Liz Ohanesian

Shadows of Dangerous Men by Scott Listfield (The Venture Bros.)

​See more photos in "The Best Art Inspired by Adult Swim."

Gallery 1988 has hosted plenty of group shows that explore the influence of pop culture. From video games to cult films, Garbage Pail Kids to Watership Down, artists have come together at the Melrose Ave. space with a mission to transforms well-known works into something new.

On Friday night, Gallery 1988 took a slightly different approach. Where group shows often touch on nostalgia and early influences, in "[gallery 1988 x adult swim]," artists took inspiration from their peers, the creative teams behind the shows that comprise Adult Swim's programming schedule.

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Image courtesy of Fox

​In 2004 when Napoleon Dynamite -- a low-budget indie film about the strange and awkward characters in a small Idaho town -- took mainstream America by storm, were we laughing at Napoleon, or with him? It's an interesting question to ponder as a viewer, but one even more fun to pose to Jerusha and Jared Hess, the film's writers.

Mike White, who's worked with the Hesses on Nacho Libre and Gentlemen Broncos, moderated a panel at the Paley Center last night that focused on Fox's new Napoleon Dynamite animated series premiering this Sunday, and began by musing on this very idea. "Are Jared and Jerusha just making fun of ugly weird people?" he wondered aloud, though eventually concluded that once you get to know the pair, you realize that "ugly weird people are their people."

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Liz Ohanesian

Kevin Eastman inside his Meltdown Comics studio, which features lots of goodies from Eastman's studio that will be sold by auction.

​There has been a lot of activity in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle world lately. Last summer at San Diego Comic-Con, Nickelodeon announced that a new TV series starring Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello would be returning to the small screen. Meanwhile, IDW secured the rights to relaunch the comic book series. When they did that, last fall, they brought back an artist familiar to TMNT fans across the world -- Kevin Eastman.

Eastman co-created the series with Peter Laird inside a New Hampshire living room they called Mirage Studios twenty-eight years ago. Inspired by Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark and Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest, they decided to self-publish the black and white comic. It was a an immediate success and, by the end of the 1980s, TMNT had become a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But Eastman has had little to do with the franchise in the 21st century. He sold his ownership of TMNT years ago and has been busy working on cult favorite magazine Heavy Metal, which he publishes and edits, as well as other projects.

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Photos courtesy of Giant Robot

Ben Jones at the opening of "The Art of Problem Solving" at GR2

​Ben Jones doesn't like nostalgia.

"I hate those wedding DJs who have mash-ups of two songs from your childhood and it's totally wrong," says Jones. "However, I do want to be like the Geto Boys, using a loop from some awesome Detroit soul record and then it transcends the sample."

Jones is a multimedia artist long associated with the collective Paper Rad. He's also creator of The Problem Solverz, the Cartoon Network animated series that's the subject of West L.A. gallery GR2's current show, "The Art of Problem Solving." His work is a careful balancing act between the familiar and whimsical. There are references to a past you know, but it's never nostalgic.

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Micah Cordy

Art Spiegelman talks life, death and art with KCRW's Bookworm Michael Silverblatt at the swanky Soho House.

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Art Spiegelman needs a cigarette. He needs about 30 Camel Blue cigarettes a day, to be precise, but at the moment he needs just one, so we are sitting in the Roof Garden at the Soho House while he exhales onto our already-quite-smoggy city.

Whether he will be able to smoke is a decisive factor in everywhere that he goes, especially on promotional tours like this one. Spiegelman was in Los Angeles Sunday to talk with KCRW's Michael Silverblatt about his new book MetaMaus, a curated collection of the raw material that led to the most influential comic book of the past quarter century: Maus, a memoir about Spiegelman's parents' experiences as Holocaust survivors, with the Jews played by mice and the Germans by cats, or Katzies.

"[Cigarettes are] my stick shift. It let's me go from one gear to the next," he told me later. His fingernails are grey.

