5 Sports Movies I Like (in no particular order)

Watching the memorable match between the United States and Algeria in the World Cup this past Wednesday (which was, sadly, followed by an American loss to Ghana on Saturday) has put me in a sports frame of mind.  Movies about sports (either fictional or based on real events) are plentiful, but truly good ones are tough to find.  Here are 5 that make the cut:

1. Hoosiers (1986)

The greatest feel-good sports movie of all time (I much prefer it to Rudy, probably because I can’t stand Notre Dame), Hoosiers is about a small-town Indiana high school that perseveres to become state basketball champs.  Whoever the guy is that plays Jimmy Chitwood must be a terrible actor because they only let him speak about fifty words, but he sure does have a pretty jump shot.  This is the only basketball movie worth the time, the rest being either mediocre (He Got Game, White Men Can’t Jump) or downright awful (The Air Up There, Blue Chips, Dr. J’s tragic The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh).

2. Bull Durham (1988)

Kevin Costner is no stranger to baseball movies, having also played the lead in For the Love of the Game and Field of Dreams (also a wonderful movie, but when it comes to tug-at-the-heartstrings baseball fare, I’ll take Robert Redford in The Natural), but his comedic turn as aging minor-league catcher Crash Davis is his best effort.  I’ve never understood why Costner is so maligned.  Sure, he’s had some duds, but any actor with Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, The Untouchables, No Way Out, A Perfect World, and Dance With Wolves on his résumé is worthy of respect.    

3. Victory (1981)

The World Cup got the ball rolling (pun intended) on this post, so it’s only fitting that a soccer movie make the list.  Expertly acted by Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, and Max von Sydow, Victory tells the story of a group of Allied POWs who join together to play a match against the German national team during World War II.  This scene alone is worth the price of admission: After an Allied team member (played by international soccer star Pelé) scores on a bicycle kick, the German officer who organized the match—a soccer aficionado, he hoped to use honest sportsmanship to counterbalance the horrors of war—erupts in spontaneous applause.  His superiors, who’ve attempted to rig the match to ensure a Nazi victory, can only frown as their efforts are upended by the unpredictability of sport.    

4. Rocky (1976)

As a sport, boxing has all but disappeared from our national consciousness over the past couple of decades.  As entertainment, though, it’s the sport with the highest ratio of quality films.  Aside from Rocky and Rocky II (and Rocky III—yeah, I said it) there’s also Raging Bull, The Great White Hope, and the more recent outings Million Dollar Baby and Cinderella Man.  I’m not going to tell you what Rocky is about because if you don’t already know, you have only yourself to blame.  It’s without question one of the best films ever made, sports-related or otherwise.

5. Vision Quest (1985)

Probably my favorite ’80s movie, and by that I don’t mean a movie made in the ’80s—as most of those mentioned on this list were—but a movie about coming of age during the ’80s.  Actually, come to think of it, I like Sixteen Candles better.  And Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  And Some Kind of Wonderful.  And Lucas (which has its own sports-related subplot).  Okay, Vision Quest is my favorite ’80s movie about high school wrestling, that much I can say with certainty.  Matthew Modine plays Louden Swain, a newcomer to the sport and a bit of an outcast who drops weight classes to compete against Brian Shute, the most feared wrestler in the state.      

**Bonus!  5 more not mentioned above that could very easily be on the list: The Sandlot, Slap Shot, Kingpin, Caddyshack, and The Longest Yard (the original, of course).

I’m riddled with contradiction.

This past weekend we took a trip with some friends to Kiawah Island, South Carolina, a vacation spot on the Atlantic Coast.  The name of the island probably already lead you to assume that it’s a coastal locale, but my wife used to live in Grand Island, Nebraska, so a little clarification never hurts. 

Anyway, while picking up supplies at the island’s only market, I overheard some locals talking about a regional ginger ale named Blenheim.  At the time, I was scouring the soda aisle for a couple of soft drinks that are hard to find where I live: Ale-8-One and Royal Crown (in glass bottles, not the more readily available—and substandard—plastic-bottled variety).  There was no Ale-8-One or RC to be found, but I did pick up a six pack of Blenheim and bring it back to our rented condo.

