondry ever NOT doing a public appearance in New York? Seriously, living in this city he's difficult to avoid. He'll be screening clips of his films, probably show some classic music vids, and talk about what it's like to be a famous French visionary. An acquaintance of mine who worked on one of his videos said that he witnessed Michel's brother Oliver directing the whole production, so maybe if you go you can get confrontational and ask him if he's just been hiding behind his brother's genius the whole time. Then again, this clip is a pretty strong indicator that he does in fact put the man-hours into his music videos...



Airbender and the best college movie ever, after the jump...


Saturday, May 10

• Avatar: The Last Airbender
• $10 Museum Admission, 2pm @ The Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, Manhattan
  

Kids love the Airbender! So do a lot of the 20-something guys I know. I have no idea what they'll be showing here, but the screening will be 90 minutes long.

Sunday, May 11

• Movie Night: PCU and Animal House
• FREE, 7pm @ Hugs, 108 North Sixth Street, Manhattan
  

You know, I can't vouch for Animal House, I've never seen it, a little before my time. PCU however, is great. Jeremey Piven's finest role, Entourage be damned. Also certainly Jon Favreau's best performance. Best use of David Spade ("Earth to tall bitch!"). Best cinematic use of the Parliament Funkadelic. Good times. Plus free popcorn.

Weekanerd NYC: Free Comic Book Day Edition - All Free, All Awesome

Friday, May 2

• Documentary Filmmakers Lounge
  
• $Free, 5pm @ DCTV, 87 Lafayette Street, Manhattan
  

Do you make documentary films? 99% of the people I know do, and I myself am the errant one percent. Well, whether you make docs, like docs, or simply want to eat free barbecue and get maxed out on Rockstar at the open bar, this open-to-the-public indie film schmoozefest is the place to be. The question you have to ask yourself is this; is your fear of networking greater than your desire for free food and booze? Did I mention the open bar also includes beer and vodka? Shit!

Free Comic Book Day and a crazy clip show, after the jump...

Saturday, May 3

• Free Comic Book Day
  
• $Free, All Day @ Comic Book Stores Nationwide
  

Happy Free Comic Book Day! It's the comic geek's only national holiday. Highlights include free offerings from Hellboy, All Star Superman, Tiny Titans, Maintenance, and my personal favorite, OWLY! Go ahead, laugh. That book's cuteness transcends all barriers, even cynicism.

Sunday, May 4

• Attack of the Fancy Clip Party
  
• $Free, 8pm @ 601 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn
  

The internet has cut every living person's attention span in half, so perhaps the future of social entertainment (ie something that doesn't take place in front of your computer screen) is the Clip Party. Four solid hours of rare, culty, and otherwise captivating video clips, including old timey commercials, music videos from the likes of Joy Division, Desmond Dekker and Little Richard, and a sure-to-be-hilarious PSA titled "I Can't Believe It..." about sexually transmitted diseases. The future is curatorial. Come see what's on display.

Weekanerd NYC: Weird Musics, Wii Mario Kart, and 2001 at Tribeca

Hey Gnerd readers! We're thinking of making Weekanerd a weekend feature only. We'll still have daily event listings on the right-hand sidebar, but we'll only do write-ups for Friday through Sunday. Is that cool with you? Let us know at tips@geekanerdblog.com.


Friday, April 25

• The Bent Festival
• $10, 7pm @ DCTV, 87 Laffayette Street, Manhattan
  

"Circuit Bending" sounds kind of dirty, but it's not. It's the act of modifying electronic toys (getcha minds outta the gutta) to create all sorts of crazy audio, from symphonic melodies to R2D2esque doots and dweets. Tonight's concert includes seven performers from around the globe, plus Free Singha beer from 7pm to 7:30, which is important cause it seems like you might want to be just a leeetle bit altered in your perceptions to fully appreciate the festivities. Check out the website for full listings, including workshops on Saturday in case you want to bend some circuits of your own. If you know what I mean.

Mario Kart Wii and 2001 with the weirdest bunch of guests ever, after the jump...


Saturday, April 26

• Mario Kart Wii
• FREE, 2pm @ Nintendo World Store, 10 Rockefeller Plaza, Manhattan
  

Test drive the new game, see if those Wii Wheels are worth the cheap plastic their molded from, and get ready to learn how to do blue sparks all over again. Jason Priestly will be making a personal appearance, apparently he owns something called the Rubicon Race Team and well...I guess that's not keeping him too busy. All I want to know is if these guys will be there...


Sunday, April 27

• 2001: A Space Oddessy
• $25, 3pm @ Pace University, 3 Spruce Street, Manhattan
  

Before there was GLaDOS, there was HAL. Wait, 25 dollars?! Oh right, it's part of the Tribeca Film Festival. So in addition to the screening, you get a panel afterwards with this ragtag bunch: Buzz Aldrin(!), Contact screenwriter Ann Druyan, MIT Professor Marvin Minsky, Matthew Modine and Ira Flatow. Jeesh! Sounds like the cast of some nerd's fever dream.

Weekanerd NYC: Rap Geeks, Trash Geeks, and Guitar Heroes

Monday, April 7

• MC Chris is Dead Record Release Show
• $5, 11pm @ The Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, 307 w. 26th, Manhattan

mc chris doesn't like being called nerdcore, and I think that's fine, because -core is surely the most pretentious of all suffixes. mc will perform his new album for the first time at this show, so if you're a fan of, erm, raps about predominately nerdy subject matter (good), you'll want to be able to say, "I was there."

Free trash talking and a Guitar Hero tournie, after the jump...