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Liz Ohanesian

​On the Saturday before the one-hour premiere of season 4 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, we headed to Long Beach's Aquarium of the Pacific for a special screening of the first two episodes, "Water War" and "Gungan Attack." The location may seem odd for a show set in a "galaxy far, far away," but it wasn't, as the Ahsoka and the rest are heading underwater for the start of the season known as "Battle Lines." We won't give away too many details about the episodes, but what happened at Saturday's event is a good indication of what you can expect.

The screening, unlike the actual television broadcast, was show in 4D. As part of the 4D experience, the theater was cold in a misty, windy sort of way. There were times when we were splashed lightly with water and lights flickered to mimic explosions. Outside of the theater, there was an aquarium show that featured divers fighting with lightsabers. If you're a fan of The Clone Wars, you will be in for a treat this week.

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Shannon Cottrell

​Shortly before this year's Dragon*Con event, convention entertainment group Wasabi Anime/Green Mustard Entertainment announced that InvaderCON II: DOOMCON would take place "near" Los Angeles. Today, the team behind the only convention dedicated to Jhonen Vasquez's short-lived Nickelodeon series, Invader ZIM, stated that the convention will take place at the Marriott South Bay in Torrance on July 28 and 29, 2012.

Over Labor Day weekend at Dragon*Con, Wasabi Anime's Tom Croom, who led the convention's Invader ZIM panel, likened the show to Star Trek. Like the original Star Trek series, he says, Invader ZIM was a science fiction story that was canceled too soon, yet it went on to develop a massive following.

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Shannon Cottrell

Start getting your Gir costume ready now.

​Last March, InvaderCON took place in Atlanta, Georgia. It was, according to the convention's Facebook page, the sole convention in the U.S. that catered to Invader ZIM fans. But, the short-lived Nickelodeon cartoon, created by comic book author/artist Jhonen Vasquez (Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Squee) has grown in popularity recently (we've seen proof in the form of Gir sweatshirts at Hot Topic) and, apparently, so has demand for the convention. Next summer, InvaderCON is set to come to somewhere "near Los Angeles" in late-July of 2012.

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Shannon Cottrell

Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer at San Diego Comic-Con 2011

​Check Shannon Cottrell's slideshow "The Venture Bros. @ San Diego Comic-Con 2011"
and Liz Ohanesian's SDCC story "The Venture Bros. : Convention Do's and Don'ts for Fans."

It's been a while since the team behind Adult Swim's popular comedy The Venture Bros. released a short, "six or seven years" by creator Jackson Publick's estimates. (The last, and only other, abbreviated episode is the Krampus-filled holiday special, "A Very Venture Christmas.") Sunday night, though, fans of the series will be treated to just over eleven minutes of hilarity with the between-season special, "From the Ladle to the Grave: The Shallow Gravy Story." The pint-sized, documentary-style episode follows the young career of Hank Venture and friend Dermott Fictel's rockin' band, Shallow Gravy. This special comes less than a year after the hour-long finale for the series' fourth season.

"We had a little less to say," says Publick of his work with Venture Bros. partner Doc Hammer. "A documentary history of a band with one song and one performance to their credit is a little easier to write than an epic season finale."

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Disney media

"Goofy embodies the can-do spirit, even though he can't do," says the voiceover actor Bill Farmer

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Many actors get the chance to play Hamlet, but only one gets to play Goofy. That guy is Bill Farmer, who for nearly 25 years has been the voice behind Disney's top dog in 3,000-plus projects spanning theme parks, TV shows, movies, video games -- everything.

"The best training I ever had was as a road stand-up comedian in the '80s. It you can do stand-up, you can do anything," says Farmer. He is also the official voice of Practical Pig of the Three Little Pigs, Horace Horsecollar, Pluto and a number of Looney Tunes characters as well. You can catch Farmer around town performing in Fred Willard's sketch troupe the Mohos (check out Farmer's kick-ass George Burns here). We caught up with Farmer at Disney's official fan expo D23 and asked him to deconstruct the dog.

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