When I’m traveling and I find myself in a grocery store, I usually check the soda aisle to see if they stock anything that isn’t on the shelf at my local Publix (if you’re not from Florida, Georgia, or South Carolina, you’ve probably never heard of Publix, and for that you are most unfortunate).  I guess you could say that regional soft drinks are a recent hobby of mine, though I have no idea why.  The truth is, I don’t even like soda.  Maybe it’s the caffeine.  Or maybe it’s the sweetness, me not having much of a liking for candy or desserts, either.  Or maybe it’s because of:

Traumatic soft drink memory #1: On a hot summer day in 1978, I entrusted my stepfather with my cup of iced cola, asking him to watch it for me while I ran willy-nilly around the park.  A few hours later, parched and seeking relief, I asked him for the cup back, only to discover he’d already drank its contents. 

Traumatic soft drink memory #2: Growing up, I didn’t get a cash allowance for performing my weekly household chores.  As payment, I instead was allotted a single 16-ounce bottle of Pepsi, the only soft drink I was permitted to have for the entire week (Mom has always been a proponent of healthy living).  As a result, I instinctively associate Pepsi with indentured servitude.

I could go on, but suffice to say that for various reasons related to both palette and my subconscious, soft drinks and I don’t usually mix.  What is it about rare soft drinks, then?  Maybe it’s the collectible nature of them, the same quality that spurred me to hoard baseball cards when I was a kid and vinyl toys today.  Maybe I’m drawn to their regional aspect out of some inner desire to support the little guy in a world so dominated by multinational corporations.  Maybe I just want to experience local flavor.

Who knows?  I just finished my first bottle of Blenheim #5, though, and it was, without a doubt, the gingeriest ginger ale I’ve ever had.  The taste was overpowering at first, but I got used to it by bottle’s end.  On my way to Chicago Comic-Con this year, I believe I’ll be passing close by Winchester, Kentucky, hometown of Ale-8-One ginger ale.  I’m curious to see how it compares.

It’s always nice to be mentioned.

Graphic Novel Reporter, a website for buyers and sellers of comics, has released its 2010 Core Graphic Novels List.  A guideline for retailers and librarians interested in starting a graphic novel section, or expanding the one they already have, the list offers suggestions by categorizing graphic novels in groups labeled The Core Ten, The Next 25, and The Expanded List: 100 More.  The Surrogates and The Surrogates: Flesh and Bone made the cut, both books appearing as a joint entry on The Expanded List.

I’m never sure what the value of lists like these are, or who uses them as a resource, but any day that my books are listed alongside Alec and The Complete Peanuts is a good day indeed.

Things I Learned in Europe (Part 2 of 4): The Wire is good TV.

In 2000, I took a two-week trip to Costa Rica with some friends.  We stayed at a surf camp that consisted of a collection of bungalows, a swimming pool, and the open-air restaurant/bar where we did all of our eating and socializing, the camp being situated in a fairly remote area on the Pacific side of the country.  There, in a foreign place on the other side of the Caribbean, I had two experiences that at the time seemed to me oddly American.  The first was that I ate the best grilled cheese sandwich I’ve ever had, hands down.  The second was that I discovered the music of a country legend who has since become one of my favorite artists in any medium: Johnny Cash. 

No doubt I’d encountered Cash’s music before, either on the radio, on TV, or possibly even in my own home (my stepfather has been a fan of the Man in Black since his Sun Records days).  If I did, I have no memory of it.  If not for the Texan who everyone called “Cowboy” and his copy of 16 Biggest Hits spinning its way through the restaurant/bar’s CD rotation, I might still be oblivious to Cash’s genius.  It took the solitude of the Costa Rican jungle to open my ears to his gravelly voice, affecting lyrics, and the boom-cha boom-cha of the Tennessee Two (or Three, depending on the song) backing him up on instruments.  Cowboy, wherever you are, I owe you big-time.