Tuesday, April 8

• Adult Education: Trash In The City
  
• FREE! 7:30 @ Union Hall, 702 Union Street, Brooklyn
  

Billed as a "useless lecture series", this monthly event is less expensive than Grad School and almost as likely to get you a job. Four nerds will talk about their experiences in waste managements, and no that's not a euphemism for the mafia. Expect to see some freegans wearing clothes made out of bottlecaps, and hope they play this song at least once:


Wednesday, April 9

• Guitar Hero III Tournament
  
• FREE! 7pm @ The Apple Store Soho, 103 Prince Street, Manhattan
  

Hey remember that game people used to play before Rock Band? Me neither. JUST KIDDING, Guitar Hero will always be Geekanerd's first love as far as pretend-guitar games go. Entrance to this tournie is first come first served, the prize is a gift card for five free songs at the iTunes Store. Wait, what? Are you serious? Apple, you can't shell out more than $5 dollars in prize money for your own in-store events? This is a bad sign people, dump your stock ASAP...

No Thursday this week! Know something good happening on April 10th? Leave it in the comments or use the email link in the sidebar.

Steampunk Magazine and It's Tutorials of Varying Danger

I won't claim to know anything about the inner workings of Steampunk culture, but I sure do like all those gears and funny hats. I also love free things, so I was pleased to recently discover Steampunk Magazine, a neatly put together magazine that you can read for free online.

Issue four just came out this week, and consists of equal parts interviews, how-to DIY projects, and lots and lots of fiction, which I want to call fanfiction but of course it isn't. I found the How To sections to be the most engaging; they get down to the nuts and bolts of actually bringing the Victoria era to life in your own 8x8 apartment. In this issue alone you can learn how to...

• ...Build your own current-tastic Jacob's Ladder (highly dangerous)
• ...Turn copper into brass (only a little dangerous)
• ...Make a funny hat (hardly dangerous)

...and most dangerous of all, how to go on hallucinatory and possibly psychotic-episode-inducing mind trips, an article which opens with the disclaimer that "Clearly, many things are illegal." Fun stuff.

Weekanerd NYC: Six Comic Creators vs Paper Mache Dinosaurs (Dinos FTW)

Monday, March 3

• Shoot Her! Jurassic Park, The Play
  
• 9:30pm @ Market Hotel, 957 Broadway (at Myrtle), 2nd Fl, Brooklyn

I'm telling you people, low-fi recreations....they're reaching critical mass. This production promises to recreate live on stage, scene by scene, the entirety of Spielberg's finest work of cinema. How will they do it? Much paper mache is said to be involved, and probably no small amount of theatrical ingenuity. This event has been talked up quite a bit from the Village Voice to the NYTimes, so I know I'm getting there early.

UPDATE 3/4/08: If you missed this, we've got a full report.


Your chance to meet a whole bunch of comic creators, after the jump...

Tuesday, March 4

• Peter David and Jae Lee Midnight Signing
  
• Midnight @ Midtown Comics West, 200 W 40th Street, Manhattan
  

If you really want to stalk Peter David, you actually have two event options; at 8pm at Comic Book Club, Peter will talk nerd shop with the lads from The Stack, so if you go to that first you can have something to talk to him about during those all important 20 seconds when he's signing your copy of Dark Tower (or any of the other great books he's writing, for that matter).

Wednesday, March 5

• The Global Graphic Novel: Straight Out of Anguleme
  
• 7pm @ Housing Works Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, Manhattan
  

French comic-book creators Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian, the duo responsible for the award winning comic anthology Get A Life, will talk about "the global graphic novel", which sounds very grandiose and probably has something to do with Tin Tin.

Thursday, March 6

• Comic Signing with Danny Simmons & Floyd Hughes, Creators of '85
  
• 6:30 @ Forbidden Planet, 840 Broadway, Manhattan
  

Wow, so many comic artists are doing events this week! They must all be in town to see the Jurassic Park show. Adapted from the book Three Days as the Crow Flies, '85 is a graphic novel about NYC in a tumultuous time, with lots of drug addicts, artists, and other off-the-grid grittiness.

Neil Gaiman Gives It Away

Neil Gaiman has my lifelong allegiance for having written Sandman, the ten volume tome that helped to remind me in my formative college years that comics could be brilliant and were worth taking seriously. Starting today Neil Gaiman's similarly deity-themed book, American Gods, is available in it's entirety on Harper Collin's website, a promotion intended to celebrate the seventh anniversary of Gaiman's blog. Gaiman fans were able to vote for which of his book's would be available for free, and American Gods won by a landslide. This creates a neat little narrative circle, as the blog itself was born out of a promotional stunt to document the writing process of a little book called....American Gods. Ah, closure! You can read the book by clicking the "browse" button on this handy widget...



Analysis after the jump...


This book was very in vogue within my circle of friends circa the summer of 2001. I loved the first few chapters but eventually grew tired of the main character, a strong silent type whose still waters never seemed to run terribly deep. I made it past the part where he gets tied to a tree for a few days (awesome, by the way) and left it at that. But I just may reread it now that it's so aggressively available. There doesn't appear to be anyway to download the text, so you've got to read it on Harper Collin's bookviewer, which is a pretty bare-bones eBook interface. Every time you turn the page a little loading screen pops up for about .5 seconds, which is annoying but is probably not a problem for those with a better internet connection than I. Several booknerds I'm acquainted with hate reading anything on a screen, but I think my aversion to that was cured when I started downloading comics- er, legal comics, I mean, like you know, Zuda. That's a real thing, right? Anyway, if anyone loved or hated American Gods, let me know if you think I'll like it now that I've grown more refined in my tastes and my attention span has decreased by about %45 due to our friend and overlord the internet.