Four Days at Dragon*Con

See also: *Dragon*Con vs. San Diego Comic-Con: Which Convention Should You Attend?
*Stan Lee Has His Own Convention Now: Stan Lee's Comikaze

A good documentary can do more than entertain or educate the audience. These non-fiction films can be a wealth of inspiration too. They can lend insight into the creative process or impart some wisdom from famed creators. More often than not, they show that making awesome things happen is never easy.

Below are five nerdy and inspiration pop culture documentaries. From a behind-the-scenes look at one of the world's biggest film franchises to the story of a legendary comic book creator, these movies are filled with humor, drama and few good lessons too.

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Liz Ohanesian

HUSH presents "Unseen" at Corey Helford Gallery

There is no single process for HUSH. The U.K.-based artist mixes methods as he applies a combination of paint (acrylic and the spray can variety), screen print and ink techniques to his canvases. In the end, the results are exquisitely layered paintings that people sometimes confuse for collage work.

Saturday night, HUSH unveiled his latest show "Unseen" at Corey Helford Gallery. The effort involves 22 pieces, including large paintings and smaller studies. This was his first show with the Culver City gallery, which has come to prominence in the past few years for showcasing some of the brightest talents in the pop surrealism and street art world. HUSH himself falls into the latter camp, and he worked on a few street pieces while he in town.

HUSH's love of street art goes back to his youth. "I did a bit of graffiti," he says of his formative years. "I wasn't a big graffiti artist."

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Liz Ohanesian

Vintage video games at BlasterCon

Tucked into a corner of the Warner Center Marriott, a mid-sized room has been transformed into The Cantina. For three days beginning Friday, the place was open 24 hours a day as part of a new fan convention called BlasterCON.

The Cantina was lined in retro video games: Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Gauntlet and so many other coin-op classics you might remember from the heyday of arcades. There was a stage in the front of the room prepared to host a bevy of musicians. Some of the artists on the schedule played music inspired by science fiction and fantasy. One guest makes music with Game Boys. The house band was called Science Fiction Jazz.

BlasterCon chairman Todd Whitesel remembers when the BlasterCON team started working on this room. "It felt like that scene in Xanadu, where you're in the derelict warehouse and the potential of the space suddenly starts occurring to you," he says.

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Liz Ohanesian

Geoff Johns and his dog hang out at Golden Apple on Free Comic Book Day

Have you walked around a comic book store or convention and wondered why so many people are wearing Green Lantern t-shirts? Geoff Johns might have something to do with that. The comic book writer helmed the series for nine years. He reintroduced Hal Jordan as the famed superhero with Green Lantern: Rebirth. The story was successful, so much so that he and artist Ethan Van Sciver continued to build this universe with the story Sinestro Corps Wars.

"A couple years into our run, we introduced the concept of an emotional spectrum," Johns says while sitting in a meeting room at Golden Apple Comics in Hollywood.

The premise of the "emotional spectrum" is simple, as Johns explains it. You have Green Lanterns. They're identified by a color and are the embodiment of "power and courage." So, why not have other Lanterns who were also identified by colors and emotions? John gives a brief breakdown. There are the Red Lanterns, "people and beings who lost somebody, who were driven by revenge." There are Blue Lanterns. They are motivated by "faith and hope" and live by the motto "All could be well."

"It wasn't the colors that made them different," says Johns, "but the emotions that they were driven by."

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Shannon Cottrell

By Liz Ohanesian

See also:
*How a Star Wars Art Show Came to Be
*Elvis Mitchell Picks the 10 Best James Bond Openings
*Skyfall Review: James Bond Now Has a Superhero-Style Origin Story

Plasticgod's small, block-y paintings stand up on a top shelf inside Little Tokyo gallery/boutique Q Pop. There's Jaws, the large villain from The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. There's a girl done up in gold, reminiscent of the opening title sequence from Goldfinger. In the middle is Bond, James Bond. It's a painting of the Roger Moore incarnation of the famed spy, dressed in the yellow ski suit that marks 007's infamous jump off a cliff in The Spy Who Loved Me. Hanging from the painting and over the edge of the shelf is a Union Jack parachute.

On Saturday night, Q Pop celebrated half-a-century of big-screen James Bond adaptations with a group art show inspired by the film franchise. The collection in "James Bond: 50 Years of 007 Art Celebration" was voluminous. Art was squeezed into every nearly every corner of the shop. There were paintings and prints, a small selection of DVDs and other themed gift items and a slew of golden guns carefully placed across the shelves.

See also: James Bond: 50 Years of 007 Art @ Q Pop Slideshow

Q Pop owner Christopher Mitchell played a selection of Bond themes over the sound system. Some people arrived dressed in Bond-like tuxes. One man stood in a corner, petting a plushie as though he were Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the Bond villain and obvious inspiration for Doctor Evil in the Austin Powers universe.

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Teen Titans Go!

See also:
*ThunderCats to Appear at San Diego Comic-Con Before Cartoon Network Premiere

Teen Titans are heading back to Cartoon Network beginning tonight. This time around, though, the young DC superheroes are up for a different kind of adventure. Teen Titans Go! is an animated comedy centered around Beast Boy, Cyborg, Robin, Raven and Starfire. Sure, the episodes will be as action-packed as anything that started out life on comic book pages. The source of those action sequences, though, might be a tad unexpected.