Flash forward almost a decade.  For years I’d been hearing good things about the HBO series The Wire, but I’d never seen it despite being an HBO subscriber for the entire duration of the show’s 5-season run.  When a reviewer described The Surrogates: Flesh and Bone as reading “like Philip K. Dick writing an episode of The Wire,” I was finally compelled to give the show a chance, if for no other reason than to find out if I’d been handed a compliment.  So I downloaded the first season before leaving for The Surrogates European book tour, figuring I’d watch a few of the episodes while in transit.  Riding the fast train from Frankfurt to Paris to begin the second leg of the tour, I was given my first opportunity.

Two days later I was scheduled for a free day to rest up and explore the Parisian sites.  I spent the entire morning and afternoon in my hotel room, where I watched the remaining installments of the first season on my iPhone.  I’ll forego adding my two cents to the Fort Knox of positive words that have already been written and said about the series, and just say that the remainder of the tour was a constant search for wi-fi hotspots that would enable me to download more episodes from iTunes.

During one of our last nights in France, Brett Weldele and I were eating at Creperie de Cluny (quality of the crepes being what they were, if it had been a wi-fi hotspot, it would be on the shortlist of my favorite restaurants ever) with Thierry and François, our guides from Delcourt, publisher of the French edition of The Surrogates.  We got on the subject of The Wire, and Brett and François quickly turned the conversation toward their favorite moments and the show’s many strengths, both as entertainment and as art.  Four guys—one from Atlanta, one from Portland, and two from France—all of us talking about a TV series filmed in Baltimore.

We live in the era of portable art, a time when Johnny Cash can travel to Costa Rica in a suitcase, and The Wire can find its way to France via . . . whatever it is that makes wi-fi possible.  The reality of that hit home in Paris, maybe because—for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on (and that might sound traitorous coming from an Italian)—Paris is the one place on the globe that I most instinctively equate with art.  It was the adopted home of American expatriate writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.  It’s the home of the Louvre and the Mona Lisa (I know, Uncle Jimmy, she was painted by an Italian, but I’m trying to make a point here). 

And, apparently, some fans of The Wire live there, too.

The Ugly Truth (Pages 6, 7, and 8)

Duane Ballenger:

Justin Gammon: 

Things I Learned in Europe (Part 1 of 4): Germans don’t beat around the bush.

The guy in the glasses and hat behind the counter is Filip, Cross Cult’s PR guru, who did yeoman’s work (that one’s for you, Jensen) setting up around-the-clock TV, radio, and print interviews for Brett and me.  It was a hectic three days, but we left the festival feeling we’d done as much as we could to get the word out about the German edition.

On our last night in Frankfurt, Cross Cult treated us to dinner at what I thought they said was going to be an Austrian restaurant, but it turned out to be Australian.  When I realized my mistake, I wasn’t worried—I’m as close to omnivorous as you can get, only abstaining from eating pickles, raisins, and uncooked coconut.  The menu listed some exotic fare, including emu and other native fauna, but what struck me most was the image accompanying the Kangaroo section:

The restaurant was dimly lit and I’m a poor photographer, so the details may be difficult to discern, but that’s a photo of a mama kangaroo with a joey snug in her pouch, both of whom were staring at me with their sad, brown kangaroo eyes as I scanned the list of methods by which their kin could be served to me on a plate.  Germans are often portrayed as a hard, no-nonsense people, a portrait that, after spending a laugh-filled weekend with the affable Cross Cult gang, I was beginning to feel had been painted with too broad a brush.  Seeing this menu gave me an understanding of how such portrayals come to be. 

Before I forget: Thank you, Outback Steakhouse, for designing a menu that doesn’t rely on lifelike images of cows, chickens, fish, or any of the other animals you offer up for consumption.  Need to explain the circle of life to my children: Delayed.

Hi, Gram.

I realize it’s been a while since I posted an update, but when you hear through the family grapevine that your maternal grandmother is beginning to doubt your health and wellbeing, maybe it’s been too long.

So what have I been up to?  Aside from putting the finishing touches on The Homeland Directive and reviewing the art and lettering for the adaptation of The Lightning Thief, yesterday I finished the first draft of the script for another, yet-to-be-announced graphic novel adaptation for Hyperion.  My preference is to have a complete draft of a script in the can before the artist begins penciling it, so I imposed upon myself a firm deadline of April 30, two months earlier than the deadline given to me by the editor.  Because, you know, life not being as stressful as I’d like, I try to find ways to make it more difficult.

