Working blue

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• Bilge Ebiri says:

  July 28, 2011 at 11:12 pm

  This is gonna sound retarded, but you know what’s the sad­dest thing about the Smurfs, as a concept? That they ret­ro­act­ively degraded the com­ic series from which they were ori­gin­ally spun off – the Adventures of Johan, a pretty fant­ast­ic series of Medieval stor­ies that could give Tintin and Asterix a run for their money in the pan­theon of European kid­die comics.
  Those stor­ies were funny, dark, excit­ing, mys­ter­i­ous, and every time I try to tell some­body about them I have to also men­tion that that’s where the Smurfs ori­gin­ated, and then it’s all down­hill from there. (As far as I know, only a couple of Johan stor­ies were pub­lished in English.)

• Glenn Kenny says:

  July 28, 2011 at 11:22 pm

  That does­n’t sound retarded at all, Bilge. I say that as someone whose bed­side read­ing activ­ity of late has sub­sisted of grous­ing about what is clearly a crap English trans­la­tion of the text of Edgar Jacobs’ Blake & Mortimer adven­ture “The Yellow ‘M’.”

• Claire K. says:

  July 29, 2011 at 12:34 am

  Oh, I remem­ber when Johan and Peewee used to appear on the cartoons!

• Bilge Ebiri says:

  July 29, 2011 at 12:44 am

  Yeah, there were often some Johan seg­ments on the car­toons, which was the main reas­on why I actu­ally bothered to watch them. Those books were very pop­u­lar in Turkey when I was grow­ing up, and I looked for­ward to find­ing them in the U.S. (hope­fully in col­or, at long last!) when we moved here. So ima­gine my sur­prise when I saw that instead there was a whole series devoted to the Smurfs, who had ini­tially appeared in only one Johan adven­ture (one of the lamer ones, as I recall).

• Joseph Neff says:

  July 29, 2011 at 2:38 am

  In Chantal Akerman’s short film SAUTE MA VILLE there’s a smurf on a door or a wall. It kinda flipped me out to see that, the short being from (I think) 1968.

• Stephen Bowie says:

  July 29, 2011 at 4:26 am

  Actually, Glenn, the memory is fuzzy, but I am pretty sure that while watch­ing THE SMURFS on tele­vi­sion between the ages of about sev­en and ten I did in fact mull over the dis­pro­por­tion­ate male-to-female pop­u­la­tion of Smurf Village and developed in response a fairly detailed and accur­ate (soci­olo­gic­ally, at least, if not ana­tom­ic­ally) men­tal por­trait of a Smurf gangbang.
  Just in case you were wondering.

• Oliver_C says:

  July 29, 2011 at 6:50 am

  Time to rewatch the Smurf scene in Linklater’s ‘Slacker’, I should think.
  Tintin may be a “kid­die com­ic” but what Herge did in ‘The Castafiore Emerald’, a sprawl­ing yet sus­tained, near-plotless farce of mul­tiple mis­un­der­stand­ings, is the graphic-novel equal of Altman.

• Gordon Cameron says:

  July 29, 2011 at 2:59 pm

  I remem­ber Johann and Pee Wee from the car­toon as well, though I did­n’t real­ize they pred­ated the Smurfs themselves.
  In defense of the blue guys, I will say that some of the ori­gin­al Smurf com­ics were, if not of Tintin qual­ity, at least the qual­ity of a good Asterix com­ic. In par­tic­u­lar, King Smurf worked some pretty scath­ing polit­ic­al satire and a clear-eyed view of human nature into a kid-friendly package.

• Bilge Ebiri says:

  July 29, 2011 at 8:33 pm

  Yeah, I do vaguely recall some ori­gin­al Smurf com­ics that were OK. I fig­ure Peyo him­self prob­ably main­tained some kind of stand­ard. And Oliver, I cer­tainly did­n’t mean any dis­respect when I referred to Asterix, Tintin, and Johan as “kid­die com­ics.” Like I said, I grew up on that stuff, and I love revis­it­ing them still. That includes the Lucky Luke series, too.
  In fact, that’s why I was so bummed about the Johan & Peewit series not being avail­able in English, save for THE MAGIC FLUTE and THE BLACK ARROW (the lat­ter of which was pub­lished some years ago in what appears to have been an abort­ive attempt to make the whole series available…but only that one ever wound up in stores, I guess).

• JC says:

  July 29, 2011 at 10:08 pm

  Well, I guess we can at least be glad Glenn did­n’t post a pic­ture of Smurfette.
  Oh, wait…she might be over 24. 😉

• Lex says:

  July 31, 2011 at 6:41 am

  FUCK blue chicks.
  WHITE PUSSY IS LOS ANGELES’S RAREST RESOURCE.
  I want to have sex with a WHITE WOMAN just ONCE IN MU LIFE.
  I AM WHITE. How come POOR WHITE GUYS can­’t get WHITE WOMEN in LOS ANGELES? This is a very press­ing and ser­i­ous soci­olo­gic­al ques­tion that deserves an answer.
  THE LA CASTE SYSTEM is POOR WHITE MEN can­’t get WHITE WOMEN.
  WHITE PUSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSY

• Oliver_C says:

  July 31, 2011 at 10:43 am

  “All right, pussy, pussy, pussy! Come on in pussy lov­ers! Here at the Titty Twister we’re slash­ing pussy in half! Give us an offer on our vast selec­tion of pussy, this is a pussy blow out! All right, we got white pussy, black pussy, Spanish pussy, yel­low pussy, we got hot pussy, cold pussy, we got wet pussy, we got smelly pussy, we got hairy pussy, bloody pussy, we got snap­pin’ pussy, we got silk pussy, vel­vet pussy, Naugahyde pussy, we even got horse pussy, dog pussy, chick­en pussy! Come on, you want pussy, come on in, pussy lov­ers! If we don’t got it, you don’t want it! Come on in, pussy lovers!”

• Frank McDevitt says:

  July 31, 2011 at 9:46 pm

  Lex’s (insane) post reminded me of this David Cross bit for some reas­on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrvtHYCP-LM