Tales of the Starlight Drive In by Michael San Giacomo & various artists
by William the Bloody
Tales of the Starlight Drive In is equal parts continuation story and anthology comic. It doesn't necessarily follow the life of a person, so much as the life of the drive in theater itself. However, this comic all begins in 1955 when a young boy named Adam and his parents move into an old Victorian house right across the street from the drive in, allowing Adam a gorgeous view of King Kong on his first night in his new bedroom. The stories range from following Adam's life, to the strange projectionist Neil, the different managers who ran the place, and of course the various customers and odd happenings on the lot itself, all framed out by a classic film.
The Good: What do I love? Comic books and movies, so why has it taken so long for someone to combine the two? This is such a cool and original concept, I'm surprised no one has tried it yet. Mainly, what happens is on the title page of every story is the movie marquee showing what's playing and the story usually revolves around it in one way or another. One of the great juxtapositions is when Adam and his parents go to see the Marilyn Munroe picture Let's Make Love, and Adam is too embarrassed to be in the car while his parents are kissing, so he sits on a bench and meets a girl about his age, whom he smooches, completely chaste and innocent-like at the same moment Gene Kelly and Marilyn share a giant and glowing on screen kiss. The majority of the stories feature well written and smart dialogue, making almost all of the backdrops an interesting read. Many of the stories also come with a built in soundtrack, as one of this drive-in's trademarks is Neil the projectionist playing music on the lot's speakers before the movie starts, which makes for another well placed framing and mood setting device. And speaking of framing, the compiled stories bookend each other really neatly in so many ways, from the first story about Adam moving in to the Victorian house to the end when Adam, who took over the drive-in in 1998, faces foreclosure in 2005.
The Bad: Unfortunately, there's a more than I'd hoped. This comic was on the fast track in 2006 with a glowing preview book available, then abruptly shelved when the company who was fronting it shut down. When Image came to the rescue, it feels like most of the stuff added since the preview was sort of rushed in. First of all, this comic deserved a better editor. There were typos all over the place, and this is a professionally compiled and distributed comic, not some lone web-cartoonist's self publishing effort. Seriously, some words run together without proper spacing, sometimes an inconsistent type face is used, there's one story where the word balloons are all kinds of crazy, and the gangster story is practically illegible. There are "walls of text" stories, which is fine, but I felt that a couple of these would have greatly benefited from being sequentialized, where a couple of the drawn stories could have done with text only. Bruno's 1965 text-only tale would have been totally awesome in panels. I would have loved to have actually seen the view he described of Reading, Pennsylvania in there. Regarding the art in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Let's Make Love stories which were both by Mike Williams, I saw them in penciled form on the internet a year or so ago, when they were still shopping this comic out to companies, and it looked gorgeous, however now that it has been inked, eeeeehhh not so much. I feel as though the inker really dropped the ball with these pencils, which is too bad. Now then, a really, really bad mistake by writer with regards to his self proclaimed favourite character of Neil the projectionist. Sigh. Well, we the readers first meet Neil in 1956 showing Invasion of the Body Snatchers and he looks to be a full-grown albeit young-ish man. In a text only tale, it is 1990 and Neil is talking to the manager about turning 50 and wasting his life since he was hiding out from the army after going AWOL in 1953. Okay, so if Neil is turning 50 in 1990, he would have been born in 1940 and there is NO WAY he could have enlisted in 1953 at the age of 13 (making him 16 in the 1956 Body Snatchers story and not looking like a teenager at all). There is also all kinds of talk about how he was going to fight in Korea but ran away after one of his friends came back from there messed up mentally. Yeah, Korea ended in 1953, and AGAIN folks, Neil would have been 13 at this time. I read, and reread that text tale to be sure I wasn't missing something, like maybe there was one of those typos and it only said "50" once and "60" the rest of the time or something, but no, repeatedly they state that in 1990 Neil turned 50 and that he ran away from the army in 1953, MAKING NO SENSE WHATSOEVER and pissing me off more and more that the writer could be this sloppy. Could he not do math? Because I did the math. It was easy. Also, there were two stories taking place near the end in the 1990s, which while the dialogue was snappy and strong, felt out of place and shoe-horned into the book because they had little to do with the drive-in and served mostly as a means for the writer to sneak in references to and promote his other comic book, Phantom Jack. It was really quite pathetic and shameless.
All in all, I did like this book. The majority of the stories were neat and had good dialogue and points of interest and I did like a lot of the art, too. When it comes down to it, typos and wonky word balloons aren't really what you base whether or not you enjoyed the story you read, though they can lessen the enjoyment levels somewhat, especially if you're a stickler like me. I could have gotten past those things, but it was the author's seeming unwillingness to do math and his insistence on self-promotion which really bogged it down a few pegs. It's too bad because take those out and you really do have a unique and interesting comic (and I really, really do like how the last illustrated story "Closing Time II" ended).
B-