Danny & The D-Rex

This one is like 90% YouTube videos

Hi. I’m Danny and I had to put my cat down the other day. It sucked!!

This Month’s Soundtrack

I’ve been obsessed with this little ditty from Australian pop-punk band Trophy Eyes ever since it came out in early 2020. It’s so ridiculously catchy that it’s easy to ignore that it boasts some of the least original lyrics ever written. It’s magical how that works sometimes.

I have no idea why/how they roped WWE star Seth Rollins to record footage of himself just enjoying the track.

Just Another Swamp Song

I have zero updates on my productivity except to say that I’ve got another crowdfunding campaign going on. This time, I’ve decided to work with Zoop, a relatively new outfit that focuses exclusively on comics projects.

Just Another Swamp Song follows Laurel, a high school outcast whose best friend is Bog, a monster lurking in the swamps of Florida. Laurel’s about to graduate and skip town while Bog has grown increasingly violent, setting the stage for the world’s most fucked up prom night. It’s basically a romantic horror-comedy that one could handily describe as “Swamp Thing meets Heathers.”

It’s a 24-page one-shot with art by CJ Camba. We’ve got some fun bonus items as part of the Zoop campaign including commissions by both me (dumb!) and CJ (good!), a print of a Florida-themed Weekly World News-styled tabloid, and a Love & Rockets homage variant by CJ.

The campaign is not long for this world, so go pre-order the book while you can.

The Name Of The Movie Is Uncle Peckerhead

My good buddy Nick Hanover recommended the 2020 indie horror-comedy Uncle Peckerhead, hailing it as one of the most accurate depictions of being in a band since Green Room while also begging me not to judge based on its title. Once I saw it was streaming for free on Tubi — the last bastion of cinema — I watched it ASAP.

Three-piece indie punk band DUH is about to embark on its first tour, but they’re so broke that their car got repo’d. Their only hope is a van-dwelling vagrant named Peckerhead, who agrees to be their driver/roadie but turns into a man-eating monster every night at midnight.

It’s a low-budget affair, but it looks great and features some surprisingly good effects when it doesn’t keep its kills off-screen. But the characters are the real reason to watch — the band’s a fun bunch, and Peckerhead himself is charming as fuck, making it tough to be mad when he murders the shit out of some belligerent metalhead or janky promoter. Someone on Letterboxd — not any sort of bastion of film criticism — kind of wrote it off as the kind of movie that wins an audience award at a horror film festival, and that’s not inaccurate.

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen both Encino Man and Tammy & The T-Rex, which are kind of similar flicks and both of which I loved. I feel like we as a society have been making fun of Paulie Shore since 1992, which now feels criminal after finding out that Encino Man kind of rules. Tammy & The T-Rex turned out to be way more tongue-in-cheek than I was expecting, which made all the difference. The version I saw was the uncut version with all the cheesy gore effects rather than the one that bafflingly tried to be a family movie.

But maybe you don’t want to hear about good movies. Maybe you want to hear about shit. I’ve had a DVD copy of Pray TV in my possession for years and years, and finally decided to pop it in. Good lord, this movie suuuucked. I’m sure nobody has ever even heard of it, but it’s an unfunny version of UHF, following a dopey public access-style TV station whose owner forces the station to pivot to religious programming in order to make more money. The god damn movie is as devoid of jokes, and I was so bored with it that I picked up my cell phone and started scrolling through LinkedIn. LINKED. IN. On a Saturday night.

Pray TV is the worst kind of “bad” movie, but Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the best kind. It’s so incredibly weird and ambitious and also totally unsuccessful at everything it’s trying to do, including being a vehicle to enjoy Beatles music. Actually, that’s unfair — Aerosmith and Earth Wind & Fire acquitted themselves pretty well — but the movie’s overall incoherent and surreal in the best/worst way. The kind of glorious disaster that can only be made by people who have no idea what they’re doing.

Buy One Of My Comics

Might I suggest Just Another Swamp Song?