I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: COLD BLUE MOUNTAIN-“White North” (Tiny Desk Contest Runner-Up 2015).

Last week, a Tiny Desk Contest winner was announced. This week, All Songs Considered posted ten runners up that they especially liked.  And I want to draw extra attention to a couple of them.

I know very little about these bands, and I seriously hope that the guys from Cold Blue Mountain look like this when they play all the time.

This may be the best set up and reveal of a joke that actually contains an awesome song.  The video is 4 and a half minutes long, but the music doesn’t start for nearly a minute and a half as the set up proceeds.

When the music starts it is heavy, like really heavy, but beyond heavy there’s a great riff mixed into the music on the second guitar–it’s a great sound.

But the “joke” isn’t over, since at 2 minutes the music stops for 20 seconds until the next reveal comes in.  It’s pretty awesome.

My only gripe is that I don’t like the vocals (growly cookie monster type)–they work pretty well with the music, but it’s not something I want to listen to, which is shame since the song really really rocks.

And the video is awesome.

[READ: February 15, 2015] Axe Cop Vol. 1

After watching Archer on FX the other week I saw a few minutes of an animated show called Axe Cop which looked weird and silly and starred Nick Offerman as Axe Cop.  I only watched a few minutes of it and then went to bed.  A few days later I was in the library and saw four volumes of Axe Cop books.  Well, I had to check that out right away.

And here’s what I learned.  Axe Cop is a web comic that was drawn by Ethan Nicolle.  But the best part is that Axe Cop was written by Ethan’s younger brother who was 5 at the time.  That’s right, five.  So Axe Cop comes from the delightfully twisted imagination of a (rather precocious in my opinion) five year old.

This book collects the beginning web comics, including the first slew of Ask Axe Cop, perhaps my favorite feature of the comic.  It also has a forward by Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Kevin Murphy!

In the beginning, there was Axe Cop.  No, in the beginning Ethan tells about how he was visiting his younger brother over a Christmas break and they started playing with action figures and what not.  And one of the guys was a firefighter with an axe.  Malachai didn’t want to play fireman, so he called this guy Axe cop.  Ethan decided to make a comic out of it and it all started from there.

The first episodes, all 1 page long, introduce some important characters: flute cop, dinosaur soldier (who is actually flute cop), uni-baby, avocado soldier (who is also flute cop) and Ralph Wrinkles (given by the Snoward Family).  We also see Axe Cop’s origin (he was born to Bobber and Gobber Smartist); he was also Flute Cop’s brother but they bonked heads and forgot that.  We also meet Babyman, Uni-Man and the most confounding superhero ever Sockarang, a man with socks for arms.

It’s pretty darn hilarious.  While the stories are all pretty much the same the awesome ways they defy logic makes them ever so funny.

Ethan says he created Ask Axe Cop as a way to use some downtime–just ask Malachi a question and draw a few panels, rather than creating a whole episode (child labor laws and all).  But it’s in these Ask sessions that the really funny and twisted side of Axe Cop emerges–probably because outsiders get to ask the questions.  Axe Cop puts on a cat suit to fight bad guys at night; he doesn’t sleep; he eats only cake; and he knows if you are a good guy or a bad guy by the way you kick.

The questions also reveal some wonderful things: Secret Attack, poison as the weapon of choice and of course Wexter the T Rex (who has machine gun arms and can fly).  We even meet Best Fairy Ever.

Part Three brings out a somewhat longer story which works quite well.  And then part four is more Ask Axe Cop (which introduces us to Abraham Lincoln Explosion God).

Some of the funniest thing are the signs in Axe Cop’s house (which Malachai apparently said) like You Can’t Eat Breakfast You Have to Do Your Job and You Know what time my job is?  Always.  And as the questions got sillier the answers became even better: like the secret powers of his mustache and the worst weapons ever (a flower gun and a rabbit gun)

The final story in the book, The Ultimate Battle, is really long.  I got a little bored by the end because the plot, such as it is, is just the team going to new planets and killing people.   True the new planets are a hoot and really that’s what it s all about (don’t look for story here for crying out loud).  But the saving grace is the hilarious parallel story about Baby Man (a man in a baby costume) trying to catch a duck (which shoots exploding eggs at him) and then later trying to catch a candy creature (who poops exploding cars) and then Eggy Eggy who poops exploding telephones.  That in and of itself is enough to win me over.  And of course, the whole episode ends on a poop planet, which is pretty cool.

I also love that by the end of this book Ethan was switching his “action” words from things like Chop! and Punch! to Materialize!  and Opaquify!

I have since started watching all of the Axe Cop episodes when they air on Animation Domination (there’s only 12 in total and each one is about 10 minutes which makes watching the whole series pretty easy to do).