Now it’s on to the Next Big Thing, though I haven’t quite decided what it’s going to be.  All I know is that I have about five months to do it because I’m scheduled to begin something else in October.  In other words, I set deadlines for myself before I even identify what it is that has to be completed.  Ah, neuroses . . .

You know you’re getting older when the documentaries are about things you witnessed firsthand.

Hats off to HBO Sports for their new documentary Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals, which recounts the careers of 1980s basketball legends Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird.  In my opinion, this was the heyday of pro basketball as a team sport, and it soon gave way to the points-driven, solo-performance era ushered in by Michael, handed down to Shaquille, and now ruled by Kobe and LeBron.

In the great debate of the time—Are you a Laker or a Celtic?—I came down firmly on the side of Bird and Celtics.  Growing up in South Florida during the ’80s, the only professional game in town was the NFL’s Miami Dolphins.  The Miami Heat didn’t get added to the NBA until 1988, so up to that point you had to look elsewhere for a basketball team to cheer for.  The Celtics were a natural fit for me, the majority of my family still living in Providence, Rhode Island, less than an hour from Boston Garden.  So Magic and the Lakers were to be despised for their flashy, West Coast, razzle-dazzle style of play, a polar opposite of the barebones, blue-collar, fundamental Celtic approach (though I chose the Lakers over the even less likable Detroit Pistons, whose style was driven by whiny, cheap-shot artists Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman).  As a dedicated basketball enthusiast—when I wasn’t in school or at work, I was on the court—the rivalry was a huge part of my consciousness.  I remember the Magic vs. Bird ads for Converse Weapon shoes, as well as a particularly jarring Sports Illustrated cover story where they used Photoshop (or whatever passed for Photoshop at the time) to put Bird in Laker gold and Magic in Celtic green, then surmised what the world would’ve been like had they been drafted accordingly.  Sacrilege.

The HBO documentary does a stellar job of portraying the Magic/Bird dichotomy as I remember it, but it also reveals something I hadn’t previously been aware of: the close bond of friendship that the years as bitter rivals forged between the two men.  Throughout their careers they came to depend on each other’s existence as the yardsticks by which they judged themselves, Bird checking the box score every morning to see Magic’s stats from the evening before, and Magic using Bird’s Rookie of the Year and MVP trophies to fuel his own ambition.  When Magic was forced to retire after testing HIV positive in 1991, the game lost all meaning for Bird, who soon retired himself.

I suddenly find myself wishing today’s NBA was more like the league of my youth, when players stayed with a single franchise throughout their careers, forging team identities and heated rivalries that endured.  When players played for their teams, not for themselves.  I’ve tried to watch today’s game, but every time LeBron tosses his powder in the air, I can’t reach for the remote fast enough.

Who knew a 36-year-old could be so fogeyish?

Sneaky Peeking: The Lightning Thief

I’ve been under strict secrecy until now, but one of the projects I’ve been working on is a graphic novel adaptation of the bestselling book The Lightning Thief, the first installment in the 5-part Percy Jackson & The Olympians series by Rick Riordan (the feature film adaptation of the same book is in theatres now).  I’ve already turned in the completed script, and Hungarian artist Attila Futaki is about a third of the way through the art.  The adaptation will also feature colors by José Villarrubia, so this one will be very easy on the eyes.

Attila posted the above page from Percy’s battle with the Minotaur on his website, along with a recent interview he did with a Hungarian outlet.  These are the first concrete images and details to be made public about the project, and more will be forthcoming as they are permitted.

Thanks are owed to Top Shelf who, had they not footed the bill for me to make a last-minute appearance at last year’s New York Comic Con, I would never have been in the room to meet Christian Trimmer, the editor at Hyperion who is shepherding the adaptation.  So much of my career has come down to being in the right place at the right time.  Many thanks to Christian as well for bringing me aboard, and especially to Rick for entrusting me with his baby.