“Snow Cones are made from people!”
-Frosty at Head Injury Theater
Too often the name’s all class and the insides are trash. This one’s got one hell of a scary front door, but the insides are all colors with a bit of an undertow.
Huh? The slow down then:
Head Injury Theater is a disgusting name for a website. It reminds me of the ugly underbelly of the internet. I’m not exactly clear on how Jared Von Hindman came up with it, but it has something to do with some hilarious B-Movie reviews that were the original intent of the site.
B-Movies: He watches ‘em so you don’t have to.
You see, one of Jared’s many callings is to review crappy movies, and by crappy I don’t mean to imply all B-Movies are crap. Far from it, but Jared has a knack at picking a particular grade of crap to review. Basically, the directors ought to be paying him to write about movies like Skeeter, the Hitcher 2 and Scarecrow Gone Wild. His descriptions of these L.A. train wrecks are priceless. So after all the crap I’ve had to review in the past and still do in the future (Just wait ‘till the next one. I’m dreading writing the thing, really.), I feel like we’re sort of kindred spirits.
The Art: HIJ’s grown far beyond movie reviews though. To begin with the very structure of the site challenges lots of internet conventions in some really neat ways. He produces a new title banner every week and better than that, they’re decidedly non-tech. They’re whatever size Jared feels like and the same with his links page: no stale banners here. Though it seems to be used on a very smallish chunk of the site, the guy seems to loath Photoshop or at least refuses to let it change anything about the art. There are great things and not so great things about this. Most strikingly both is that there’s so little hiding behind technology. For better or worse, paint sticks and Jared seems willing to share tons of paint he’s stuck to stuff. Lots are experiments, failed and successful. It’s a bold artist that lets you wander around in his sketch-book and at times, that’s what this feels like.
First impressions of all of this are absolutely jarring: black background with explosions of color, sketchy lines, drunken lines, splotches, tin foil. But every once in a while it works in big, bold ways. On my first visit, I scrolled through the art quickly and moved on to the comics, but they’re more of the same: jarring. Then the opera? La Boheme and the Don Giovanni in all their cartoon glory. Again, it all feels like experimentation until you click to take a closer look at a couple that catch your eye, and something will catch your eye.
The Comics: There are a few comics. The Soylent Green reference quoted above is the only one that made a lasting impression. Many seem to be from an earlier period (I think the site says as much), funny, but not a highlight. There’s plenty of that boldness lurking on their edges though.
From my point of view as an artist, Head Injury Theater is one big “huh?” I’d never have the balls to lay down some of these lines and I often can’t believe he’s even tried it, but he has, sometimes poorly, sometimes well, but there’s just way too much there to fault any of it.
Thanks for submitting the site. It was...an experience.
Keep them coming folks: sites, CD’s, books, comics, blogs, whatever. If you can get it to me, I’ll review it. We’re well into the several hundreds of daily visitors so the promo’s got to be worth the submission.
(Oh. One final note. I did the strip last week, before the latest batch of paintings (on foil?) were put up. I see the Tin Man has made another appearance. I’ll have to say, HB’ll be excited when he sees everything’s alright with Mr. Rust after the rat infestation. On an historo-mythological note, the swinging axe thing in the strip above was in the original Oz story. Before Dorothy stumbled onto the Tin Man (factory workers), he had a curse put on him by the Wicked Witch of the East (Industrialization). The curse was that every time he swung his axe, it would lop off a part of his body to be replaced by a machine (the worker becoming part of the machine they’re strapped to for so many hours a week). At least one high school history teacher treated the whole story as a big Populist Party parable to get his kids excited about the gilded age. Any guesses about who the other characters or features might represent? It’s all guessing, of course. When asked, Frank Baum claimed the whole thing was just a children’s story. He was a fallen populist. Come on. Take a guess. The Yellow brick road? The Lion? The Wizard? The scarecrow? The Monkeys? The Witch of the East? The slippers? The emerald City? The Balloon?)
-Bob Stevenson