The famed characters first made a splash on Cartoon Network back in the early 2000s with an eponymous cartoon series that lasted for five seasons. That incarnation of Teen Titans was helmed by Glenn Murakami and, while the show had its humorous moments, it was primarily an action series. Years after the show ended, the crime-fighting team popped up in shorts that ran during the network's Saturday morning programming block, DC Nation. The New Teen Titans shorts inevitably lead to the latest Teen Titans vehicle. However, Teen Titans Go! has become its own entity. The voice cast of the core characters remains the same, but the show has new adventures, a new look and even a revamped theme.

We caught up with the creative team behind the new series.

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Gilbert Hernandez

In Marble Season, Gilbert Hernandez creates a world that is as detailed as it is vague. The setting is suburban America, in a neighborhood similar to the one the famed cartoonist knew as a child in Oxnard. The exact year is intentionally unspecified, but it's sometime during the 1960s.

"I fudged a lot of the details," says Hernandez by phone, in advance of his appearance at Skylight Books on Wednesday, April 24. "I'm putting it right in the middle of the '60s in a way. The Beatles are introduced, that would have been 1964. The comics that they're looking at would have been earlier."

Hernandez calls the micro-universe in his latest book "a dreamworld of the '60s." References float in and out of the consciousness of the children who play with actions figures and argue about television shows. "I wanted to be specific with certain comic books and TV shows and music of the day, but also didn't want to be restricted," he says.

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Photo by Daniel McFadden, property of Anchor Bay Films.

Rob Zombie remembers the first time he saw Jaws. It was in 1975. He was a child at the time, probably in fourth grade by his recollections. "There wasn't anything scary happening," he remembers. Yet Jaws became a legend of the horror genre it was, in a large part, thanks to the music. "John Williams was really the master of making...those notes, become a tangible thing," Zombie says. "You hear the music and there's a shark even though there is visually no shark in the frame."

Decades later, Jaws still stands out to Zombie as one of the best examples of film and music working together perfectly. "For 20 years afterwards, you couldn't get into a pool without someone singing the theme," he adds.

Few people understand the power that music can have over people. Rob Zombie does. The director The Lords of Salem, due out in theaters on April 19, first made a name for himself as a musician. Actually, rock star is a more accurate description. In the early 1990s, he led the band White Zombie from underground act to rock radio mainstays. He eventually went solo and, ultimately, carved out a career as a director while continuing to release albums.

He made his directorial debut back in 2003 with House of 1000 Corpses and went on to helm the 21st century reboot of Halloween. Zombie has been straddling the worlds of film and music for a long time. In fact, he's releasing his latest solo album, Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor, on April 23, just days after the film release and is headlining the Mayhem Festival tour this summer.

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Liz Ohanesian

(L to R) Kutmasta Kurt, James Reitano, Kenny Keil, Chali 2na

In Nineteen Eighty Five, the comic book series by James Reitano, a group of teens come of age as hip-hop hits Santa Cruz. Their lives are shaped by the a then-budding youth culture revolving around DJs, MCs, street artists and break dancers. Technically, the story is fiction, but it's inspired by Reitano's own high school experience.

Reitano is the founder of the design and animation firm TFU Studios. He's created lots of music videos for artists ranging from The Dickies to Cut Chemist. Reitano's roots are in street art and, back in his high school years in Santa Cruz, he befriended an up-and-coming DJ now known as frequent Kool Keith collaborator Kutmasta Kurt. The connection between the two pop culture phenomena is strong for Reitano and Kurt and they aren't alone. That was the gist of "Hip-Hop & Comics: Cultures Combining," an in-depth discussion panel featuring hip-hop and comic book artists at WonderCon last Saturday night.

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Liz Ohanesian

Orleans by Van Arno

See also:
*Bulbous Noses and Painted Grins: Clowns! at Corey Helford Gallery
*Eric Joyner's Vintage Robots Travel to Thailand in Paintings at Corey Helford
*Natalia Fabia Looks Towards Lolita Fashion and Domo in 'Fashionable Aftertaste Without End"

Since 2006, Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City has been at the center of worldwide pop surrealist explosion. Shag has shown here. So have Paul Frank and Tokidoki. Locals like Natalia Fabia and Luke Chueh made their mark, in part, thanks to their solo exhibitions at the gallery. On Saturday night, those artists and over 50 more graced the walls of Corey Helford and neighboring CHG Circa for the group show "Art Collector Starter Kit."

Some of the artists included in the show have been working with Corey Helford since the beginning. Others were more recent discoveries by co-founder Jan Corey Helford. The only thing most of the pieces had in common was size. With few exceptions, the contributions to "Art Collector Starter Kit" were a uniform 12" x 12". That's petite for this crop of artists, but the small pieces served a purpose. Gallery co-owner Bruce Helford explained that this was a chance to offer work from some of their hottest artists at a lower price point. "New collectors and people on a limited budget can begin their collection with an original," he explains.

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